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Mystery Funny Contemporary

A woman clad in a black suit and tie walked along the sidewalk. With her left hand, she lifted a cup of coffee to her unusually bulbous lips. In her right hand, she held a brown briefcase. Her asymmetrical eyes looked ahead and saw two men in similar clothes looking towards a grey building on the opposite side of the sidewalk. One pointed a device towards the building while the other fiddled with one of the numerous piercings on his face. The device looked like an elegant combination of a telescope, a satellite dish, and a 1999 Toyota Camry.


Inside the grey building, two men in lab coats stood in front of what looked like two microwaves covered in tin foil and connected with a rusty pipe. One man looked at the other then down at his clipboard. He moved his pen up and down a little bit without writing something. His mouth hung open ready to speak but lacking words. His brain still cobbled together what he saw like a jigsaw puzzle with no edge pieces.

Two seconds had passed before he scribbled something down on his clipboard.

In front of the two, smoke billowed out from the top of one of the microwaves and crept its way up to the ceiling. The box contained a coffee cup with the name “Lindsay” written on the side. In the other sat a Styrofoam cup holding a yellow liquid and marked with the words “K9P CUP ‘B’”. 


New to the world was the field of quanto-polar-kinesiology, and new to this laboratory was the cup of coffee in that box. Quantopolarkinesiologists seek to study the polarity and movement of the most minuscule particles in the universe. The two quantopolarkinesisiologists who stood dumbfounded by the results of their latest experiment sought to understand how one can use concepts from the field of-- well you know what field I’m referring to. 


Anyways, those two.. People researched how to switch the places of two objects in space. The machine they used worked by sending and receiving magnetic signals, not dissimilar to how some animals use echolocation. After reading the signals, the machine can then identify each fundamental building block of an object from atom to the quark and even to the newly-discovered and aptly-named whocareson particle. Once the scan completes, an additional set of magnetic signals are sent to decompose the object scanned into individual hydrogen atoms, and reassemble those atoms given the magnetic imaging blueprint of the other item scanned.

The entire process takes place in under a second but is sensitive to environmental conditions. Because it heavily relies on magnets, disturbances in magnetic fields can create errors.

For a brief second, the scientists heard a sudden and immense bang. After that they heard nothing. The ground shook beneath the scientists. Their feet awkwardly danced as they fought the earth’s desire to pull them towards itself.

In a room adjacent to the scientists an intern lay on the ground. Half of an intern to be exact. The bottom half to be even more so. 

Throughout the room pipes twisted and turned around each other like a box of shoelaces. They flowed through the walls and coiled around each other escaping back through another side. Pipes engulfed the room, leaving only a narrow passage from the door to the far edge of the room. This passage had just a moment ago been widened by an explosion.

Pipes nearest to the blast leaked their contents. A few dripped steady streams of various liquids. Others appeared not to leak anything at all. 

One of these pipes not appearing to leak anything in fact seeped hydrogen into the surrounding air. Both of its disconnected halves reached out in front of the now crumbling wall. A gauge attached to one end let its hand lay limp after pointing to its far-right numbers. Beneath the pipe, coins, keys, and a few paperclips littered the scorched concrete floor.

The half of an intern that lay in the room with the pipes had once been a full intern. This full intern had followed all safety precautions and guides given to him, but, evidently, something had gone wrong.

That something wore a Hawaiian shirt and cargo pants and stared, perplexed, at a far wall. People called him Todd, but he called himself Todd (that's usually how names work). Their backside leaned against some kind of console covered with all sorts of buttons, levers, and screens. He set down a coffee cup next to them, rubbed his eyes, and leaned forward. As he did this a big red button labeled with some disregarded warnings lifted beneath him.

The scattered parts of his phone lay against the wall. The screen, in its dying breath, displayed the message “You’ve matched with Lindsay,” accompanied by a picture of a woman wearing in a black suit. 

It took about a second for Todd to run over to his phone’s mangled wires and miscellaneous shattered pieces. He scooped them up and cradled them like a mother attempting to nurse a stillborn child. A single teardrop dropped onto the phone and distorted her unusually bulbous lips. The girl on the screen stared him and in her asymmetrical eyes he saw a grim reflection of himself. 

As Todd continued mourning his dying phone and looking at her oblong face he noticed an increasing amount of her features. As he did this he began to think that maybe he hadn’t lost as much as he thought.

He wiped the few tears that still ran down his face and stood up. After shoving the remains of his phone in his pocket, trying and failing not to tear his cargo pants on the broken glass screen, he saw a teardrop fall to the floor. Followed by another. And another. And in fact, they seemed to land all around the room, not just beneath his eyes. He swerved his head around and eventually looked up to see the sprinklers on the ceiling overhead spraying water down on him. A moment later a siren began to blare.

Throughout the building, people meandered towards the fire exits for the third time this week. Fortunately for the man who had just had an episode over his phone breaking, one of these exits occupied a part of the wall in front of him.

It took him about three seconds to notice the apparent emergency and step out the door.

The bright landscape reflected a vibrant energy the grey building lacked. The result was a nearly insignificant sting that only a millennial could complain about. To remedy this he held a hand above his eyes like a pirate looking out to the endless sea except he looked towards a sidewalk in front of him and sidewalks are only on occasion equivalently dangerous.

A well-dressed businesswoman walked down the sidewalk in front of him. She carried a briefcase in one hand and a Styrofoam cup in the other. Her fingers curled around a label someone had drawn on the cup. Between them, one could make out the words “K9P CUP ‘A’”. 

K9P is an unusual solution unlike any other in the universe. Its exact salinity, acidity, and rarity make it perfect for nuclear fission reactions. It also happens to be one of the rarest solutions in the universe. As evident by its name, Its only known origin is in the bladder of dogs.

The woman stepped in front of the man who had piercings littering his face. The man with the strange device stood ahead of the woman. He repeatedly bashed it with one of his hands and muttered PG-13 rated words.

He was called Voskoboynikov Lavr Nikitovich Tolkachyov Yevdokim Rostislavovich Yevdokimov Krasimir Yevgenievich. The RAfIFASaOMiOCSPaGiOtEDaPoRiaOCaT (Russain Agency for Intelligence, Foreign Affairs, Spying, and Otherwise Meddling in Other Country's Scientific Progress and Government in Order to Establish a Dominance and Presence of Russia in all Other Countries and Territories) had stationed him in America solely due to the fact he has the most American-sounding name out of any other Russian. The United States has a similar organization known simply as the CIA.

Inside the laboratory, an intern monitored nearby magnetic fields. With each bash of the Russian’s device, the singular straight line that represented the magnetic fields surrounding the labs jiggled slightly. With each consecutive hit, the irregularity grew. After two seconds, the straight line had turned into a turbulent ocean wave washing through the otherwise blank screen. 

The Russian hit his device once more. Magnificent lights illuminated the device’s entire body like a two-dimensional fireworks show. The vibrant greens, blues, and reds distracted Todd and for a moment he didn’t notice his phone fly out of his pocket and towards the device the man held before his face. As another second passed, the woman stepped in front of the man holding the device. She lifted her arm to take a sip from her cup and knocked the man's device towards the other man whose face was covered in piercings.

What happened next was not pretty. In fact it was so not pretty, there is no word in the English language to describe how not-pretty it is, so I made one up that embodies exactly how not-pretty it is. 

Pziodkfop.

December 31, 2020 22:49

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3 comments

Unknown User
22:02 Jan 06, 2021

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Goblin King
22:38 Jan 06, 2021

Thanks for reading and thanks for the kind words!

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Unknown User
22:39 Jan 06, 2021

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