Roland isn't one to laugh out loud but such a reaction earns one, though it lacks any semblance of joy or mirth. How does one even begin to say it, describe it? The kind of world he inherited, voted into office too soon...Earth's tapestry tearing at the seams before he ever got a fighting chance to fix a thing.

"Yeah, that's one way to describe. Things were really bad." Roland chances a look at Tidus, meets his gaze halfway. "There was a lot of heat on my country from the start. We were a relatively young nation, but we grew to be one of the biggest superpowers in a short span of time. The fact that it was our initiative to bring everyone else together under one alliance...You can imagine it rubbed some people off the wrong way. And that was that."

Or, in other words, power has never been pretty. And the unspoken truth is heavier than what he makes it out to be; he knows that one nuclear strike would have started a domino effect worldwide. It was effectively the end for all of them; every country, every citizen on that globe. He realizes the gravity of his collective loss quite late, reminded of how much was taken from him in that instant only when he sees the same thing happen in the second world.