Tamta/4193

Contact with the Players

By this time, the Players had endorsed intimidation as their primary diplomatic strategy, proudly announcing that they had watched the Raspara slaughter a thousand young Lilypad children while the Lilypads were rescuing the Raspara's child slaves, only to ride into the campsite after the fighting was over and put both the Lilypads and the rescued slaves back into slavery on the same labor camps. They also declared that the Lilypads' rescue mission was a war crime, because it had led to many deaths, and that the Lilypad rescuers deserved not praise but punishment. The Players promised that they would make the Lilypads' lives even more painful than they already were, allowing the Play commanders free rein to use cruel tactics against the children that the Play army would never use against adult soldiers.

The Players assigned the task of diplomacy with children to their military, meaning that unlike all other diplomatic meetings, the children would be meeting with Play military generals instead of traditional diplomats, and the Play military's only goal was to win more territory for the Players. The traditional Play diplomats had always been women and had strongly believed that they could make peace with their enemies by appealing to common interests. The Players stated that the children had proven that they did not deserve to be treated with fairness, and that with any territory the Players took from the children's nations, however much blood was shed was irrelevant because the Players were taking control for the interests of the greater good.

The Players also announced a new war against the Scorpion children who had just signed a treaty of submission to the Players, where the children declared the new Scorpion territory of Tāmta to be within the Play nation, as part of the Play district of Tanaanu. The Scorpions had earlier considered themselves neutral and had so far responded to all military threats by fleeing ever further from their enemies. They had recently decided to take a side, saying that they actually considered themselves to be part of the Play nation. The Players responded to this treaty of friendship by adding the Scorpions to the list of nations that the Players would soon conquer and stand on. The Players promised that this new war applied only to Scorpions living outside the refugee territory, because the Players still respected Moonshine's territorial integrity, meaning that they would not be actually invading Tāmta, but warned that the Players would soon be massing soldiers on the borders of this territory, and because the refugee territory could not survive without trade, the Players would soon wield control over even the refugees.

Outside reviews

To some outside diplomats, the lack of sympathy proved the children's claims: if the children were exaggerating, they would have at least one ally on their side looking to gain political capital from the children's accusations against the various adult powers around them, while knowing they would face no serious military resistance. But precisely because they were telling the truth, no allies had anything to gain by siding with them, and therefore they tried to deny the children's claims in order to escape responsibility for help.

Summer elections in Tāmta

By February 4193, the peak of summer on the common shared calendar, new elections for the entire Parliament were due in Tāmta, and this time the Hardwoods decided to field candidates for all 100 positions, including the two overseers. They still expected that they would lose most of their campaigns, but were encouraged by the fact that they had previously defeated children in a children's nation without cheating and without resorting to loopholes in the election laws.

Nonetheless, the children in the Scorpion-Beetle coalition were increasingly taking it for granted that they were smarter than the adults in the Hardwood party, and perhaps smarter than other groups of adults as well, but not smarter than the adults who still held a few reins of power in the Scorpion party.

The Hardwoods were of mixed backgrounds, and some were well-educated, but they had not grown up in a heavily political society. By now, the Hardwoods had conceded that the children were very smart and were not simply cheating their way into victory. But the Hardwoods who took the political system seriously held to the belief that if they obeyed the laws of their nation, they would be accepted as ordinary citizens eventually. Two men named Yàmu-Xʷētagʷa and Gaḳadànu ran for the two overseer positions. They also fielded a candidate for president but considered this race to be futile.

The Hardwood party announced that they preferred not to have their candidates stand on the debate stage in the middle of the row of child candidates, as they felt it embarrassing and awkward. They did not specifically forbid their candidates from doing so, but suggested that they could better reach their audience if they held separate events in which the candidates of the other parties would field questions to the Hardwood candidate, so he could address them all at once rather than pretending to be one of them.

Hardwood reform proposal

Now some Hardwoods proposed having two nations in one place, as was the case further west in Erala. The Hardwoods would revert to their own self-government where they did very little, and the children's parties could have all the government officials they wanted without adult interference. The two governments would meet up in binational diplomatic committees so that they would not be at cross purposes. This meant that there would be Hardwood officials after all. The Scorpions considered this idea, but felt that it would weaken their power overall, since the Hardwoods might claim that their smaller population size no longer mattered, as they were a fully independent nation.

As a compromise, the Scorpions agreed to set up two parallel governments: they would retain their existing Tāmta government with the Hardwoods, and the Hardwoods would also be allowed a nation of their own in the same place, whose laws and taxes would apply only to the Hardwoods (unless they were able to pull in more citizens from outside), with minimal Scorpion oversight only to ensure safety. Then, the Hardwoods would be required to participate only minimally in the Tāmta government instead of running candidates against the children's parties for every open position. This system, though complex, had precedent in that some parties such as the Soap Bubbles had traditionally governed themselves through their party, obeying party laws and courts in addition to those of the nation they lived in.

What the Hardwoods objected most to was the expectation that they should run political campaigns against children; while they agreed to the new system they said that they would prefer to isolate their candidates to positions in which few if any children were interested, while running unopposed in the elections of their own coextensive nation.

Next election cycle

In August 4193, Tāmta held democratic elections again.

Handover of power

After the election results, the Scorpions' remaining adult leaders resigned their positions, saying that the young Scorpions had so impressed the party founders that the founders had decided to hand over power four years earlier than they had promised to. This meant that not just the nation of Tāmta, but the Scorpion party itself, was entirely run by children, albeit with some of them now fifteen years old, having been Scorpions for nearly two years.

This handover of power was important because the Scorpions had always considered the well-being of their political party to be more important than what nation they lived in.

Many Scorpions believed that their duty was to eventually fight a war, although enthusiasm for battle had faltered after the Scorpions realized how many young children had died on the battlefield trying to protect themselves from the Players. Now, realizing that they would forever be few in number, the Scorpions debated openly whether their battle instincts should be nurtured or suppressed, but promised that they would not allow themselves to flee an invasion again.

The Scorpion leaders retained positions as advisers, but could not vote, and had no means to access the powers they had given up. Therefore, if the young Scorpions decided to go to war, the adults could no longer stop them, and moreover the adults knew they would likely be at the front lines of battle.

Crystals arrive in Tāmta

Late in 4193, the Crystals arrived at Tulip Lake, seeking to settle in the Scorpion kids' colony of Tāmta (still considered part of Hōki by the Crystals) and live side by side. The Crystals were led by women, and the migrants consisted of traditional families containing female leaders alongside their husbands and children.

The Crystals' migration continued a long Crystal tradition of settling in the nations of other groups and becoming an established minority. The Crystals had always considered themselves a transnational organization, and believed that they could recruit new members from the pre-existing traditional refugee populations along Tulip Lake, and perhaps even from the Scorpions.

They believed that the Scorpions shared a common interest but also understood that the Scorpions had purposefully isolated themselves from all other armies, even their supposed allies, and might not enjoy being colonized. The Crystals believed that they would nonetheless be capable of winning over the Scorpion leaders, saying that the Crystals would provide protection that the few Scorpion adults could not.

Linguistic differences

The Crystal diplomats, having learned to speak Play earlier in order to meet with earlier Play-speaking groups, had always felt the language was unfit for adults and of a different nature than their own language. Indeed, Play had so far contributed very few loanwords to the Crystals' languages, Middlesex and Leaper. Those few words that did exist were mostly terms for children's things, such as toys and candy, or were used ironically to imply the object being described was as out of place in Crystal society as the Play language as a whole would be.

Thus for example the Crystals sometimes used the Play loanword tiabataba for candy, even though they had two words of their own, and Play ŋaupupi did not mean "election", as in Play, but rather could mean either a sham election in which the result was pre-determined, or a more positive meaning indicating a group of children deciding amongst themselves how to play a game. Play words were almost never used for their literal meanings unless they referred to children's things. As in so many other cases, the various groups of Play-speaking children such as the Scorpions were unable to take offense at this situation because it was all they had ever known, and even Play-speaking adults typically cared little about how their language was viewed by outside groups, as native Play speakers took pride in their language's famously difficult grammar, saying that if Play was fit for children, the other languages must be fit for animals.

The Crystals also realized that Play lacked convenient terms of derision for children, apart from addressing children with terms for a different age group. Diminutives did not exist and the suffix -i was restricted to literal use. This suggested to the Crystals that the Players and their Play-speaking ancestors had been a child-focused culture for a very long time. Yet the most common word for adult, papapūapu, was derived from the word for wrinkle, while another common word (tatibumna) meant "out of control" and a third word simply meant "old".

Attempts to impress Crystal politics on the Scorpions

The Crystals supported an exclusively female power structure. Unlike most outside groups, they made little distinction between boys and men, calling both lĭkʷa. And they did not see the Scorpions as deserving of any special sympathy simply because of their young age. Since the Scorpions had a male surplus, most of their leaders were boys. All female Scorpions were voluntary members who obeyed the democratically elected leadership and did not seek power of their own. The Crystals respected this, but also wanted to meet with female diplomats whenever possible, and for the Scorpions to respect the Crystals' own strongly feminist politics.

The Crystals also planned to impress on the young girls in the Scorpion population that they were better leaders than the boys. Since the Crystals were primarily female, they worried that the Scorpions would pay them unwanted attention as they grew into men, and perhaps even as adolescents. They believed that the only way to prevent this was to encourage the Scorpion boys to look to women and girls as role models, and to promote female leaders among the Scorpions even if they only held unofficial advisory roles. The Crystals wanted to police the boys' behavior directly, but understood that the task would be difficult.

Scorpions' reply

The Scorpions sent a team of young boys and girls to reply to the Crystals, showing that they spoke with one voice and did not have separate ideologies based on gender. These children told the Crystals that they endorsed feminism, just as the Crystals did, because in their short lives they had been attacked and invaded many times over by adult men, and never once had they been physically attacked by women. But they had never been attacked by boys either, and even though the Crystals seemed to think all boys had the instincts of animals, the grouping of thousands of young Scorpion boys and girls together in close quarters had yet to result in any significant in-group violence. This went strongly against the Crystal belief that boys were as violent as men, if not more so, and that any closely packed population of young boys would quickly result in the boys attacking both each other and anyone around them who made easy victims.

Five-party rule

The Scorpions told the Crystals that they were welcome in Tāmta, but that they would need to give up all pretense of being in charge, whether because they were women or because they were adults, and admit that they were fellow refugees who could not expect other refugees to stand aside for them.

The Scorpions sent their youngest enrolled boys as diplomats to meet with Crystals, who reminded the Crystals that the Scorpions had won the approval of the other refugee groups present, and that Moonshine (despite considering itself still a branch of the Crystals) had done nothing to oppose the Scorpions' takeover.

The Scorpions offered to recognize the Crystals as a legal political party in Tāmta, even allowing the possibility that the Crystals would accumulate more members from the other refugee groups and outvote the Scorpions. Thus the Scorpions enrolled the Crystals as their nation's fifth political party, alongside the Scorpions, the Beetles, the Hardwoods, and the Top Riders. But they said that any attempt to push the Scorpions around using force would lead the Scorpions to abandon their long plan to take revenge on the Players and instead finish off the Crystals. Even though the Scorpions were claiming they were still children and therefore too young to fight, they believed that they could easily defeat the Crystals, and therefore that it was no crime to send their boys to battle in such a conflict.

To any Crystals who did not wish to cooperate, the Scorpions offered the prospect of leaving Tāmta and settling in any of the many other areas of Hōki still open for settlement.

Symbolic gestures

The Scorpions were isolated by over a thousand miles from the Clovers, and by a smaller but just as uncrossable barrier from the rest of the Cold Men and from the Players who were invading the Cold Men. There was no trade road, even over hostile territory, connecting the Scorpions' hideout in Moonshine to either of the other territories, and the Scorpions assumed that the hostile Leash army would abduct anyone moving through the wilderness if the Players did not get there first.

Therefore the Scorpions signed a symbolic peace treaty with the Players, saying that if they ever met face to face, the Scorpions would give the Players anything they wanted except entry into the Scorpions' private territory. This was a further step away from their inherited ideology. Earlier, they had declared themselves to be part of Tanaanu, a historically rebellious area within Play territory located more than a thousand miles away. This was treasonous in itself according to the Cold ideology that the Scorpions had been taught in school, but now they were allying with the Play party as a whole, and not a rebellious faction that had arisen within it. The new treaty was especially important because the Players were now only a few hundred miles from the Scorpions, and the land that lay in between them was nearly undefended because it was the refugee colony of Hōki.

The Scorpions also signed an adoption treaty with STW, saying that they would adopt all of STW's remaining Grass Walker orphans (paipa natuam) at no charge, provided that they accept Scorpion party membership. The Scorpions said that they would be allowed to remain Clovers if they chose to claim that identity, as the Scorpions did not consider the Clovers a political party. Because they knew STW would have a difficult time reaching the Scorpions' territory in Moonshine, they did not expect STW's merchants to arrive with any significant number of orphans, but they promised that they would hold to their promise even if it meant adopting so many orphans that they could no longer be an army.