Fuck it - You need to make money off of the samples you have. That's the reason they kidnapped you after all. You don't have a set deadline yet but you have to at least pretend to play by their rules. Your obligation.

Also, the catalog. You can't buy stuff without money, jackass. You can't just steal shit to make ends meet like your grandpappy used to do.

You check the sample of pollen you still have underneath the microscope. It hasn't shown any new properties yet but you got some tests you wanna run on it. The anomaly this came from was able to interfere with the electrical grid. What if that property transferred over to the pollen?

You place one of the batteries by the microscope. If the pollen could mess with electricity, this should be close enough to notice it. The effective range of the anomaly was enough to affect your whole lab after all.

The pollen begins to react bizarrely to the close proximity of a source of electricity. The already unstable shapes twist and contort into smears of yellow static that are impossible to read. It reminds you of those videos of a dude pressing a magnet against a TV to mess with its display.

The distortion weakens whenever you move the battery away from the pollen. You flinch as you move the battery away. It's ice cold now. You quickly test something by loading the battery into the CD player.

It still works but the CD player immediately flashes a "LOW BATTERY" alert on its display. Odd, you were certain it was at full charge when you got it.

You examine the pollen to see how it changed after the current was cut. There's suddenly a lot more staticky yellow orbs floating around in the slide. The images encrypted or 'etched' into them are also a lot clearer now. You can make out distinct faces and backgrounds where you otherwise could only see faint impressions.

Most of the images seem to just be copies of ones you already saw. You somehow cloned the pollen just from having an available power source nearby.
You wonder if this transfers over to the anomaly itself as well - Is THAT what it feeds off of? The lights were flickering whenever it wasn't being directly interacted with. It could've just been hungry. Noted.

That's all you could figure out for now. You try a few other random things but no other object you bring close to the sample brings out any reaction.
You remove the sample from the microscope. You place a new sample of the CIGARETTE MOLD onto a slide to see what it looks like underneath.

At this zoom, the slime mold fades away into small little brown orbs that have sharp, jagged spikes surrounding their spores. Nothing unusual there but you want to see how its plastic dissolving abilities works at this level. You carefully introduce some plastic shavings onto the slide.

The spores immediately swim over to the plastic. A thin liquid is spat out of the holes in front of the spores and onto the plastic itself.