Subumpam
Subumpam is an exonym. Subum is actually a Pabappa word meaning "because of (military) victory", and -pam is Pabappa for "state" (though it was borrowed into Subnumpamese). It served as the capital territory of the Gold Empire around the year 1950. This was an alliance of states situated around the coasts of the Golden Bay intending to keep Nama, the largest state, from controlling the right of way of all the other states. Nama itself was invited to join the union but did not.
Subumpam is a culture and language spoken just to the west of the ancestral Pabap homeland. They built cities such as Wabula Pipem. The culture died out in this area fairly early, crushed by Khulls and Pabap expansion, but by then they had already explored much of the interior of the continent (reaching 39N in the east) and became the substratum in the territory of Goga. They lived in the vicinity of the area of Blop, but did not settle Blop because there were at the time many other rivers and lakes nearby. The planet was still much colder then, with glaciers quickly retreating but still present in many areas which were much warmer than 32°F. Thus they found that by moving west they could easily find warmer territories, with mild summers but winters just as warm as their original homeland in the south.
The modern name of their territory is Subumpam, but the borders do not correspond very well. Today Subumpam is mostly populated by Poswobs rather than Pabaps, and in its western part there are many Khulls speakers as well.
In the northeast, they settled in what are now the Poswob states of Tuppy, Wawiabi, and Fweb.
In the northwest, they settled in Goga.
Between Goga and Wawiabi they settled all across the north coast, but here they were otunumberd by aboriginals to a much greater extemnt and therefore did not actually create "Subumpamese" settlements, but merely made the existing aboriginal settlements a bit more diverse.
To the southeast of Subumpam, along the coast, is the Pabap state of Pipapi. Its borders today include some land that was originally within Subumpam. In fact the name Pipapi is simply Pabappa's reflex of the original name Pipaippis.
Languages
Climate and geography
Subumpam is a small but densely settled empire, located between latitudes 27°N and 28°N and 37°E to 40°E. Its climate is strongly influenced by the Raba Ocean to its south, and the summer monsoon which provides ample rainfall to the coast and much of the interior. The rain is strongest in the east, as the adjacent sea which separates Subumpam from the deserts of Lobexon becomes wider as it transitions into the Raba Ocean. Thus, the climate of western Subumpam is hotter and drier in summer than that of eastern Subumpam, whereas in the winter there is little difference between the two.
Although the tropics are nearby, no area in Subumpam has winters that are consistently warm enough to enable the cultivation of tropical fruits such as pineapples. Like Paba to its east, the native vegetation of Subumpam is dominated by cold-climate species such as spruce trees, because Subumpam is cut off from the tropical plains of Gʷùṭu by the Gold Sea on one side and a tall mountain range on the other, and only those species which could tolerate the cold climate of the intervening mountains could reach Subumpam.
However, maple trees grew in the area, both in the lowlands and highlands, and were the dominant supplier of wood for indoor furniture.
Early history
Subumpam was settled by immigrants from a part of Laba named Mumba, which was geographically intermediate between the homelands of the Pabaps and the Tarpabaps. It was a smaller place than either of them, but because it was further north than most, their people had an advantage in getting to Rilola over more southerly peoples whose ships had to stop in Mumba on their way.
Subumpam was not a single monocultural nation like Paba; it was actually a union of eleven cultures who had separate histories for about a thousand years. Some were coastal, others landlocked. The coastland was all on the south, so the northern nations were poorer. But the primary cultural contrast was not north/south but east/west, with the easterly states like Pipaippis being more Paba-like than those in the west and center. Furthermore, the western states were closer culturally to Nama than the states in the center and east, because even though Nama covered Subumpam's entire northern border, the economic center of Nama was in the south, near the western border of Subumpam. All of the rivers were prdominantly north-to-south, so the poorer northern states were culturally linked with the states immedaitely south of them more strongly than they were linked with the states to their east and west.
The earliest powerful settlement was Pipaippis. It was found in a deep bay around 620 AD, around the same time that Paba was founded in the equally deep Tamusur bay about 60 miles further east. Given the stereotypical sounds of their langugaes, one might think Pipaippis was the Pabap settlement and Tamusur was the Subumpamese, but this was not so.[1] However, the people of Pipaippis did not think of themselves as "Subumpamese" at this time; they were simply the nation of Pipaippis. Their name meant "thunder star".
Meanwhile, a new people calling themselves the Nik settled between the Pabaps and Pipaipians and formed a new colony named simply Niklas. They were culturally similar but physically different from their neighbors, and their presence had the effect of dividing the Pabaps from the other new colonies and thus cementing their identity as a separate nation rather than joining the early Subumpamese cultural web.
Internal conflicts
Ethnic conflict between the various nations of Subumpam was minimal because the presence of non-Subumpamese ethnic minorities in most of the eleven nations reinforced the common identity of the Subumpamese and led them to identify with each other despite their differences. Territorial conflicts did occur, but casualties were much fewer than those in wars in which Subumpam was invaded by an outside power.
- NOTE, LIKELY THIS WILL CHANGE INTO A SUMMARY THAT DOESNT INTRODUCE TH TERM "SUBUMPAM" UNTIL FAIRLY LATE IN THE HISTORY, PERHAPS C 1900. INSTEAD, THERE WILL JUST BE THE NAMES OF THE ORIGINAL CONSTITUENT NATIONS.
Early contact with Paba
Subumpam was bordered on the east by the kingdom of Paba. Paba had been founded in 633 AD, and at the time its people considered themselves to be an independent nation, similar in status to the many tribes to their west that later became Subumpam. At this time, Subumpam was not an empire, but a loose alliance of many independent settler nations that each had their own cultures and slightly different languages. The people of Paba joined the alliance early on, and Paba sold many seaworthy ships to the sailors of various Subumpamese nations early on.
The people of Paba and Subumpam had many things in common. They both had the same typically blonde, blue-eyed physical type, and therefore both stood out starkly from the dark-skinned aboriginals they were settling among. The Pabaps tended to be shorter people than the Subumpamese, but the Subumpamese were internally diverse since they themselves had varied origins.
However, Paba's royal family soon took turns that led them away from formal integration with Subumpam although they remained an ally. While the colonists of the various nations of Subumpam took pride in their ability to improve the living standards of the aboriginal peoples of their territory, the Pabaps early on joined in on the aboriginals' tribal warfare and came to consider themselves just another tribe among the many that had long been fighting for control of the territory the Pabaps were now colonizing. At first, the Pabaps had been afraid that all of the dark-skinned tribes would unite and crush Paba, but the Pabaps were able to reignite old ethnic hatreds between those tribes and make alliances with tribes that occupied their enemies' land and help them in wars. The Pabaps realized, however, that their primary strength was their seagoing ability, and so the Pabaps invested heavily in their navy at the expense of their land army, and their people were at times preyed on by roving bands of aboriginals even from tribes that had been defeated.
Contacts with Kava
The nation of Kava, located a few hundred miles west of Subumpam, had been founded by Fùba people early on but was cut off from the Fùba settlements in Subumpam by two nations populated by West Andanic peoples. Kava was a theocracy, meaning that all of its laws were derived from the scriptures of their religion.
Contacts with Andanic peoples
Some people in western Subumpam wanted to unite with the West Andanese, bringing both them and the Kavans into an expanded Subumpam, whose base of power would be in what had been the western fringe of Subumpam.
The Eastern Empire Project
In response to the attempts of the western nations to expand further west, leaders in eastern Subumpam took a different approach and looked to establish a binding political union with the nation of Paba to their east. For hundreds of years, the people of eastern Subumpam had been in intimate contacts with the closely related Pabap people, and had considered Paba to be just another Subumpamese settler nation. However, as Paba grew in power and influence while Subumpam stagnated, the people of eastern Subumpam began to consider that perhaps they could instead become just another Pabap subdivision[2] instead. They called the proposed union between Paba and eastern Subumpam Lenia, and promised that western Subumpamese nations could also join provided they were willing to keep the seat of power in Paba with a secondary regional capital in eastern Subumpam.
Religion in eastern Subumpam
The eastern Subumpamese people followed the Sisnasi religion, which differed from the Pabap religion of Yiibam, but also from the western Subumpamese religion of Kalpata.[3]
Relations with the Gikuba peoples
The ambitions of the Lenians were held up by a wedge of aboriginal peoples, the Giḳŭba, living between Paba and eastern Subumpam. The Gikuba were an assortment of dark-skinned aboriginal tribes who had chosen to ally with each other against both Paba and a separate alliance of dark-skinned tribes who lived among and to the east of the Pabaps. Subumpam's leaders knew they could not make a formal alliance with the Gikuba without abandoning their alliance with Paba, and with it, their dream of a united kingdom of Lenia. The Subumpamese had so far maintained peace with the Gikuba tribes by keeping their eastern border open, allowing Gikuba people to move to Subumpam, promoting cross-border trade agreements, and limiting contact with Paba to value-neutral transactions of non-military goods.
The Lenians in Subumpam wanted to attempt a squeeze march against the Gikuba, hoping to trap them between a wall of Pabaps and a wall of Subumpamese. But the other Subumpamese nations refused to support this plan, knowing that it would strengthen eastern Subumpam at the expense of western and central Subumpam. The Lenians in Subumpam also realized that while the border between Paba and the aboriginal tribes was firmly delineated by the swift-flowing Esempapa River, the border between eastern Subumpam and the aboriginal tribes was merely a series of stone markers, easily crossed in a war, and that a failed attempt at a squeeze march would hurt Subumpam far more than Paba since the aboriginals would almost certainly focus on invading Subumpam rather than a much more difficult attempt to invade Paba.
Furthermore, the Subumpamese realized that the Gikuba minority in Subumpam itself would quickly turn hostile in the event of a war, even if Subumpam were the victim of an invasion rather than the aggressor. The Lenians thus looked to their north, to the aboriginal Repilian tribes of Maimp, Litila, and Galà, which had been enemies of the Gikuba peoples in the past and could provide Lenian soldiers land on which to camp in order to give their people the advantage of altitude, so they could rush the Gikuba peoples from above. However, other Lenian strategists advised a more cautious approach, stating that if the Subumpamese were given permission to settle in these nations, they could work towards a union with Paba without the need to invade any Gikuba territories, since Paba itself was also slowly moving north. Under this more peaceful plan, the eastern Subumpamese planners realized that union with Paba would likely only take place several generations in the future, but hoped to sign a treaty with Paba and the Repilians establishing the union, to be called Lenia, as a military alliance with the guarantee of safe passage for Lenians across Repilian territory in the interest of economic and military cooperation.
Treaty with Galà
Soon,What year? the nation of Galà signed a pact with Subumpam promising military cooperation and the free right of passage for all Subumpamese and Pabap people through Galà territory. The Galà people accepted the Lenians as a single ethnicity and therefore agreed to help in any way possible to help the two Lenian areas of the planet remain in contact. They also asked the state of Mrlu, a dark-haired tribe that considered its people to be unique in the world, to join Lenia and allow the Lenians and the Galà unrestricted access to its territory and trading markets.
The Treaty of Lenia
Around 1030, Paba signed a treaty with the four nations of Eastern Subumpam establishing the political union of Lenia (called Lainye by Pabaps and Līńu by Subumpamese).[4] However, the treaty did not claim any of the land inhabited by the aboriginal peoples of Gikubà to be part of Lenia, and Lenia thus consisted of two discontinuous territories: one was Paba, the other was eastern Subumpam. Paba was still at war with the Gikubà tribes, but their soldiers had made no progress against the Gikuba for many years, and by 1030 both sides of the war were focusing on defense and self-preservation. In this war, Paba was part of a wider alliance including several other aboriginal tribes, but since Paba was the only member of the alliance interested in settling on the west banks of the Esempapa river, only Paba was forced to put its soldiers on the front lines, and had therefore suffered the most casualties.
When the leaders of Gikubà heard about the Treaty of Lenia, they declared war on Subumpam. However, they promised not to invade Subumpam so long as Subumpam respected its earlier treaty in which they gave the people of Gikubà access to Subumpamese territory and refrained from all military assistance to Paba. Their declaration of war was intended as a warning to Subumpam that Gikubà would react with violence towards any attempt by Subumpam to expand into Gikuba territory or cut off their trade routes with other nations.
Contacts with the Zenith
While those in eastern Subumpam were attempting to link up with Paba and form a new alliance called Lenia, people living in western Subumpam were looking to encircle the Lenians with an alliance of all of the mountain states such as Galà, Ihhai, Maimp, Litila, and others. These people included the Zeniths, and although the Zeniths were just one of the many peoples they sought to include in their alliance, the Zeniths stood to benefit from such an alliance in ways that the other groups did not since the Zeniths were transnational and wanted to freely move from one area to another.
But of far greater importance for the Zeniths was that, if successful, their mountain alliance would trap the Lenians on the flat coastal plain, stopping any further northward expansion of either Paba or eastern Subumpam. However, the Zeniths did not want to start a war with Lenia, since the Lenians would make useful allies in future wars and their coastal territory could prove valuable for Zeniths as well.
Some Zenith strategists called for an alliance that included parts of eastern Subumpam, because they knew that the supply of food was much more reliable in the lowlands, and wanted to be able to access the coast or at least a river that reached the coast. Western Subumpam did have a sizable coastline, but it was in the nations of Vuʒi and Yuenan, whose climate was drier than much of the land further east. They declared themselves to be part of an ethnic group they called the My̆la, a constructed identity comprising portions of the populations of all of the nations to the north of the Gold Sea; their only unifying characteristic was that they all lived at least partly in the mountains.
Lenia-Zenith relations
Both the Lenians and the Zeniths claimed an alliance of nations based on shared ethnic ties, but their claims overlapped significantly. In particular, the Lenians claimed that the people in mountain nations such as Galà and Mrlu were Lenians, and the Zeniths claimed they were Myla and that the Zeniths were also Myla. The Galà people had rejected their identification as Lenians, noting that all of the lowland peoples of Lenia had blonde hair, whereas the Galà were of diverse origins but most had dark hair; however, they were unable to suppress the desire of the nation of Mrlu, whose people also had dark hair, to join the Lenian alliance. Mrlu's people did not identify themselves as Lenians either, but their nation was in a strategic location among the highest of all mountaintops, and had the coldest climate in the area.
Likewise, most of the people in the mountains had little sympathy for the Zeniths, who had a long-established habit of building parasitic colonies in other nations and preying on the people least able to defend themselves. Organized prostitution was common in Paba and Thaoa, with the Zeniths in control. However, the Zenith proposal for an unbroken chain of mountain nations connecting to the ocean in the west and possibly also the east appealed to many residents of the mountain states, and they hoped they could pursue a diplomatic solution with both the Zeniths and the Lenians that would satisfy both sides and benefit the residents of the mountains as well.
Galà-Lenia military alliance
Nevertheless, Galà and Mrlu were not enticed by the Zenith's plan of an east-west empire across the mountains, and chose to sign a treaty of military cooperation with Lenia. Galà sent a battalion of soldiers into Subumpam and stationed them in the city of Pačēpus (Kaivi), the capital of the state of Pipaippis and the most important city in eastern Subumpam. Mrlu did not participate in this action but affirmed their allegiance to Galà and thus to Lenia. Galà was very poor, but its soldiers were widely renowned as battle-hardy, and Lenia did not object to their presence. The soldiers built an extension of the city of Kaivi for their people, and many civilians from Galà moved in. These people generally did not learn to speak Subumpamese, and functioned as though they were independent from their host nation. The presence of the civilians actually drew more protest from the common people of Pipaippis than did the soldiers, because many Subumpamese people believed that the Galà people were vampires, since Subumpamese folklore talked about a race of vampires who lived in the mountains and certain areas of the countryside. The Lenians in Pipaippis thus often avoided the Galà quarter of their capital city and made no efforts to teach them Subumpamese.
The Zeniths reacted to the new alliance by declaring war against all of Lenia, including Paba. However, since the Zeniths had no state of their own, they were unable to trigger a military invasion even by the generally pro-Zenith military planners of the nations of western Subumpam. The Zeniths believed that they would be able to trigger such a war if they were to go in unilaterally and start attacking Lenians, but few Zeniths were willing to risk their lives in a struggle that would only benefit their future descendants.
Galà takes control
By signing a pact with Lenia, Galà informed its people that they were adhering to the principle of national loyalty — the idea that people should be loyals to others within their nation, and not seek to form transnational alliances with members of the same religion or political party. Galà had several ethnic groups, and the military strategists of Galà declared that only those ethnic groups who lived only in Galà were truly Galaqian,[5] whereas groups such as the Zenith, who built parasitic colonies within other nations rather than forming a self-sufficient nation of their own, were not part of Galà and could not become citizens or soldiers.
The leaders of Galà rejected the type of partisan politics prevalent in the area at the time, where political parties were allied with religions and membership in a political party took precedence over loyalty to one's country and ethnic identity. They promised never to seek an alliance with any transnational organization, nor with any stateless peoples whose loyalty to their own kind was firm but refused any loyalty to the nation in which they lived.
Galà expelled all Zeniths from its territory, and suggested that Lenia do the same. Further, they declared that citizens of other nations could not move to Galà and become citizens, except Lenians with no non-Lenian ancestry.
The concept of a single nation declaring absolute loyalty to more than one ethnic group, but to none outside its borders, was common in the mountainous regions of Nama where Gala lay, where territories of different ethnic groups could overlap appreciaply without tempting the different peoples to fight each other for land. Lenia fit nicely into this model, as its terrain was mostly flat land. Therefore, the Lenians lived on low ground, the Galà people lived on higher ground, and the aboriginal Repilian people lived on still higher ground and on the north slopes of the mountains.
Some Lenians were disheartened by Galà's principle of national loyalty, since they knew that the people of Galà were part of a larger tribal group called the Andanese, who also built parasitic colonies in other nations, including some in Lenia. However, most Andanese colonies were in Paba, where the people were the property of the royal family, and there was no concept of citizenship to be awarded or revoked, and loyalty to the royal family was by coercion rather than choice.
Paba adopts pacifism
Within a few generations, Paba's royal family came to pursue a policy of universal pacifism. They wrote a new constitution for their empire which promised that Paba would never start a war, and would participate in wars only when an outside power would benefit from Paba's defense; if Paba was attacked unilaterally they would quickly mobilize their people to accomodate the invaders but these people would be unarmed and incapable of fighting back even in self-defense.
The royals thus immediately signed peace treaties with the various aboriginal tribes they had been warring against and handed over the deeds to much of their land. Paba also promised the enemy tribes that Paba would help them in any future war by giving them food and other supplies and expecting no compensation for their efforts.
Because Paba had been participating in these wars as part of a wider alliance, they were not simply pounced on immediately by the tribes with whom they had previously been fighting; Paba was, for the meantime, still protected by the allegiance of the various other tribes that had been on Paba's side. And because the peace treaty had been accepted by both sides, these aboriginals had also mended relations with each other. Paba had wisely chosen to make friends with the tribes to their east, meaning that the land they were surrendering was entirely to the west of Paba, which meant that it was between Paba and Subumpam, and therefore any attempts by Subumpam to expand to their east would put them in violation of Paba's treaty and lead to a war in which Paba and the many dark-skinned aboriginal tribes would likely all unite against Subumpam.
When Subumpam realized that their close ally, Paba, had cleverly manipulated the aboriginal tribes into signing a treaty that benefited Paba but severely handicapped Subumpam, they began to rethink their alliance and work towards a united Subumpam free of its ancestral ties to Paba. But they could do nothing to stop Paba's growth. Paba's commitment to pacifism took their soldiers off the battlefield and brought them back into their homes, leading to a high birthrate. As Pabaps settled the tropical and subtropical peninsulas to the south and east of Paba, their population began to grow even faster, and within a few hundred years the population of Paba was greater than the combined population of all eleven nations of Subumpam.
Also party to this treaty was the nation of Niklas, a tribe of dark-skinned people who, like the Pabaps and Subumpamese, were colonists rather than aboriginals, and, having arrived on the continent long after the Pabaps and Subumpamese had already settled down, had chosen to settle between them. Here, they had allied with the aboriginals against Paba and Subumpam, but were eager to accept the treaty because the treaty gave them the right to also settle in Paba itself.
Contacts with Nama
Paba's standard of living soon exceeded that of Subumpam, and despite their promise of pacifism the Pabap Navy soon encircled Subumpam and came to control trade far beyond its borders. This was not an act of war; Paba was trading with nations even further west, and Subumpam was stuck in the middle with little wealth of its own with which to contribute to the trade. Soon, pirates from tropical nations such as Katō and Taryte began kidnapping Subumpamese people to use as slaves on plantations in their home countries, and Paba refused to defend them. Subumpam began to draw up plans for a common military in order to better protect themselves, but the individual nations refused to give up their military sovereignty. At the national level, the coastal states did militarize to some extent, and were given financial aid by inland nations as compensation.
Subumpam in the Gold Empire
Later contacts with Paba
Subumpam was seen by the rest of the world as being essentially a sister empire of Paba. THey had many things in common, such as (during the Gold Era) language, good shipbuilding technology, and a love of peace and large multicultural empires. But they had many differences as well. Paba was a unitary culture founded in Tamusur Bay in 633 AD and remained a unitary culture as it grew upward and outward into one of the largest empires of its time. This was possible because Paba avoided war and had one of the highest birthrates of any culture of its time. Subumpam, by contrast, had a modest birthrate, and although its people tried to avoid war, they were geographically closer to the sources of their wars than was Paba. Thus their population never grew significantly over time.
Subumpamese and Pabap people were physically different as well. Both peoples tended to have blonde hair and blue eyes, and darkk-skinned tribes such as the Nik and SUkuna often lumped them both together as "blondes", but Subumpamese people were much taller than Pabaps and therefore the two did not marry each other very often even when living in the same cities. Also, the Subumpamese were more internally diverse to begin with, since they had come from different parts of Laba and some had mixed more with aboriginals than others. In general, the Subumpamese living in the far west tended to be darker than those in the center and east, for several reasons.
Note that, unlike dark-skinned people, the Subumpamese could marry Pabaps and have children without others knowing on sight that these children were of an interracial marriage, since they would resemble tall Pabaps or short Subumpamese. Thus there was not as much shunning of mixed-race children when a Subumpamese-Pabap couple decided to have children. This middle ground population served as a bridge so that other Pabaps and Subumpamese could then marry them and further blur the lines between the two groups.
However, they remained divided by their very different religions. Pabaps believed in Yiibam, a religion that worshipped a god named Yīa. The Subumpamese believed in a religion called Sisnasi, and believed it was far more developed than Yiibam and did not cause its people so many problems. People of mixed Pabap and Subumpamese descent identified with a religion rather than a race, and therefore the concept of being both Pabap and Subumpamese simultaneously did not make sense to most people in Subumpam.
Although both empires profited much from the sea, Paba was luckier here because it had much more seacoast per unit land area than Subumpam did. Subumpam was almost entirely flatland, which meant that it was good for farming, even in the cold climate that dominated the area in its earliest days. Paba had lots of flat land too, but soon pushed its way northward into the mountains, and also had some places that were flat but had poor soil and could not be used for farming.
Another difference is that both empires abolished slavery early on (it had been present among some aboriginal groups), but only Paba allowed their people to be sold to foreign nations to work as slaves on plantations.
Both Paba and Subumpam were frequent victims of attacks from outside armies. But one difference was that Paba was never attacked from within: many foriegn nations cut open Paba's delicate borders, but Paba was a strongly cohesive society, and none of the groups within paba, even the underclass peoples such as the Fua, ever attempted a civil war on the Pabaps all around them. To some extent, however, this was helped by the fact that the Pabaps were smaller and more delicate than all of their minority groups and most of those groups had a cultural taboo against attacking small people. Nevertheless, the minority groups did not fight each other either, even during the period of Pabap history when Pabaps themselves had become only 3rd largest ethnic group.
Subumpam, on the other hand, had a history of watching minority groups within its borders suddenly turn hostile and start major wars. These wars were much more damaging to Subumpam than Paba's wars were to Paba, because in Subumpam, most of the deaths were civilians. Like Paba, Subumpam seemed to have resigned itself early on to being a nation of perennial victims. They said "Sometimes our enemies will kill us, and sometimes our friends will; we will never stop making enemies and friends." Subumpam did not consider itself to be a pacifist empire; they blamed their embarrassing military history on the misfortune to be surrounded by larger, stronger empires (even Paba) on all sides while in addition being full of barely healed wounds resulting from the fact that they originated as an alliance of smaller states rather than growing from a strong stem.
Population growth
As above, Subumpam's nations did not experience strong population growth. In the 600's AD, Paba was just one of many settler nations founded along Rilola's south coast; albeit one of the strongest ones even from its very beginning since they had the most seaworthy ships. Pipaippis was a Paba-like state that was populated by Subumpamese people and seemed the likeliest rival to Paba early on. But a low birth rate and economic barriers from other states kept Pipaippis confined to just a small area along the coast, whereas Paba exploded outward in all directions, even south, and even eventually claimed the land that lay between it and Pipaippis.
Even when all of Subumpam united into a single empire under their United Subumpam Treaty, they were still smaller than what had become of Paba, both in geographical extent and in total population. Moreover Paba's population was younger and its land was perpetually overcrowded. Subumpam realized that Subumpam could not become a world superpower, and at best could merely make shifting alliances with world superpowers.
Government
Subumpam originated as an alliance of nine nations, and two more joined later on. Some of these names are given as code words taken from the numbers 1 through 11 in Subumpamese: Bipabum, Nī, Manīa, Vuʒi, Yūez, Yūenan, Pipaippis, Vuʒinī, Puripup, Punsam, and Pombi. Technicakllky these wouldbntr bew used even as codenames though because they are the cardinal numbers instead of the ordinal numbers. All of the states with Pabap majorities begin with the letter P, though this is a coincidence, as none of the adjacent states over the border in Paba itself happen to begin with P.[6]
Subumpam is unusually ethnically diverse internally, even for a nation founded by recent immigrants from the islands of Laba. It is not just an alliance of eleven cultures that are different from each other but monolithic inside; they are actually diverse even down to the level of towns. This is due to various factors:
- Whereas most other settler nations either killed off their aboriginal population or pushed them to a tiny reservation that was excluded from mainstream society, the Subumpamese were peaceful and did not try to wipe out the aboriginals.
- The Subumpamese happened to settle in an area that was at the meeting points of two very different aboriginal cultures, who were hostile to each other and did not generally mix, so they ended up with both of them.
- The Subumpamese grew so quickly that they began to take over the territories of other settlers such as the Pabaps, adding two of their states to the Union. Pabaps were a majority in these areas, but as they moved west they became a new minority in the other nine states.
- The Andanese, a people who preferred to live as an underclass in nations dominated by other peoples than to form their own, were common in Subumpam.
- Yet more groups of people began moving from Laba to Subumpam as Subumpam became prosperous, and some of these groups of people even had minority groups within them.
Nama is even more diverse than Subumpam, even at local levels, but because Nama never had an ethnic majority, it is seen for the most part as an alliance of microstates rather than one large host empire with a thousand little tribes living inside it.
Bipabum
Bipabum (also known as Wipabun, Vipon, ʕʷipôn, Bifom, and Pisom) is the "capital" nation of the Subumpamese Union. It is an ethnically very diverse nation. Along the south coast, most people are Pabaps. Unlike most other states, Pabaps living in Bipabum often still speak only Pabappa.[7] They make a living from fishing and do not rely on the government for very much. In the southwest, however, even along the coast, most people are Subumpamese and that is where the capital city of Wabula Pipem is located. It is also the home base of the Subumpamese Navy (Pisčapus).
Further inland, the population is still primarily Subumpamese, but there are is a sizable minority (about 18%) of aboriginals who call themselves Sukuna. These peopke have blended with Subumpamese and created a mixed-race subset of people. The mixed-race people have the religion and culture of the Subumpamese and therefore call themselves Subumpamese. Some of the full blood aboriginals have alos assimilated this way, but not many.
Bipabum is also the target of a lot of immigration into the Subumpamese Union, since Bipabum is the richest state. Most immigrants are from either Nama to the north and west or the Star Empire to the southwest. The Stars are not geogrphically connected to Subumpam and can only reach it by a long boat trip across the sea or by immigrating first through Nama. Nama, however, is hostile to the Star Empire and does not allow most Star people to enter. However, this is difficult to enforce, because many people living on the southern coast of Nama are very similar in appearance and culture to the Stars. The Star Empire considers southern Nama's people and Bipabum's Sukuna minority to be ethnically identical with the Stars, since they are all physically similar: they have dark skin and distinct facial features, unlike the Pabaps and Subumpamese who are mostly blondes, and unlike the Namans who have many racial types but none of them particularly known for being dark. The Stars claim that any nation that has ethnic minorities is a nation of invaders. They say that the only reason Subumpam and Nama are ethnically diverse is because they were originally Star nations that got smothered by immigrants from outside. The Stars have been trying to turn the Sukuna people living in Subumpam against Subumpam and essentially start a civil war, with the intention of not only getting control of the land but potentially also enslaving all of the other non-Sukuna people. However, the Sukuna people have been quickly assimilating into Subumpamese society, especially strongly in the nation of Bipabum.
Moreover, there are two distinct cultures of dark-skinned people who have also moved into Bipabum, mostly on boats with the Pabaps. which means that a lot of the dark skinned people are actually themselves implants. One of these is the Niḳ (Pabappa Nep, Subumpamese Nik). Like Bipabum's Pabaps, they are a fish-heavy culture, and prefer to live along the immediate coast and make a living solely by fishing the ocean. They have not intermarried much with Pabaps because they are much taller than Pabaps and for that matter, all of the other people living in Bipabum. The other group is called the Tarpabap people. They are mostly in Subumpam for the purpose of raising an army to settle the cold, underpopulated interior of the continent, and if successful, also the hot, overpopulated tropics.
Nī
Nī This is inland from Bipabum and in many ways seems like a continuation of Bipabum. But it is much poorer since it has no oceanfront and does not have a river that connects it with Bipabum. It does however have a river that connects it to the ocean state of Pipaippis (see below). Nī is the state with the largest Andanese minority, and it also has a lot of Sukuna people.
Manīa
Manīa A western state with a lot of ethnic diversity. Immigrants from Nama usually stay here instead of moving on to the richer states like Bipabum.
Vuʒi
Vuʒi The westernmost state, whose population mostly does not speak Subumpamese.
Yūez
Yūez Similar to Nī. Has foothills of the Popoppos Mountains, where many Namans live. Has a lot of Sukuna people as well.
Yūenan
Yuenan
Yūenan was similar in geography to Bipabum, but smaller. In the Gold Empire, Yūenan came to support socially conservative policies such as banning foreign languages and discouraging immigration.
Rise of nativist politics
In 2057, Nama had conquered both Subumpam and Lobexon and united the two empires into a new empire ruled largely by Nama. Nama introduced a new form of government defined by political parties, in which minority parties were given extra power to oppose the majority. The Subumpamese people as a whole strongly supported this government, partly because they were the smaller of the two empires and figured that such a system would tend to benefit them at the expense of any enemies they expected to arise.
However, they soon were proved wrong. Nearly all Subumpamese people supported the Gold Party, but the empire of Lobexon to the west was divided among many small parties. Thus the Subumpamese, despite being outnumbered, were forced to identify with the majority party, and thus had less power in the government than even their small numbers would have otherwise granted them. To make matters worse, the Gold Party was focused largely on fighting its enemies in Lobexon, chiefly the Crystals and the Gilgosi, and since nearly the entire Subumpamese population was Gold, the Gold party leaders expected the Subumpamese to volunteer themselves to fight insurrections in Lobexon. The Subumpamese realized that fighting these battles would kill a lot of Subumpamese men and benefit only the Gold party members in Lobexon.
Attempts to set up a specifically Subumpamese party repeatedly failed, as the Gold Party's army was responsible for military defense of Subumpam, and threatened to withdraw protection from any area of Subumpam that voted against the Goldies. After a few decades of uncontested power, the Gold government assumed control of Subumpam's politics even at the local levels, and even went so far as to pass a law banning Subumpamese people from joining any other political party. This was the only such law in the entire Empire: subjects of all other ethnicities were free to identify with whichever political party they wanted; the Subumpamese were the only people in the empire who were not allowed to have opinions.
The Yuenanese people were upset at the way their people were seen simply as pawns for their Naman overlords. However, they were aware that the Gold government was generous in some ways that previous oppressors had not been. When a wave of liberalism and relaxed political control swept over the Gold Empire during the period from about 2140 to 2170, the Subumpamese state of Yuēnan passed increasingly assertive laws intended to resurrect Yuenan as an independent power.
Ethnic resettlement program of 2161
In 2161, the Gold government announced a new program intended to get all of the dark-skinned people in Lobexon and all of the light-skinned people in Subumpam to mix and mingle with each other in order to put out the fires of ethnic hatred. Yuenan's government said that there was no ethnic hatred in Yuenan, and thus no fire to put out. They took power into their own hands and nullified the proposal. Since Yuenan's government at this time was 100% Gold, the imperial Gold government could not object to this action, and Yuenan was excluded from the resettlement program.
Yuenan soon went further and passed a law banning all non-Subumpamese people from serving in its government, and making Subumpamese the only language people were allowed to speak in public. By this time, the Subumpamese people had long since come to see themselves as one, and did not divide themselves according to their ancestral cultural divisions such as Yuenanese, Bipabumese, and so on. However, dark-skinned ethnic minorities such as the aboriginal Sukuna people and recent immigrants from Lobexon were still mostly considered non-Subumpamese even if they spoke the language fluently. Thus, all ethnic minorities in Yuenan were disenfranchised by the new law.
Yuenan had a small minority of dark-skinned people of diverse origins; some were aboriginals whose ancestors had lived in Yuenan for thousands of years, others had arrived on a boat from Lobexon and had lived in Yuenan for only a few years. Although these people were hurt by Yuenan's new laws, the imperial Gold government realized that the real target of Yuenanese anger was not the dark-skinned people who had immigrated in recent years but rather the high-level Gold party officials, who were largely of Naman descent rather than being native Yuenanese. Again, since these new laws were passed by a government that was 100% Gold, the Gold party's own belief system forbade them from even raising an objection to the laws; they were forced to pretend that they agreed fully with all of them. Thus, Yuenan fired most of its government officials, elected natives in their place, and soon became more powerful than all of the Subumpamese states around it.
Yūenan soon used its new power to elect a pacifist government. They believed that Yūenan was at peace with itself, and that all possible wars could therefore only serve the interests of outsiders, particularly Namans. They invited foreigners and ethnic minorities to move into Yūenan, but stated that Yūenan would not fight for their home nations in a war, even if the remainder of the Empire did.
Invasion of 2172
In 2172, a branch of Lobexon's Gold Party calling itself the Têt (/te:ʕt/) invaded Yūenan and built military campsites there. Although the real target of their invasion was the state of #Yūez, and there were other paths from the ocean into Yūez, they chose to invade largely through Yūenan because of Yuenan's pacifist government and reluctance to attack invaders. Many Yūenanese were kidnapped by the invaders and forced to help them fight their way through Yuenan. Nevertheless, the invaders held to their promise to invade Yūez, and once the entire Têt army had cut through Yūenan they remained in Yūez and did not look back.
Tarytean colonization
In 2175, a group of colonists from the Lobexonian state of Taryte settled in southwestern Yūenan, and built private settlements in which no non-members were allowed. Their goal was to kill off all of the Subumpamese people, starting with those living in Yūenan. These people, called Dabondians, claimed allegiance to nobody else and did not expect help from Taryte or any other state in the Empire. They had chosen to settle in Yuenan because they believed that its people were uniquely weak and would be easy to slaughter.
The Yuenanese police force attempted to encircle the settlements, but were defeated. Since states in the Empire did not have their own armies, Yuēnan was forced to call on Nama for help in repelling the invaders. The Yūenanese realized that they were liable to be forced by Nama to sign a new treaty abolishing all of their nativist laws and restoring a government led by foreigners from Nama.
However, Nama was undergoing many other internal attacks at this time, and in fact the entire government of Lobexon (but not Nama or Subumpam) had been overthrown just three years earlier by a paramilitary wing of the Gold Party calling itself the Polotta. This coup had not affected Subumpam or Nama, since they pledged allegiance to the Gold Party itself, and not a particular branch, although some of the resistors had fled into Subumpam for safety. However, the Polotta branch of the Gold Party was now attacking the resistors (called Têt), thus making Nama more helpless than it had been at any time in recorded history.
Introduction of slavery
Nevertheless, that portion of the Naman army which was stationed in Subumpam was still strong enough to arrest the Dabondian invaders. The Namans rounded them up and transported them to northeastern Subumpam, particularly the states of #Puripup, #Punsam, and #Pombi. Here, the Namans set up slave camps on land taken from the locals. The climate here was too cold to build plantations, so the slaves mostly worked in mechanical labor.
Any locals who protested were also enslaved right alongside the Dabondians. In 2176, a new law was passed in Subumpam giving the Naman overseers the right to enslave any person for any reason, and the right to take any land from Subumpam to build new slave camps.
Even though Nama had quickly flushed away the invaders, Yuenan's people realized that they had been invaded twice in three years by intruders from Lobexon and seemed likely to be targeted for more such invasions in the future. Even though Nama still respected Yuenan's decision to ban all immigrants from participating in its government, the Yuenanese realized that this respect would not buy them a way out of an all-out military invasion. They realized that their dream of a state where Subumpamese people could be powerful instead of just being pawns in a wider war was thus likely impossible.
Pipaippis
Pipaippis is the smallest state. It consists mostly of Pabaps, who are again mostly concentrated along the waterfront and the rivers leading to it. The Pipaippis River and the bay it feeds into are important sources of power and wealth for the Pipaip people, and they are one of the strongest states despite being the smallest. The capital of Pipaippis is Kaivi Maniyi. Like Bipabum, Pabaps living in Pipaippis often speak only Paleo-Pabappa and have little to gain by learning another language since they already dominate their society with Pabappa. Pipaippis is unique in that it was originally mostly Subumpamese, but wealthy Pabap people moved in and outgrew the Subumpamese within just 200 years. They are also unique in that they seceded from the Subumpamese Union when they felt threatened, and joined Paba, which they felt to be a safer empire.
Vuʒinī
Vuʒinī Upland of Nī, this state has a lot of Pabaps, Andanese, Namans, and Sukuna. Yet it is still majority Subumpamese even after all that.
Puripup
Puripup Population is a mix between Subumpamese and Pabaps, with some Andanese`in the southern part. Not much blending of the peoples has taken place because of problems with religion. Religious converstion is made rare by the strong differences in body type. Subumpamese are the tallest, Pabaps in the middle, and Andanese the smallest, with the addtional difference that Andanese women are taller than Andanese men. Pabaps tend to be found furthest east but have been gaining at the expense of the other groups throughout history. Unusually, the Andanese here are mostly clustered in the south rather than living only where Pabaps live. The people are very poor, and have different religions, but they are more peaceful than a lot of similar multiethnic nations. Hilly and subtropical, hot in summer.
Punsam
Punsam is a mountainous nation consisting mostly of Pabaps, with some unsettled and mostly uncivilized Repilian aboriginal people in caves in the north. Not many Subumpamese live here yet, but they are slowly streaming in from the west. They are famous for their annual festival, similar to the carnivals in the modern USA, which attracts people from all the nations around them and in the end brings money into Punsam from t he richer nations around them. The people of Punsam have to work veru hard for it though.
Pombi
Pombi: Further south than Punsam, but still very mountainous. Propulation is about 85% Pabaps.[8] They share most of the cultural characteristics of Pabaps in Paba, including a high birthrate, low crime rate, and unwillingness to participate in wars. They are also very small people, and find no shame in admitting they've lost a fight to a woman. Historically Pabaps have been suspicious of the Subumpamese people, but Pombi is a nation of Pabaps that overcame that fear in recognition that Subumpam was potentially a very great empire.
Unlike the other states, Punsam and Pombi had joined the union having previously been states of Paba, and thus had no distinct ethnic histories of their own. That is, there was no "Pombian" or "Punsamese" culture distinct from that of Paba. Thus they joined the Union as a confederation, offering to diminish their voting power to that of a single state, and run all votes through a new "confederation" government if Subumpam felt they were pulling too much weight in the government. This never happened, however, and the two new states soon became more culturally diverse while also becoming less different from the rest of Subumpam.
Religion
All religions in Subumpam are sects of Ridia; see Religions of Teppala.
Subumpam was one of the first countries where religion and politics coincided. Although Subumpam was not a democracy, it did have political parties, and these were all based in religion. Essntially religion determined which political party someone supported, and to change parties meant to change religions. These in turn often corresponded to different ethnic groups, for example the Sàŋhʷṁi religion was only practiced by Andanese, the Sĕyepa religion was only practiced by immigrants from the Star Empire, and so on. However, some ethnic groups had more than one native religion, and that is why the names of the religions are not simply derived from the names of their predominant ethnic group. Sometimes also a religion will reach majority status among more than one ethnic group, and Subumpam was one of the first national empires that successfully spread its religion to other ethnic groups and reached majority status among some of them. The major religions in Subumpam were:
Sisnasi[9] is the native religion to Subumpam, and reached majority status among Kavans when Subumpam took over Kava, and remained after Subumpam fell. Nevertheless, minority religions do exist:
Sàŋhʷṁi (Saumfuma in Bābākiam) was predominant among Andanese people, as it was wherever else they went. The Kavan leadership did not see this as a problem because their own native religions had always been allies of the Andanese.
Sĕyepa was brought over by immigrants from the Star Empire, and has few converts among the native Subumpamese.
Emon is another religion brought over by immigrants from the Star Empire. Its members worship the sun.
Yiibam is the native religion in Pabap territory at this time, and has a few converts among the Subumpamese.
Kâ is another religion brought in from Nama.
Lastly, some people are atheists. There is an organization of atheists named Litila (NAN), but most atheists do not belong to any organization. Furthermore, Litila is most popular in the cold hills of the far east, whereas numerically most atheists are in the capital territory of Bipabum, and have no interest in Litila. When Litila invaded the rest of the Union with crabs, the atheists of all of the other states reaffirmed their commitment to the stability of the empire.
A religion called Si was practiced by birds who had flown in from the Arctic
Culture
Comparisons with Kava
In mahy ways, Subumpamese culture resembled that of its more famous relative Kava, since Kava arose from a subset of Subumpam. But Subumpam existed for about 1500 years before Kava did, and participated in many wars. Their original state was, like its neighbors, positioned along the southern coast of Rilola in what is today considered a tropical climate but in the 1900s was merely temperate. Unlike most of the states nearby, Subumpam was not an ethnostate with a single language and religion, but rather a union of five major cultures and several more minor ones. They thus created a very large country, militarily more commanding than any of its neighbors, and set the stage for many future wars in which all of Subumpam's neighbors, despite not being geographically connected, conspired to squeeze Subumpam from all direections.
Unlike Kava, Subumpam was not military aggressive. The government they created natively made it very difficult to declare war, and they were far more often the victim of an invasion than the aggressor. Furthermore, Subumpam was often yoked into alliances with foreign powers who revoked their ability to independently declare war altogether, and thus the only wars Subumpam fought during these times were for the benefit of their occupiers.
Ethnic divisions in Kava and Subumpam
Subumpam had always rejected racism. By contrast, Kava's founders explicitly stated that they were a collection of tribes of Subumpamese, Pabap, and Andanese descent who had banded together to fight back against their oppressors, who were all of dark or moderate skin tones.[10] Despite being a collection of tribes of somewhat diverse physical appearance, the Kavan people were united by their pale skin tone. The Kavan people wore white clothes and identified themselves with the color white and with blue eyes and blonde hair. They considered themselves to be at war with all people whose skin was darker than theirs, even if it meant a war against the entire world.
About four years after the foundation of Kava, a troop of about 250 dark-skinned Crystal people who had heard about the new nation landed along the eastern edge of Kava's coastline and launched an opportunistic invasion. Since their founding, the Kavan government had promised their people that their new nation would be for light-skinned people only, but when the dark-skinned Crystals invaded them, the Kavan military generals blushed and realized their people were having such a difficult time fighting their difficult natural environment that they were too weak to defend themselves in a real war.
The Kavan leaders tried to pretend that the Crystal colony had come to them by invitation rather than invasion, while secretly offering the Crystals money to leave Kava and invade Subumpam instead. But when the Crystals blocked off access to parts of Kava's coastline and took control of the coastal economies, the Kavan settlers lost faith in their leaders and some defected to the Crystals, who were just as hateful as the Kavans but based their worldview on religion instead of race and therefore allowed conversion.
However, wider conflicts soon forced the Crystals and the Kavans onto the same side after all, and the Crystals actually agreed to submit to Kava's rule, and the Kavans agreed to allow the Crystals to remain in Kava even as they pursued anti-Crystal racial polices elsewhere in their new homeland.
Comparisons with Paba
Subumpam was often also associated with its more famous neighbor Paba, but the two cultures were not particularly closely related, and did not intermarry often until the last years of Subumpam. Their religions were very different as well. They did have some similarities: Paba's logo was a five-pointed star in a circle, and Subumpam's was a 4-pointed star in a circle: shaped like ⨁. (Earthans would call this a cross, but in Subumpam, there was no tradition of treating it distinctly.) These were sometimes likened to blueberries (⍟) and cranberries (⨁), but the Pabaps preferred to identify themselves with larger and juicier fruitsL strawberries, raspberries, and grapes.
Pacifistic politics
The Subumpamese people traditionally loved peace, but the Pabaps were far more pacifistic even than the Subumpamese. During one war, Paba reacted to an invasion by disarming its military, and sending the now-defenseless soldiers out to greet the invaders with gifts and invite them to settle down in the countryside and marry Pabap women. The Pabap government told its people that native Pabap men were too small to satisfy their women, and that they should be glad that they had been invaded since the native Pabap women would be much happier to marry the invaders. Even Subumpam considered this reaction to be absurd and many Subumpamese hoped that Paba's masochistic worldview would not bleed over into Subumpam by way of the many Pabaps living in eastern Subumpam.
Unlike Subumpam, Paba was historically an ethnic state founded by the Pabap people, rather than an alliance of previously independent empires. Thus, all of Paba shared a single culture. Yet, perversely, Paba's government embraced racial discrimination against the native Pabap people, placing them at the very bottom of their society and openly declaring that all ethnic minorities, even invaders, were superior to the Pabap people and would thus have extra privileges not attainable for ethnic Pabaps by any means. For example, the government created a welfare fund, which was dispensed only to certain ethnic minorities, and allowed these people to completely avoid work and yet enjoy a standard of living higher than that of the Pabap working class, from whom the money to fund the welfare payments was taken. Often, Pabap governors, protected by foreign mercenaries, rounded up Pabap civilians and sold them off to foreign empires as slaves, leaving the ethnic minorities living in Paba untouched.
Some Pabaps had, at various times, tried to complain about their abusive government, but the government of Paba had long ago solved this problem by declaring that Pabap people were not allowed to have opinions.
Yet, no matter how hard Pabaps tried to hurt themselves, they seemed to emerge from each self-inflicted crisis miraculously stronger and more prosperous than before, whereas Subumpam's fortunes seemed to get worse with each passing generation. Thus the Subumpamese, already panicking over the prospect of invasions from the larger empires around them, were forced to suppress a growing pacifist movement, whose proponents seemed to want to cut down Subumpam's military even further and flirted with Pabap-influenced ideas such granting superior rights to ethnic minorities and inviting enemy soldiers to colonize Subumpam for the express purpose of marrying them to native Subumpamese women.
Some Subumpamese politicians came to believe that Paba was unique and that its masochistic politics would not work anywhere else. They identified two key differences between Paba and Subumpam that made them plead with their countrymen to stridently avoid emulating Paba.
First, they said, although Subumpam was not a true democracy, it was far more responsible to its people than Paba, which was an absolute monarchy with no power, even at local levels, for anyone but the royal family. The royals appointed governors to rule their states and cities, but all of these could be recalled and replaced if they dared step out of line with the wishes of the royal family in the capital city of Biospum. Thus, no matter how much the Pabap underclass was abused, they were helpless to unseat the royals, and the Pabap imperial government was thus perfectly stable. And a stable government was exactly what Paba's allies wanted to see, since it was extremely submissive to the interests of those allies, and therefore, none of Paba's allies had any reason to want to invade Paba.
Secondly, and partly as a result of the aforementioned royal stability, Paba actually had a strong military, even if they stridently avoided using it even in self-defense. When invaded by the Star Empire, Paba had told its people to swallow the sword and let the Stars do to the Pabaps whatever they wished, but only because they were sure that their native population could shoulder the abuse without putting themselves at risk of complete annihilation. These Stars were not attempting to overthrow the government of Paba; in fact, they were fleeing a defeat in Subumpam, figuring that even though Paba was much stronger than Subumpam, Pabaps reacted to invasions by rolling over and doing their best to keep their attackers happy, and therefore it was literally impossible for the Stars to suffer defeat in Paba.
But these Star soldiers were just a small piece of the wider Star army, the bulk of which had already surrendered in Subumpam. Paba knew that its masochistic foreign policy would put it at risk of being wrecked in an all-out war if a large army such as that of Nama were to unite and decide to crush them; they avoided this fate by being so submissive to their neighbors that none of the neighbors would be willing to let another neighbor grab more than their fair share of the abuse. Thus, in essence, Paba had signed an alliance with its many abusers, allowing each of them permission to abuse Paba in specific ways while reserving other forms of abuse for each of the other neighbors. For example, only Thaoa could take slaves.
Knowing that they were still fully in control, Paba's strongest ally, Nama, allowed Paba to build a surprisingly powerful navy, and a moderately powerful land army, so that Nama would not have to defend Paba entirely by itself in the event of a failure of the alliance of the abusers.
Ethnic divisions in Paba and Subumpam
As above, Subumpam had always rejected racism. They taught their people that even though the empire of Subumpam had been founded on land stolen from the Sukuna aboriginal peoples, they had always been peaceful towards the Sukuna and had welcomed them as citizens. By contrast, they said, even the hyper-pacifistic Pabaps had founded their nation on a genocidal war against the dark-skinned people that surrounded them. (Paba answered this by claiming they had merely joined a preexisting conflict of one dark-skinned tribe against another, and that only after a third dark-skinned group invaded the Pabaps did the conflict become a truly racial war.)
Ethnic groups
Ethnic groups living in Subumpam did not correspond very well with the national boundaries of the 11 states within the Empire. A listing is below:
Subumpamese The majority group. Originally, even the Subumpamese had been an alliance of ten cultures with their own languages but the same religion, but they quickly came to see themselves as one after they formed into a single country in the early 1700s. Thus, Subumpamese people from one state could move to another state and not be considered foreigners.
Andanese Very common throughout the Empire, the Andanese have historically preferred to live in other people's nations rather than build their own, even if it means living as an underclass.
Pabaps The Pabaps traditionally lived east of Subumpam, but Subumpam expanded to take in the western fringes of Pabap territory, which resulted in the states of Pipaippis, Miepabem, and Nańavū (though Pipaippis, whic his not contiguous with the other two, became majroity-Pabap only with additional iimnigration).
Stars Immigrants from the Star Empire, who are actually a large number of cultures rather than one, but who nevertheless, when immigrating into Subumpam, came to identify themselves simply as Stars rather than as immigrants from their original home state.
Sukuna A dark skinned aboriginal minority in Subumpam.
Repilians A light skinned aboriginal minority in Subumpam. Known for their strong tendency for their women to be taller than their men.
Namans Immigrants from the very large and diverse Empire of Nama. As above, they are not a single culture, but a cooperation of hundreds of distinct tiny nations, with no majority and no single dominant culture that controls the others. Nevertheless, once in Subumpam, they have always tended to stick with other Namans and to give up their subnational identity in favor of just calling themselves "Namans". However a partial exception to this trend is that Repilian people from Nama often live with other Repilians rather than with other Namans.
Nik A tribe of very tall, thin, dark-skinned people who immigrated from Laba. Early on, they had inhabited territory locaed between Paba and Subumpam, but when Paba took over this land, they took over the Nik. Most Nik people stayed where they were, but some moved into Subumpam. Both Paba and Subumpam respected Nik culture, but Paba was unwilling to let them compete for power in the Pabap navy or even to secure fishing claims off the coast of Paba, as Paba early on saw sea power as its key to prosperity and did not want to share it even with positive, peaceful minority groups like the Nik. In Subumpam they were treated kindly at first, but later came under suspicion as Subumpam came to realize that nearly everyone moving from Paba to Subumpam was a source of trouble for Subumpam.
Tasnu Also known as Tarpabaps, this is another tribe of very tall and thin dark skinned people who immigrated from Laba, but they are not closely related to the Nik. Unlike the Nik, they are not stereotypically happy with being a minority under another nation's umbrella and instead want to use Subumpam as a stage from which they can raise an army to conquer the interior. As their name suggests, they are commonly seen with Pabaps, some of whom are also interested in settling the interior, and have already given up their native languages in favor of speaking Pabappa. A smaller number of Tasnu people have moved elsewhere on Rilola, but they are mostly dependent on Pabap-built ships to get around. Around 2686, they conquered Subumpam and made it their new homeland.
Fužai This was Subumpam's name for a people that lived mostly in the north and west of their empire, and were disliked by all outside groups, even other underclass groups. The Thaoans called them Sukaŋ, the Namans Xʷugâ, and the Pabaps Fua although the Pabaps also used a dysphemism Pispitam as the word Fua had become seen as so rude that even an insult was more kind. Pispitam was more descriptive, however, as it meant "kings of cutting". Pabaps observed that the Fužai seemed to cut up or otherwise destroy everything they touched, and were among the most violent societies known. But they could not put this violence to use even in an army since they so often refused to obey their commanders. The Fužai claimed to be the majority in the state of Vuʒi, but Vuʒi considered them merely a subtribe of the Vuʒians. Nevertheless, the Fužai in Subumpam were strongly attached to their claimed home state of Vuʒi, and did not seek to destroy SUbumpam since they knew that Subumpam was feeding Vuʒi. Fužai considered themselves a "middle" people between the masochistic Subumpamese to their south and east and the overly violent and stupid Star people to their west.
Later history
Subumpam soon became one of the most violent places in the world, as it was often invaded and otherwise victimized by its neighbors. However, Subumpam generally refused to retaliate against outside empires that invaded them; they focused only on attempts to deliver their own people to the safest areas within Subumpam and on trying to work out a peace treaty with the invaders that would leave both sides as happy as possible.
The Wabula Pipem Treaty
The founders of the Subumpamese Union signed a treaty establishing a strong central government in the city of Wabula Pipem, and granting themselves powers above all of the "national" governments they ruled over (they used a word pappa,[11] translated "nation", for the ten subnational entities dominated by just one ethnicity and religion and waš, here translated "country", for the supranational government they had created). Subumpam had ten pappa districts and one marginal district (Vuʒi) that was mostly comrpised of ethnic minorities who did not speak subumpamese and were only agreeing to join because they wanted military protection.
They believed that they needed a strong central government to keep the national governments under control. They were not a democracy and never had been, but they created a parliament in which representatives from each of the 11 nations could vote on issues amongst themselves. This type of setup was common in this world, for example in the even large empire of Nama. They gave smaller, weaker nations extra power to oppose the majority, and encouraged people to form political alliances that were not merely based on ethnicity, as they figured a government based around ethnic coalitions would have no actual core politics.
Subumpam was not a pacifist nation, but did have some pacifistic traits. Officially they were only allowed to declare war, even in self-defense, if their primary religion (Sisnasi) was threatened. This meant relatively little because the other countries around them all had different religions, and even within Subumpam there were several different minority religions existing alongside Sisnasi. Sisnasi mythology contained both scientific and moral lessons, and most believers expected these lessons to be infallible and often lost faith whenever they were able to see otherwise. The religion was strongest in the north and weakest in the coastal south, where in the early 2100s a scientific atheism began to gain ground.
Contacts with Paba
To Paba, Subumpam was the most peaceful of its neighbors. Subumpam had outlawed slavery early, and Subumpam did not take Pabaps as slaves either for itself or en route to the nations north and west of Subumpam that did practice slavery. Paba was thus not afraid when its two westernmost states, Punsam and Pombi, left Paba to join the Subumpamese Union.
Contacts with Nama
Subumpam consisted of territories that had originally been owned by Nama but had been separated from northern Nama by tall mountains. Its population had consisted primarily of the Sukuna aboriginal people, which was hostile to Nama. Thus Nama did not object when the Subumpamese settlers began spreading out along the coastline, and tried to become allies of Subumpam early on.
Nevertheless, Nama realized it had a long-standing problem of lack of access to the coastline. Subumpam was much smaller than Nama, but had considerably more coastline. Nama had huge amounts of upland mountain territory, but only a tiny seacoast, which was very difficult to get to because the Naman seacoast happened to be located where the mountains had their steepest slopes, and there was very little flatland there; the mountains butted directly up on the coast. Subumpam, by contrast, was located on a continuation of the same mountain range, but here the slopes were much gentler, and there was about 20 times as much land between the mountains and the sea in Subumpam than there was in Nama. Nama's government was too internally divided to ever agree to a war against Subumpam, and Subumpam itself had a seat in that government. But Nama signed an agreement with Subumpam early on that allowed Nama to build ships and station them in Subumpam's harbors, thus becoming a reserve navy that Nama could use in the event of a war. They were unable, however, to prod Subumpam into signing a full alliance which would empower Nama to use Subumpam's own navy in the event of a war.
Early contacts with the Star Empire
Beginning in the 1700s, the Star Empire sent its ships to Subumpam for trade. These trade agreements were generally helpful to both empires. However, Star pirates often also visited the south coast of Subumpam, and abducted Subumpamese people to use as slaves in their homelands (usually the far south). Subumpam complained about the abductions, but the Star Empire claimed that they were unable to stop the pirates since they were entering from territory the Star Empire itself did not have firm control over. Subumpam repeatedly paid money to the Star Empire to rescue the slaves, but the missions were never successful, which told Subumpam that the Star Empire was not its friend. Nevertheless, the Star Empire admired Subumpam and several times looked for an argument they could use to pressure the Subumpamese government to sign an alliance with the Stars, particularly an alliance against the Stars' age-old enemy Nama.
The Ice Age War
In 1823, a cold summer caused a famine in Nama that killed over half the population and caused the normally peaceful people of northern Nama to fumble their way southwards through rocky mountain passes looking for help from other Namans and in some cases taking control of farms and gardens by force. Since parts of Nama also bordered Subumpam, Namans entered Subumpam from the north, primarily a nation named Maimp, looking for food. Subumpam was doing fairly well during the cold summer because they derived much of their food from the ocean, which had not been affected, but nevertheless, the parts of Subumpam that were invaded were of course the parts furthest from the sea and thus the least well-off during a famine.
The government of Subumpam did not declare war against Nama, because this was not a religious war, and in return the Namans promised not to hurt any of the Subumpamese people. However Subumpam was frustrated as they struggled to find food for the Naman refugees as they knew the Namans could not give anything back, and most Namans admitted they were planning to move back to Nama once the famine was over, unless they found out their own homes had been destroyed, in which case they mostly wanted to stay in Subumpam.
The next summer was also cold, and it became clear that the famine was not just confined to the year 1823. More Namans began to move to Subumpam now looking for food, and some of the ones who had originally stayed in the upland north began to move to the coast now, figuring the food supply would be more reliable there. At first, the Namans had refused to even work for their food, expecting the government to feed and house them for free since it was an emergency. Now, the Namans moving south planned to stay in Subumpam, and therefore offered to assimilate and become low-class citizens. However, as none of them knew how to speak Subumpamese, there was little they could do, and they were severely straining the food supply of Subumpam. Paba willingly took in some of the refugees, even though Paba's food supply was being strained as well, because they figured they could make it up by either selling the refugees as slaves to Thaoa or hiring them to do the jobs of some underclass Pabaps so that those Pabaps could then go out to sea looking for more fish.
The Subumpamese government asked Nama to stop the flow of refugees, saying that they could just as easily be boated to a tropical area where food was not in short supply, but Nama told the Subumpamese that the refugees were unauthorized and therefore not under Nama's control. In reality, they did not want to send the refugees to the tropics because all known tropical areas were populated by their traditional ethnic enemies, the Stars. And so Subumpam was forced to declare war against Nama, despite the fact that the Namans did not specifically threaten the religious life in Subumpam. This was thus an unpopular war even from the point of view of starving Subumpamese peasants, and the Subumpamese soldiers who were going to war against Nama were themselves facing food shortages and could not fight well. Moreover, they realized that they would have to march up steep mountainsides just to get their own territory back, if they assumed the war required that they clear out all the Namans from Subumpam. Moreover, Nama preferred to station much of its navy along the coast of Subumpam rather than in Nama, and the Subumpamese army worried that if they moved north to invade Maimp, Nama could invade Subumpam from the south. Thus they were forced to leave a large part of their army at home occupying the south coast to ensure that Nama could not invade.
The Subumpamese army was at an extreme disadvantage here, as their own territory was full of the Namans that they were declaring war against. Namans living in Subumpam blocked off pathways such as roads and bridges, attacked soldiers, and even threatened to massacre innocent Subumpamese citizens if the Subumpamese army did not surrender immediately. Also, wild animals attacked the humans, since they were suffering from hunger too, and were intelligent enough to realize that humans were food. The army responded by dividing itself into two groups: one to keep control in the homeland, and another to invade Nama. The battalions that chose to invade Nama were the ones that had already been stationed near the border, and were generally the least well-fed since they were already in a starvation area. The battalions that stayed behind were actually larger, as they considered protecting Subumpamese civilians to be even more important than winning the war.
The invading Subumpamese faced severe food shortages as they fought, often dying of either starvation or food poisoning as they were forced to eat unripe fruit, poisonous mushrooms, or decaying animal carcasses that had already been mostly picked bare by wolves or other animals. Nevertheless, the Namans they invaded were even worse off, and they managed to push their way over the mountains and into Nama's own territory within another two years. The part of Nama they invaded was called Maimp and its people were called Imps. In 1827, the Imps signed a surrender treaty allowing Subumpamese troops the right to stay within Maimp and control the food supply and trade between Maimp and Subumpam. This put a stop to the flow of Namans into Subumpam and the resulting food supply shortages in Subumpam, but made the situation in Maimp far worse than before because Subumpamese troops had to feed themselves almost entirely from Maimp's farms rather than buying food carried along the difficult route up the mountains from Subumpam. The Subumpamese army renamed their occupied territory Wimpim now and enrolled it into the Subumpamese Union.[12]
Meanwhile, many Namans remained in Subumpam, and the Subumpamese government did not have a plan for what to do with them. Trying to resettle them in Nama would be very difficult, they realized, and would likely get a lot more Subumpamese people killed. Subumpam had outlawed slavery in their home territory, and even if they decided to declare that all Namans were criminals or prisoners of war the Subumpamese knew that they could not their own people to accept any kind of mass punishment for them.
Occupation of Wimpim
The Subumpamese army occupying Wimpim soon faced violent resistance from the Wimpimese peasants. The occupying soldiers were embarrassed as they found themselves facing the same problems that they had faced in Subumpam earlier: blocked-off roads, harrassment, and threats against their weakest members (many Subumpamese soldiers had brought family members with them, as was common in military operations in this era). They had expected to be the ones giving orders now that they had won the war. They couldn't understand how a tiny minority of invading Wimpimese Namans had been able to eat comofrtably in Subumpam by taking their food from Subumpamese, but yet when the Subumpamese army invaded Wimpim they found themselves hunting in the mountains for their food because they could not coerce the Wimpimese to feed them. They figured that there were three problems that explained why the Wimpimese always seemed to have the upper hand:
- The Namans were much poorer than Subumpamese; before, during, and after the war, and were also a lot more rural. Maimp did not have any cities, merely a collection of hundreds of tiny villages.
- The Naman civilians were more heavily armed than Subumpamese, because even though they were almost all working in farm-related occupations, they needed to hunt to find enough food to survive, whereas in Subumpam hunting was handled by a small percentage of the population.
- The Subumpamese were a lot more reluctant to punish criminals than the Namans, or even most other peoples in the world. Even now, as Wimpim had been enrolled as the 12th state in the Subumpamese Union, Subumpam's army was being told by the governors back home that they were not allowed to bottle up the Namans in Wimpim, and that Namans should be allowed to move into wealthier states such as Bipabum since they were now citizens of Subumpam. However, the Subumpamese government had no power here, as they did not have the power to overrule their own military. Their opinions merely made the occupation of Wimpim unpopular in Subumpam.
Nevertheless, the Subumpamese were there to stay. They were not merely an all-male occupation force intending to serve for three years and then go back home to be replaced by others; whole families of Subumpamese had moved into Wimpim now and they did not want to leave, particularly as the situation was at least gradually improving now that the cold spells had edned.
The native religion of the Imps was called Alaila or Popasopa. Very few Imps converted to Sisnasi, and in self-defense the occupying Subumpamese became more strongly religious over the next generation. They had declared Wimpim to be in a state of peace now, and removed the blockade, which meant that Imps could move into the rest of Subumpam if they wanted to. Most Imps stayed in Wimpim, and those who did move mostly moved to areas with other Imps rather than trying to learn Subumpamese and enter mainstream society. Thus, they stood out even from other minorities within Subumpam. Since Wimpim was the poorest state in the Union, anyone moving from Wimpim to Bipabum became a member of the lowest class.
The Subumpamese living in Wimpim gradually began to move back to the south, since they realized Wimpim was always going to be poor, and life was better along the coast. As they moved out, Namans from other parts of Nama moved in. Wimpim had three major groups now: the native Imps, the Subumpamese, and the non-Imp Namans. The Non-Imp Namans were nevertheless of the same religion (Alaila) as the Imps, and it seemed logical that if a new war in Wimpim were to erupt, it would be the two Naman groups versus the Subumpamese. In the late 1940s, the Subumpamese governors of Wimpim were made to sign a resolution that the government of Wimpim was intended to serve the interests of Namans only, and that the Subumpamese were not welcome. The Subumpamese considered themselves civilians now, but were still mostly living in areas that would be important during a war, and were still better armed than most Subumpamese since they needed to rely on hunting to secure their food supplies.
WImpim invades Subumpam
In 1952, Wimpim seceded from Subumpam, and declared war on Subumpam. They had worked out an alliance with Paba, Nama, the Star Empire, and the Subumpamese state of Vuʒi (a western state populated mostly by Vuʒians who had only joined for economic reasons). All combined, these allies had a population well over 20 times the population of Subumpam. However, in reality, the alliance was merely a formal declaration that the governments of these five entities all agreed that Subumpamese presence in Wimpim was unwelcome, and that Wimpim wanted to return to being a subject of Nama. Nama did not actually intend to invade Subumpam, and the Star Empire had joined the war only in the hopes of being rewarded with Subumpamese territory if the war were to go deep enough. In reality the Stars hated Nama much more than they hated the Subumpamese or anyone else. Likewise, Paba had joined the war because Nama forced them to, but even Nama did not expect the Pabaps to risk their lives fighting their cousins in Subumpam.
Nevertheless, the large empires around Subumpam merely had to dip their fingers in order to cause deep open wounds in Subumpam, and the fighting in the War of 1952 was far more brutal than the fighting in the War of 1823. The Wimpimese immigrant community in Subumpam was divided: some fought for Subumpam, some fought against Subumpam, and some focused on killing other Wimpimese. Other minority groups in Subumpam also erupted, particularly the Vuʒians. Lately, Vuʒi had come under close scrutiny from the rest of Subumpam for taking wealth away and giving nothing back. They were not in a position to cause violence, but they did disrupt shipping whenever possible.
Originally, Wimpim had planned to secede and fight a mostly defensive war. But as they heard about the violence occurring in Subumpam itself they asked Nama for help in supporting a ground invasion of Subumpam, essentially a revenge occupation intending to put all of Subumpam under Naman control. Nama refused the offer, because Subumpam was not an enemy of Nama as a whole, and they knew that Wimpim was not capable of causing much damage to Subumpam on its own. But Nama, acting on its own, sent its navy southwards along the coast of Subumpam, blockading the western half of Subumpam from all outside help. They did not think they would be capable of extending their reach all the way across and hoped that the fact that the eastern half of Subumpam's coast was largely under the control of Paba anyway would help the Subumpamese realize that they were completely surrounded on all sides, land and sea. (Despite its population, all of Subumpam was just about the size of Bulgaria on Earth.)
But the Subumpamese military, fearing the worst, refused to surrender, and the war continued until Nama's army, led mostly by commanders from Maimp, had occupied the entire Subumpamese Union with their coalition force consisting of Imps, non-Imp Namans, Vuʒians, Pabaps, and Stars. Attempts by the Subumpamese government to set up refugee camps for Subumpamese fleeing the invasions failed because the Subumpamese did not discriminate based on race or religion, which meant that the invaders were able to infiltrate the camps and carry on the war even there. Furthermore, other ethnic minorities besides the Namans also joined them and attacked Subumpamese people in the refugee camps. The only minority that did not launch attacks was the Pabaps, who were, by virtue of their blonde hair, often instead victimized by the other groups.
The Treaty of 1956
The war ended with a treaty punishing Subumpam for its actions and allowing it to remain independent but assigning it a status mostly inferior to its neighbors. Some points in the treaty were:
- Maimp was returned to Naman control with its present borders.
- Nama was permitted to retain Subumpamese prisoners of war as a slave class indefinitely. They could not be repatriated to Subumpam.
- A parallel government was created in Subumpam that applied only to Namans living or visiting there. This government could overrule the native Subumpamese government in some ways and could call for an invasion from Nama since this new parallel government was a Naman one. This was called a "soft" occupation.[13]
- The state of Vuʒi was returned to Subumpam, but given war reparations and was exempt from certain taxes that the other Subumpamese states needed to pay. It was the only state within Subumpam that would retain a separate army and navy. This was done only after the people of Vuʒi had refused both independence and incorporation into Nama.
- Naman ships were allowed to use all Subumpamese ports, including for military use, and Namans were allowed to do business on the Subumpamese mainland, not just in port cities.
- Subumpam was required to supply food to surrounding nations during times of famine, with no compensation paid to the Subumpamese government.
- A small range of mountainous areas in northern Subumpam was also turned over to Nama. This excluded areas that were majority-Pabap instead of majority-Subumpamese. They were adjacent to Maimp, but not considered part of Maimp because their population was almost entirely Subumpamese. Thus strategic mountain hideouts were off limits to the Subumpamese army and a large number of Subumpamese people were living in Nama. Nama was allowed to enslave these people, although that decision was in the hands of the governors of the new state. [14]
- The Subumpamese military was reduced in size, and subject to some control by Namans to ensure that they were not preparing for yet another war against Nama or against a more delicate ally of Nama.
Despite the fact that Subumpam had been conquered by a coalition of Paba, Nama, Maimp, Vuʒi, and the Star Empire, the rewards in the treaty excluded Paba and the Star Empire. They excluded the Stars because Nama knew that the Stars had only fought in the war in an attempt to stop Nama from gaining too much power, and that although they had pretended to care about Subumpam's abuses of Namans during the occupation of Wimpim, what they really wanted was to get a foothold in Wimpim, and thus Nama, for themselves. The Star army did not actually kill any Subumpamese and carefully avoided situations in which they would be forced to choose between unwillingly killing Subumpamese soldiers or disobeying the orders of the Naman commanders. However, they were not neutral; they assisted the Naman army with supplies and ships due to the fact that Nama did not have a lot of natural harbors in which to raise a navy.
As for Paba, they were not rewarded because they contributed very little to the war, largely because so many Pabaps lived in Subumpam peacefully already that they did not want to lose their comforts by becoming yet another enemy of Subumpam, even in a war they were guaranteed to win. Paba had sent its army in to occupy the areas of Subumpam where most Pabaps lived, but they were ordered not to kill anyone unless they were first attacked by the Subumpamese army (not civilians).
Relations with the Star Empire
- See Star Empire for longer summary.
Around 1958 AD, as Subumpam was being humiliated by the treaty with Nama, the Star Empire (located partly in modern-day Taryte) asked Subumpam to join as a single state. The Stars wanted to make an alliance with Subumpam against Nama because the Star Empire was located on the western shore of the Gold Sea, and Subumpam was located on the eastern shore. If they joined forces, the Stars figured they could control all shipping through the Gold Sea and wall up Nama. The Subumpamese government was wary of this offer, since they themselves did not have anything against Nama, and did not want to risk being dominated by a foreign power so soon after their birth since the Stars told them they would only get one vote instead of eleven (for the 11 nations of Subumpam). But the threat of military action against Subumpam by surrounding nations other than Nama led the rulers of Subumpam to agree to the alliance, thus completing the Star Empire.
Subumpan signed a pact with the Star Empire that merged the two empires into one. The new capital was placed in the far east, in the state of Pipaippis. The people of Pipaippis rebelled against their new controllers, and pulled out of the union. In response, the Star Empire abolished the Subumpamese military and made them the only member of the alliance without a military. Although they could still vote on resolutions, the western Star states knew that they could control how Subumpam voted by threatening military action against them if they did not obey. This was especvially difficult when the Stars themselves were divided on an issue, as the Subumpamese representatives realized that no matter which way they voted, they would be severely punished by someone for it.
Attempts to escape
In 1974, Subumpamese sailors attempted to reach Baeba Swamp, but their ship was captured by pirates and they realized that they had to pass through many nations in order to get somewhere like Baeba. They realized that if they wanted to grow, they would have to grow over contiguous territory. But currently, all of the land around them was controlled by Nama, which would not let them in.
Subumpam in the Gold Empire
The Gold Empire, also known as "Star Empire II", also included Subumpam. It was very much the same setup as the Star Empire I, but less abusive and less violent. It also lasted a vastly longer amount of time than the Star Empire I, and was only considered to be a successor by those who were proud of the Star heritage of the original. During its reign, its people simply referred to it as the Gold Empire. Subumpam entered the Gold Empire in 2057, though formally acceding only around 2080, and remained until the Vegetable War which ranged from 2662 to 2674.
Subumpam's people saw that the western half of their empire, Lobexon, seemed like it would be locked into a civil war for its entire existence. They desperately tried to remain neutral in the war, as they worried that if any of the parties in that war were to gain access to any power in Subumpam's government, they could throw the entire Subumpamese army into Lobexon to fight a war that would gain nothing for Subumpam and likely get most of their male population killed. Nama continued to blockade the shores of Subumpam to prevent illegal immigrant groups beaching on Subumpam's many harbors and building forts from which to raise mini-nations that would attempt to pierce through Subumpam's thick but largely inferior peacekeeping force.
The Têt offensive
As the Têt branch of the Gold party continued to lose battles in Lobexon, its leaders in Subumpam (still mostly pro-Têt) began to worry about a possible Lobexon vs Subumpam war, knowing Lobexon would easily crush Subumpam unless Subumpam was able to flip the tables by freeing the slaves in Lobexon and arming them quickly enough to make them as strong as their masters.
The Gold party leaders of the western Subumpamese state of Yuez in 2168 declared themselves a rebel territory and invited defeated Têt warlords to move in. They wanted to build a new, fortified state within Subumpam that would be pro-Têt in the case of a total victory for the competing Polotta branch. Many thousands of Têt people sailed in, but since Yuez was inland, they needed to enter through other states such as Bipabum and Yuenan. This was not a problem so long as the Têt branch of the Gold poarty was nominally in control.
But in 2172, the Têt surrendered, and the immigration of Têts became classified as an invasion. The new Polotta-led Gold party denied that the Têt were Gold, and consigned them all to slavery. This led to infighting within the Naman navy, as Nama had promised to respect the outcome of the war and switch its allegiance to the Polotta if the Polotta were to win. Nama's navy, rather than Lobexon's, was in control of the coast of Subumpam (Subumpam had not been allowed a navy of its own). THus Naman ships fought other Naman ships, and meanwhile the last holdouts of Têt power in Lobexon tried to crash through the blockade and reach Bipabum so they could then fight their way through the now pro-Polotta state of Bipabum to their stronghold in Yuez. Note that naval battles in this time period mostly consisted of ships bumping each other into solid objects and throwing flaming boomerangs onto the other ship in the hopes of setting it on fire.
Bipabum suffered more than Yuez in this war, because the Polotta from Lobexon were not planning on an all out invasion of Subumpam just to destroy Yuez. They actually considered Subumpam militarily unimportant, as it was surrounded by Nama on one side and Paba on the other, and even if the Têt conquered all of Subumpam for themselves the now pro-Polotta Namans could simply invade from the mountains and conquer them without even using their navy. But Bipabum considered itself important enough to fight back. Earlier, the Têt governors of Yuez had whittled down their military and openly asked to be invaded by Têt. Bipabum responded by strengthening its army. Although Bipabum was unwilling to invade Yuez itself, because it would be a civil war, they were well-prepared for the invasion of Têt from the coast fleeing their defeat in Lobexon. Realizing this, most Têt attempted to immigrate through Yuenan instead, which had become pacifist and showed no resistance, but since Yuenan's coastline was little more than 1/10 the length of Bipabum's coastline, the naval blockade was much stronger, and many Têt ships had to beach in Bipabum and fight their way through the farms and woods to reach the north.
As a general rule, Subumpamese civilians tried to stay out of the war, as they saw little point in helping one oppressor take them away from another oppressor. But they were forced to help the Têt people migrate inland, and this brought them into conflict with the well-armed Polotta people, who had recently purged Bipabum's army of any suspected pro-Têt loyalists. Thus essentially the only two armed parties in the conflict were the army of Bipabum, which was pro-Polotta, and the invaders from Lobexon, which were Têt. The Subumpamese thus were only able to participate in the war as victims rather than victors.
Nevertheless, the Polotta still held to their promise not to invade Yuez. They had been reassured that Nama would keep a close watch on Yuez, since Yuez had a small border with Nama and all of Subumpam was still forced to allow Naman soldiers into their territory and to allow them to inspect civilian settlements to make sure Subumpam was not trying to raise an army stronger than what Nama could defeat with a single push down the mountains.
Further conflicts
The brief naval war had greatly weakened Nama's naval barrier around Subumpam, and even the one around Lobexon. In 2175, a breakaway nation from Taryte in central Lobexon sent its people to southwestern Subumpam (Yuenan) to set up a new country there in which the entire population would be dedicated to military service and the destruction of Subumpamese society. They agreed with the Gilgosi that the Pabap genocide of the Sukuna people 500 years ago deserved a sequel to make up for the mistakes in the original, only they extended the threat to the peaceful Subumpamese, who had only absorbed the SUkuna rather than killing them off.
The government of Subumpam was unable to react to this development, as it was undergoing a crisis already trying to deal with the conflicts between the Têt and Polotta factions in its own government. Nama itself had to step in and arrest the soldiers. Nama then enslaved both the soldiers and the Subumpamese that they had attacked, saying the Subumpamese were at fault for ignoring the threat and for later protesting the use of slavery as punishment, and that the punishment for protesting slavery would itself be slavery. In a further embarrassment, the slave communes were placed entirely in the far east of Subumpam, where Pabaps were the majority, as they didnt want the soft Subumpamese people to release the slaves.
Wolf in Wool
One of the campsites used for slavery, Wolf in Wool, was in 2183 actually sold to the government of Paba itself, and Paba became a slaveowning nation, even if only in an area slightly west of the Paba-Subumpam border.[15] THus Subumpam realized that they had been humiliated by their own government and by their thousand-year allies the Pabaps.
Paba invited its most dangerous criminals to move to Wolf in Wool to take out their frustrations on the enslaved Subumpamese. They introduced a new plague, called Ipitaubumbam, which consisted of a fungus that lived on the bark of pine trees. A human who scratched themselves on the bark of one of these pine trees would thus gain the fungus on themselves, and it could enter their body, causing a slow, debilitating death. Moreover everything they touched would also be contaminated, though far less strongly than the original tree had been. Thus, the slaveowners put their slaves to work cutting down pine trees with no gloves on their hands.[16]
Note that unlike the situation in Lobexon, Subumpamese couldnt simply run uphill to escape their country, as Nama itself held their entire northern border. However, even with the introduction of slavery, most Subumpamese considered their lives under Naman oppression to still be far better than those of the lower classes of society in Lobexon for the time being.
Also in 2183,[17] a security guard at the Yībūk slave camp attacked a child at a slave school. THe security guard was kicked out, but soon returned to the school, bragging that he had only been "expelled" and was never charged with a crime. Thus the children were very afraid. Much chaos resulted,[18] resulting in a wider slave revolt. Soon, a subset of the Subumpamese slaves won control of their cmapground (not Wolf in Wool) and killed the slavemasters. These people were a new political party codenamed XLG.
XLG turned back and hit the Subumpamese, but even so, they killed the slavemasters, and formed an alliance with the slaves. The only ptoblem was that they now needed new slaves, so they found more Subumopamese people. Thius slavery was continued even at the hands of former slaves. XLG had declared itself to be an alien people now, and did not generally hold sympathy for the rest of the Subumpamese people. Instead they worked on getting Nama to recognize them as a political party so that they could build a nation of their own.
Crystal settlement
Around 2200, a few thousand Crystals moved into the Subumpamese states of Bipabum (still the capital territory) and Nī (further inland). Unusually, they came almost entirely from the east, having previously migrated to Paba as refugees but worn out the patience of even Paba by refusing to send their children to school and standing in Paba's cities proclaiming that Pabaps were a stupid, impulsive, and superstitious people who needed the Crystals to help them grow into adults. Paba had not expelled the Crystals, but merely blocked access to all of the benefits of citizenship which left them with a choice of slavery or starvation if they did not flee. Since the Subum side of Paba-Subumpam border was very weakly guarded, they were easily able to slip into even the capital region of Subumpam.[19]
The Crystals had been hoping they would be able to disguise themselves as Sukuna, an aboriginal dark skinned tribe in Subumpam that resembled the Crystlas but had mostly intermarried with Subumpamese families and had entirely lost its religion and language. They did this because even though the Sukuna had no representation in Subumpam's government, the very fact that they had no legally recognized identity meant that they could not be outlawed or enslaved. But the Crystals were wrong, as the government did in fact enslave the Crystals upon discovery, although the ones who had chosen to move to poor, rural areas of Nī had been at least partly successful in blending in.
Again the Subumpamese people as a whole protested the new slave plantations, and again the Naman slavelords punished the protestors by adding them to the slave pool. This time the camps were in the warm flat lands of Bipabum, where more agricultural work was possible. Here the two slave groups learned that they had a lot in common: even though they were of different religions, their two religions were in many ways similar. Although this had no meaning in the wider Subumpamese society because the only Subumpamese bonding with the Crystals were slaves, word did get out that perhaps Subumpam was about to lend its support to the Crystals in their stuggle in Lobexon, and that perhaps the Crystals had finally after all found a foothold in a foreign nation.
Contact with FILTER
Both the Subumpamese peasants and the Crystals in Subumpam were friendly to the Islanders of Wapeblo Island (Ƥāli); they considered the Islanders a brave if foolish people for threatening to take over the entire world, but agreed that if they ever somehow managed to do it, their government would be far more benevolent than Nama or any of the governments proposed by the Lobexonian groups currently being oppressed by Nama. The Islander logo of a tall female soldier standing on top of a dying, helpless male was seen as amenable, even cute, by the strongly male-dominated societies of the rest of the world, and they yearned for the opportunity to bring Islander culture to the mainland. The Crystals in particular had become famous for "accepting" Feminism (meaning, in this context, the rule of men by women and in most cases a biological trait in which women are taller than men), which made them dangerous in the eyes of Lobexon for two reasons: firstly, the absolute upper class in Lobexon was itself Feminist, being descended from Macro-Repilians from the cold interior of Nama who carefully set themselves apart from all other races and had maintained a tall-female, short-male society for thousands of years; and secondly, all of the other people in Lobexon did not want to live in a society in which their male power structure was so weak and helpless that their oppression would become even easier: Feminism did not seem to make women any stronger, either physically or socially; it simply removed all of the power of men, essentially in the eyes of Feminism's enemies turning them back into little boys.
However, the Islanders as a rule did not feel safe moving into Subumpam or Lobexon or any other territory where they would be a tiny, easily eliminated minority. THey instead invited others to move in with them instead to various colonies they planned to create, some in the rainforests of the far southwest, others in the cold snowy uplands of Nama. They considered Nama to be a safe place because at least in the areas they were planning to go there was no established society nearby that was strong enough even to defeat the tiny, impoverished Islander colony. They invited Subumpamese, including the Crystals in hiding in Subumpam, to move to their new nation, which they called simply FILTER (the name of their political party), and even if they themselves were not Feminists they promised that within a few generations they would be.
However, the tide began to turn later on. FILTER and the Crystals signed the Feminist Treaty, which merged the two groups together at least within the territory of Subumpam. Most FILTER members had been Subumpamese immigrants far back in the past, and over 200 years they had maintained their religion. The Crystals had a different religion, but were open to an alliance as they had decided their only enemies were atheists. Thus, the two groups both came to call themselves Feminists. Nevertheless, they wanted to maintain their two votes in Nama's Mirro Project, so they did not completely abolish their separate identities.
FILTER figured Subumpam would be a good home for their army because the Subumpamese people were rather feministic already,[20] and tended to be passive in their encounters with foreign occupying armies. They took the Cranberry as the new Feminist symbol and told people that they were going to smother their enemies with cranberry juice[21] instead of only fighting with spears and swords. Nevertheless, they did not put down their spears and swords.
Paba reacted to the Crystals' choice of Subumpam for their new homeland with interest. For many years, Pabap males had been terrified of being dominated by the much taller tribes around them. But they feared moderately tall tribes like the Subumpamese much more than supremely tall tribes like their own homegrown Tarpabaps. This was because while Tarpabaps considered beating up on a waist-high Pabap civilian to be a crime worthy of the most severe punishment, middle-sized tribes tended to have mixed feelings about whether Pabaps should be treated as specially inviolable or merely as people who happened to be a bit more unlucky than other tribes. This is why Pabaps often took in immigrants from Laba who were among the tallest people in the world, but relatively few Subumpamese or assorted Naman cultures that were halfway in between.
A Feminist victory in Subumpam would put Pabaps' worries to bed permanently, as they knew the Feminists would essentially rid Subumpam of its entire "tall male" population even if it took several hundeed years. Meanwhile, Paba did not want to sign a formal aliiance with FILTER for fear that FILTER women would come blasting their way into Paba to feminize Paba's men as well. When the Pabaps in Subumpam also became wary of the Feminists' sudden intrusions into their territory (they had joined with the Crystals, who still had most of their people in the east), Subumpamese peasants realized a problem. Throughout history, Paba had been the docking point of many groups of immigrants, and every single one of them was taller, stronger, and generally more violent than the Pabaps they lived among. Paba had hardened itself up in defense and thus made it possible for their nation to contain people who saw them as nothing more than toys to play around with and not only survive, but even use these people to protect them against other nations. Whereas in Subumpam, the people were of moderate stature, and did not generally look upon all minorities with fear and insist on special protections for their soldiers even during the worst of their wars. Thus, Subumpam was perpetually a victim of other nations, as their people were trusting of even the groups that had been hardened by the even more violent societies around them, whereas Paba seemed to slither out of every major war entirely unharmed. Subumpam realized that by tolerating the Crystals, they might be subjecting their entire society to yet another abusive war of a heavily armed foreign military attacking defenseless Subumpamese civilians while Subumpam's own military was too small to even attempt to fight back.
Since most Pabaps in Subumpam lived in the east, Paba tried to convince FILTER to place its armies in the west. They were relieved, even so, when FILTER chose to settle in the very core of Subumpam, in the capital state of Bipabum. And they soon moved on even from Bipabum to the neighboring nation of Nèye, having done only a small amount of damage to Subumpam itself in the meantime. The Crystal side of their coalition had been enslaved, because they were visibly distinct from other Subumpamese people. These Crystals were upset at FILTER's inaction as they saw Crystals rounded up, but FILTER had promised them in secret that they were still full allies and that they would let the Crystal party in Nama know what had happened.
This made Subumpam uneasy, because as above, the ever-suspicious Paba seemed to have an accurate history of predicting trouble, as they analyzed the threat potential of all outside groups and complained only against the ones they felt were potentially dangerous while welcoming all others as new members of Pabap society. Subumpam's government realized that the Crystals were one of the rare peoples that Paba had rejected, and that they had essentially dumped them on Subumpam without the Crystals ever undergoing a reform. Subumpam had enslaved the Crystals now, but the Crystals as a whole were seemingly still growing. Moreover, if they were now allies of FILTER, every success for FILTER was a loss for Subumpam. And FILTER had just openly crossed through all of Subumpam without any opposition, and even had killed a few Subumpamese people saying it was self-defense.
Subumpam after the Vegetable War
During the Vegetable War, Subumpam suffered even more. A species of crab known as the liui (also liwi, ribi, wiwi, lìʕʷi, etc) crawled up from the ocean and ate most of the Subumpamese people. They had been being bred by the people of the Naman nation Litila, north of Subumpam, as Litila was unhappy being an impoverished mountain nation and felt they could make themselves bigger if they adopted nonhumans into their army. They were surprised when the crabs achieved victory and even more surprised when they celebrated the victory by eating the humans who had bred them to be so strong. As Litila was north of Subumpam, the crabs needed to cut their way through all of the rest of Subumpam just to get back to the ocean.
Paba rescued the Subumpamese, who had died in enormous numbers without being able to kill a single crab. Most of the soldiers in Paba's army were Tarpabaps, and they stayed in Subumpam after the war. Most of them married Subumpamese women even if they were already married back home, as they considered Subumpam their new home, and the Subumpamese their new people. Thus a new ruling class known as Merar was created. More Merar people immigrated from Paba to Subumpam after the war was over and established a new military governemnt in Subumpam. At first, they promised the Subumpamese people that Subumpamese people would have no voice in the new government, as they blamed the Subumpamese for being so masochistic that they had destroyed their own nation several times over. The Merar actually genuinely believed that the best governemnt was a military occupation government dominated by a race of people foreign to the land they ruled over. However, as they had married Subumpamese women, and some of these were war widows who already had Subumpamese children, for all practical purposes the Merar were a blend of the Tarpabap soldiers from Paba and the native Subumpamese people. Almost all of the Tarpabaps were men, and almost all of the Subumpamese were women, so they married each other and almost completely blended togtheer. In previous eras, two people so different from each other in race and religion suddenly merging in this way would have been unthinkable, but in the aftermath of a war which had killed the vast majority of the population in the most gruesome way imaginable, nothing was impossible. But even so, the religious differences between the two cultures emerged soon afterwards as a wedge dividing them apart.
Sisnasi believers who did not marry Tarpabaps generally held even more firmly to their faith now because they saw Yiibam as a primitive religion. (Atheism was now a taboo because Litila had been atheist; even people from families who had been atheist for centuries had come back to whatever religion their distant ancestors had practiced.)
Postwar Subumpam
The Tarpabap soldiers who conquered Subumpam soon declared independence from their parent empire and married Subumpamese women. They renamed themselves Merar and this came to be the name of the new tribe that was born of the union between Tarpabap men and Subumpamese women.
Later history
Much later, the center of power shifted northwards, and other empires stopped drooling all over Subumpam. Subumpam fought one final war in 7414, against Paba, but by this time both Paba and Subumpam had been so thoroughly pacified and feminized that their soldiers spent more money on bath and beauty supplies than on weapons, and Subumpamese soldiers often mailed love letters to Pabap soldiers that they had seen while spying behind enemy lines. Meanwhile Pabap soldiers sewed new battle uniforms for the Subumpamese in the hopes that if they had more fashionable clothes they might think twice about getting them dirty. Nevertheless, Subumpam won the war.
Common features
Despite being commonly associated with Pabap culture due to similarities in appearance, culture, and language, the two groups are not particularly closely related. Both tended to have blonde hair, but they had different facial features. Subumpamese people were taller but markedly thinner than Pabaps even from the earliest days of their coexistence.
Notes
- ↑ However, the capital of Tamusur later gained the name Pambrampa. Also, Tamwušub, the Poswa name. better apprxoimate the sterotypical sound: /'ta.mʷu.šubʷ/.
- ↑ insert Russian word
- ↑ Who follows Calacila?
- ↑ Thus, the -ia can be considered part of the name of the polity, and not a suffix.
- ↑ Spelling is due to older form of name.
- ↑ They are Blip, Nupebla, Labum, Warar, Ampu, and Nasa.
- ↑ Note that Pabappa refers to the Pabappa language as it is today in the year 8743. Back in the 1900s, it was only just beginning to be a distinct language and thus was still partly intelligible to speakers of Subumpamese (but not Andanese, which had broken of 2000 years earlier even than that).
- ↑ This was previously labeled as Fimpameinu.
- ↑ a Bābākiam name
- ↑ Note that this was in 2371, but that Kava-like sentiment had bubbled up from the depths of the oppressed classes for a while beforehand.
- ↑ pàdʷa > pàġʷa > paʔgʷa > paʔbʷa > pappa
- ↑ Note that the name Wimpim is not related to the nearby independent nation of Wimpus, which was not invaded.
- ↑ It is not an autonomous state because the Namans are not concentrated in just one geographical area. Essentially they were adding Subumpam to the Naman Dissenter Union as yet another state, but applying this status only to the small subset of the population of Subumpam that was ethnically Naman. This was a compromise between the few people that wanted a total Naman takeover of Subumpam and the much larger group of people that wanted Subumpam to be at peace and stay independent. They also write that this parallel government has the right to vote for the rest of Nama to invade Subumpam, since they belong to Nama, not Subumpam.
- ↑ Even Nama was not confident that they could enslave a population that large even if they were confident they could seal its borders and control it militarily.
- ↑ In Pabappa, Pampap. Not common to use these words, but widelty understood. Thus the pun works in both languages.
- ↑ this could be better explained if it were a beetle or worm living inside the pine tree, which bit people whether they had gloves or not.
- ↑ check this.
- ↑ see offsite "I Mappa Kahila Hyu"
- ↑ But Paba's side was very heavily guarded, so they could not change their mind and move back to Paba.
- ↑ in the lowefcase sense of allowing women to reach power
- ↑ earlier wrote "love"
