"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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"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."
no subject
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."
no subject
Hange shakes her head and finishes off her drink. It's something that burns her still, though the circumstances are drastically different now.