Story the Third, Part the Second: Thin Walls make Strange Neighbors

A brief refresher: During our storied second year at PCU, Schmendrick and I were housed in a particularly unpleasant building among strange and unpleasant people. This is an account of one such, who occupied the room next to ours.
I don't believe I ever learned this personage's name, as we seldom met. In the way of visual information, we assembled the following: Our neighbor was almost certainly male, tall, thin, and probably possessed of some Asian ancestry.
All else which we learned of him came in the form of auditory transfer of insufficiently buffering materiel. Which is to say, the connecting wall was thin and of shoddy construction and we could hear him all too well. Via this route we learned:
Firstly, that he was inordinately fond of online poker games. Late into the night we would hear the steady yet intermittent bells, whistles, and synthesized wind chimes as he presumably amassed and lost fortunes. These were punctuated by infrequent cheers and significantly less infrequent curses and shouts.
Second, he was posessed of... what's a suitable phrase... 'intimate companion'. We never saw her, and in fact can only assume it was a her based on... erm... audio cues, let's say. Of course, we strongly hope that said cues were not entirely accurate, since if they were, the person in question was about twelve.
These, then were the conditions we tolerated at all times. I will finish by recounting an incident which, while it occured but the once, feels representiative of said conditions.
This story takes place during late evening*. I believe Shmendrick was already asleep, I was finishing some assignment for my data structures class (see entry '...and the Wings Fall Off!') when I heard from the hall just outside our door a series of sounds for which 'kerfuffle' should be elevated to onomatopoeia. This sort of thing happened in this setting, so at first I paid it no mind. Once the sirens started, however, it seemed prudent to peek out and ensure that the world wasn't coming to an end. By the time I extracted myself and made my way to the door (armed with a sword, just in case I was wrong and Armageddon was at hand), I observed the following individuals clustered around our neighbor's open door: said neighbor, clearly dressed for bed and apparently bleeding from a sizable cut on his hand, a young woman I had never seen before, a middle-aged woman I had also never seen before, a representative of campus security, and what looked like both a real live paramedic and an honest-to-goodness policeman (the latter in particular being an extreme rarity in this building). Having established that no demons were going to attempt to batter down the door, I went back to work. It was later established that the course of events outside had been roughly these:
The young woman was a recent graduate who, for reasons unclear, had brought her mother (the older woman) back to campus on some sort of nostalgia-fueled tour. She, the daughter, was a member and former resident of the building in which we resided, and had occupied last year the room now containing our next-door poker-loving non-associate. Clearly drunk off her ass, she had decided to visit her old room. At around 11 pm. I'm not sure what her mother's excuse for allowing this was. Perhaps she was drunk too. Anyway, they had approached the room and simply walked in - without bothering to turn the light on. Neighbor Boy, awakened from a likely drug-influenced nap, in the dark, by two people invading his room, got up with such haste and lack of coordination that he broke a mirror and cut his hand on it, at which point he commenced screaming with such volume and ferocity that his uninvited guests called the police.



*A note for non-college students regarding the divsion of time: Time in for us was described by the interactions of the 24 hour solar cycle and and the variable length 'waking cycle', defined as the duration between two times when you wake up, with a minimum of about 14 hours and a maximum in excess of 72. Evening, on a day where you have classes, begins at the end of your last class and lasts until the time you begin the sleep that end with the beginning of the next waking cycle. On days when you do not have classes, evening begins either at dusk or shortly after the first meal of the waking cycle, and lasts until the first time you say or thing 'I should have gone to sleep by now'. Evening follows 'day', and is followed either by 'sleep time', if you took your own advice about going to bed, or 'ass-o-clock in the morning', if you did not.