Rick grabbed a scrap of cloth from his desk and held it to his nose, blocking out the noxious fumes. In time, the pink mist began to clear and then vanished.
Rick threw the cloth down on the basement floor and growled.
“Fucking useless kid."
Rick cleaned the rest of the mess and reset all his beakers. It took some time, but he soon had everything back to the beginning of his failed experiment.
It was a stroke of luck he hadn't added the finishing ingredients, or the harmless mixture wouldn't have been so harmless. Rick began mixing again, and to his relief the music upstairs stopped. No doubt Brendan was leaving to go smoke pot with his buddies in the field behind the old ball diamond. Again.
Sure enough, he heard the door slam and his step son pull away in his junker car.
Good, Rick thought to himself. At last I can concentrate.
Isolated in his basement lab, Rick lost himself in his work. He carefullly boiled this, skimmed that, and mixed this, bringing himself back to the point he had reached before Brendan's obnoxious music had confounded the critical moment of his experiment. He donned a full respirator and a sealed chemical suit before adding the final key ingredients to his mixture, firing it through a series of tubes and allowing it to boil in a flask. The pink liquid turned a brighter shade.
Rick carefully poured the heated liquid through a strainer and removed chunks of remaining impurity from the solution. With a small amount saved into a vial, he capped it carefully and allowed it to cool in a stand. He removed the protective suit and began to clean up his work table.
As the vial cooled in the stand, Rick struck a devilish grin as he grabbed a pair of keys from under his desk and turned to a locked closet in the back center of the room. He unlocked the heavy padlock and swung the doors open, revealing a collection of dubiously legal animal test subjects.