touchscreens | [Video]

[The camera shows a young man - maybe in his mid-twenties, possibly a little older - in a clean white lab coat, with a calm smile and red hair that's obviously been dyed fairly recently. He looks composed and confident - or, as someone more observant might note, he looks like he's trying to look composed and confident.

The nervous fidgeting, however, begins not too after he starts speaking.]

Hello, visitors to Saeng Seong. My name is Hwan, and I'm an employee in this city's science and technology research facilities.

I...erm, o-on behalf of my colleagues, I wanted to inform you all that the issues you have been experiencing with dramatic changes in internal body temperature should be resolved completely as of late last night. We're sorry that it's taken this long.

I also wanted to apologize for the fact that this happened at all. We...we, well, we really weren't trying to do anything that could potentially harm any of you. As many of you could probably guess, our department is heavily focused on solving the city's current energy crisis. One of our main goals right now is to find ways to make the energy that all of you produce through physical contact more efficient - after all, if we can make what all of you are already doing count for more, the problem gets solved faster, and that makes everyone happy, so-

[Oh dear, he's rambling.]

Ah, anyhow, we were attempting an experiment along those lines. It wasn't supposed to affect you all individually in any way, but we...well, miscalculated. We didn't expect this to be the result at all.

So...So again, we really apologize for what happened.

[Did his supervisors really tell him to apologize this much? Who knows.]

Oh, and if anyone has any further problems or concerns, please don't hesitate to inform Mai, Irene, or anyone else who can relay the message to us. You can also comment here and talk to me.

And...um, Goodbye.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

While I understand why you're doing what you're doing, and I appreciate that you're trying to make things easier for us, I'm really not convinced it's worth you and your organization tinkering with things that could negatively impact our bodies. ['And minds', she almost adds, but holds back on.]

Thank you for apologizing, though. I'm sure it can't be easy when you know full well a number of people will take offense.

I understand your concern, but we honestly didn't realize that what we were doing would affect your bodies at all, negatively or otherwise. We take full blame for the mistake. We're doing our best to find out where we went wrong so that we can avoid such a miscalculation in the future.

[He hopes.]

Okay. This is making me feel a lot better about all this... you gave me the initial impression that you all had no idea what you were doing, and trying to fix it almost made all of us a lot worse.

Would it be overbearing to ask for warning before you all try another experiment in the future? Maybe assistance from one of us that isn't natively from Saeng Seong? I'm sure there are scientists here that would love an excuse to try and fix this problem from the inside.

No, that's...that's definitely not the impression we want to give.

Well, one issue with that is the fact that we're constantly working on something or another, so those warnings would have to be very frequent. It's possible, I guess, but...well, ultimately the decision isn't mine to make, but I can still bring it up to my supervisors.

[He sounds really uncertain about that last part, but his confidence picks up a little when he moves on to the next subject in question.]

Though as for assistance from non-natives, we've actually had that under consideration for quite a few weeks now. We'd like to sort some things out before we extend a formal invitation to all of you, though.

I wasn't aware there was a whole lot of research to be done on us - are we that interesting of subjects? Alternately, was that much time put into the project to study possible outcomes before we were "summoned"? I'm just not sure how much there is to gain from studying our capabilities for energy generation.

[At the suggestion of opening research to the imports, Sora noda.]

I'm glad to hear you're starting to put plans into place. I really think there'd be something to gain - not just in actual research, but in goodwill toward us and general morale - by employing some of us that aren't from here.

Oh, no, you misunderstand. I can't explain in detail - it's kind of complicated - but our recent studies relate more to how we collect and maintain energy than to your capacity for energy production. How the energy is handled is just as important as generating it in the first place, right? We don't want anything that you all are doing to go to waste. But, anyhow, that's why we were so surprised when the atmospheric stabilizers reacted and affected everyone as they did.

And...I agree. [He smiles.] It's a step that I'm personally happy we're going to take.

Ah... I can see that being a little bit better of a topic, and a more sane research subject. I hope you're able to make some headway! It's definitely important research. I mean, not that I'm not liking it here, but I'd like to be able to go home, someday.

And all of you will. We're here to make sure of it.

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