Sounds like you speak of this like a personal experience?
University can be a treasure trove of widely-disparate significant experiences. You've seen a lot of anime, so you should be able to easily imagine the variety of students that exist. Some plodding. Some dull. Some alert, involved, and imbued with luck that they create for themselves. Some with blah personalities. Some with rich witty inquisitive minds. Some that were merely students doing nothing but nerd studying. But one thing for sure - none of us were fortunate enough to have an AMD 3.4Ghz quad core processor. Heck, that was more powerful than the university mainframe which only had monochrome monitors and computer card readers.
In our dorm, we had dorm lock-picking contests. The cylinders felt like 5-pin tumblers. The best winner in each Wing would compete with each other to find the dorm champion. The only tools allowed are paperclips. You may prepare your paperclips ahead of time. My best time was 4 seconds. A wingmate beat me with 3 seconds.
The problem with dorm doors is that there is a master key for all the doors. So we were evidently hitting the master combination instead of the individual combinations. By feeling each tumbler out, people soon came up with their own versions of reverse-engineered "master key".
There was also the passed-down "legend" of one dorm whose keymaster person inherited a big ring of master keys to all sorts of places including the underground tunnel system all over the campus. With that, you can travel a LOT of places, under streets, to other buildings many blocks away, etc. The tunnels were big and everywhere because that was where communications, power, security, and utilities ran their pipes, optical fibers, and cables. Some tunnels were much wider than others of course. It was weakness of many university buildings that they needed to have door keys for authorized staff, professors, and students. Because there were so many different people, that meant the exterior doors of most buildings had well-worn tumblers. That was important to people making more keys for the keymasters' collection.
It was more a game than anything else. As far as I know, nobody holding the main ring of keys and the smaller rings of keys were into stealing anything. The chronic problem was graft/corruption in the official university staff with contracts. For example, all records in the university's hands of a major painting project were mysteriously destroyed except for one duplicate set that was retrieved by some vigilante students who used a master to open up one of the painted project areas during their own independent investigation of the work done versus the officially stated cost and area to be worked. The vigilantes then brought up the case and started a big corruption stink that if completed, would have gotten the vice president of university maintenance canned. But in presenting the evidence, the identities of key students was known of course. One day, three anonymous adult males went to the leader of the vigilantes and physically assaulted and retrieved the evidence. Thus ended the corruption case because the vigilantes no longer had hard copy evidence of what was done and NOT done but charged for in the kickback scheme. It was good that the student was not severely injured. But the vigilantes would not have been able to do what they did without the original access thru various locked doors.
Another time, there was a set of thefts going on. A security guard was officially blamed by the university for doing the thefts and fired and of course convicted in a kangaroo court. It was a lesson in how the STATE GOVERNMENT can set things up so that even though there was not even hardly any circumstantial evidence, the prosecutor can basically convince a jury to convict someone by faking his way through in order to score some more "achievement convictions" for his resume before he moves on to a higher political office.... UGH. Now, some of the same vigilantes with their own rings were once again involved in this thing but with a different group of people presenting information to the university student press, to our student body government, and to an outside reporter of a newspaper with an investigative Pulitzer award. *heh* Yes, it was a "liberal" paper because conservative papers are generally poor at revealing business and government corruption to the public. The key thing was that quite a few students liked the security guard and felt that he would not do such a thing. And the students were right. A number of the items stolen were well-known to students who explored "forbidden" areas using the power of their rings. And no, there were not nine smaller rings of keys derived from the one master ring much as you may speculate. Because these items were known, their date and time of existence were also known to students. Discussions occurred trying to pin down the very last times that the items were known to exist before disappearing. The students tracked it down to a janitor/custodian who was not able to avoid temptation. The security guard was then exonerated of the conviction thanks to the vigilante students and the power of the liberal press. The conservative paper would not even bother. *sigh* There was then some sort of secret out-of-court settlement for false conviction between the guard and the state government. I hope the LYING republican state prosecutor is compelled to tell Saint Peter at the Pearly Gates why he had staff fake up evidence to the point of getting a jury conviction. The vigilantes knew they had to lie low in case the law enforcement came after them in revenge for overturning the false conviction.
Damn, there was a lot of crime if you keep your eyes open. Many people subconsciously keep their "eyes" shut and never notice what goes on around them corruption-wise. I officially held various keys to university buildings because I was either research support or an officer in a major campus student organization. One time, some fellow chemical laser researchers noticed that our lab was missing our little boombox. We contacted campus police and ...... TL;DR.... the guilty culprit (a university state government employee!!!) was arrested after a sting operation was set up. What a waste of good study and work time the criminal gave us which of course could not be regained. Technically, it would have been a lot more profitable to us if we had just wrote off the boombox and let the state government employee keep on burgling. I bet that employee was republican. But we were still fired up with the spirit of fighting crime and corruption. Little did I know that one day, the inherent corruption of government employees and gridlock would have me say "Voldemort 2012 Vote The Lesser Evil".
It's been many many years since. I wonder where those minor rings and the one master ring are now?
