mukumsa: переводы

→In one aspect at least, I was correct: after what we've seen, our government will never willingly let us back above the clouds...

→It was fearmongering, but it was all too easy to get caught up in it when the stakes were perceived as high as they were. For that matter, look what I’d just seen: the Raiders certainly gave the impression that many of the stories we were told were actually true. Chess, Grace, and Bernard were decent ponies, but how was I to know there would be more like them down here? For all I knew, “Raider” might have been a disease… a preposterous notion, as I’m sure you’re aware, but it seemed at least plausible to me that we might well have passed the point of no return, that just maybe it would be best if we just... disappeared down here.

→I was no different. I mean, there were certain restrictions lifted when I joined the military. We learned that the Steel Rangers, for example, had managed to survive on the surface. Hell, that turned out to be one of the few bits of intel that had actually been correct, too. But there was always that worry, that terror of jeopardizing the cloud-cities. It was why we accepted the fact that there were no rescue teams for stranded squads. Why waste the ponies? The rescue teams might not make it back either, and considering the lost team might be “contaminated” anyways, why risk it?

→Only a few days ago, that word had power. Over what I thought… what I believed. You have to understand, Tailwind and I grew up in a society so different from the surface. We were in such a state of constant fear of the surface’s terrors that eventually we became numb to it. “Contamination” is the word used to describe what we all believed was the concept of bringing a terrible contagion of some sort back to the clouds. Radiation? Disease? In hindsight, nopony really knew. All we knew was that we had to keep “contaminated” ponies out of the clouds, at all costs… Even our own kin, should it come to that. No one questioned, because what was the alternative? What if we were wrong, and our way of life was destroyed as a result? No one wanted to be the one to bring it all crashing down.