Some unrest was building up in the city. A building had been damaged during the night, and no one knew who was responsible. She hoped for their sake that they wouldn't be found, because it likely would have meant getting kicked out of the city. That was a death sentence, no matter how anyone liked to pretend otherwise.
Things hadn't properly gotten worse. They had, yes, but the situation needed to be looked at from the right angle. It was expected that things would degenerate in some way, and given how they hadn't really gotten that much worse there wasn't really a point in complaining. Especially with how stressful the period was, problems arising wasn't a surprise in any way.
Food was getting a little scarcer, which kept everyone on edge. She'd helped with a few extra scouting missions, but even still times were tough on that front. The population in the town was only growing, and food sources outside only seemed to become rarer. It was part of the reason why the city would be so eager to throw someone out.
Food outside would probably run out, eventually. She'd heard someone was trying to set up reliable sources inside the city, but it wasn't an easy task. Not with how much the Ziz had changed things. Fruit trees weren't really an option in the short term, even if it would have been nice to be able to plan for more long term stability, and seasonal crops were far more complicated to get going. With limited supplies, every seed planted was a seed someone wouldn't be fed with.
If it had been possible to expand the Mirror's reach, things would have been different. More land to work with, more space to build and house ponies in, an easier time conducting explorations. Maybe it would have even made long distance expeditions a possibility. They weren't really viable, right then. The city couldn't afford to use food to fuel a mission that had no certainty of coming back with enough to justify it.
It really was an annoying situation. Too little resources to take those gambles that might have allowed them to get enough resources to stabilise, because the price of losing on them would have been too steep. But it was what they were stuck with. The Mirror's influence was tied to the confines of the city, and unless someone managed to reverse engineer it there was nothing to do. And, of course, no one would actually attempt to study it so, as the risk of damaging it was too great a threat.
She'd been doing some reading on the matter in her spare time. It had not exactly been a pleasant experience, being enlightened on just how messed up things really were, but she'd found she couldn't stop herself from learning even if she wanted to. Apparently, no one really knew how the Mirror worked. It was all guesswork for the most part, courses of action established through long periods of trial and error with no real knowledge of why or how what worked did.
They had their smartest constantly studying it, but whoever had built that thing outclassed all of them. The knowledge that it hadn't been enough to save them in the end was not a pleasant thing to bear.