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Alfred and Ivan were both scientists having lunch in the break room. Ivan came back to the table with his sack lunch and sat next to his unusually silent friend, who was scrutinizing a picture on his phone for the past five minutes. Ivan sat down next to him, making the blonde shake away from his trance.
"Must be something either scientific or important to be holding your attention span for longer," the Russian chuckled.
Alfred pouted, but then shoved his phone in Ivan's face, showing him a picture of a...virus? "I dunno what the frick this is and it's been driving me crazy! Not even our group leader knows what the heck it is and she's a biology major!"
Ivan blinked. Pushing his phone away from his face to see the picture better, he squints at the photo of...uh, "What even is this, Fedya?"
"That's the thing!" he slams his hands on the table, "I don't know! The biology major doesn't know! I've been asking Google for the past fifteen minutes and not even Google knows! I was thinking it was a virus, then later thought it was some kind of bacteria, but this thing has fricken tentacles and spikes! And it looks like the thing has a...I think a head-like feature? I don't know!"
Sighing, Ivan places his hands on Alfred's shoulders in an attempt to get the hyper American to stop bouncing, "Calm down, Fedya, it's," he squints at the picture again, "You are positive that no high superiority does not know what this is?"
"Yes! No one does!" he proclaims.
The Russian deadpanned, "Are you sure this is not...some sort of lint?"
Alfred gasped, offended, "Heck no! It was in a closed ecosystem! There was no way it could be contaminated!"
"Knowing you, I think even you'd be able to accidentally get lint stuck in your 'closed ecosystem'," he giggled.
"No, that thing's wicked secure. There's no way anything could've gotten inside, I swear!" Alfred promised determined. This thing didn't look like a piece of lint! What kinda lint had tentacles and spikes coming out of it? Alfred was very sure he also saw cell structure within it and he knew lint didn't have that.
Ivan rolled his eyes and decided to play along, voice heavily laden with sarcasm, "Ah, yes, my great scientist who has made a discovery of a new species of virus. Pray, tell what you plan to name this new discovery, Mr. Jones?"
Shaking his head at his Russian friend, Alfred unlocks his lunchbox (some coworker ate his beef and rice last time and he didn't want a repeat) and takes out a rectangular cut pizza with a slight cringe. It was the only way to pack it in without ruining it. There was no crust on the end and the toppings were falling off the side. Now, the containment felt fairly warm due to the pizza, so he assumed that it didn't need any more additional warmth. So he stuck about half of it in his mouth and bit down.
Alfred gasped, dropping the remaining pizza onto his napkin on the table, "Oh, my gosh, the center is cold!"
His friend next to him blinked, "...You're naming it 'Oh, my gosh, the center is cold'? My, what an interesting choice of name. Mind telling me what made you come up with such a deduction?" the Cheshire-can grin on his was irritating Alfred.
The American gave his friend a mock punch in the shoulder, "I was talking about the pizza, tebya Krasniy! " Alfred hissed, throwing the leftover pizza away. He wasn't in the mood for it anymore and felt like he was going to regret doing that later.
"Oh, was that Russian I heard?" Ivan chuckled. Alfred was multilingual and could speak in a plethora of languages. He's been everywhere Ivan wished he's been. Alfred also would speak in different languages when he got overly emotional in things, like over the name of probably a piece of lint.
"Shut up! I'm going to ask the head instructor about this! Maybe he'll know something," he mumbled, staring at his phone. He goes out of the photos app and taps his Reddit, "I'm gonna ask the internet in the meantime."
"Put it in r/science or r/biology," Ivan leaned over, peering at his phone as Alfred's ambidextrous fingers ran all over the keypad onscreen.
"Yeah," Alfred responded busily. A comment appeared later.
'Ain't that lint or something?'
'I dunno what the heck that is...'
'...Maybe trying r/whatisthis?'
Alfred and Ivan stared blankly at Reddit's responses.
"...just in case this does go down in history, can we name it 'Oh my gosh, the center is cold'?" Ivan smirked with a creepy but fun-inducing grin.
Alfred gave him another punch to the arm, "Shut up, man," he grumbled but chuckled with him all the same. Whatever the heck it was, it was creepy, disgusting, weird, and caused one of those rare moments where Alfred and Ivan aren't trying to rip each other's throats out in complaints.