"When downtown got bombed a number of years ago, a couple falling buildings took down chunks of wall, I guess, but they were patched up quick," she replies, shaking her head. "Bigger problem is people sneaking in and out, bringing the infection in."
"Haha! I guess I shouldn't be surprised, but - someone bombed your downtown enough for a wall breach? I imagine they topped the wanted list for a while after that."
"Funny story," she replies, "the military did that. They thought if they narrowed our living area down to the North End, they could carpet bomb downtown and hopefully kill off all the infected living there."
"It did a pretty good job," she agrees. It was horrific at the time, listening to the explosions some miles away, but so much has happened that it feels smoothed over, just another bad time. "We definitely saw a drop in outbreaks. It didn't last, though. Can't cure Infection with bombings."
"And I'm sure the civilian casualties slaughtered by their own government weren't soon forgotten by those who survived them... at least if your people were anything like mine."
"Oh, definitely not, so we have a fuckton of activists and terrorists trying to liberate from them constantly," she replies. "But what do you do? The Quarantine Zone is a place to live. Can't turn up a place to live."
Hange taps her glass against the table a couple times, mulling her response over.
"About ten years ago now, the walls experienced an attack... we lived in three walls, you see? Concentric rings. The outermost wall was breached and the territory between the middle and outer wall became impossible for humans to inhabit. It was a crushing blow to us.
The winter after Wall Maria's collapse, the monarchy ordered a quarter of our population outside. It was billed as a 'resettlement effort' but everyone with a functioning brain knew that in actuality, it was an effort to toss people out of the lifeboat to make it more comfortable for the rest. Everyone lost someone in the exodus. Friends, family. And out of the two hundred fifty thousand who left, about one hundred survivors returned to us."
Three walls. Makes sense –– might've made sense back home, too, if there weren't a staggering lack of bodies and materials to make it possible without massive losses.
Tess shakes her head in disgust.
"Pretty shitty odds," she remarks. "I don't really know what our population is like anymore, but we lost sixty percent of the country in a three month period, twenty years ago. We've probably lost most what's left since. You guys probably lost lots of farmland losing that wall, right? The inner area is probably a city."
"You got it. The loss of arable land was absolutely crushing. That said - if our nobility had been willing to tighten their belts even just a bit, we probably would not have had to sacrifice so many people, if any of them. Any population culls like that are made with an eye to eliminating idealists, political dissidents, radicals of all stripes... people who'd be willing to go against the rule of the king. Or who are used to living outside the law already. You see?"
Hange shakes her head and finishes off her drink. It's something that burns her still, though the circumstances are drastically different now.
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Hange sounds not approving, but impressed. Intensity always makes an impression on her, whether it's noble or horrid.
"That's - haha - we'd have a proportion of politicians who thought that was a bang-up idea! Did it work?"
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"About ten years ago now, the walls experienced an attack... we lived in three walls, you see? Concentric rings. The outermost wall was breached and the territory between the middle and outer wall became impossible for humans to inhabit. It was a crushing blow to us.
The winter after Wall Maria's collapse, the monarchy ordered a quarter of our population outside. It was billed as a 'resettlement effort' but everyone with a functioning brain knew that in actuality, it was an effort to toss people out of the lifeboat to make it more comfortable for the rest. Everyone lost someone in the exodus. Friends, family. And out of the two hundred fifty thousand who left, about one hundred survivors returned to us."
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Tess shakes her head in disgust.
"Pretty shitty odds," she remarks. "I don't really know what our population is like anymore, but we lost sixty percent of the country in a three month period, twenty years ago. We've probably lost most what's left since. You guys probably lost lots of farmland losing that wall, right? The inner area is probably a city."
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Hange shakes her head and finishes off her drink. It's something that burns her still, though the circumstances are drastically different now.