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 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.
The chemist moved with precise speed, mixing this, pouring that, and recording his results in a worn binder at his work station. At last, he had a bubbling lime green mixture, thick like oil.
"Well." He said nervously. "Here goes experiment #526."
Carefully, Rick grabbed a nearby spray bottle and gently poured the bubbling chemical into the glass bottle. He put the nozzle on, twisted it shut, and turned to a locked cabinet against the far wall.
Jingling the keys in his pocket with his free hand, Rick proceeded to unlock the steel cabinet, revealing a small inset room with a variety of animals.
Rick browsed his selection of potential test subjects. A captured crow, a snake, a spider, and a rat. He decided the snake would do, and picked out the sealed plastic container.
Through the mesh top, Rick observed the dark blue viper. An "exotic" he had obtained from a conservationist friend. Nobody had asked what it was for when Rick had forked over eight hundred dollars.
The chemist took the container over to his work station, set it down on the counter top, and raised the spray bottle.
"Bottoms up, scaly." Rick toasted, and misted his strange chemical over the snake's body. The animal reeled back into a corner of the container, hissed angrily, and coiled into a ball, bearing its fangs threateningly.
Rick watched, waited... nothing. He stood for a good fifteen minutes observing and noted no change in his subject.
Frustrated, Rick set down the spray bottle and picked up the snake, returning it to the locked cabinet and sealing the doors once more.
Defeated, he marked down experiment #526 as a failure, and went upstairs with a heavy sigh to wash up before his day at the college lecturing.