Dolls

The Dolls were an amalgamation of conquered tribes under the control of the Matrix slave empire. Dolls were of mixed ancestry, but the most common ancestral tribes were the Swamp Kids and the Players. Other slaves were abducted from the Crystals, the Soap Bubbles, and the Moonshines. Still others were taken from Dreamland.

Language

Most Dolls spoke Play. The Dolls taught their abusers how to write, as the slavemasters were impressed by the ornate scripts the Dolls used to write their language. These scripts were originally devised for Late Andanese, however.

Some were not enslaved long enough to have learned the languages of their masters, or even of the other slaves. When they dispersed, these languages survived and some entered new territory.

Early history

Ancestry and origins

The Dolls were shorter than all of the neighboring tribes, and therefore made easy victims. Yet, as the Matrixes raped them, they gave birth to babies who ever more resembled the Matrixes.

Abduction of the Swamp Kids

The primary ancestral tribe was the Swamp Kids; in the year 4190, the Matrixes invaded a troop of Swamp Kids, abducted hundreds of thousands of soldiers, and brought them back to camp to meet their new Matrix masters. These slaves were primarily males, since the Swamp Kids used an all-male army, and therefore they could not bear children. However, the Matrixes had had a previously existing pool of female Player slaves dating from a prior conquest.

The Swamp Kids had grown from the Paaapa tribe, a group of Pabaps who had unusually dark hair. This was due to a greater proportion of Andanese ancestry than was the case for most Pabaps. This Andanese ancestry made them even shorter than the other Pabaps, and as the last of the pure-blooded Andanese were wiped out in distant battles of the same war, the Swamp Kids found they had become the shortest people in the world.

The Matrixes realized that the Swamp Kids would be ideal slaves, as they were easily intimidated even by unarmed Matrixes and even the best of the Swamp Kids would lose any fight against an adult male Matrix. They married the physically small Swampy men with women of other, taller captured tribes in order to produce children who would be almost as small as the Swamp Kids.

Differences in appearance

The Swamp Kids had always disliked the tall people of Dreamland, and said that even though the Dreamers were taller and stronger than Swamp Kids, they were clumsy and fragile, and suffered from frostbite whereas the Swamp Kids seemed to be most at home in the coldest habitable climates. Furthermore, the Dreamers were vulnerable to sunburn despite being otherwise well-adapted for their warm climate, and therefore were forced to wear heavier clothes than other people to protect themselves from the sun. The Swamp Kids' original homeland, Paba, was slightly further south than Dreamland but yet also colder than Dreamland, and therefore the Swamp Kids were accustomed both to stronger sunlight and colder winters.

However strong the Swamp Kids were against the forces of nature, they could not compete with the superior strength of individual Matrix people. The Matrix soldiers simply walked right into the column of advancing Swampy soldiers and picked them up, stabbing those who resisted, and suffering very little damage for their efforts. The Swamp Kids could not retaliate against the Matrix kidnappers because their soldiers were camped in the Matrixes' own nation, Tata, in the mistaken belief that the Matrix was their ally.

Abduction of the Bubbles

The Matrixes also abducted slaves from the Soap Bubbles, a tribe of people who were genetically close to the Matrixes themselves but who received little sympathy. They typically had blonde hair and blue eyes.

The Soap Bubbles had branched off from the Thunder party in the year 3844 and fled into the empire of the dark-skinned Crystal people, based in Baeba Swamp. Because of their blonde hair, the people of Baeba came to identify the Bubbles as Nunabetari, another tribe of blonde, blue-eyed people who had come from Dreamland and had decided to live parasitically. The Bubbles, however, insisted that they had no interest in joining the Nunabetari and that they would be willing to fight for Baeba against Dreamland in a war. However, many Soap Bubbles drifted southwards into the desert, far from any possibility of war, and simply considered themselves a minority within Crystal society.

The Matrixes considered the Soap Bubbles to be highly vulnerable people because, as a minority in Baeba, they were distrusted by all other Baebans and would have difficulty convincing the Baeban mainstream to protect them in a war against an invader who sought to hurt only the Soap Bubbles. As they were traditionally nonviolent, they made poor soldiers, and the Matrixes were able to abduct many Soap Bubbles into their pool of slaves in Tata. They abducted both males and females.

Abduction of the Moonshines

The Matrixes also invaded an organization of humanitarian rescue workers calling itself the Točîku, which had originated in the nearby empire of Moonshine. Moonshine's rescue workers were suffering severe casualties in Baeba, as they were unarmed but were frequently attacked by the people they rescued in Baeba. The Matrixes offered to rescue the rescue workers so long as they would all agree to be slaves for the Matrix on encampments in Tata, but the Točĭku refused and therefore the Matrixes were forced to use violence. This brought them into Baeba's civil war, and both sides of the Baeban civil war considered the Matrix their enemy, but neither was prepared at the time for a revenge invasion northward into Tata. Thus, the Matrixes were able to abduct Moonshine people with some difficulty but nevertheless continued success.

Fayuva Era (4106 - 4767)

The Dolls' only victory was as part of a coalition force invading the Matrixes who had formerly abused them.

Structure of society

This content may be moved to Cosmopolitan_Age#Northwest_Coast, though that page is already crowded.

The multiethnic Thunder quarter of the Anchor Empire broke down quickly after the great war in Baeba. At the dawn of the Cosmopolitan Age, this area of the world was in a power vacuum, as it lay between Baeba, the Moonshines, and the Ghosts, but was not an attractive target for invasion by any of them. The Play speakers would likely have migrated down the Plup River, bringing their language with them, but even they may have been disorganized and so their language could have broken up into dialects and then separate languages, increasing the diversity of the area.

Naming

The Play name for the region was Fayuva and for the new country Fayuvas. This could be translated into English with a name like Sharpland or Clawland, but the name was chosen because it rhymed with Mayuvas, one of the names of Dreamland. (Note that, similarly, Žayuvas had been chosen as one of the names of Memnumu.) More specifically, the Play word fayu depicted any sharp body part of an animal, whether a tooth, a claw, or something else; its use by the United Pacifist League underscored their awareness that, as humans, they did not have any sharp body parts with which to shed the blood of their enemies, and that as humans, they were pacifists by nature.

Height gap

It is possible that the multiracial society will segregate itself based on body type. Although the Dreamers, Oyster speakers (who were of diverse political affiliations), and Cupbearers all commonly had blonde hair, and thus were Lenians, they would have nonetheless considered themselves distinct. As elsewhere, the central divide would be not about skin or hair color but about whether it was women or men who were the taller sex.

Historically, the Dreamers had tall men and short women, while the other two tribal confederations were mixed. This means that Dreamer society could maintain itself, despite being cut off from Dreamland by both Baeba and the Players, as an endogamous social group within each nation. Then, the Oyster and Play speakers could marry each other but yet also soon form into two endogamous groups based on their height profiles, with some of the tall-male families blending into Dreamer society while others remained distinct for political reasons.

It is overwhelmingly likely that the Matrixes would have preferentially selected and bred slaves from the lineages with tall women and short men, knowing they would be easier to push around, but because the Matrixes held power for just a single generation, and because they bred with their own slaves, they would not have been able to significantly affect the population structure in this manner, and in fact may have pushed the gene pool back towards a masculist height profile.

Physical appearance

Apart from the height profile, the three tribal groups were of similar appearance. They had weathered several invasions by tribes with dark hair and even dark skin, but because of the high latitude and cold climate, dark skin was maladaptive, and strong pressure existed for the children of mixed marriages to inherit a lighter skin color. Indeed, this may have been an unspoken reason why the dark-skinned Ghosts did not try to conquer nations that would have otherwise been an easy targets for them.

Of the three tribal groups, the Players would have had the darkest hair color overall because they were the only group with Andanese ancestry. The Oyster-derived tribes would likely have had the lightest. But because the Oysters and Players married each other frequently while the Dreamers were mostly endogamous, these differences may have soon become unnoticeable even to the locals.

It is also possible that there will be endogamous groups based on speech patterns, which by definition would have languages of their own. This requires that the Andanese strain of the Player tribes be recoverable, however, rather than blending into the wider society around them, and this is unlikely because they were forced into slavery for a period of time where they did not have the choice of who to marry.

Daily social organization

Thus, the maximum possible diversity within a Cupbearer Coast nation would consist of:

1. A Dreamlandic-speaking community where men are taller than women;
2. An Oyster-speaking community where men are taller than women;
3. A Play-speaking community where men are taller than women;
4. An Oyster-speaking community where women are taller than men;
5. A Play-speaking community where women are taller than men;
6. A second Play-speaking community, but whose language has a distinct sound and shows Andanic influence, where women are taller than men.

It would seem that none of the nations will have all three of Play, Dream, and Oyster speakers in meaningful amounts; Dream/Oyster is found in Poise and Olansele, Play/Oyster in Yīspʷilinâ, and Play/Dream in Gàqa, and within these bilingual nations there may be further divisions along gender lines, but this would still mean at most there would be four societies (the Andanese are unlikely to be found in these mixed nations).

New nations and redrawn borders

See paper map.

The Play speakers initially covered the north coast, but Baeba's greater population density drew the focus of the Play speakers to the far west, and it came about that Play languages were soon spoken mostly in the western states, including inland areas, though some remnants of the former north coast settlements remained because the Play speakers here typically lived separately from the Dreamers.

Politics

Political representation

Appointment of leaders

Remember to use the EC system (not electoral college!).

Rather than assigning extra voting power to members of closed-entry privileged parties, as in Memnumu, or treating tiny tribes as equivalent in power to whole nations, as did the Gold party, the EC system established the Phoenixes (EGW) as an absolute ruling class, whose members continually voted each other out of the party, replacing them with new members from the underclass parties.

New political parties

Because the tall-male and tall-female societies stood apart by mutual respect, they would not need to form political parties of their own. It is possible that political parties in this region were based primarily on ideology rather than tribal identity, defying the global trend towards identity-based politics.

United Pacifist League

The United Pacifist League must become the dominant party in at least one area very early on, perhaps even from the dawn of the Cosmopolitan Age, and remain so for thousands of years, as it is the dominant political party in the Poswob Empire in 6800 AD (and likely even in 8700 AD). Likewise, it was historically dominant in Lypelpyp, although canonically Lypelpyp later replaced it with a home-grown party. Lypelpyp's language is derived from Play, and it may be that UPL is naturally dominant whenever the Play speakers take root, with other parties existing due to political pressure from Moonshine, other foreign powers, and possibly internal conflicts with the descendants of the Dreamers.

Moonshine-oriented party

Nonetheless, as the nearby Moonshine Empire grows in power over the centuries, they would have increasingly favored the tall-female societies, and encouraged feminist politics even for the Dreamers, so there could be a political alliance called the Feminists or even the Moonshines (though the Moonshines would not accept these people as true Moonshines). In theory, Dreamland could have also applied counter-pressure and funded Masculist organizations, but the shared linguistic connection, as well as Dreamers' different attitudes towards gender issues, may have led them to simply identify their favored political parties as Dreamer parties rather than specifically picking them out as men's parties.

Phoenix party

The Phoenix party was the party that evolved from the Phoenix party of the tropics, whose people invaded Fayuvas sometime before 4220, meaning that they were involved in the war and did not merely arrive after the other armies had worn each other out. They supported Moonshine in global politics but Moonshine had already been driven out of the region by this time, and they did not expect help from Moonshine. They may have renamed, but strictly speaking, their name was never surrendered to Baeba's Leaper party, nor to the Gold party that later enveloped the Crystals. (The Phoenixes had surrendered their name to the Crystals, but not all Phoenixes signed the agreement; by the time the Crystals surrendered their own party to the Goldies, most Phoenixes were living in the tropics and had no knowledge of what had happened.)

The name is a loose cultural translation describing rebirth, and therefore does not violate Nama's tradition against naming parties for large animals. They may have been the source population for DKG if this was not simply a branch of the mainline Crystals.

Likewise, since the Phoenixes came from the tropics, it is possible that they also still held territory there into the early Cosmopolitan Age, though not in the western regions near Baeba, as this became Ghost territory instead.

Ghosts

The Ghosts of Comfort tried to establish a foothold in Fayuvas, but had so few supporters among the natives that they became an army and only ruled what areas they could hold by force. They preferred to move into territory where pacifist politics prevailed so that they could bully the locals without fear of counterattacks. This likely put them at odds with the Phoenixes.

Cells

The Cells (NTG) were a breakaway party from the Phoenixes formed early on. Another name for this new party was Wami or Wamu, but this was not their true name as it was from a different language. The Cells supported the right of the Phoenixes to rule as a hereditary noble class, but opposed slavery and insisted that the Phoenixes release all their slaves, as the Cells had already done. Thus the Cell ideology was nearly identical to that of Moonshine, even though Moonshine promised that the Cells would never have the right to call themselves Moonshines even though they opposed slavery as the earlier Moonshines had demanded.

The Cells, nonetheless, probably have their greatest concentration in the West, far from Moonshine. This may mean that the Cells are identical with UPL, or that they are a single pacifist party which pledges allegiance to UPL.

The party name refers to skin cells, though the popular conception here was that a cell was the smallest visible division on the skin, and included the scales of fish and reptiles, so the word "scale" would also be an appropriate translation.

The Cells soon learned of the situation in distant Memnumu, where a faction of the Play party calling itself the Police had assumed control of the whole of Player territory and yet won the support of the weaker Players by promising to defend themselves from their mutual enemies. Like the Police, the Cells were physically robust people, having originated from the Phoenix tribe of the tropics; like the Police, the Cells had many enemies in common with the smaller, weaker people they ruled over. However the Cells knew they had a much more difficult situaiton than the Police, as there was no contiguous territory for them to rule over; rather, the Cells had cells of activity scattered throughout Fayuvas, interspersed with those of the Phoenixes, since they had arisen as an alliance of those who had rebelled from the Phoenixes rather than as a single unified military movement.

Cell party platform

The Cells supported pacifism and insisted that the people they ruled over not be allowed access to weapons. The Cells exempted their own people from this law, stating that the Cells were a hereditary police force, and needed weapons to protect both themselves and their subjects. They also argued that a police force should be of a different ethnicity than the people they ruled over so that family ties would not lead to a conflict of interest. These ideas did not occur to the Cells until after they learned that it had already happened in the Player territory of Memnumu.

The Cells opposed slavery, unlike the mainline Phoenixes, and therefore expected that all of the Dolls would prefer to vote for the Cells rather than the Phoenixes. They insisted that Dolls be allowed to vote, and that every census in Fayuva assign the Dolls' votes to the Cells, meaning that the Cells would easily win every election (unless the Doll party were considered to be separate from the Cells).

The Cells soon began to marry into Doll families, though they encouraged their people to marry the tallest and most physically fit Dolls so that future Cell families would still make good police officers, and future Doll families would be even shorter than their ancestors and would be unlikely to rebel or to make policing the nation difficult. In this, they stood apart from the Phoenixes.

Manipulation of minor parties

The Cells knew that there would be some Dolls who rejected Cell rule, and that these people could come to this position for one of two reasons: either they could be extreme pacifists who opposed arming even the police, or they could be militants who wanted a Doll-only homeland where the Dolls would have access to weapons and be allowed to police their own people.

Meanwhile, the Quest party had outlasted the war, but was confined to a small area in southern Tata, and although they sympathized with the Dolls, the Quests were tribalists and considered their people to be hardier than the Dolls; therefore they did not seek to enroll Dolls in their party, and the Cells hoped they could use the Quests to frustrate attempts by any Dolls to make an anti-Cell alliance by showing that the only party favoring an armed peasant class also opposed the Dolls. With this argument, they hoped that they could force any Doll rebels into the extreme pacifist camp, which would make them even weaker than other Dolls. The new hyper-pacifist party was called the Tadpoles (Ŋavaa), similar to a party that had existed earlier in the tropics, although the name was not the same word in the Play language.

The Cells also allowed the registration of a militant Doll party called the Seashells (Tauŋūu), figuring that this would divide the Doll population further still, and that the Doll militants would be the weakest group of all since they would have a difficult time rallying their own people and a difficult time getting access to weapons since all of the existing armed groups would oppose them, and because they could easily be physically separated from each other.

There were a few minor unconquered parties such as the Plumes still holding rallies in remote areas of the Empire, though they admitted their politics meant little in their new world. They did not typically identify their people as Dolls, and the Cells hoped that they could turn these people against the Dolls as well, even though they planned to oppress them as just as they oppressed the Dolls.

Summary of early Fayuvas parties

Thus the major parties at the dawn of the new era were:

1. The Phoenixes, a slaveowning party from the tropics, who had been an underdog in world politics for centuries but had come out on the top of the pile by avoiding the war that had engulfed the other armies in Baeba.
2. The Cells, a wing of the Phoenixes that rejected slavery but nonetheless oppressed the indigenous people by denying them access to weapons and political power, as well as denying them the right to join the Cells.
3. A Feminist party that continued to support Moonshine's interests even though Moonshine refused to intervene or even to let these people formally join the Moonshine party. They claimed to be the only truly non-ethnic party in the Empire, yet they had very strict entry requirements, and membership was effectively hereditary.
4. The Dolls, also identified as the United Pacifist League, a pacifist party which the Cells considered as their subjects; the Cells at first claimed that all of the Phoenixes' slaves should be counted as Dolls as well, but later backed off on this claim.
5. The Tadpoles, a hyper-pacifistic wing of the Dolls which the Cells propped up in order to suppress rebellion.
6. The Seashells, a militant wing of the Dolls which the Cells also propped up, making it even more difficult for the mainstream Dolls to access weapons.
7. The Quests, a tiny but heavily armed ethnic party concentrated in southern Tata which sympathized with the Dolls but rejected any alliance with them, believing them too weak to survive a war.
8. The Ghosts, a tiny ethnic party concentrated even further south, which had attempted to start an ethnic war in Fayuvas, and then turned to brazen armed struggle when their outreaches were rejected. A loophole in the constitution caused the Ghosts to be effectively barred from participation in politics early on, and the rival parties showed them no sympathy.
9. The Dreamers, indigenous people who tended to have dark hair and spoke a different language, but had for the most part lost interest in the politics of Dreamland, and were thus yet another ethnic party.

Phoenixes move north

When the Phoenixes realized that they were welcome in Dreamer territory, but yet locked out of power there, they decided to send people into the pacifist states of the north, knowing that people there would be easy to prey on, even for a party such as the Phoenixes that had no army of its own. The Phoenixes said that they would protect the pacifists from all outside parties, but in return, the pacifists needed to cede all political power to the Phoenixes. The Phoenixes thus restored the Leaper's name for these pacifists: the Dolls.

NOTE: Canonically, the Phoenixes were already in UPL territory by 4220 at the latest, and thus played a role in the final stages of the war, rather than merely showing up after the other armies had worn each other down.

Early challenges to democracy

The Phoenixes and the Cells both embraced democracy even as they oppressed the indigenous Dolls and other tribes they ruled over. They differed in their planned implementation of democracy, however, even as they gradually came to accept that they were sharing an empire and that neither party would be able to pull together a geographically contiguous empire within the foreseeable future.

Conflict over slaves

The Phoenixes allowed their slaves to vote, but at first declared that slaves' votes only applied to internal affairs, whereas the Phoenixes' votes applied to the whole empire. They said that slaves were not legally citizens of the Empire, but rather citizens of a landless nation existing as a legal entity only, and therefore did not have the right to vote in the wider Empire.

By contrast, the Cells awarded the Phoenixes' slaves full citizenship, and argued that they had the right to count all slaves' votes as belonging to the Doll party, which they tightly controlled to ensure that it would always vote the same as the Cells on important issues. When the Phoenixes heard this, they began to claim that Phoenix-held slaves were imperial citizens after all, who had surrendered their votes to the Phoenixes in an early surrender treaty, and that the slaves had both a fixed vote in the imperial parliament that always aligned with the Phoenixes, and their previously granted votes on internal issues applying to the legally defined landless slave nation. However, the Phoenixes did not claim the right to interpret the votes of free Dolls as also belonging to the Phoenixes, and thus surrendered control of the Doll party to the Cells.

The Phoenixes conceded that, given a free choice, nearly all slaves would prefer to vote for the Cells over the Phoenixes, and based their right to control the slaves' votes on the argument that the slaves did not have a free choice. The Cells, meanwhile, had no intent of freeing the Phoenixes' slaves, because they realized that if they could get the Phoenixes to agree that the slaves' votes should count towards the Cells, the slaves would be the most loyal voting block of all, even more loyal than the Cells themselves, since people sometimes broke away from the party. The Cells did their best to hide this fact from the Dolls, knowing that the true will of the Dolls was to oppose slavery, and that the Dolls might attempt to join the weak Seashell party if they were to realize that the Cells actually supported slavery so long as they could get the slaves' votes assigned to the Cells.

Counterargument

As the Cells continued to demand that the slaves' votes be assigned to the Dolls (which they were sure would always vote like the Cells), the Phoenixes developed a new counterargument: they threatened to annex the original tropical homeland of the Phoenix party into the empire of Fayuvas, arguing that if the Cells had the insight to determine how slaves would vote, then the Phoenixes had the right to determine how their cousins in the tropics would vote, and that the Phoenix claim stood on firmer ground because they knew that the Phoenix party still existed in the tropics. Then, the Phoenixes published their estimate of the population of the tropics, showing that it was far higher than the entire population of Fayuvas, and argued that all of those votes should be assigned to the Phoenixes even if not a single new person from the tropics ever moved to Fayuvas.

The Phoenixes expected the Cells to back down on their argument, and even most Cells agreed they had been outsmarted, but the Cell party leadership insisted that if the Phoenixes truly believed in their argument, they would allow Cell census takers into slave plantations to collect votes from the slaves, and that no votes from the tropics should be counted without a similar journey in which both Phoenix and Cell representatives would visit the entire population of the tropical Phoenix homelands to ensure that the voting profile was as large and as solid as the Phoenixes claimed it was. The Cells figured that they might even win support for their own party in the tropics, as most people living there had no idea that their party had split.

Resolution

The Phoenixes realized that they would not be able to make a credible case that the slaves on Phoenix plantations were voting Phoenix voluntarily, but they knew that they could intimidate the slaves to vote against the Cells, knowing that the slaves' livelihoods depended on their Phoenix masters, and figuring that they could convince the slaves that the Cells did not actually care much about the well-being of the slaves.

The Phoenixes ordered their slaves to begin voting for a decoy party, neither Phoenix nor Cell, which would be a preexisting party in Fayuvas rather than a new creation. They rolled out a plan they believed would strengthen the Phoenixes' position in the long run:

1. First, the Phoenixes force their slaves to vote for the decoy party, threatening corporal punishment or worse to anyone who disobeyed; since all votes were public, there was no opportunity for a slave to break from the herd.
2. Once the slaves' votes were counted, their votes would outnumber those of the decoy party's true membership, meaning that the decoy party would be effectively a new slave party whose preexisting members would have no voice in.
3. Then, because the Phoenixes would retain physical control over their slaves, they could dictate the slaves' opinions on all important issues.
4. Therefore, by controlling the views of the slaves, the Phoenixes would eliminate the true members of the decoy party from democratic competition.

They selected the Ghost party, the chief military rival of Fayuvas, to be the new decoy party for the slaves. Because the Ghosts were transnational, the Phoenixes hoped to antagonize the Ghosts living outside the empire, and potentially draw them into a war in which Baeba would intervene on the side of the Phoenixes, leading to further gains for the Phoenixes in the future and perhaps an agreement with parties such as the Cells that would put away their internal rivalries as they joined together against the Ghosts.

Therefore the Ghost party lost its opportunity to compete democratically in Fayuvas, and even the Cells agreed that this solution solved a problem that both the Cells and the Phoenixes had been worried about. The Cells knew that the Phoenixes could eventually switch the decoy to a new party, but agreed to postpone the conflict and not to argue that the slaves' votes belonged to the Cells. The Phoenixes promised the Cells that the decoy party would remain the Ghosts for the foreseeable future, and that if the Ghosts disbanded and reformed under a new name, they would be easily identified and the decoy party would simply switch to the new Ghost party. Lastly, the Phoenixes called off their attempt to annex the tropics, knowing that the tropical Phoenixes would have little interest in the affairs of Fayuvas unless baited with new agreements which would benefit the tropics and not Fayuvas.

Ghost-Dreamer relations

When the Ghosts realized that they lived in a democracy but had no right to vote, they attempted to force their way into other political parties, hoping to dilute the votes and make the other parties' platforms more favorable to the true Ghost party. They realized that they had no chance to join the Phoenixes or Cells, and that the Dolls were too securely controlled by their enemies, so most Ghosts believed that the only chance they had to seek power democratically was to join the small Dreamer party. The Phoenixes were already trying to pull in converts from the Dreamers, and the Ghosts decided to tolerate this, realizing that every Dreamer who became a Phoenix made the rump Dreamer party easier for the Ghosts to take over.

Both the Ghosts and the Phoenixes appealed to the indigenous Dreamer minority in Fayuva, for different reasons. In nearly every way, the Phoenixes held the stronger pull on potential converts, but nonetheless, the Phoenixes had many weaknesses which prevented them from completely routing the Ghosts.

Feminism

The Phoenixes explicitly endorsed Moonshine-style feminism, and considered applying to join the Feminist Compact, an alliance of nations who supported Moonshine even though they were not allowed to join the core Moonshine Empire. (To formally join Moonshine, they would have needed to either forcibly remove the entire non-Phoenix population of their empire or define themselves as a landless party; moreover, they would have needed to give up all of their slaves.) Feminism was popular even among men, as the long period of war had led men to believe that a society in which men submitted to their wives would be the only type of society safe from war, and thus it was no shame for a man to submit to a female power structure. The Phoenixes nonetheless focused their outreach efforts on women, hoping that they could deprive the Ghosts and other parties of the female base that those parties would need in order to experience natural population growth. The Ghosts were unable to fight back with a masculist platform because a large part of the Ghost power base was feministic as well, and the Ghost leaders knew that to explicity endorse men's rights would cost them most of their women, and most of their married men, and therefore doom their party. Nonetheless, the Phoenixes lost ground here because they had such strict admission criteria that many potential male converts were ruled out of the party from birth and the Phoenixes stated that they did not need an adult male power base to rule their empire, as their police force would be primarily female and they would have no army.

Most importantly, the Phoenix feminist platform demanded immediate implementation of a society in which women were taller than men, as in Moonshine, and because this was known to be an inherited trait, conversion was impossible, and the Phoenixes ruled out any married couple in which the husband was taller than his wife, along with the children of such couples. It so happened that the Dreamer minority in Fayuva tended to have tall men and short women, whereas in the Empire as a whole, the height of men and women were about equal.

Pacifism

The Ghosts planned to declare war against Baeba Swamp as soon as they believed their army would be strong enough to win, and if necessary, stated that they would also declare war against the pacifist empire of Moonshine. The Phoenixes believed the coming centuries would be an era of peace, even if also one of poverty, and stated that the Phoenix military would only be a police force, obligated to keep the Empire whole, but not to engage in wars abroad or even to defend the Empire from invasions (since the Moonshines were openly pacifistic and Baeba Swamp claimed to have no interest in an invasion, even far in the future). The Phoenixes thus had greater appeal; nonetheless, some potential members questioned the ability of the Phoenixes to hold their empire with only a police force, leaving the borders open to invasion; even Moonshine refused to abolish their army.

Yet, both the Phoenixes and the Ghosts alienated pacifists in Fayuva, for different reasons. The Ghosts declared that pacifism was a mental sickness, stating that it was human nature to fight, and moreover that they considered pacifists fair targets in war. While the Phoenixes opposed war, they were the only party in the Empire that practiced slavery, and their slaves were taken almost entirely from pacifist groups who had been unable to fight back. Thus Phoenix "pacifism" was a sham in the eyes of opponent parties, and the Phoenixes held back from explicitly declaring themselves a pacifist political party.

Physical appearance

Both the Ghosts and the Phoenixes were dark-haired tribes, often with dark skin, living in an empire whose population was light-skinned and often showing blonde hair. The Dreamer minority, however, had darker coloration than the people around them as well, and both the Ghosts and the Phoenixes hoped they could appeal to the Dreamers in this manner.

The Ghosts declared that blonde hair was a sign of cowardice and that in their militaristic society, people with blonde hair were unwelcome except as slaves, and would be given the worst treatment even among slaves. The Phoenixes avoided categorizing people based on physical appearance, knowing that mixed marriages would help grow the Phoenix population, and stated that while the Phoenixes would never give up their blonde Lenian slaves, they defined their tribe by heredity, and that a member would never be thrown out of the Phoenix party for having been born with blonde hair. For this reason, the Phoenixes had greater appeal. However, the Phoenixes admitted that most of their slaves had partial Crystal ancestry, meaning that they were enslaving their own relatives, whereas the Ghosts promised that they would never enslave their own kind, and that because they defined their tribe by physical appearance, the question of whether a slave did or did not have Ghost ancestry could never come up.

Ideological ancestry

The Ghosts and the Phoenixes both claimed to be the true ideological successor of both the Raspara and Crystal parties, which had been strongly hostile to each other before the war but had forged ties at the very last stage of the war when both were overcome by their enemies. Scholars nonetheless associated the Ghosts with Raspara and the Phoenixes with Crystals, and nearly all people considered the Crystals to be more trustworthy than the Raspara. Yet the Ghosts claimed to have revised their constitution, whereas the Phoenixes identified themselves as conservatives, saying that their ideology had not changed in more than two hundred years, even though they had formed their party in the tropics where the world around them was very different.

Summary

The Phoenixes alienated the Dreamers by demanding that women be taller than men, while the Ghosts alienated the Phoenixes by demanding the Phoenixes (both male and female) enlist in the military and prepare for war.

Some Dreamers did join the Ghosts in order to gain political power, figuring they would switch sides at the last moment if war were to break out against their true ally, Dreamland, or if a situation erupted in which the ex-Dreamer Ghosts were put on the front lines to defend the original Ghosts. Very few Dreamers joined the Phoenixes, but at the same time, the Dreamers considered the Phoenixes to be no threat, as they had no army and put women in charge of all affairs both foreign and domestic. Thus, although resistant at first, the Dreamer minority eventually decided to allow the Phoenixes to settle in Dreamer territory and coexist as a minority in the wider Fayuvas government, banding together against the Ghosts while also both plotting to sap power from the pacifistic Dolls concentrated in the northern coastal region.

Weighting of votes along party lines

The small Dreamer minority supported a different form of government, and hoped to work elements of their ideas into Fayuvas. They supported the ancient Gold system, in which minority parties are given extra power in the parliament to oppose the majority, and in which parties' vote shares are unrelated to their party's size. Thus, the Dreamers claimed that they deserved to be considered on the same level as the Phoenixes and Cells, and that the Phoenixes and Cells deserved to share the amplified voting power as well, since the true majority party in their empire was the Doll party, even though the Dolls were largely controlled by the Cells.

The Cells had managed to isolate the mainline Doll party from potential allies by dividing the Doll tribe into three parties, and showing that all of the other parties were effectively closed to potential Doll membership because they were tribalistic parties who considered the Dolls inferior.

Furthermore, the Dreamer minority demanded that the Pacifists amplify the voting power of all of the non-Pacifist groups, claiming that as minorities, they needed extra power to oppose the Pacifists. The Dreamers claimed that Pacifists would make good soldiers because they were much more obedient to authority than other parties, and were willing to sacrifice their lives for the sake of their enemies. This was in keeping with the ancient policy of the Gold party, and the Dreamers pointed out that in Dreamland itself, minority parties indeed had extra representation in parliament.

Relations with foreign powers

UPL-Ghost relations

UPL territory bordered the rival Ghost Empire, whose constitution referred to blonde-haired tribes as pissies (patin) and considered them fit for abuse by Ghosts and by other tribes. The Ghosts may have tried to divide the Lenians in UPL on the basis of hair color, agitating for the dark-haired groups to put aside their differences, join the Ghosts, and attack the blondes. Indeed, they tried to arm the Dreamers in this area, even as they opposed the Dreamers in Dreamland and banned the Dreamer party from the Ghost Empire.

The early Ghosts, who formed around 4150 AD (before the Cosmopolitan Age),^{though this date seems much too early} claimed their racial discrimination program was necessary to undo the Firebreath's policies of discrimination in the opposite direction. (The Firebreaths may even have still been around, though they would have been controlled by Moonshines.) Yet the Ghosts claimed that they opposed racism because the Ghost party was ideological, whereas the Firebreath party had been tribalistic. The Ghosts claimed that their party was open to membership of all tribes except those with blonde hair, and that their exclusion of the blonde Lenian tribes was based on a law of nature, and did not need to change. Thus, they quickly abandoned their early argument that their discrimination laws were simply needed to equalize the standing of the different tribes.

Indeed, it may be that the Ghosts' original capital city lay directly in the Pacifists' line of settlement. In the long term, however, their strategy failed. The Ghosts had similarly attempted to spark a racial war in Baeba Swamp by promoting the interests of the dark-skinned aboriginals while antagonizing the Iron party, whose members mostly had light skin and dark hair. This led the Iron party to defend the interests of the Lenians, though they took very little positive action and began encouraging Lenians in Baeba Swamp to move to Dreamland.

Because the Ghosts were trying to provoke two simultaneous wars using contradictory positions, their own leaders began to question the Ghost ideology, and defections became numerous. In Baeba Swamp, many Ghosts converted to the Iron party, giving the Irons a firm grip on power.

UPL-Baeba relations

The Irons were not pacifists, but by running a world government from Baeba Swamp they kept hostile powers from starting new wars within their territories. They may have won the approval of Moonshine even though Moonshine was not part of their world government.

UPL-Moonshine relations

Moonshines were pacifists and shared interests with UPL, but their main interest in Blossom politics was to promote feminism among the Blossoms. Thus it could be said that the Ghosts tried to divide the Blossoms along racial lines while the Moonshines divided them along gender-power lines.

Geography

The Plup River was called Nimesippensami in proto-Baywatch; the Thunderers could have borrowed the name at this stage. The Wineapple version of the name would have been Nimešipezami.

Phoenix-Cell joint parliament

This section will be moved somewhere more convenient; it is here to show that it was not present from the foundation of the new empire.

Although the Phoenixes had originally intended for the government of Fayuvas as a whole to be superior to the internal governments of the parties within it, both the Phoenixes and the Cells realized that in the future, they could be voted out of power by their subjects or even by their slaves if they did not create extra-democratic entities to ensure that the subject parties continued to serve the interests of the two armed parties. Thus, despite their disagreements, the Phoenixes and the Cells created a new Parliament on top of the imperial parliament, and in this parliament, only the Phoenixes and Cells were represented. They stated that the new upper house they were creating would rarely meet, and would rarely originate legislation of its own; they would serve primarily as a check on the power of the preexisting lower house that was open to all legal parties. (The two legislatures here are called the upper and lower house for the sake of familiarity; the Play language simply called both legislatures by proper names.)

Gikani Era (4767 — )

In 4767, the Phoenix overseers announced a new era of increased pain for their Doll slaves and subjects. Thus began the Ŋikani era.

It is possible that, as had happened in the past, when an antislavery movement arose during the Gikani era, the antislavery advocates planned to kill all of the slaves, as they saw the slaves as irreparably broken by their abuse and incapable of functioning within wider human society. Thus the slaves would have sided with their masters, and strengthened the masters' grip on power.

This era may have featured a refined version of the above parliamentary system, in which the ruling party can overrule all other parties regardless of their population share, except when the opposition to the ruling party's vote is entirely unanimous and the ruling party's vote is not. The effect of this is that all power in fact rests with the ruling party, but that when the ruling party is divided, a minority within it can sometimes win the vote by demonstrating that the common people are on their side.