Talk:STW

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Joja had concentrated power in her hands by offering money and other services to non-STW members who pledged allegiance to her authority. What she did was not illegal, as she could technically do anything that was not forbidden by her superiors, but it was draining away the power of the local government to the point where it pleaded to the national government for laws banning such enterprise.

The local representatives in the national government agreed to pass certain lenient laws forbidding STW to take any actions that might "weaken the ability of the local bureaus to carry out their duties", but when the leaders of STW heard of this, they were outraged. One person in particular, "Spicy Lips", balked at what she saw as the corrupt local government trying to weed out competition by blaming STW for disorder that was really no fault but their own. Joja became an instant hero as she kept quiet while other chiefs fumed about how the government was trying to siphon money and power away from the hard-working members of STW 44 Sala. And Piplap's "father" Behabe screamed that the government was hurting his company by forcing cutbacks on the level of industry in the base (a separate action).

And so, STW's local council refused to follow the new law, and the government asked for a meeting with one of Base 44's representatives to try to talk things out. In the end, the government representatives caved in, saying that as STW was entirely legal under the Rapalan constitution, any actions taken by it are thus legal, and it is the government's responsibility to adapt to STW, not the other way around. Other parts of the government were appalled by this decision, and many governors either ordered government takeovers of any STW bases that existed or might spring up in their local areas or passed legislation banning it entirely.

The people's response, however, was not what the governors had come to expect from their citizenry. All over the country, people protested that they were being denied the right to join STW, something they were supposed to enjoy. Most departments still held to their governors' decisions, but a few caved in and allowed an independent STW base to open in their territory. Those departments that did not allow STW or allowed it only under government supervision were discriminated against by STW's rapidly growing economic sectors. With this encouragement, people left the departments in large numbers, and STW's membership swelled. Joja was promoted twice during this turmoil, and was no longer associated with just one base, but she still kept a watchful eye on Piplap and others at Base 44 Sala.

i wrote this over 20 yrs ago and it is of little relevance now.

also

The Zenith originated from a tribe of people living on the south slopes of the Sučithasi mountains who were famous for their aggressive hands-on promotion of violence against women. Unusually for an ethnic group, they were more than 50% males, and constantly were looking for more women to add to their tribe. Over time, the Zeniths broadened their appeal somewhat, and began also promoting violence against children, young animals, the elderly, and wounded soldiers. They gained the respect of the feministic cultures around them when some of those feminists, such as FILTER, became even more violent than the Zenith.

For 400 yrs, the dark skinned Crystals and the pale skinned Thunderers had traded places as to who was abusing whom. STW fixed the problem by putting themselves on top of both of them. Anyone who joined STW ceased to a member of either of the other groups.

====Contact with the Crystals====

See Lantern Empire and Thunder Empire.

The Crystals were descended from slave laborers on the tropical plantations of Lobexon, whose entire native population had been enslaved after losing a war against Nama. They hated Nama from the very beginning of their existence, and never wavered. However, Nama had always been an extremely open and welcoming empire, and allowed Crystals to move to Nama and be free from persecution. The Crystals had, early in their existence, alienated themselves even from their fellow slaves by promising to only work to secure the rights of Crystals, while being perfectly content to watch their neighbors such as the Gilgosi and Kampa people remain in slavery indefinitely. Unwelcome even among the very bottommost members of their society, those Crystals who managed to escape their plantations preferred to exit Lobexon entirely rather than seek out a life in the rainforest where they knew they were likely to be killed by any outsiders.

However, the Crystals were good at waiting patiently, and they realized that Nama was actually a very weak empire, perhaps the weakest in the world. Nama's military had two insurmountable problems: first, despite Nama's enormous size, it had only a tiny coastline, in the extreme south, and that coastline was walled off from the rest of Nama by the world's tallest mountain range. Nama had north, east, and west coasts as well, but they were all entirely icebound, as was the land beneath it. The few people in that area of Nama actually lived entirely on the ocean, fishing through holes in the ice, rather than on the land which had no nutrition at all. The second weakness was Nama's tiny population. Even though their land was huge, the world was recovering from a severe ice age, when its food supply had been very low, and even as temperatures increased the food supply stayed about the same. THeir invasion of Lobexon had helped get them access to vegetables, but very little of this food ever reached the core Naman population in the north.

In 2246, the Crystals were the junior partner in a war against Nama in which they won decisively. They had attacked Nama's weak southern coast. When the war was over, they realized that Nama had not even counterattacked them, and had participated in the war only to try to evacuate refugees from the invasion to other areas of Nama. Even after all that, Nama did not persecute the Crystals living in Nama, and the Crystals were able to plan further attacks against Nama from the relative safety of their homes in Nama.

However, other groups were also aware of Nama's weaknesses, and therefore also invaded. In fact, in the War of 2246, the Crystals were not in charge; they were following an army known as FILTER. FILTER was a radical feminist group that put women in charge of their entire society, including the military, and even went so far as to use female soldiers in close combat.

In 3884, the government of Altotta had been overthrown by a group of Thunderers who wanted to restore their nation's original intolerance of immigrants. The government that they overthrew had been run almost entirely by immigrants from Dreamland who had impoverished Altotta and gave the money to Dreamland. The government before that had been run largely by the Crystals, who were also mostly outsiders. They said that Altotta was a nation for Thunderers only and any other groups found living in Altotta would be subject to slavery or exile. Thus, most Crystals living in Altotta became slaves. These new Thunderers also went further and endorsed racism, meaning that Crystals could not simply convert to Thunderism to achieve equal status. The Thunderers were quite diverse, because they had grown over a large area and married many aboriginals, but they had grown almost entirely over Repilian territory, and the few areas of their Empire that were not Repilian had seceded anyway. Thus, like their Kavan ancestors in 2371 AD, the Thunderers in 3884 AD were all light-skinned people, usually with blonde or light brown hair. The Crystals, on the other hand, were also very diverse, but they had spread mostly over areas whose aboriginal populations were very dark-skinned, just like the original Crystals in the 1500s. To the Thunderers, all of the Crystals looked alike. There were dark-skinned Thunderers and light-skinned Crystals, but almost all of these were the offspring of Crystals who had moved into Altotta and married into a Thunder family. Only a tiny number of true religious converts existed. Since Altotta had been run by the Crystals for sixty years, most of these families were several generations deep. There had been similar contacts further back in history; even as far back as the 2370s, when Kava was only four years old, a troop of Crystals had invaded Kava and set up plantations. These people were welcomed because at the time, Kava was so weak that its government was forced to pretend that the invasion was an invitation. These settlers were mostly adult males, so the Crystal settlers and the Kavan women had had many children. This was terribly embarrassing for Kava because Kava had been founded on the same principle of being a nation for Kavans only, but a foreign army had just invaded their territory and taken their women. But now the Thunderers banned all people known to have any Crystal ancestry from identifying as Thunderers, and put all but the upper class of the Crystals into slavery.

The Thunderers hated the Dreamers much more than they hated the Crystals. Unlike the Crystals, the Dreamers could in fact sometimes blend in physically with Thunderers. This was because the Dreamers were descended from a mix of Thunderers with immigrants from Laba.

The Thunderers also endorsed atheism, even though the government they had overthrown was also atheist, but they considered religion to be of little importance in their society and did not prevent the Crystal slaves from practicing their religion. They even managed to remain formally an ally of the Crystals' home empire of Baeba, despite being openly racist against Crystals. This was because they both hated the empire of Dreamland even more than Altotta hated the Crystals. Moreover, Altotta offered to repatriate Crystals to Baeba using trade routes and to ensure that the slave labor the Crystals worked was much more lenient than that assigned to the descendants of the immigrants from Dreamland.

Lypelpyp was located on a trade route in a valley in a very rural area.  There were no significant settlements nearby except the national capital, Wempy.  Lypelpyp was more powerful than its state's capital, however, and people early on came to refer to the entire state simply as "Lypelpyp".  

Politics in Lypelpyp had long been dominated by the uneasy relationships between the people of the Thunder and Crystal Empires. Previously, the two had been one, but racial and religious conflicts drove them apart.

Shortly after the founding of the first STW base in Lypelpyp, the temperature in Lypelpyp plunged to below —50°F for several days in a row. Many natives of Lypelpyp hoped that the shock of the cold weather would repel the Crystal immigrants, who mostly came from the hottest part of the tropical empire of Baeba Swamp. But the Crystals were prepared to deal with the weather, and did not leave.

THIS ONE SHOULD PROBABLTY VCOME BACK LATER

Lypelpyp seeks power

STW was strong mostly in the western edge of the Thunder Empire, in cities such as Lypelpyp. Lypelpyp was part of the Thunder nation of Kava, which had been named after the original Kava. Since the original Kava had been cut off from the Thunder Empire by one of Nama's few military victories, there was generally no confusion between the two nations. However, in diplomacy, people in Lypelpyp's Kava renamed their nation Kavi ("from Kava"). Lypelpyp's people were of a different ethnic group than most Thunderers, but still considered themselves Thunderers and did not distinguish between them and the others. Lypels who moved to other areas in the Thunder Empire were treated as equals. Lypels had not undergone the repentance of 3915 when the Thunder government had repudiated racism and liberalized its court system; they preferred the old, hyper-aggressive Thunder philosophy. This was pasrtly because, being of pure Hinku descent, they were physically intimidated by all of the taller, stronger people around them, and partly because Lypelpyp didn't see a need to apologize for enslaving Crystals when it was well known to them that Crystals were still abusing (but not enslaving) Lypels.

But they actually favored Crystal immigration into Lypelpyp for several reasons:

• Lypelpyp was at the western edge of the Thunder Empire and until the Crystals had met them there, they had been surrounded by hostile enemy tribes. Now they were instead surrounded mostly by Crystals, who looked down on Lypel people but remained generally nonviolent. The Crystal nation nearest Lypelpyp was Yīspʷilinâ, which had earlier been part of the Thunder Empire but was handed over to the Crystals fairly early on. The Thunderers that had been living there had mostly remained, and were treated well even if they did not convert or marry into a Crystal family. Thunderers were no longer allowed to move to Yīspʷilinâ, but this policy was being dictated to them by Baeba, and Yīspʷilinâdid not strictly enforce it. STW actually helped Thunderers leave Altotta just as much as they helped Crystals get in. So they favored Crystal immigration into Lypelpyp because they knew that Crystals would likely not attack a nation with a sizable Crystal minority, and that if they did, they would have to deal with a revolt in their own nation since there were many Thunderers there and those Thunderers were not preventing from owning weapons. (Crystals sometimes punished criminals by banning them from using sharp objects, meaning that they had difficulty even obtaining food.)
• Although at first, the hard-working Lypels seeing Crystals who had lived in Lypelpyp for only a few years getting rich merely by joining STW were violently jealous, the fact that STW opened its arms to Lypels just as much as to Crystals made them realize it was better to be on the same side. They thus threw aside their ethnic and even their religious identity in favor of merely belonging to STW. Then the few pro-immigrant organizations in the rest of Altotta came to see Lypelpyp as a model to follow, even though Lypelpyp was draining the economy of the rest of Altotta simply because STW had not yet expanded far outside of Lypelpyp.

Debate

STW was firmly on the side of the immigrants now, especially the Crystals, and even though the immigrants were legal, most Thunderers' attitudes had not changed since before 3919. Most immigrants into Altotta were Crystals, the same people who had driven Altotta into poverty just 80 years earlier. Altotta already had a sizable Crystal minority, which had just been released from slavery, and the Thunder leaders figured that the Crystals would be even more hostile towards Altotta than they had been in the past. Some Thunderers wanted to move to the Crystal Empire, figuring that they could at least prevent a Crystal takeover of Altotta by threatening to cause problems in the Crystal Empire itself, but the Crystals wouldn't let them in. They realized that the Crystals' nonchalant attitude towards Altotta's slavery program had been due to the fact that the Crystals treated Thunderers quite badly as well. Frustrated at their people's sudden helplessness after being the most powerful empire in the world for hundreds of years, the Thunderers considered formally outlawing immigration once again since they figured at best it would fill them with a second hostile underclass and at worst lead to yet another government led by foreigners.

In a formal debate, the Crystals defended their right to send their people to colonize Altotta while not allowing Thunderers to move to Crystalland by saying that Altotta owed the Crystals a lot of territory for doing nothing when invaders from Laba had invaded Crystal territory in the mid-3700s and deprived the Crystals of their entire north coast, calling it Dreamland, while sparing Thunder nations that were immediately adjacent. The Thunderers reminded the Crystals that Dreamland had in fact invaded Altotta, and had run the entire government of Altotta for 40 years before getting thrown out of power, and still had its people living in Altotta, albeit now as slaves. They also reminded the Crystals that Altotta had previously been conquered by the Crystals and run by them for eighty years, for which the Crystals had never apologized.

The Thunderers who opposed immigration generally opposed STW, since STW to them was a tool to make even the native Thunderers tools of the immigrants, since STW was so wealthy and powerful that even anti-STW Thunderers in Lypelpyp were shopping at STW, and promising to oppose any attempt by the national government of Altotta to shut down STW. Even though STW allowed native Thunderers to join, they realized that most of the members were Crystal immigrants, who seemed to be favored by STW for promotions.

And thus even the anti-STW, anti-immigrant Thunderers in Lypel were forced to hide behind the shoulders of the Crystals when the topic of immigration came up because they relied on the Crystals for most of their economic well-being. STW meanwhile embarrassed the national government of Altotta by leading violent robberies of businesses owned by Dreamers, then blaming Altotta for not caring about the problem of immigration. (STW still refused Dreamers the ability to join STW.)