Tamta/4195

Crystal men arrive in Clover territory

By January 4195, the male Crystal troop of about 25,000 soldiers was facing resistance in Baeba's northern district of Pavaitaapu, as they tried to take control of Clover territory to fight the police force called themselves Sunspots. The Crystal men had struggled to complete their journey; they no longer had control of the coast, and Moonshine denied them entry because they were not of the Moonshine faction of the Crystal party.

When they arrived in Pavaitaapu, they found that while the local police force was unpopular, most of the civilians wanted to have their territory run by Leapers, Matrixes, or some other local party, but not the Crystals.

Offer of Soap party status

The Soap Bubbles proposed admitting the male Crystal soldiers to their party all at once, telling them that they would be free from their obligations, and could choose whether to stay in Pavaitaapu or return home to the Nest. Many of these men were young and not actually married to Crystal women, so the Bubbles said that they might find new women in Clover territory if they chose to stay. Traditionally the Soap Bubbles had imposed very strict entry requirements, including a rigorous athletic test, but they stated firstly that the local faction of the Bubbles had not been doing this and secondly that, being soldiers, most of the Crystal men would likely pass the test if they chose to take it.

The Bubbles made it clear to the Crystal men that if they joined the Soap, they would need to immediately end all conflict with the Sunspots. The Sunspots were not a political party, and therefore the Soap Bubbles allowed their members to join the Sunspots without losing Soap party membership. Yet other Bubbles were not part of the Sunspots. This is why the Soap Bubbles and the Crystals still considered themselves allies despite the Sunspots and Crystals being at war. (In fact, the Soap Bubbles and Crystals were also at war, but only in Baeba Swamp, and the Soap (but not the Crystals) had said that any of their members who left Baeba would be free of their obligation to fight.)

Worries about Soap Bubble collapse

The Bubbles hoped that if the Crystals joined, they would retain their anti-Sunspot alignment, and free the Bubbles from dependency on the Sunspots, which had created an uncomfortable situation within the Soap Bubble military hierarchy. But the single troop of Crystals arriving in Baeba was vastly larger than the entire Soap Bubble army, which at the time had only 3269 soldiers, meaning that the expanded Soap army would be effectively run by the Crystal men. Thus they worried that the Crystals might free the Bubbles from dependency on the Sunspots, but then go further and require that the Bubbles expel their pro-Sunspot members or even declare war on the Sunspots. The Soap Bubble party leadership was not fully democratic, so the Crystals could not do these things by a simple vote, but since the ex-Crystals were so much more numerous, they would be able to threaten disobedience or civil war if they did not get their way. Still, the Soap Bubble soldiers were in much better shape, both physically and in terms of weapons and armor, than were the arriving Crystal men, who had lost many soldiers just trying to get to Baeba and seemed wholly unprepared to fight the war that they had actually been sent to fight.

Situation in the Nest

By this time the all-female police force in the Crystal's Nest home territory had banded into an army, stating that because their men were fighting a foreign war, the women would need to protect the homeland. They had already been invaded by thousands of men, who had declared allegiance to the Sunspots as they arrived, meaning that the army the Crystal men had expected to fight in Baeba Swamp had come after the Crystal women in their heartlands. The Crystal women outnumbered the men but were still losing most of their battles. Additionally, another army, the Matrixes, was talking about forcing their way into the Nest as well, but the Matrix military leadership still believed that there were better things to fight for in Baeba Swamp. The Soap military leaders did not know all of this, but told the Crystal men that Soap military planners were experts and that the proof of it was that they were living in the midst of a war and had not been defeated despite being outnumbered by several of the armies around them.

Last wave of migration

The new waves of Cold children migrated independently, and therefore at different speeds. New groups of Cold children continued to arrive into early 4195.

Cold-Scorpion treaty

Once in Hōki, these groups came to live as one, identify as Butterflies, and assert that they were also the only surviving Cold Men. They re-established the Blue Cocoon, which superseded the Scorpions' short-lived nation so that the Scorpions could continue on as a separate faction of the Cold party (they had earlier split from the Cold Men) and therefore vote in the elections of the wider Cold Men.

The Cold Men knew that by abolishing the Scorpions' nation of Tāmta they would trigger a conflict, but again promised that they would resolve the conflict without resorting to violence. Because they wanted their own states to remain legally distinct entities, the Cold Men allowed the Scorpions to also have their own states within the Blue Cocoon; previously the Scorpions had considered Tāmta to be a single entity with only one city and no subdivisions.

Cold Men propose reforms

New politics

The arriving Cold refugees were not happy with the Scorpions' decision to live side-by-side with the two groups of adult refugees, the Hardwoods and the Crystals. By this time the Cold Men outnumbered the Scorpions and warned that they would simply vote the entire adult population out of the nation if the Scorpions did not expel their own adults and then force the refugees living in traditional families to move to another refugee colony. This was illegal according to Moonshine law, as Moonshine did not give refugees the right to reject other refugees, but the young boys in the Cold population were growing stronger and braver every year and were now contemplating the feasibility of open rebellion against the very people who had kindly let them in.

The Cold Men understood that parents would certainly not abandon their children to the Cold-Scorpion coalition, and therefore that they would be able to take over the areas of the settlement where those families had lived. They hoped that most adult refugees would obey the demand to leave because they had previously cooperated with the Scorpions' short-lived multiparty democracy, but they also knew that they had never gotten along well with adults in the recent past.

Cold majority appears

The Cold Men outvoted the Scorpions as promised, but prepared for the frustration that they predicted would accompany a political victory they were too physically weak to enforce.

Resolution and new treaty

To the surprise of the Hardwoods and many others, the entire adult Scorpion population, including the women, agreed to leave the Cocoon and leave their children behind. They thus promised to join the wider society of Hōki, but ensured the young children that they would attempt to maintain intermittent contacts through the Cold Men's border patrols.

Then, the Cold Men declared that the Blue Cocoon was a sovereign nation owing nothing to Hōki or Moonshine, even as they assumed that they would be immediately invaded by yet another adult army seeking easy victims.

The Scorpion leaders assured their population that their previous stay in the wilderness had taught them survival skills that even adult veterans did not know, and that they would survive any imminent threat from outside. The Scorpions continued to insist that they had done the right thing by inviting the Cold Men to settle in the Cocoon and vote the Scorpions out of power democratically.

The Hardwoods and Crystals did not cooperate with the Cold Men's new order, and chose to remain in the children's territory. The Cold Men repeated that the Cocoon was off-limits for all adults, even those raising young children, and that they were required to leave so that there could once again be a refugee territory for children only. The Cold Men warned that they were planning to arrest adults for trespassing, and deputized their entire population to carry out these arrests so that there would not be a specific police force for the adults to target if they chose to escalate to violence. But the Cold Men knew that they were powerless without the Scorpions' cooperation, and that if they attempted to enforce their new law, the adults could attack or even kill young Cold police officers while driving the Scorpions into an alliance with those adults.

Scorpions attempt to retain control

Because the Cold Men had told the adult populations that they could never return, the Scorpions argued that the Cold Men's laws must apply to the areas where those adults now lived. This meant that the Cold Men were claiming jurisdiction over that territory, and by logical extension, that territory must still be part of the Blue Cocoon. Therefore the Scorpions considered the expelled adults to still be citizens. The Scorpions then annexed the territories the adult population had moved to, saying that they could continue to vote. Since they could not physically contact the adults to get their votes, the Scorpions decided to write in the adults' votes themselves.

Hardwoods' reaction

Many Hardwoods believed that the surprisingly low crime rate among the Scorpion population was due to potential Scorpion criminals being afraid of the adult male Hardwoods who shared the streets, despite their having repeated many times that they were not afraid of adults. The Hardwoods expected similar behavior from the Cold Men. Traditionally the Hardwoods had allowed limited violent behavior amongst their own children, seeing it as part of human nature, especially for boys; by adulthood, the Hardwoods expected their men to solve problems through discussion and compromise. The migrating Cold boys had thus surprised the Hardwoods by declaring violence to be an adult behavior that children should shun in favor of peaceful solutions, showing that their worldview was the precise opposite of the Hardwoods; the Hardwoods believed that violent boys grew into peaceful men, whereas the Cold children believed that children made peace and adults committed crimes and started wars. The Hardwoods understood that it would be very difficult to convince the Cold boys to change their minds, but believed strongly that doing so would make their nation stronger, as the Cold Men would inevitably become adults and, if they did not change their worldview, might be very violent adults and ones who would attack a very weak enemy.

Baeba model

They proposed a aystsem that required cooperation between the various parties who had split the territory, and especially so in cases where territorial claims overlapped. Thus, offices such as governor could not exist in the traditional sense; there could only be a person who had direct control over their own party's citizens and indirect control (through a cooperative effort) of the other party's citizens. The new Play word vapitāsīa "administrator" was used to describe these one-party governors whose stated goal was cooperation rather than competition. Each vapitāsīa was appointed based on their party's election procedures, and had authority over those people only. The Lilypads believed that, as so often in the past, their rival party's officials would get along perfectly well, perhaps even better so than did traditional governors in multi-party states; and that their main problem would be with the adults whom they were just now inviting to join their system.

First year in the Blue Cocoon

Most people in the Blue Cocoon believed that the primary political conflict would be the Cold Men's inability to physically remove the adult Hardwood and Crystal populations from their territory, and the Scorpions' unwillingness to help the democratically triumphant Cold police officers enforce their new law. Some Hardwoods worried that sooner or later, one of their own men would attack a child, and this incident would trigger both the Cold Men and the Scorpions to unite against the adults and push them out of the territory by pure force. But conflicts soon appeared that did not involve the two groups of adults, and the Hardwoods encouraged their people to remain uninvolved and let the children fight their battles nonviolently as they both had promised.

Economic conflicts

Considering themselves at peace, the Cold Men opened stores and offered their services in the traditional labor market, but found that the other groups, even the Scorpions, looked down on them and would only allow them to sell their products in special stores for merchandise made by the Cold Men. That is, instead of grocery stores, furniture stores, bookstores, and the like, there could only be "Cold stores" where everything was bunched together. One reason for this was that the Cold Men had refused to outlaw shoplifting. The average age in the Cold party was younger than the Scorpions' because the Cold Men had absorbed many thousands of young children whose parents had abandoned them, whereas the Scorpions had already seceded by this time. The Cold Men claimed that they were nearly self-sufficient, but that some among them still needed help to make ends meet. They believed that the best way to meet their needs was to steal from rival parties, including the Scorpions, rather than trying to set up a welfare system. The Cold Men argued that they had proven their good behavior and that each shoplifter knew precisely what they needed better than a middleman in welfare system could do. Thus, the Cold Men allowed their members to shoplift from stores owned by other groups, and stated that if they were physically harmed in the process, they would consider it to be assault. Lastly, the Cold Men believed that the other groups in the Cocoon were less needy and therefore did not allow the other groups to shoplift from the Cold stores.

Because of the layout of stores of the time, customer-facing merchandise was limited, so shoplifting of any but the most petty things required the customer to engage with a salesperson, and was much the same as robbery. It was much easier for a salesperson or distributor to steal from a store than for a customer. The Scorpions allowed their people to prohibit Cold kids from shopping at their stores, but believed it was unnecessary. Rather, by excluding the Cold Men from their distribution networks, the other groups could make a much greater difference in the amount of theft the Cold kids inflected on them.

Hygiene

The Cold Men insisted that all citizens of the Blue Cocoon obey strict hygiene laws, worried that the Scorpions' lifestyle of living close to nature would lead to a plague that would mostly hurt the Cold Men who were not accustomed to living in pestilential conditions. Both the Scorpions and the Cold Men considered humans to be a part of nature, but had different ideas about what this meant. The Scorpions' view on this issue was similar to that of the Players, saying that filth too was a part of nature, and could actually protect strong humans against disease while sickening the weak. By contrast the Cold Men believed that soap and bathing were a part of nature, and that humans needed to constantly clean their bodies in order to remain healthy; human anatomy was just such that humans were able to easily clean their entire bodies while bathing, unlike all other animals. The Cold Men said that to deny this was to deny human nature, and would make humans vulnerable to diseases that they were not meant to endure. The Cold Men's view on this was partly influenced by their alliance with the Soap Bubbles and the children in the Soap-influenced Clover dynasty, but also came from their having been attacked by the notoriously filthy Players.

Contact with the Clovers

By this time, the Clover children's nation of Pavaitaapu was overwhelmed by the war raging around them and no longer functioned as a sovereign territory. Some adults in the Clover nation wanted Baeba Swamp, still legally dominated by the Leapers, to annex Pavaitaapu and protect the Clover children by adopting the youngest ones into childless Leaper families and granting the older children control over neglected mountain areas that other armies would be unlikely to invade. By this time those few Clovers who had ever been armed had lost this, and the Clover nation was dominated by two groups of adults (the bodyguards and the police) who were fighting for control of the children. These two groups were not formally at war, but isolated incidents occurred in which members of each group attacked each other or attacked the children. The Cold Men had earlier established warm relations with the Clover king, the Golden Sun, but in March 4195 the Golden Sun's bodyguards fatally stabbed him and his younger brother during a party. The king of the Clovers was now a 13-year-old boy whose trade name was Silas.

Formation of the Slopes

There was a new renegade party called the Slopes which had also been founded by a boy; the Slopes held a celebration shortly after their founding, and adults who attended the party assaulted the young Slopes after nightfall. Many traumatized Slopes rejoined the Clovers after the assault, while others resolved to endure the abuse as they planned for a future in which they would make weapons and seize control of the unarmed and defenseless populations around them. Thus, the remaining Slopes were not merely criminals, but a minority among criminals who considered their drive for power so important that they would endure years of abuse from stronger criminals just to get access to weapons and power when they became adults.

The formation of the Slopes alarmed the adult populations of Pavaitaapu and news spread to those living far afield. The Slopes' party platform made clear that they expected they would be physically assaulted by adult men as part of everyday life, and that they neither expected nor welcomed any outside group's offer to protect them; they resolved to fight the adult criminals on their own despite their obvious physical disadvantages. This was because the Slopes had abolished the concept of crime, just like the Zenith party whom they so admired. The Slopes also leaked plans to help the Zeniths in the war involving the adult groups around them, expecting to win control of the land they fought for rather than allowing the Zeniths to push them onto the front lines and then steal control of the land after the war was over.

The Slopes in many ways resembled young Zeniths. Unlike the Zeniths, however, the Slopes sought to rapidly increase their population by natural reproduction and by adopting young children, particularly the young orphans in Mutanapana who had still not been rescued by the common people of Pavaitaapu or by any other outside party.

Slopes react

The Slopes were more communitarian than the Zeniths, meaning that individual members had relatively less freedom, and the Slopes as a whole had more power over each Slope party member. But whereas the Zeniths were mostly male and attracted people looking to live a life of self-reliance, many Slopes felt they had noplace else to go, and did not seek positions of leadership. This meant that individual Slopes seeking leadership positions could wield more power over their party than individual Zeniths did over theirs.

Soon, a young Slope leader named Sima-Kīsiba ("Window") declared war on the Crystal women without endorsing the Sunspots or any other group. Previously, Window had been a follower of a particular Zenith leader, but had quickly come to see himself as a leader in his own right and stated that he would pay no allegiance to the Zeniths either.

Another boy popular at this time was named Vamnape; his name was related to that of the Clovers' Tapupais police force which was just being assembled.

Breakdown of law

By this time, there was no single police force that had control over the Clover nation, and violent crimes against children increasingly went unpunished. The Clovers mostly accepted this, and stated that they would prefer to face unfair battles against traditional adult male armies rather than give up their sovereignty, but that they would not stop Clovers from fleeing to safety, and would even risk their own lives to help the youngest of the Clover orphans escape Pavaitaapu so long as they could trust that the children would be headed to a safe territory such as the Blue Cocoon rather than into the home of an abuser.

Scorpions and Crystals change

Eastern politics

It seemed to some that, while the traditional armies fought for control of Baeba Swamp, the various nations whose populations consisted entirely of teenagers and children might have the eastern rural hinterlands to themselves, as this land was much poorer and seemed untempting to the more powerful armies in the Swamp. Some young leaders in the east were open to diplomatic ties with the Slopes, who had promised to destroy all beautiful things, but not with the Zeniths or any other adult parties, even those who had never done them any harm. At the same time, they were openly critical of the Slopes. Thus, the young politicians seemed increasingly intent on building a new world run by their generation, and where the adults of the previous generation would become irrelevant.

Thus the leaders of parties like the Scorpions and Cold Men, who had always seen each other as allies, now became more brave about criticizing each other, and also spent less time criticizing the adults in parties such as the Hardwoods.

Likewise, the adult parties mostly ignored the children as they always had. The Crystals were one exception to this, but they had no adult male leaders in the region either, as their entire adult male population had decamped to Baeba.

The Slopes and Clovers were young but surrounded by adult armies. The leaders of the east were not sure whether the Slopes and Clovers would be interested in immigrating to the eastern wilderness if given the opportunity. For the Clovers, it would mean giving up vast amounts of wealth, but it seemed increasingly unlikely that the Clovers would ever inherit the wealth they were legally entitled to.

Commons protest incident

Many young Cold boys staged an anti-Scorpion protest at Vamīptau Tuaus, a public commons in the Scorpion village of Vasavavu, in the district of Pamtaipu, an area of Tāmta that had been recently created by the Cold Men to make the Scorpions' settlements politically similar to those of the Cold Men.

Because this protest was in Scorpion territory, the non-Scorpion Hardwood and Crystal populations were allowed in the commons as well. Some of them did not speak Play and did not understand what the children were so angry about, and merely stood and watched in amazement. Others did understand Play or asked others to translate for them. Near the center of the commons, nine boys carried protest signs while a tenth boy, Saummumi, stood in front of them and began yelling angry words.

After Saummumi started running towards the Scorpion boys, a Hardwood man attacked a different Cold boy who was standing in amidst the Scorpions; none of the boys were even addressing the man, but he mistook the situation for a threat and beat up the boy who was standing between him and Saummumi. Then he fled the scene.

Crystal reaction

The Crystals reacted to this by endorsing the Cold Men's plan to rid their territory of adult males, even though the Crystals were themselves illegal simply for being adult women and did not expect to be legally allowed back in. They only hoped that if they cooperated with the Cold plan, the Cold boys would recognize them as friendly, and even if they insisted the Crystals not be allowed citizenship they might allow the Crystals to remain physically present with a small autonomous territory of their own. The Crystals also stated that they were joining the alliance for their own protection, and not because they believed that the Hardwoods were invaders; the Hardwoods were the only group in the Blue Cocoon who consisted primarily of traditional families, and had been there before the others arrived; thus the Hardwoods described themselves as indigenous to the area while the children and the Crystal women were both sometimes described as refugees and sometimes as colonists (Play mašeta).

Scorpion reaction

Meanwhile, the Scorpions, who had previously been passive, now endorsed the original Cold plan to remove all adults by force, but stated that they would first target childless men, then childless women, and lastly men and women who had dependent children in their homes. This new plan ignored party membership, meaning that childless Hardwood women were considered equivalent to any childless women in the all-female Crystal party. Many Crystal women had children in their homes, but Crystal tradition had encouraged children, especially boys, to move out at even younger age than the Scorpions and Cold Men did, with boys traditionally moving out at age 10. The Scorpions counted these households as childless even if the boys had not actually moved out, and considered the boys to be prime targets for enrollment in the Scorpions or perhaps the Cold party.

The Scorpions were better armed than the Cold Men and thus better equipped to fight against adult men, but both the Cold Men and the Scorpions knew that the Hardwoods could quickly escalate the conflict into a war, and that in a war, there would be far more deaths among the Cold and Scorpion children than among the Hardwood adults. They also knew that the Crystals were not only unreliable allies, but very weak, as the Scorpion boys had actually attacked some Crystal women the previous year and the Crystals reacted by seeking outside protection instead of attempting to bring the boys to justice or even invading the boys to bring them under control.

Cold Men respond

The Cold Men were upset not just because one of their younger members had been beaten up by an adult, but because the man seemingly had no comprehension of what he was doing and was simply acting on instinct. And because this incident had occurred at a protest against the Scorpions, which the Scorpions had allowed and did not even involve the Hardwoods, the Cold Men wondered if it was no longer safe to protest, or even assemble, in their nation lest a rogue adult wander through the crowd and decide to attack children out of pure spite. Thus, the Cold Men compared the Hardwoods to wild animals, saying that they and the Scorpions were in danger just walking around their nation, always at risk of being attacked even without a trigger or background of hostility. They realized that if they were already in danger while officially at peace with the Hardwoods, they would be in much greater danger should the Hardwoods ever come up with a legitimately compelling reason to attack them.

The Cold Men knew that the Scorpions had been living with the Hardwoods and had not complained. Some Cold Men now suspected that the Hardwoods had been assaulting Scorpion children all along, but that the Scorpions were afraid to admit this because it would have made them look weak and ruined their public image. Now that the violence was undeniable, the Scorpions could no longer pretend that the Hardwoods were their friends, and so buckled quickly under pressure. But, noticing that it was not a Scorpion boy who was attacked, other Cold Men took it as a sign that the Scorpions were going out of their way to firm up their alliance with the Cold Men, even if they really did still believe deep down that the Hardwoods were mostly gentle towards the children around them.

Hardwoods speak out

The Hardwoods had little sympathy for the children, saying that the Hardwood police force (formerly the cover-all Tāmta police force) was too busy protecting the Hardwoods from the throngs of children around them to also protect those children from the Hardwood men. They claimed the Scorpions and Cold boys needed to start their own police forces if they felt they needed protection from the indigenous adult minority of their newly founded nation. They said that many Scorpions were now as tall and strong as some of the weaker Hardwood men, and although they admitted that this could not justify the attack on the much younger Cold boy who had posed no threat, they also stated that they no longer had any obligation to prosecute crimes against non-Hardwoods.

The Cold Men and Scorpions both insisted that there was no violent crime problem within their parties, and therefore Cold children as young as seven years old (the ones who had been abandoned by their parents) were allowed to live independently and walk around town without seeking protection from an older member of the party. The Cold Men insisted that they should not need to shelter these children because they would not be in any risk of danger were it not for the Hardwood criminals. They did not collect detailed crime statistics, but stated that Cold Men and Scorpions had committed only a negligible amount of violent crime and therefore proved that even the youngest children would be safe if they could only keep the Hardwoods out of their living areas.

The Cold Men insisting that they were not attacking each other found the men's other claim (that it was the Hardwoods who needed protection) even more frustrating to address. They asked the men to show them all the Hardwood victims of Cold and Scorpion criminals, and explain why they needed a police force for protection but the Cold and Scorpion children were able to live unprotected. The Hardwoods answered with familiar words: the Hardwoods were not attacking each other, and the only significant violent crime was between the rival parties, not within them. They refused to show the inquiring Cold Men the victims they had asked for, saying that the Cold Men would simply deny being the perpretrators since they had already refused to acknowledge that Cold Men could be violent.

Indeed, not only the Hardwoods refuse to apologize, but they also escalated their attacks against young Cold children, focusing on robbery of goods distributors. They said that they were only taking back what had been stolen from them, insisting that the Scorpions would be doing the same if they were only physically fit enough to outmuscle the Cold Men. The Hardwoods also began robbing Cold stores directly, physically forcing their way into the store's warehouse. The Cold Men had never specifically admitted to taking goods from the trading network that kept Tāmta supplied with goods, but had made clear that they would do so if they felt they needed to. Now that the Hardwood men were openly committing and promoting looting of Cold-owned goods and stores, the Cold Men felt pressure to retaliate by escalating their own thefts and specifically targeting Hardwood distributors. But in an internal vote, the Cold leadership decided they had had enough of being physically pushed around, and would do their best to eliminate the problem at its source.

Two-party stage

When the Cold Men realized that the Hardwoods had turned their peaceful children's society into a violent one by sheer physical force, they banned all adults from their territory and outlawed adult political parties. They stated that the only party with legitimate differences of opinion in their territory was the Scorpions, and therefore that all future political contests would involve only the Cold Men and Scorpions. The Crystals, who had brought no harm to either of the two children's parties, were ruled out of their nation just the same simply because they were adults. The Cold Men made no mention of the Slopes, and thus no endorsement of them, but did not outlaw the Slopes either.

Therefore the Scorpion and Cold children, agreeing to rule out all adults from their territory, created yet again a nation meant to be entirely without adults, whose leaders expected to face violent resistance from the adults who claimed they had as much right to live there as did the children.

New role for Šanataŋūs

Agreeing to enforce the new law, the Scorpion-Cold coalition abolished the adult male guards around the district of Šanataŋūs. They contemplated allowing the Crystals to take over the role, but reminded each other that the Crystals had admitted that protecting boys from men was not their priority, and that the Crystals were a transnational party whose interests superseded those of any nation they lived in. Therefore the children unprotected Šanataŋūs and said that the children living there would need to defend themselves. They also assured these children, however, that by removing adults there would no longer be a threat to them, and that when the Cold Men became adults themselves they would keep out of Šanataŋūs. Further, they recommended that the people of Šanataŋūs enforce this law against each other, meaning that they would all need to move out when they reached adulthood; this would make Šanataŋūs a perpetual territory for children only, always being refreshed by newly orphaned children or those who chose to run away from their families. As the young leaders hoped that both of these groups would dwindle in number as living conditions improved, they hoped that the population of Šanataŋūs would rapidly decline over time, but promised that it would remain open as a safe place for children who had no adults whom they could trust.

The Cold-Scorpion leaders knew, however, that there were still two obstacles in their way. First, the children of Šanataŋūs might draw the adult guards deeper into their territory, meaning that any attempt by the Cold police to remove them would lead to conflicts against the children; secondly, even if the children agreed to give up their guards, they were not obligated to obey the Cold boys' recommendation to apply the law to their own future adult selves, since the Cold government had specifically granted Šanataŋūs and other districts autonomy and the power to nullify laws such as these.

The assault in the commons had taken place just weeks after a policeman had kidnapped a young Clover boy for protesting against the police force; word of this did not reach the Blue Cocoon immediately, but when the Scorpions heard what had happened, even those who had been reluctant to follow the new strict policy mostly abandoned their remaining objections.

Birth of the Hipside Society

Hearing this, the Cold district of Fipapanu offered to absorb the adult refugees of both the Hardwoods and the Crystals, and recommended that they live together but insisted that they must live apart from the various groups of children in Fipapanu. Fipapanu's leaders were slightly older than the average in the Cocoon and promised that they would not fear or run from adults; they however insisted that because the potential entrants were not members of the Butterfly alliance and could not join it, they could not live together with the Cold Men.

Being older, Fipapanu's Cold Men had been more able to take care of the youngest children among them, and therefore Fipapanu's average age was about the same as the average for the Cocoon, but more spread out, with more older teenagers and more very young children than the other districts. They had also been the only ones to revoke their law against childbirth, and their plan was to remain in Fipapanu and reproduce to grow their population as quickly as possible regardless of the danger their children would be in due to the war around them. Reproducing made them legally adults, which made it illegal for them to leave Fipapanu even to visit other Cold territories, and therefore they hoped to also draw in other Cold couples looking to start new families.

But although they insisted they live apart from the Hardwoods and Crystals, they felt that once those groups entered Fipapanu, they would become loyal citizens of Fipapanu. They planned to further divide their district into neighborhoods, meaning that there would be sixth-order political divisions in their society: neighborhoods within a district within a nation within a nation within a refugee territory within an empire. The leaders of Fipapanu coined names in Leaper and Moonshine for their territories, and came to call Fipapanu Hipside after the trade name of the nearby Hipside River. Thus Moonshine diplomats referred to Fipapanu's Cold Men as Hipsiders, and they were the only group to have a trade name. (The Hipside River was actually on the other side of the Cocoon, but they named themselves after what had been for many of them their most important migration route).

Pacifism and policing

The Hipsides reaffirmed the inherited Cold doctrine that children were pacifists by nature, and that both war and violent crime were entirely the fault of adult men. They stated that war was not inherently bad, but violent crime was; they promised that their nation would never suffer from a crime wave because they would redirect their men's healthy urges towards warfare, most likely against the slave-seeking Matrix army in the west and any other armies that supported the Matrix soldiers. They also stated that even if the entire adult male population left Tāmta to fight a war and women were so tied down that children were left to roam free, they still would not suffer a violent crime wave because they knew that children were too gentle to do such a thing, and that children by nature always sought friendly relations with other children their age, even those caught on the opposite side of a war. Thus the Hipsides sought to adopt war orphans not only from the politically friendly Clover kingdom, but also from the groups who were fighting against the Clovers. They believed that they would prosper as a society if they were able to adopt tens of thousands of orphans into their homes, raising them alongside their own biological children, all while rejecting any offers of help from outside adult groups such as the Crystals. The Hipsides believed that a young nation was a healthy nation and that even an extremely young nation where adults were greatly outnumbered would remain prosperous so long as they were safe from outside invasion.

This belief went sharply against the beliefs of both the Crystals and the Hardwoods. The Crystals considered men and boys together, since to them childhood was a life stage and not an identity. They stated that war and violent crime were committed almost entirely by males, against both males and females, and that the age of the perpetrator made no difference to them. The Hipsides had little interest in the Crystals' opinions.

Hardwoods' view

Meanwhile the Hardwoods, along with many other groups of refugees in Hōki, believed that children were in fact far more violent than adults by nature, but were constrained by their even stronger fear of adult authority from actually committing the sorts of violent crimes that the Hipsides blamed on adults. The Hardwoods claimed that each of the societies in which the Hipsides claimed children had run a society entirely without adults were in fact inhabited by adults, whether helpful or harmful, and that both types of adults frightened the children so much that they were afraid to commit crimes for fear that their punishment would entail being handed over to the adult groups who would abuse them until they died of their injuries.

The Hardwoods believed that if the Hipsides were somehow able to rescue the orphans living in the Clover kingdom, Hipside territory would be immediately overcome by every known societal malady, from famine to plague to property theft, and that violent crime would include many incidents of children attacking younger children which the Hipsides would be unable to explain using their doctrine that young people were innocent by nature.

The Hardwoods also explained that while adults in general, including men, were gentle by nature and sought to protect the vulnerable children around them, the Hipsides had grown up in non-traditional societies where the adults they knew were mostly not their parents. The Hardwoods further stated that the sort of men who were most likely to seek to live in a children's nation were the very sort most likely to commit violent crimes, and that the Hipsides needed to realize that not all men were like the Tadpoles and other groups who had abused them in the past.

Hipside response

The Hipsides rejected these claims and again stated that they had proven their case by their mere existence; if a nation of children were destined to succumb to internal violence, the Hipsides would not have survived into adolescence. They explained that they had been attacked time and time again by adult males, both on the battlefield and in the streets, and that this proved that men, not boys or children, were responsible for both war and violent crime. They described the few incidents in which children had hit back, such as the Spines' recent attack on the Crystals, as being much like humans' attempts to communicate with wild animals, where what looked like a human attacking an animal actually did not hurt the animal in any way, and was simply the only way the animal would pay attention to the human.

Denial of military obligations

The Hipsides promised that they would create a strong police force but not an army. They accepted the Cold Men's insistence that all factions of the Cold Men must participate in a common military, and therefore that the Hipsides could not have their own private military outside the Cold Men's control. But they also stated that they would choose peace over party, and that if the Cold Men launched a war, the Hipsides would declare themselves an independent party with no obligation to join that war. The Hipsides also promised, nonetheless, that any among them who supported the war would be free to rejoin the Cold party and that the Hipsides would not stop them from joining the war, which they expected would take place in the west and pose little danger to the Hipside society.

Because the Hipsides were located in the western region of Hōki, and sought to expand their territory further, they knew that should the war turn around and the Matrixes begin an invasion of Hōki, their civilian population would be hit before the civilians of the Cold factions who had fought in the war. The Hipsides accepted this, and promised that their police force would protect the young children of the Hipside society against any invading army.

Usurpation of Moonshine authority

Four years had passed since the Cooks had taken their first steps towards emancipation from their parents; now the oldest Hipsiders were seventeen years old, though most were younger. The Hipside leaders believed that they had already waited too long to start raising families of their own, and that they needed to focus on reproduction to expand their population even if it meant that the first generation of children born in Hipside would be very poor. They also announced that they were the latest of several groups seeking to adopt the remaining STW orphans stranded in Clover territory, and would raise these children as Hipsides rather than allowing the adult populations around them to adopt and raise them into their own societies.

The Hipsiders stated that despite their youth, they were better educated than the adults around them, and deserved to be in control. They then stated that their authority extended to the other refugees in Hōkī as well, and that they would annex various adult territories around them, bringing them under their jurisdiction, so long as they judged it would be safe to do so and that most of the refugees they would be bringing in would either support the Hipsiders or be ambivalent. The Hipsiders nonetheless abolished voting rights for all other parties, saying democracy was incompatible with their form of government, because only the Hipsiders were bunaa, a Play word for teacher outside the context of a school, one who guides others and provides correct solutions to difficult problems.

The Hipsiders appointed diplomats to walk through the other areas of Hōkī, saying that the other refugee populations should support the Hipsiders instead of Moonshine, because while the Moonshines had provided the territory of Hōkī as a safe place for refugees of all nations, they had done little to protect the lives of people once they had arrived, whereas the Hipsiders would establish clear internal borders for their subpopulations and ensure their safety.

Thus the Hipsiders set themselves up as a rival refugee territory, on the same level as Hōkī, but promised they would continue to obey their military alliance with the Cold Men, and to respect the Cold Men's map which showed Hipside as a single much smaller district they called Fipapanu. Although the wider Cold party had inherited a deed to the land that the Hipsiders were now expanding into, they had not expected to wield authority over it, and so the Hipsiders believed that they could expand over this land without triggering a conflict against the other Cold Men.

Treaty of Lampanga

The Hipsides signed a pact with the landlocked refugee colony of Lampanġa to their south. This was a Leaper name, and most Lampanga people did not speak Play. The Lampanġa were primarily descendants of Yoy-speaking Andanic people from the southern territories on the edge of the tropics, thousands of miles away, that were now mostly controlled by the Egg party. They were genetically related to the Zeniths but had no political ties; the inhabitants had mostly stopped thinking about party politics, but after making contact with the Hipside kids the Lampanga leaders announced the revival of their ancient Square Tile party (Leaper Hamalōnta).

The Tiles had been driven out of their homeland much earlier by an unrelated conflict but were now largely anti-Egg, both because the Eggs were occupying their ancestral homeland and because the Lampanġa had originally been forced into hiding because they supported the Dreamers in a war which ended up giving the Dreamers control of much hostile territory. The Hipsides were politically opposed to the Tiles for this reason, and yet they still felt they could find friends in Lampanga and forge a stronger nation.

Promise of unpaid labor

The treaty stated that the Hipsides would work in Lampanga building roads and bridges for the people there, while teaching the Tiles to speak Play, and that they would do these things for free. In return, the Tiles would be encouraged to move to Hipside territory so that the population would be mixed in both territories. Nonetheless the Hipside kids reminded the Tiles that the Hipsides were a closed-entry party, and that the Tiles could achieve citizenship in the Hipside territory but would never be able to vote in the Hipsides' internal elections; since the Hipsides had set up a one-party government, these internal elections were the only elections that mattered.

The Hipside kids understood that most Tiles were not interested in politics and figured that they would not mind moving to a territory in which they could not vote because for all practical purposes they had not been able to vote in Lampanga either. Thus they emphasized that the treaty had two points, both favorable to the Tiles: the Hipsides would be working in Tile territory for free, and the Tiles would be able to live amongst the Hipsides. The treaty seemed so favorable taken at face value that the Hipsides were certain that the Tiles would accept it, as the only favor the Tiles were expected to do for the Hipsides was to move to the Hipside children's territory, which was on the lakeshore, and even this was optional. The Hipside leaders understood that they were cheating themselves in their new treaty, but explained that population growth was so important to them that they would seek to sign treaties that harmed their lifestyle and robbed them of their independence in order to achieve this goal.

The Hipsides insisted the Tiles live in compact neighborhoods with strictly delineated borders, and that this was due to party identification rather than age, so the segregation would continue even once most Hipsiders were adults, but the Hipside voting population worried that this was an empty promise and there would be no feasible means of enforcing it. By contrast, the Tiles believed in an integrated society and allowed the Hipsides to settle close to each other, but not to have an exclusive neighborhood to themselves.

North-south migration

The Hipsides established diplomatic settlements in the Tile towns of G̣ʷehanni and Lamàta-Gʷùṭa. Despite their promise to work in Lampanga doing unpaid heavy manual labor, the Hipsides sent mostly their younger members to start their outreach program, assigning them the task of finding Tiles who could speak Play, and finding Tiles who would be willing to move to the lakeshore, regardless of whether they spoke Play. They were saying that they needed to establish bilateral relations and find a common language before they could pursue further projects, and that they needed the stronger older boys to remain at home to build up their living quarters along the lake.

The Tiles sheltered the Hipside diplomats in or near their school buildings so that they would spend much of their time with other children, including younger ones, and perhaps in time help teach at least some of the children to speak Play. The Tiles promised to treat them delicately and ensure that their fresh new deal did not soon go sour. Even so, the Hipside travelers privately admitted that they felt uncomfortable and out of place in Lampanga, as they stood out sharply from the Tiles and could find almost none who spoke Play. The few Tiles who did speak Play listened the Hipsides' plans and mostly were supportive, and ensured the Hipsides that they would find many Tiles who would be willing to move to Hipside territory.

A small number of Scorpions also moved into Lampanga for various reasons; most agreed with the Hipsides in that building a stronger nation would help all parties.

Meanwhile, hundreds of Tile men accepted the Hipsides' invitation and moved north into the Hipside territory as expected, many stating that they wanted access to the lake so that they could establish a stable food supply for both the Hipsides and themselves. The earlier refugees such as the Hardwoods had not allowed them to do this; indeed, Moonshine had never officially allowed the refugees access to the lake, as it was part of Moonshine proper rather than the refugee colony, but had not aggressively policed the water in part because the previous non-refugee inhabitants of Hōki (when it had been called Hōmoya) had had access to the lake as a whole.

Relatively few of the Tiles were interested in non-physical jobs, and relatively few were women, children, or intact families. The Hipsides decided that it made sense for most Tiles to work with fishing and food preparation because they would be better able to handle the jobs than would the Hipsides, but the Tiles admitted that they did not have enough boats for their population and would have difficulty convincing other groups to sell or manufacture boats for them.

Crystals object

The Crystals had traditionally been enemies of the Tiles, even though the Tiles had mostly lived peaceably and had not identified with politics until the Hipside kids established friendly ties with them. This was because the Tiles were a male-led society, and because the Tiles had a land claim against the Eggs, a faction of the Crystals who were at the time occupying the Tiles' old homeland (though the Eggs had not been the ones to push out the Tiles). The Crystals claimed that the Hipsides were walking into a trap and that the Tiles had only agreed to the treaty because they felt they could exploit the Hipsides and perhaps even push them out of their refugee colony along the lake. The Crystals also claimed that the Tiles should not have access to the lake and that Moonshine's lack of objection was because the Tiles were hiding behind the guise of being part of a children's nation, against whom the Moonshines felt it would be cruel to enforce their trespassing laws.

The Crystals also realized, however, that the leaders of the Hipsides were well-educated in politics, and that perhaps the Hipsides felt that they could always count on the Crystals supporting them no matter what they did, knowing both that the Crystals had no other allies besides Moonshine and that the Crystals had already committed themselves to conflicts in the west.

The Crystals realized that if the Hipsides were motivated by genuine selflessness, believing that their duty was to stand aside and help other parties even if they got nothing back, their best means of achieving this goal would be to make an alliance with the Tiles, who would gladly accept the Hipsides' free gifts and build forts in Hipside territory from which they could launch attacks against the defenseless Crystal women. But the Crystals also realized that if the Hipsides had become very selfish, they would also stand to gain from an alliance with the Tiles, since the Tiles would almost certainly not attack the Hipsides, and also would not join the Hipsides' conflicts in the west, as the Tiles' only outstanding claim against another party was with the Crystals. Thus the strong men in the Tile army might help protect the Hipside homeland while the Hipsides sent their own army westward to fight the Matrix.

Plans for further expansion

Undeterred by objections, the Hipsides planned to expand even further, mostly to the west and south, by incorporating other refugee territories into their own, intending to follow the same plan of allowing unlimited migration of the other groups into Hipside territory so long as they promised to live in compact neighborhoods and accepted that they could not vote in Hipside elections. They also planned to write the next treaty on their own, without the Tiles' input, so that it would be two separate bilateral relations instead of a three-way alliance. They understood that the refugee groups had generally been able to get along in the past, without the Hipsides' support, but that they generally had not written formal treaties. Despite their desire to move west, the Hipsides then selected the eastern territory of Etatăni as their next target for a new treaty; here lived the descendants of the early rebel Mīžìpa and his supporters, who had slaughtered many Crystal women in the 3900s.

The people of Etatani belonged to a tribe called in Leaper Tahankʷ. They were strongly tribalistic and demanded better living conditions than other refugees. They had banned the Moonshines from visiting their colony even though Moonshine was supplying the refugees with food and basic needs; they survived by extracting tributes from the passing Moonshines, which they then used to buy supplies from the other groups. As they had turned against their early leader Mīžìpa, who had demanded a sober lifestyle, they had become rich by dominating the alcohol trade along the river and had fiercely defended their right to enjoy this wealth while still claiming refugee status. More politically savvy than other refugees, the Tahank suspected that the Hipsides were intending to start a war in the west, while the adult male populations of the Tahanks, the Tiles, and perhaps the Hardwoods would all be forced to fight while the Hipside men would stay home, either saying they were still too young to fight or that they needed to care for their young children at home and their pregnant wives.

The Tahanks thus demanded an even more unfair treaty than the one to which the Hipsides had earlier voluntarily written for the Tiles; the Tahanks wanted the right to come and go in Hipside territory as they pleased, so that they would not be bound to a war, and that they would never cross paths with the Tile party, to whom they were hostile even though they both had common enemies, and that Hipsides visiting Etatani territory would need to stay within certain areas and would not be treated as guests nor given free food or lodging. The Tahanks were also eager for war, but their preferred target was the Crystals, and they knew that a Hipside attack on the Crystals was unlikely because the Crystals were still supporting the Hipsides.

Treaty of Cooperation

The Cold Men and Scorpions signed a pact reinstating the Lilypad Association, a group including both parties along with the Clovers and any allies the Clovers had control of. They also declared that the Lilypads were now a political party, with the constituent parties being reduced to factions within it, and that the Lilypads would remain Lilypads as they became adults. The Lilypads excluded the Hipsides from their new party because the Hipsides had earlier chosen to secede from the party's common military, but the Hipsides promised to continue diplomacy and to allow their members to join the Lilypads even while remaining in Hipside territory.

This treaty also created a new party called the Sippers (Play Tappea) to rule the nation's capital territory, Šanataŋūs, and stated that Šanataŋūs would be a one-party state with no obligation to participate in the nationwide democracy so long as they remained pledged to the common military and allowed the entrance and exit of the Lilypads who had earlier chosen to place their capital city in Šanataŋūs. The Lilypads intended Šanataŋūs to be inhabited by children only, who would quickly move out as they reached the age of thirteen, but the Lilypads acknowledged that by awarding autonomy to Šanataŋūs they were specifically depriving themselves of the ability to enforce this, and that Šanataŋūs would in a few years likely become similar to Hipside as the adolescents would likely remain in Šanataŋūs and start raising families.

Lastly, the treaty abolished all restrictions on childbirth, meaning that Lilypads could begin raising children in their territories. They still worried that a war could reach them even in their refugee colonies, but stated that waiting any longer to begin reproducing would only harm their children, as the safest years they had ever known were upon them already and safer times were unlikely to follow.

Language policy

The new treaty continued the use of the Play and Late Andanese languages side by side, saying that Play was official and Andanese was secondary. By excluding the Hipsides, they did not need to learn or listen to the non-Play languages of the other refugees.

Previously, Late Andanese had been a military language valuable for secret communication. But in 4193, the Matrix army had begun to learn Late Andanese and some of the simpler Play ciphers, and also began writing their own. The Matrix ciphers were called Xap and were referred to with numbers. This name is a distortion of the name of Baeba Swamp.

Vowel-only cipher

The Matrixes created a vowel-only cipher, Xap 21, in which the thirty syllables of Andanese were represented by a sequence of two vowels; the first syllable had a seven-vowel inventory and the second had a four-vowel inventory; the remaining two syllables were represented by a silent vowel in each syllable. There were consonants in Xap 21, but they did not carry important semantic meanings, except in the rare cases where the Matrixes used the cipher two encode two messages of about the same length alongside each other.

The letter L

The Players and their forebearers had long considered the sound /l/ to be obscene, because it involved making one's tongue visible to the listener. Players were thus required to pronounce the /b/ sound instead even when speaking foreign languages. This policy did not apply to the Andanese people, who instead followed an opposite rule of replacing every b with an /l/ even when speaking Play or other languages with phonemic b. The Players had abolished the Andanese tribe in 4175 and took ownership of the Andanese language, claiming it was well-suited for their military. But they did not abolish the prohibition against /l/, nor did the other Play-speaking cultures, who agreed with the Players that the sound was obscene.

As the Lilypads and others had sat through many meetings with foreign diplomats, continuing to obey the traditional Play rule, they realized that the Leapers found their obedience alternately amusing and distressing, as they reliably obeyed a rule they had been taught in the nursery, even when no adults were around to enforce it, and even in the face of foreigners who openly defied and laughed at the rule.

For the first time, the Lilypad leaders now said that their people were free to pronounce the l sound whenever they wished, whether speaking Play, speaking Late Andanese, or just having fun with their tongues. They did not change the languages themselves, however, and expected Play speakers as a wider community would decide that both languages would continue on much as they were and that Play would not have an l sound in upcoming generations.