Oyster War

The Vegetable War was a war on the planet Teppala which raged from 2662 to 2674 AD. It was so violent that nearly all large animals were killed, leading the people who survived the war to become vegetarians, at least inland.

Parties to the conflict were:

• Litila, actually an alliance between Litila and Thaoa which promised to fight anyone who did not submit to them, even it meant fighting the entire world. Litila is a religion which wants to put a species of worm-like crab called the liui in control of humans. This is still not the same as the Inkʷa/Ifena/Isyna group, which favors animals in control of humans in general, but not just the one specific species of crab. The liui are often called "crabworms" in English, because worm in English is a general term for any organism with a wormlike body shape, and the situation was similar in most humans living in nations to which the crabworms were not native. However, they really are crustaceans, being crabs with very elongated bodies. They communicate with humans purely through sign language: the crabs wave their claws and the humans wave their hands in mutually recognized patterns to spell out each letter of each word in their shared language, which was based on Subumpamese but had many loans from the crab's native language. Written language was also used.
• The Gold Empire, actually a part of the Gold Empire that had rebelled and conquered the rest of it.

Litila was based in northern Subumpam. They wanted to turn over control of the government to the crabworms and stop the explosive expansion of human settlement all over the continent. They were rejected by everyone else as masochists with simple minds. But their power grew rapidly, as the crabworms actually were a very intelligent species capable of running an advanced nation. Their exoskeleton was too firm to be pierced by any known human weapon, so humans were forced to fight crabworms by avoiding them instead of attacking them. They were thus very powerful at war, and Litila's military power was limited only by how many crabworms they were able to breed.

In 2662, Litila invaded the Gold Empire with its army of crabworms and humans. Litila was much smaller than the Gold Empire, and was located in the worst possible position, but the Gold Empire had been weakened slightly by having just come out of another major war against Nama, in which Litila had fortified its borders and remained neutral. Thus Litila was able to attack at full power against a weakened enemy.

Nevertheless, the Gold Empire was very strong, and they gained allies as they fought as even their enemies in Nama preferred them to the crabworms. Thus the war was the bloodiest war the world had yet seen, and after twelve years almost all animal life apart from humans, crabworms, and a few other mobile species such as birds had gone completely extinct. Surviving humans were pure vegetarians except for a few living along the immediate south coast. Meanwhile the human governments of both sides of the war had collapsed and their replacements were not interested in continuing the war.

Nevertheless, Litila had won the war, as its goal had been no more than to defeat the human population and establish more land for crabworms. Crabworms now set up a new government in Subumpam that excluded humans entirely and considered them merely as food. The Subumpamese were upset that the crabworms had chosen the very humans that had been helping them seize power as their primary food source, rather than the enemy humans that they had captured. But the crabworms made no distinctions at all among the various classes of humans; to them they were all just meat.

Thus life in Subumpam was so bad now that all other humans, even those living in pestilential conditions far away from Subumpam, were better off than the Subumpamese, and began to take in Subumpamese refugees in their nations. They hoped that they could starve out all of the worms, or at least force them to all move to the coast where a relatively uninterrupted food supply still could be found.

In 2674 a coalition of human nations attempted an invasion of Subumpam from the sea. They had mostly come from Nama, so they landed in Vuʒi, on the southwest coast, and began to march inward in search of crabs and distressed humans. Crabs preferred to live in rock nests, so it was uncommon to see a crab simply crawling out in the open even in a time of safety. But the sight of the advancing mob of flesh encouraged the crabs to come out, as they had been running short on food in this area recently. The humans tried to fight back, but were simply unable to hit the crabs hard enough with their swords to injure them. And so the entire human battaltion was killed without the crabs suffering a single casualty in the battle.

A few humans had stayed behind on the ships, and even though crabs could also crawl along the ocean bottom and could burst their ships from below, the area they had landed happened to be empty of crabs for the time being because the fish in this area had also been depleted. When they saw that none of the humans that had marched inland came back that night, they figured that they had probably been eaten and decided to return to Nama.

Back in Nama, the human coalition decided that it was unwise to attempt to invade Subumpam. They looked for other strategies such as chemical warfare, while continuing their attmpts to rescue runaway humans hiding in the wilderness where crabs could not easily reach them.

The crabs had spared Thaoa from direct geographical occupation because even though it was one of their strongest allies, Paba stood between Subumpam and Thaoa, and the land route was not easy to get over. But even so, the crabs looked hungrily at Paba as their next conquest, and the Pabaps realized their long streak of escaping being involved in the world's bloodiest wars was about to end.

Later history

After the war, the human population of this part of the world was so destitute that they did not fight any major wars for another 400 years, and the balance of human power shifted to the colder northern areas of the continent, where large animals had not been affected. The human population density here was very low, however, so humans in many areas were not even the dominant species. This led to an era in history where humans were fighitning mostly agaiunst animals instead of other humans, although complex wars with human+animal teams fighting other human+animal teams also occurred. In the frigid north, the primary inhabitant was the penguin. Slightly further south, there were rabbits, wolves, eagles, and firebirds (a seagull-like bird). In the water, there were a few dolphgins, but they lived a difficult life because they were walled in by ice on one side and land on the other, and could not escape back to the wider ocean. (They had moved in during an unusually warm series of summers in which the sea ice partly melted and the water was at its most bountiful.)

Penguins did not normally attack humans, but all of the other large animals did. Rabbits were the most dangerous, because they were as vegetarian as humans were, and therefore competed for the same food sources. They also commonly lived in cities, as did humans. Wolves were also very dangerous, but considered humans a third-tier food source as humans were much smaller than the prey they liked to eat. Eagles and firebirds considered humans their absolute ideal food source, but eagles found the climate too cold to live in and firebirds had a difficult time getting to this area from their homes on the other side of the icecap. Dolphins were natural allies of humans, having known about them for many tens of thousands of years because they had seen them on Laba, but the dolphins living here were in danger of starvation and did not even attempt to be friendly towards humans. It is notable that most of the animals that reached local dominance were predators that had out-competed all of the other animals including the other predators. Humans and rabbits were incapable of being predators, and acheieved dominance by artifically strengthening themselves by building cities and learning to use weapons (although rabbits were disadvantaged because of their shape, they could nevertheless use and handle weapons such as swords.) Another example of a non-predatory dominant species was the hedgehog, although humans for the most part were not familiar with hedgehog-only civilizations yet; they had only seem them living in the woods around humans.

The humans living in Mabimbižip (literally "soap bubbles") had been wishing for a long time that the dolphins around them would die. Dolphins were eating them, because they were so hungry that they would eat even humans, and the dolphins were also eating most of the fish that the humans themselves would have preferred to live on. They had reached the coast, but found that the coast was the worst area of land to live on, whereas human settlements in the interior such as Tarwas were doing much better. The Mabimites were good at checmical warfare, and considered poisoning the water, figuring that it could still be repopulated by fish later on since fish could swim through ice and doilphins could not.