“Pulse” Gang Stealing Escalator Gearboxes, Causing Mayhem

Since the dawn of time, Stuyvesant’s escalator system has been reliably unreliable. However, nobody thought the escalators would be completely shut off from student traffic for weeks. It turns out that the problems will be fixed soon, because the cause of these shutdowns was discovered: a group of red-clad students who have been stealing the escalator gearboxes.

This group of mystery pupils, bearing gang slogans like “Feel the Pulse” and “Coopertition,” have been seen on security cameras removing the escalator gearboxes and smuggling them down to the fourth floor. Unfortunately, because they wear “694” baseball caps and tinted safety goggles, these students remain unidentified. They typically show up around 8:30 p.m. on Friday nights, when all sane students have already left the school, and take the chains off of the gearboxes before loading them onto the service elevators. Security guards attempting to apprehend these miscreants have been distracted by incredibly polite members of StuyPulse, Stuyvesant’s resident robotics team, who are in the middle of “testing autonomous routines” at this hour.

“Honestly, we’ve been having issues due to budget cuts, but we’ve recently found a good way to cut costs,” one sophomore said. “We’ve started reaching out to the local community for gearboxes, and we’ve been able to get some for very affordable prices right within the school!” This sophomore was then hustled back into the robotics lab by a group of menacing upperclassmen.

Other StuyPulse members proved less welcoming to interviews. “We don’t appreciate excessive questions at this point in time. Our build season has just started, and we’ve got more than a few designs that we’re trying to keep secret until our first competition,” said a senior while casually leaning on a large stack of gearboxes. When our interviewer attempted to ask about the gearboxes, they were immediately interrupted by students moving a large carpeted field through the door, at which point the senior and the gearboxes vanished somewhere into the lab.

The only piece of evidence left by this “Pulse” gang is a half-filled hot chocolate mug with “694 StuyPulse” printed on it that was left in the vicinity of the 2-4 escalator stairwell. Because of this evidence, the 2-4 escalators have been shut down for months as the biology department attempts to harvest the DNA of the culprits from the crime scene.

One member of the Pulse gang has sent an anonymous tip-off to The Spectator, claiming to have information about the inner workings of this menacing group. Apparently, they’ve been trading with groups operating under pseudonyms like “The TechKnights” and “Iron Maidens,” sending gearboxes to them in exchange for “ranking points.” Yet when asked if they could tell us what exactly these ranking points were for, the student replied, “That’s how mafia works.”

In the meantime, the Pulse gang’s footprint has spread to include the nuts and bolts on the Tribeca Bridge, which have been replaced with StuyPulse pens. Even now, construction workers are attempting to repair the damage, but the Pulse gang has been stealing the tools of the workers, leaving the bridge increasingly held together by the power of cheap branded pens.

The escalators are due to turn back on soon, but with new safety precautions.

“In the event that someone who doesn’t have the special janitor key attempts to remove the gearboxes, an alarm will start going off throughout the school,” a security guard said. “We actually got the help of StuyPulse students to design these alarm systems, so they should be completely secure!”