"Hey. This is my first time making a... post on my own, I think. It's mostly just been asks or whatever a 'reblog chain' is. So... it's me. It's been a second." The video flickers on to reveal Cedric, sitting in his own room instead of the previous feeds in his office, pacing around slowly. He's likely been waiting for the loading to finish and for the feed to start. He grasps the back rest of the chair and lowers himself back down to sit in a second.
"And, uh, we've found the right compositional chain to form a stable compound out of the Yellow Phosphor. It can handle some decent heat, and it's bright! The idea is that we'll be installing it in houses soon: the people need to see real, real light more than ever. And this isn't that close, but it's so much closer than what we've got." He starts clicking the pen against the surface of the table: the back part. The thing you press to start using it: to write that is. Exposing and retracting the ink, as he reclines back into his chair. Looking up in boredom, it might be easy to think.
"That new sun is coming up, basically... and we've been really doing our best: and I mean, really doing our best. Kip still... well, never mind. Basically, everything's going pretty okay... as far as it could go. Plus... I managed to get my hands on the computer. At my fervent request, Kip allowed me to take the thing home." He takes his goggles off: and that requires him to take his hat off. He uses a microfiber cloth on the side of his desk: he first opens up the container that the goggles are meant to be stored in: and unfurls it from the inside.
"She asks that I need to obviously contribute the most help in making the new one, but that shouldn't be too hard. You do it once, you can always do it again. I think she knows that I know that she knows she's been down in the dumps, and I know that if I act like I'm enjoying myself then maybe it'll help her." He wipes the goggles' lenses down, before swiftly putting them back on: and soon after lines up his hat and the spare goggles there. He doesn't know why he felt the urge to: maybe just because he wants to stay on top of things.
"That's obviously not the reason I did it. Obviously, if you scroll down on this feed or whatever: something I can't do on anyone else's because the terminal on this PC sucks and we've been trying to get an operating system but everything else takes more importance... I guess this message reaches more than just our world." He grasps his dog tag, attached to the side of his hat: and he grasps it tightly. It's metal rather than whatever it was made out of before: mostly just because. It's an aesthetic choice: it looks better with the red. Another thing he was forced into.
"If I want to be really honest: if I want to request help from others who just so happen to be... acting from outside this world, to be specific..." He doesn't really want to believe it: and you can see that plastered on his face, but the evidence is there, in front of his eyes. "...can't be doing it on the public PC, right? Haha, ha..." He takes a long and confined breath out. It's long, but it's obviously not a breath of relaxation. Rather, just more stress: maybe. Some other things came to mind that won't let him relax, it's more likely.
"...It's, it's been a lot recently. It's been so much that we can barely keep up, but I think I've said that a lot: it's just more so. It's been getting pretty difficult. Wouldn't, couldn't do this if we weren't getting any mileage out of it. The only thing that keeps us going, really, I think. The churches are... in civil unrest. Archbishop Prototype has been doing his best to calm people down alongside Archbishop Prophetbot, but... no dice."
"Prophetbot, too..." It hurts him to say this, due to the similarities Prophetbot has with his own friend. "We brought him here because he was a relic of the past, but with his programming he can't physically really do much to calm the people. He's just decoration, basically. And nobody has any time, so we can't do anything about it. Though I wouldn't, I can't blame them. I don't know what I'd do either."
"The spread of purpure is getting worse. I want to say we couldn't have done anything about it, but that would probably be a lie. We could've done something, most likely, and we just didn't. Or more appropriately, we didn't have the emotional means to see the way." Cedric isn't a nail-biter, but things change. This is one such time. "And I want to say sorry to the people we've lost, but they can't be here to hear it: so we have to keep doing this. For them." He pries his eyes open, even though he doesn't really want to look into the camera's lens.
"No matter how hard we try to enforce: tape off, seal off the rivers... people are still taking samples and samples when we aren't looking. Our defense can't be foolproof: there aren't enough people. Hell, our theory is that maybe the guards are taking from it too. It sells for a pretty penny: so we've been trying to work on a camera system we can hook up to a computer. After all, Red Phosphor is one of the core components of..."
"Boring work stuff. But yeah. That's the extent of everything interesting that's happened now. Meeting frequency has increased, though. Prototype, Kip, Prophetbot and I alongside most other people who are in positions of power: we gather and try to convene. It's nothing special: we convene, we share the info we've got, we talk about what's been going on... more or less, kind of like this."
"If you can see me, or if you can hear me."
He chokes out hesitantly. He swallows his pride.
An unspoken desire coils out behind his eyes, but he denies it.
His fingers stop fidgeting with that pen, but he doesn't know what to do with his hands, and he doesn't know what to do when he's seeing so perceived. But there's nothing to perceive him: it's just a lens and a machine, so what is there to say?
"Please, help us. If you can. That's... that's all."
Another plea from the dying world. He stares down at his notepad, before slowly raising it up to eye-level, as it hides his face. His neck slowly cranes down, and his eyes shut while his lips purse in silence.
"I'm sorry. All I can really do is ask, ask, and ask."
"I'm sorry." He puts his hands together in a clasp: not trying to hold on to anything, but rather himself. A symbol not too far away from the conventional hand symbol they use to pray for forgiveness from god, for they must have sinned.
