Only female in Mechanical Engineering (Third pov)

There's a saying in the engineering departments. 

'The female students in the department are to be treated like your own sisters. So ensure she is safe and happy.'

Every engineering department took protecting their female classmates very seriously, and the one department that took it to the extreme was mechanical engineering. It had a record of no female students for consecutive ten years. Everyone in that department prayed for a female student every single year. Some would pray at every temple in the locality every day, and some would promise to stop their addiction. Some even went ahead to promise to get ordained if just one female student entered in the following year. 

So when Kriti joined the mechanical engineering department as the only female candidate after ten years, she unknowingly earned an entire army of all kinds of men as her sworn brothers. She always found this as a very funny, quirky characteristic of her seniors. 

Now, she needed just these characteristics to get her job done. She needed manpower. 

Kriti entered her practical class in the middle of the session. The professor was watching national news on his phone. He didn't care who entered or who left the lab or what was going on inside the lab. All he cared about was whether everyone was minding their own buisness. Kriti walked up to the register, signed her name, and sat next to her usual bunch of boys she hung out with, carrying three pendrives, and asked, "Does anyone have a flash drive? I have to store a bunch of videos in one drive." 

Everyone in the lab started looking in all kinds of places for one good flash drive, and finally a computer science student gave an old empty one. "What is it for?" He asked. 

"I have to analyse a bunch of videos to catch a criminal." Kriti said, and she connected the flash drive and one of the pen drives to the lab desktop computer' CPU. 

Everyone in the room got curious, "What kind of criminal? Are we going to investigate someone? Are we catching a murderer? Or a serial killer?" 

"Are you mad? Catching a serial killer, it seems. Before even we catch them, they will kill us." One refuted.

"Dude, all serial killers have a style and type of people they want to kill. As long as we are not their type, we're set." One of the boys said, pulling up his collar, trying to look cool and brave.

"We are not catching a murderer or a serial killer. We are catching a drug addict." Kriti said as she moved the files from her pen drive to the flash drive. 

"A drug addict." Everyone's mood soured. It was an open secret that half the engineering population were some kind of addicts. Some weed, some alcohol, some tobacco. Hell, some were even addicts of caffeine. So catching a drug addict was not something they were interested in. 

"A drug addict who has a rumoured charge of SA and harassment." Lalith spoke up out of nowhere. The crowd gasped in shock to process his presence. 

"When did you come here, Vice Head?" One asked.

"Been here all the time. Who do you think provided her with the 'Slay Queen' pen drive?" Lalith said with disdain. Lalith was a twink and took it very personally if a crowd had ignored his presence, just like now. 

"So are you going to help us gather evidence or not? It would be ok for us if you don't, but it's just that we have to watch six months worth of videos from different angles to collect the evidence." Lalith said, rolling his eyes dramatically to show the load his brain has to take. 

"Don't worry, for our lady, we shall help you, Vice Head." The crowd decided. 

"Wait, let me finish uploading it to the flash drive for physical evidence and then sharing it in the cloud for you guys." Kriti said with urgency.

"Don't worry about that. We'll manage. Just wait here for the pen drives. We'll take care of the rest." The boys took over the system, just what Kriti wanted. 

After ten minutes, everyone dropped their practical class and became a part-time surveillance monitor, checking for Manaav and his group. Kriti and Lalith also sat and watched video after video to gather evidence for apprehending Manaav. 

A robotics and AI major said, "How about this? Kriti, give us as many photos of this guy as possible, and we'll modify the current basic search algorithm we are working on for this case. There are just too many videos to watch here, and we don't have five months worth of time to watch them."

"That sounds amazing. I'll see if I have that many pictures. Otherwise, I'll ask people I know who have to send as many as possible." Kriti said and messaged other council members personally. Lalith asked all of his party friends to send as many photos of Manaav they had.

Everyone made it a personal mission to get rid of this guy. Kriti's and Lalith's phones started buzzing with hundreds of messages and pictures of Manaav.