Tamta/4194

Timeline

4194 • 4195 • 4196 • 4197 • 4198 • later history

Nest War

Diplomatic isolation

The Scorpions were interested in adopting the Grass Walker orphans as a good deed in itself which needed no explanation, although they conceded that because their population was primarily male, adoption was the only means by which a good many of them would be able to raise families of their own. Since the Crystals had come to Tāmta from the west and still owned wagons that could carry them over land, the Scorpions realized that the Crystals might be able to help bring the orphans to Tāmta. If this were to happen, the Scorpions figured that the two parties' opinions of each other would both improve, as the Crystals would prove themselves a valuable ally when a third party was in distress, and the Scorpions would prove to the Crystals that they were of kind hearts despite their outwardly aggressive ideology and heated political campaigns.

However, when the Scorpions approached the Crystals to see if they could help transport the orphans eastward into Tāmta, some Crystal diplomats accused the Scorpions of planning to abuse the younger Grass Walker children, saying that adoption was simply a cover for their plan. Hearing this, the Scorpion children announced that they would no longer come to the Crystals seeking help.

Rise of Saltspring

January 19, 4194

A 13-year-old boy named Saltspring (Play Tana Mayafama) took the lead in repelling the Crystals' political advances, creating a new office that was below the president (named the Knife) but also independent of him. He had fought in close combat against the illegal Tadpole intruders in the Lilypad nation two years earlier and claimed to have saved the lives of other young Lilypads by scaring the men away. Some said that the Tadpoles had simply attacked other children, and that Saltspring's strategy was futile, but even these people acknowledged that Saltspring was a hero for bravely taking on the Tadpole men knowing he could easily have been killed.

The Crystals were reluctant to accept that the Scorpions admired this new leader, as he seemed to stand in the way of feminine power. Quickly the Crystals recognized Saltspring as their primary diplomatic enemy, saying that the Knife had appointed Saltspring to do the job that the Knife could not do on his own.

Realizing that the Crystals were afraid of a thirteen-year-old boy, whom they kept referring to with terms usually retained for adult men, the bystanders in the Hardwood party and other unaffiliated groups began to turn against the Crystals.

Saltspring goes to war

To the surprise of the president, the boy declared himself a Sunspot, even though the Sunspots were based a thousand miles to the west. He then promptly declared war against the Crystals. Saltspring said that he would rouse a second Sunspot army inside the refugee camp, whose members would be mostly Scorpions who objected to the Crystals' presence and supported the Sunspots' war against the Crystals in Pavaitaapu.

Saltspring's Sunspot troop consisted of only about fifty soldiers, all boys, but stated that they would vastly overperform their numbers and their young age because the Crystals were so weak. This was because just months earlier, when the Crystals had been concentrated in the Clover kingdom of Pavaitaapu, they had agreed to surrender all of their weapons to their long-time ally, the Soap Bubbles, who then promptly betrayed them. Indeed, the Soap Bubbles who slaughtered the Crystals in Pavaitaapu were those who belonged to the very same Sunspot army that Saltspring and his followers had just joined.

The Sunspot boys still did not have armor, but they had acquired weapons by various means. The Crystals, including their adult male soldiers, had neither armor nor weapons because they had not had time to recover or manufacture new weapons since their defeat in Pavaitaapu.

The boys called themselves Spines (Play Vavata Pamiti) to distinguish themselves from the other Sunspots. The metaphor here was a reference to spiny animals such as porcupines; although Saltspring's soldiers were not the strongest in the world, anyone who touched them would get hurt. This name had been used as a political party's name in the past, and Saltspring said that he would be willing to start a new political party if the Sunspots expelled him and his followers, but said that he would remain loyal to the Scorpions unless rejected by them.

The Spines promised to avenge the Crystals' nonviolent political humiliation of them with extreme violence, saying it was the natural response for a free-standing army in their situation.

The Crystals did not know of this sudden development and continued to believe that they were sharing their territory only with the Scorpions.

Battle of Lanăra

Because the Crystals did not know of the new war, they had made no preparations for defense. In the Crystal settlement of Lanăra, the Sunspots easily found a group of about 400 unarmed Crystal women who were working clustered together with no men or children nearby. Even though they were greatly outnumbered, the boys had swords and the women did not, so they rushed at the women intending to cut them all up as quickly as possible, with no worries about the women's ability to fight back.

In this battle, the Sunspots killed 63 of those women, while the others outran them. Their performance was uneven: Saltspring killed seven women just by himself, but most of the boys were too slow to catch up with any of them. Nonetheless the Crystals did not fight back at all, and therefore the Sunspots returned from their battle unharmed.

Among the dead women were Vapāa, Ŋaišassipa, and Tuvāpata, all of whom had been advocates for Crystal politics who had opposed the original Sunspots in the west. (Their birth names were in Leaper.) Most of the other women killed were apolitical but belonged to the wider Crystal movement.

After the massacre, the Sunspots went into hiding so that the Crystals would not find them. The Spine War (Play Pamiti Vapias) had begun, and the boys came to think of themselves as the Spine battalion of the Sunspot army. (This was the Spines' name for the war, because they initiated it, but it later came to be known as the Nest War as the peak of the fighting moved westward.) They stated that the refugee territory was fair game for fighting a war, but that refugees were not fair targets. Thus, they were targeting the Crystals because they believed Crystals could not be true refugees.

Because the Crystals had never learned of the boys' split from the Scorpion party, the Spines assumed that the Crystals would blame the Scorpions for the attack, launch a counterattack, and then trigger many Scorpions to either join the Spines or escalate into a full-scale war against the Crystals.

Explanation of attack

While the Spines remained in the wilderness to escape detection, they nonetheless figured they would eventually be discovered, most likely by the Scorpions. Together they wrote a defense of their attack on the Crystals, hoping to convince the other Scorpions to join their side or to at least cooperate with them in driving out the Crystals.

The Spines claimed allegiance to the Sunspots in the belief that the Sunspot men were also being threatened by the Crystals, and had attacked Crystals in self-defense. They noted that the Sunspots had preferred to drive out the Crystals rather than to kill them, and preferred to kill them rather than to capture and torture them. This set them apart from other all-male armies such as the Matrixes, who were well-known for torturing their victims, including women and children.

Political motivations

The Spines considered themselves boys, in part because the Crystals kept insisting that boys were no different than men. The Scorpions then promised that like other boys, they would never attack soldiers their age or younger, but would only target adults. They said however that the women they killed were adults just as much as any men, and that they were not targeting the Crystals simply because they felt women made easy victims; rather, since women were clearly in charge of Crystal society and had attempted to put women in charge of the Scorpions as well, it was women who were the enemies of the Spines.

In fact, many of the victims who died that day were quite young, but because the Crystals considered them to be adults, the older women made no special effort to protect the girls from the angry boys, and the boys attacked them indiscriminately. Even so, the boys agreed after the battle that they had not deliberately targeted the youngest ones and would not do so in the future. They also realized that the Crystals could not complain specifically about the deaths of the teenage girls without admitting that the Spines and the Scorpions were even younger than this, and therefore that the Crystals had been wrong earlier to treat the Scorpions as if they were adults.

The Spines stated privately that they hoped their attack would start a wider war between the Scorpions and the Crystals, that the Scorpions would forget about their long-term plans to invade the Players, and that the Players would remain neutral in the new war. The Players had earlier promised never to invade Moonshine, and that they would consider the refugee camps to be part of Moonshine. Thus the Spines realized that the only safe place to fight a war was inside the refugee state of Hōki where both the Scorpions and the Crystals had moved.

Wider reaction

Crystals

The Crystals reported the massacre to their leaders, not daring to report it to the Scorpions. The Crystal leaders prepared to launch a war against the Scorpion children in retaliation for the attack, but also worried that if they had fared so poorly in their first battle, they might not be able to win a war. Even the men were afraid to face down the Sunspot boys because the men would need to attack from a distance, throwing rocks and other objects, or else expose themselves to the boys' swords and spears. The Crystals realized that they might need to flee the Scorpion colony and find somewhere else to live.

Leapers

When outside parties such as the Leapers in Baeba Swamp heard about the unexpected turn of events, they stated that the Scorpions were full of rage because they had been repeatedly pushed from one territory to another, always by adults, and had seen many of their members kidnapped and abused by adults, and therefore the Spines simply took the first opportunity they had to take out their frustrations on another group of adults, even though their victims were both very weak and innocent of any involvement in the Scorpions' past troubles. The Leapers noted that the Scorpion territory had a large male surplus population, and predicted that the relatively small attack against the Crystals was only the beginning of a much wider war in which the Scorpions would attack anyone who got in their way, even if their victims claimed to be allies of the Scorpions.

Moonshine

Moonshine's Parliament received word of the attack after the wider Crystal party made contacts with them. The Moonshines reaffirmed their commitment to absolute pacifism, and that pacifism required that the strongest army take control of any territory they lived in. Because the Spines were stronger than the Crystals, they deserved to rule, and therefore the Crystals deserved to be slaughtered. Thus the Moonshines avoided making a commitment to rescue the Crystals.

It was only through Moonshine that the Scorpions finally learned what the Spines had done. The Scorpion leaders denied involvement in the massacre, but stated that some of their members had been missing for several weeks and that they could not track them down. The Scorpions nonetheless agreed with Moonshine that the strong had every right to abuse the weak, and that the Crystals deserved to be killed for putting their women in such a vulnerable position with no protection. Thereby the Moonshines and Scorpions forged an informal alliance, and the Scorpions contemplated a future invasion of Moonshine.

Hardwoods

The Hardwoods were the last to learn what had happened to the Crystal women. They realized that they were just as vulnerable as the Crystals, because they also had no armor and little access to weapons, and were living spread out through the children's territory such that they could not easily group together for protection. Some Hardwood families decided to flee Tāmta and seek refuge in other areas of Hōki, even knowing that living conditions were much worse elsewhere. They believed that Tāmta would soon be overwhelmed by violent crime as the Scorpions' male surplus adopted Spine-like behaviors and attacked weak victims regardless of ideology. Others decided to remain for various reasons.

Grass Walkers

The Scorpions reaffirmed their promise to adopt the Grass Walker orphans, even knowing that there was little chance of cooperation any longer with the Crystals who were best suited to transport the orphans eastward. Before the massacre, there had been a minority among the Crystals who believed in the Scorpions' sincerity, arguing that since the Scorpions were almost all orphans and runaways, they would make ideal caretakers for younger orphans. The Crystals had long practiced nontraditional parenting themselves, such as raising children in groups. The Crystals did not allow single men to take guardianship of children, but the Scorpions hoped that if they promised to raise the children in groups, their female members would satisfy the Crystals' definition of a mother figure and that the Crystals would assume those girls would be trustworthy enough to stop the abuses the Crystals claimed the boys would otherwise be prone to inflict on the younger children.

The Scorpions figured that their massacre of the Crystal women had no bearing on their suitability as caretakers for younger children, and that therefore the Crystals' positions should be unchanged, but realized that even if some Crystals still supported their plan, they had likely ruined their chances of cooperation by allowing the Spines to emerge and carry out their attack against the Crystal women.

New election cycle

In the wake of the massacre, another new election took place in Tāmta in February 4194, the first time that the Crystals were allowed to vote.

When the Scorpions realized that the Crystals were seeking revenge for the earlier massacre by attempting to peacefully vote the Scorpions out of power, the freshly appointed Scorpion party leaders came to more closely identify themselves with the perpetrators of the massacre, saying that pacifists were unnatural and deserved to die painfully, like prey animals, so that the Scorpions could grow stronger by feeding upon them.

War in Pavaitaapu

In 4194, the Crystals declared war on the Clover children's bodyguards (the Sunspots) and sent their entire adult male population back into Pavaitaapu, from which they had only recently just fled, to fight the war. Men who refused to fight gave up their Crystal party membership and joined other refugee groups. This meant that the adult Crystal population in Hōki was now entirely female, and the Crystals became even more suspicious now of the Scorpions and of the Cold Men who were now trickling in to the Scorpion settlements along Tulip Lake and Hipside River. By contrast, the other groups became disproportionately male because ex-Crystal men, but few women, were joining them.

To the Crystals' dismay, Moonshine recognized the Scorpions' claim to be a children's nation, as they had when the Scorpions had arrived just months earlier, and therefore Moonshine had no expectation that the Scorpions, including the adult leaders, would move west with the Crystals to fight the Sunspots.

Without their adult male population, the Crystals became ever more wary of living among the Scorpions. At the same time, the Scorpions relaxed.

Migration of Crystals from interior states

The war declaration also applied to the wider Crystal population living outside the refugee territory. The Crystals were the majority population in many states to the south and west, and in these territories, there were few men able to defect from the Crystals, as the only party that would be safe to join was the Soap Bubbles, into which entry was very difficult. This new declaration of war therefore was about to make vast areas of countryside almost entirely free of adult males.

Even though the order to war applied to the entire adult male Crystal population, the Crystal military strategy did not call for all of the men to attack at the same time, so some Crystal men remained behind to guard the Crystal nation's borders. It also did not apply to Crystals living in Moonshine or Play territory, which the mainstream Crystal party could not enter. Nonetheless, the inland areas of Crystal territory east of Baeba and south of Moonshine were considered unnecessary to guard, and therefore really did become devoid of adult males.

In total, about 25,000 men left their homes and joined the war in Baeba Swamp, and 12,000 more remained near the edges of Crystal territory, ready to join the rest in Baeba when they were called to do so. This was much larger than the Sunspot population of just a few thousand men, but the Crystals knew that the Sunspots were better-armed and that they would have allies among the civilians in Baeba.

The Crystal parliament's mobilization order created an interior zone within the Crystal territory called the Nest (Leaper Wāntàti) in which no adult males were allowed; here lived about 50,000 Crystal women, their children, and a very small number of Soap Bubbles. When word of this reached neighboring nations, men from territories such as Olansele decided to move south to help repopulate the Nest. There was no Crystal border guard between Olansele and the Crystal women's territory because they were officially allies. Yet, because these men were not Crystals, they were not subject to the mobilization order, and they felt the Crystal police force would be unwilling or unable to arrest them.

When the men from Olansele and other territories realized that the Crystal men had left the Nest and that the Crystal women were now entirely unprotected, they declared themselves to be Sunspots, making what had been a legal (though unwelcome) migration into a declaration of war. These men in some cases abandoned their own wives to move in with the Crystals, but most of the earliest migrants were unmarried.

Crystals plead for peace

The movement of Sunspot men into the Crystal women's interior zones upset the Crystals' plans to defeat the Sunspots in Baeba Swamp. The global Crystal parliament had approved this war, meaning that the Eggs in Play territory and the Moonshines in Moonshine territory had cast their votes in support, but because they did not send any soldiers to fight, their territories were still protected by loyal Crystal men. Now, the Crystals in the Nest wanted to pull some of their soldiers back home to protect them from the Sunspot men and others they predicted would soon arrive, but the global Crystal parliament stated that the war in Baeba was much more important than the well-being of the Crystals in the Nest, and that they would be willing to lose control of the Nest if it meant that the members of the other Crystal factions could move to Baeba after the war was over.

The Crystals in the Nest felt that the other Crystal factions, particularly the Eggs, might be angry at the Nesters because thirty years earlier, the ancestors of those in the Nest had voted to abandon the Eggs in a similar situation in which the Eggs' all-female colony was invaded by a troop of men calling themselves the Firestones, and those women soon gave birth to babies fathered by the Firestones. But the Crystals in the Nest had never harmed the Moonshines in any way, and yet they realized that the Moonshines seemed to make life difficult for them at every opportunity. Moonshine's diplomats explained this by saying that the Nest was not important because the Crystals living there were poor and rural, and that the Nest mostly existed as a buffer to keep enemy soldiers out of Moonshine. Nonetheless, the Crystals in the Nest reaffirmed their alliance with Moonshine, believing it to be the world's most successful Crystal empire, and deputized their all-female police force to fight off the invading Sunspot men with no help from outside.

Other Cold Men arrive

The Players had earlier told the children who were encircled by Play battalions that the time to flee had passed and that they would be forced to join the Play party as they grew up, and would be held under supervision so that they could not sabotage the new states the Players were building in the captured territories. The Players had many reasons for this.

But they held to their promise that anyone to the north of the Play battalions would be allowed to forever retreat further north, into the core of Moonshine territory, and that the Players would not invade them there. In the meantime, these children lived in a wilderness territory claimed by neither Moonshine nor the Players, as they had always wanted to. But they no longer felt safe, and so nearly all of the children in the wild moved north into Moonshine.

New Cold census

The number of Cold troops who arrived at Tāmta was far less than the 141,000 who had been living in free territory at the time of the treaty and had resolved to make their way to safety in Tāmta. The Cold children were not emotionally prepared to answer the question of what had happened to the many tens of thousands of children who had not been able to complete the journey. They knew that before their migration began, the Players had already captured 30,000 children in battle, and understood that these had most likely been enslaved rather than killed. They knew that the Players had attacked them from behind as they were retreating northward, and hoped that the many missing children were living in safety, if not in freedom, under Play control. (Even though the children had surrendered, the Players attacked them anyway, stating that they had not met the conditions of surrender, as the Players had demanded a direct transfer of power to the Play military. The Players had been inconsistent on this because they did not have full control of their military leaders.)

The Cold children took comfort, nonetheless, in the knowledge that the arriving children were on average younger than the general population. Nearly half of the population who had successfully completed the journey consisted of the so-called Deer Paws (nanuu pūu), children under 12 who had been abandoned by their parents. This was because the older children had taken care of the younger ones, protecting them from danger at their own expense, and staying behind so that younger children could go first. Many of the youngest children had been bunched together in a territory called Lypelpyp when the migrations began. This was more firmly controlled by STW than were other areas along the trade road, and in fact had a shorter route to safety than the East Bath migration route in the east; however, it required the children to pass through a river in Erala, which was dangerous and poorly governed territory. The children believed that STW must have taken it upon themselves to deliver the youngest children to safety along this route, and many of the youngest who had arrived stated that they had been hidden in cargo shipments, perhaps to hide them from the people at the many stops along the way.

New colonies in Tāmta

The Cold Men built new settlements in Tāmta, which they then declared to be for Cold Men only, and also independent of each other, though they still pledged allegiance to Tāmta and said that the five colonies were all ruled by Cold Men and so would have a unified military run by the Cold Men's existing command structure. Thus, they said that their military was more important than their nations.

Tāmta had consisted of a single district since its foundation two years earlier, but now the Cold Men wanted to bring their traditional system of government with them, in which people could concentrate themselves according to political ideology and live among their own kind. The Cold Men stated that their political party was still important, but that they had disagreements even with each other, and believed that the best way to get along was to divide themselves along political lines into districts while still remaining bound by the pledge to support the Cold party overall and serve in the military.

Fipapanu

The Land of Tomorrow, this district had many other names, such as Ŋumatūnu, Panu and Rasalu. This had been anticipated to be the capital, but the settlers soon declared that they wanted to live a life as far removed from politics as possible.

Many of the settlers here believed that they could start a new nation along the lakeshore. They still considered themselves Cold Men because of their promise of military allegiance, but stated that they would not form coalitions with the other Cold Men. As such, they allowed their people to create new factions of the Cold party with any ideology, or to become nonpolitical.

This meant that the people of Fipapanu were no longer bound by their promise to abstain from starting new families in their new territory, and therefore the people of Fipapanu declared that their territory was open to any Cold Men with young children. They expected to outgrow the other districts by this measure. There were still at this time very few people over the age of fifteen, but young marriage was traditional in their culture.

Titapa

A compact territory for Cold Men who preferred urban life, Titapa resolved itself to be otherwise apolitical and to cooperate with all of the other districts. There were buildings in this area that had been constructed long ago by previous inhabitants, even before it had become a refugee territory, but these were largely in ruins and the Cold Men knew that they would need to work hard if they wanted their territory to resemble a traditional city.

Many people here formed a close relationship with the district of Fipapanu. Titapa's people stated that they had found their ideal place to live and would not move.

Papayau Šeke

A sparsely populated area with few natural resources. In one corner of this territory, it bordered the much smaller district of Titapa. The people of Papayau Šeke wanted to experiment with a non-democratic government within the democracy of Tāmta, and stated therefore that they would elect a toparch (nenua) who would have absolute power within their territory but no power outside it. Thus the residents of Papayau Šeke would not need to bother with any internal political affairs. They hoped that they would still be allowed to vote in the Cold party elections and in Tāmta's governmental elections, but acknowledged that they might be ejected from the union for being non-democratic.

Pusuaani

This is the place also known as Imama-Hamapaa in Late Andanese, where the thematic syllables /ma/ and /pa/ were chosen artificially. The ordinary Andanese name would have been Yaa-Haalaa.

Vauŋāmtu

NOTE: This seems to have been partially confused with the island of Šanataŋūs.

This was the Cold Men's name for all of the islands within Tulip Lake, a place they felt would remain safe even if all of the remaining territory was lost. The food supplies were reliable but the Cold Men knew that they could not feed the entire Cold nation, and so they resolved to keep the population of Vauŋāmtu very low.

Šanataŋūs

Note: if this is on an island, it could not have three border patrols. It seems to have been partially confused with Vauŋāmtu.

Though its primary name was Šanataŋūs, this district had an alternate Play name Mišabami and was known in a cipher as 2-47. Located on a small island in the lake, which was nonetheless iced over for much of the year and therefore accessible. This district was intended to be a safe place for the most vulnerable in society, including those who did not feel safe even around the rest of the Cold Men. These people referred to themselves as nina, a Play word which could mean a toddler, someone with far-reaching plans for the future, or someone who makes a great mess. They were known in a trade language as bèd and began saying that bèd was an exact translation of the Play word and encompassed its full range of senses.

Tamataa

Soon, subdistricts (neighborhoods) were founded, such as Tamataa, which was founded by two six-year-old boys. These neighborhoods had their own governments, but the governments had very little power. (Note that in the Play syllabary, this name was not seen as particularly similar to Tāmta, having only one glyph in common; thus, it was not a pun and not much remarked upon.)

Because the two six-year-old boys were in charge, anyone moving to Tamataa was required to obey them, and they attracted few settlers. Most settlers were six years old or even younger.

Timing of elections

Positions served here had a minimum term length of just one month, much shorter than the Scorpions' six-month terms that they had inherited from their positions in school classrooms. These one-month terms were a custom they had picked up during their brief time in Nama.

Early events

The doctor

One boy was much sicker than the rest and could not meet his daily needs on his own. Although he could walk, the living situation was so dire that children needed to be able to run at high speed. The other children in Tamataa felt sympathy, and understood that older children outside the neighborhood might be able to help, but told him it was not safe to leave the neighborhood because the people outside, even the other Cold Men, could be dangerous. But the boy continued to grow sicker and the other children were unable to help. Finally in desperation he left the colony at night and sought help in the wider district of Šanataŋūs. An older boy understood what was wrong but the boy needed to stay in Šanataŋūs for several days because they were fully reliant on Moonshine's traders for medical supplies. After several days the Cold kids were able to nurse the boy back to health, and he thanked them by showing them his home in Tamataa, but the other children in Tamataa yelled at him to stay out, as the older children were not welcome there and therefore neither was he. The other children had posted signs in the colony showing men kidnapping small children and stated that even though the people who had helped him were children, they were older and were part of the wider adult world and thus could not be trusted. Thus Tamataa's people came to be called Cupbearers, the people who rejected help from the only people who wanted to help them.

Expelled by the Cupbearers, the boy moved back to the wider colony of Šanataŋūs and began discussing the need for the Cold Men to re-enter Tamataa since he knew that there were almost certainly more children struggling as he had, who might die if they were forced to rely on other small children for advice and for help. The Cold Men were unsure how to handle a political conflict against children half their age, and wondered if they could hire adults to simulate an invasion of Tamataa that would drive the small children back into Šanataŋūs out of desperation.

Border patrols

The Cold Men in Šanataŋūs broke the law when they appointed adult male guards to patrol the borders, which they referred to as The Door (Play tuma, a word earlier used in the name of the Cupbearer party) and said that they would not let anyone in, again applying this rule even to the other Cold Men. The wider Cold Men could not understand why the children in Šanataŋūs wanted adults to patrol their borders, even knowing that they had been betrayed and attacked time and again by various groups of adults and never by children. Unable to convince the new settlers to get rid of the adult guards, the non-Šanataŋūs Cold Men sent a team of young children to patrol the external border and attempt to prevent the adult guards from wandering off base and entering the wider Cold territory.

The children in Šanataŋūs responded to this by sending another team of children to patrol the internal border, and said that the children would not let any children leave or enter without authorization. This meant that the adult guards would be surrounded by two groups of children and that the district of Šanataŋūs would have three border patrol agencies: welcome children, welcome adults, and unwelcome children whom they hoped would give up or at least cooperate with the other two. The children on the inside were assigned to control of the movement of other children, and the children on the outside (who did not officially live in Šanataŋūs) were to do the same, while the adults in the middle were in control of the movement of adults (but were pledged to always deny entry).

The children in control of Šanataŋūs said that they were not setting up a trap; children would be allowed to leave and re-enter, but would require prior authorization from the children patrolling the perimeter, and that anyone seeking such a journey would need to show how it would benefit the district as a whole. Most of these were diplomatic missions, but one girl was sent on a mission shortly after the founding of the district to acquire any books she could find that were written in Late Andanese so that the children could learn the wisdom and medical knowledge of the lost Andanese civilization.

Figuring that any conflict between the three border patrols would almost certainly involve the trusted adult patrolmen attacking the young children out of pure spite, they assumed any such event would trigger the other Cold Men to invade Šanataŋūs and attack the men, and therefore predicted that none of the adult patrolmen would betray their nation in such a way. Thus the children in Šanataŋūs claimed that they would be safe precisely because they were so vulnerable. Other Cold children found this logic unacceptable, saying that they were all but inviting the adult guards to attack them, but the residents said that their guards were from the Hardwood population and had so far proven trustworthy, albeit somewhat difficult to get along with.

Early population growth

To the dismay of the wider Cold population, Šanataŋūs soon proved to be the most popular of the new districts, with people pledging to move there or else pool their votes to increase the representation of Šanataŋūs and therefore increase its effective population. When Fipapanu refused to become the capital, many settlers in Šanataŋūs felt that Šanataŋūs would be the next best choice, and that their people would be willing to host diplomatic meetings and other political functions even if they primarily served the interests of the non-Šanataŋūs Cold Men. Indeed, the other Cold Men were friendly to this idea, but realized that the border patrols might object, because it would mean that their jobs would be nearly the opposite of what they had originally intended if they were forced to nearly always allow people through in both directions.

Tasataupu

Here pine trees grew, and the Cold Men said that they would hide inside the tree trunks from their enemies. Thus it was called Tasataupu. In fact this was metaphorical, as they realized they could not actually hollow out the trees. Many of the settlers who chose Tasataupu were among the best-educated children, and these had created an informal and non-political group within the Cold Men who felt that they might someday be in charge of the whole party, and had pledged to stick together rather than dividing into factions.

May 4194 census

New Cold refugees continued to leave the wilderness until May 4194, by which time the wilderness was nearly empty. They knew that it would likely take them months, perhaps more than a year, to reach the colony of Tāmta. This was because they did not have the advantage of traveling in a large group, as the Scorpions had done.

Cold-Scorpion conflicts

For the first time, the Scorpions faced a political enemy party comprised of children their age, instead of adults or children controlled by adults. They had said time and again that children would never attack other children, and claimed that their history proved their case, but now, their adult enemies had receded into the background and were greatly outnumbered by the young Cold refugees, who seemed likely to soon outnumber the Scorpions as well.

The young leaders of the two groups of children nonetheless affirmed that war and violence were crimes of adults, and that they would resolve their conflict peacefully through politics rather than on the battlefield. Some adults, overhearing this, hoped that they might still have one last chance of seizing power in Tāmta by threats of violence, but knew that they would have very little time left to rule before the children matured into adults themselves.

Problems in Šanataŋūs

Border guards

The children in Šanataŋūs soon found themselves facing what to many of them was a familiar problem: the adult guards who had been assigned to patrol the district's border were now trapped between two children's territories, neither of which would let them pass through in either direction. Earlier, the adult guards had been expecting to be allowed limited freedom of movement in the southern territory, just outside the border of Šanataŋūs, saying that any such movement would be necessary to make sure invaders were not approaching. But when a troop of children arrived and said that they had been assigned to keep the adults out of the other districts, the adults found themselves confined to a thin strip of land around the border. They could not move north either because they had earlier signed an agreement with the children denying the guards the ability to trespass within Šanataŋūs. The guards realized that they would be wholly dependent on the two groups of children for their food and basic needs, and some wanted to re-negotiate the founding pact to give the guards a colony within the children's inner territory so that they would be self-sufficient and the children would not need to tie themselves down delivering food and other supplies to the guards.

Debate about capital status

Many Cold Men in Tāmta now wanted Šanataŋūs to be the capital of the Cold territories, and to define the Cold territories as a discontinuous autonomous nation within Tāmta, which would itself be defined as a wholly sovereign nation within the Moonshines' refugee territory of Hōkī. Hōkī was in turn just a state within the Moonshine Empire, so the children were placing a nation within a nation within a state within an empire, and this innermost nation was divided into autonomous districts. The Cold Men claimed legal jurisdiction over the Moonshine Empire since they had inherited the claims of their parents, and like their parents they understood that this was a diplomatic technicality, but they used this to help prop up the authority they claimed to redraw borders within the refugee territory.

For the most part, the people of Šanataŋūs accepted this, because they felt it would help ensure their safety, even if it meant that many people would be constantly arriving and leaving their territory, which had originally been intended to wall itself off from the rest of Cold society. Most people in Šanataŋūs still trusted the adult border guards and were more concerned with the outer rim of children who had arrived to patrol the adult guards.

Children's missions

July 23, 4194

Samaupa's mission

The leaders of the state of Šanataŋūs assigned a young girl named Samaupa-Name to discover the secrets of the lost Andanese civilization, whose language had been handed down to just a few of the kids' parents, and was almost entirely unknown to the young and growing kids in the refugee colony. They believed that if they could discover the Andanese wisdom, they could build a new society as prosperous as their original homeland had ever been, and no longer need to return to a warmer climate.

Samaupa knew that the Andanese were now extinct in their original homeland, which was now controlled by the Play party. She knew that some Andanese speakers had fled to Xema and had used military bases in Xema to wage war against not just the Players, but the whole of the wider world, as they sought to turn nations against each other and then invade those weakened by wars. Samaupa knew that whether she chose to explore Play territory (Memnumu) or Xema, she would be unwelcome there, and therefore that this was a dangerous mission.

Both of the territories in which Samaupa felt she might find relics of Andanese culture were adjacent to territory claimed by Moonshine, but choosing Xema afforded her the advantage of crossing only through Moonshine territory. Therefore she decided to seek out a mission to Xema, beginning by crossing on her own into the Moonshine state of Safiz across the lake from the refugee campground.

Attempts to reach Xema

These kids were interested in Xema for other reasons. Xema was the home of the Unholy Alliance (UAO), an organization of twelve men leading thousands of slaves who themselves owned slaves, all claiming to be working in human trafficking particularly of children. Xema was also home to the Ring (ZDE), which had invaded and occupied much of Play territory eight years earlier at a time when the Players and Cold Men had briefly been allied to each other.

Both of these groups had always focused their efforts on invasions far outside their territory in Xema, and both had specialized in child abduction. But whereas the Unholy Alliance sought no alliances with other powers and admitted that they were evil, the Ring soldiers had attempted to impress their enemies by saying that their kidnappings were much better for the children they captured, who were largely orphans, than to leave them alone in the midst of such a deadly war. Almost nobody was convinced by the arguments of the Rings, and there were few adults who had been in contact with both groups. Thus the children in Tāmta were the first to propose a war against both the Ring and the Unholy Alliance.

The children believed that conquering Xema would be difficult, perhaps impossible, but that merely reaching Xema could bring the roving armies under control. Moreover they believed that no other outside army would oppose them, and that the various armies of Xema might not even defend each other, so even an army of children could win a war in Xema.

Other missions

Other young citizens at this time, such as Pūmfūmti, also went on missions to record and transcribe literature, mostly seeking Play literature that would be easy for them to understand but difficult to access. Anyone who completed such a mission was allowed to claim the work as their own, as they had no expectation of the Players voluntarily giving them access to hidden Play knowledge, but they were also expected to acknowledge that the knowledge they were transcribing was of traditional Play origin.

One Play state that the kids were interested in was Taŋaiva.

August 4194 elections

The Scorpions now held their first six-party elections, with the legal parties being the Scorpions, the Beetles, the Top Riders, the Hardwoods, the Crystals, and the Cold Men. The Scorpions had allowed the Beetles to continue as a separate party even though it no longer provided them any significant advantage in elections because they were facing so many other parties. Instead, they made the Beetles sign an agreement to be even more closely bound to the Scorpions, and allowing the Scorpions and Beetles to forfeit votes to each other, such that they competed effectively as a single party with four candidates in each election, two girls and two boys.

Cold Men's position

The Cold Men were much like the Scorpions, and declared that they would allow both boys and girls to vote in Tāmta, just as they always had in their internal party leadership elections. They had tended to elect mostly boys despite having a roughly even gender balance in their population, and saw no problem with this. They therefore said that they would field a single candidate for each election, not one boy and one girl for each seat.

Scorpions attempt to gain vote share

The ruling Scorpion party defined the Crystals as an all-female party with only adults allowed to vote. Recently, however, the Scorpions had suspended their traditional prohibition against other parties voting for them. They had created this rule because they did not want other parties to overwhelm the Scorpions and elect poor candidates on purpose in elections where a Scorpion victory was guaranteed. But now that there were so many other parties with viable candidates, the Scorpions realized they needed all the support they could get. The Scorpions still had full control of their internal party nomination process, and therefore believed that the possibility of poor candidates getting through buoyed by false support from hostile parties was no longer a realistic threat.

Likewise, the Scorpions identified the Hardwoods as adults, both male and female in about even proportions. Of the six parties in Tāmta, the Hardwoods were the only group that consisted primarily of traditional families with a husband, a wife, and children at home. The Scorpions claimed that Crystals' voting population must be entirely adult women because the Crystal party laws had sent their adult male population abroad to fight the war, and because they did not allow children to vote. Neither did the Hardwoods allow children to vote.

Plans to further extend voting rights

This meant that the child populations of both the Crystals and the Hardwoods could theoretically vote for one of the other four parties, because those other four parties consisted entirely of children, and now allowed children even of other parties to vote for them.

The Scorpions figured that if they passed a new law allowing all citizens age 5 and older to vote, it would not greatly affect their own campaigns, since the newly enfranchised young children would most likely vote nearly randomly. (The Deer Paws could not vote because they had not completed elementary education, and the Cold party required this for membership, irrespective of age. They had been promising to work out a way to admit the Deer Paws without formal schooling but so far most Deer Paws had been uninterested.) If they concentrated their votes into the Scorpion and allied parties, they could inflate the Scorpion vote totals and carry many Scorpions to victory; even if the children voted mostly for the weaker candidates in the pool, they would still help the Scorpions overall since the votes would be pooled.

Meanwhile, if the Hardwoods and Crystals decided to accept children's votes in order to keep up, the children would pollute the voter rolls of those two parties with their naive, uninformed worldviews, and force the adult parties to campaign on issues that meant nothing in the wider world or else risk losing the children's votes to the Scorpions.

To this end, the Scorpions wondered how best to attract the votes of children away from their parents, and whether it would be worth the effort.