Paba

Bābākiam is the name of the parent language of Poswa and Pabappa, spoken around the year 4200 in Paba. The name means simply "language of Bābā", where Bābā is the old name of Paba.

Phonology

Babakiam is the parent language of Poswa and Pabappa and thus shares with these languages many characteristics.

Vowels

There are four vowels, /a i u ə/, spelled a i u e. The first three vowels can also be long. The schwa is the rarest of the three vowels, and words with schwa are usually cognate to words with no vowel in closely related languages such as Khulls.

In its classical stage, Babakiam was notable for allowing unrestricted vowel sequences, particularly of /a/, for example bāaaau "(park) bench", which is syllabified as bā-a-a-au (four syllables), and paaapa "dark-haired". Such words were rare, however, and almost always transparent compounds (as in the case of bāaaau) or loanwords (as in the case of paaapa). Nevertheless, Bābākiam does maintain the unusual distinction between long vowels and a sequence of two short vowels, and minimal pairs of this type are very common. Vowel sequences often result from the deletion of voiced fricatives between vowels (/ž/ is the only voiced fricative remaining in the language), whereas long vowels generally were long in the parent language and result from a series of much earlier sound shifts. Other words, such as taīū "maple leaf", exhibit both types of changes.

The vowels /i/ and /u/ become /j/ (spelled "y") and /w/ (spelled "v") before other vowels and in some positions also after vowels. Thus a word like patiyiyibis "bladder" is phonemically /patiiiiibis/, with five /i/'s in a row.

Babakiam was still called Babakiam as late as the year 6000, because the dialects were mutually intelligible (and indeed almost identical) to the language spoken in Paba (then called Baba). No phonemes were lost going from Babakiam to Poswa other than the vowel length, which was lost early on. On the other hand, Pabappa lost many of its phonemes.

Consonants

The consonant inventory is very simple: /p b m f w t n s š ž j k ŋ/, unless /w j/ are considered allophones of the vowels. It is unusual in that it lacks liquid phonemes entirely when all the languages around it have /l/ and most also have an /r/-like sound. Thus Babakiam sounds like children's speech. /b/ is the most common consonant, and in later stages of the language, it became even more common because /b/ was inserted to break up the monstrous sequences of /a/ and /ə/ that had existed in the parent language. Thus classical Babakiam taabābā "nest" became tabababababa and bāaaau became bababababar.

Most words end in vowels, but can also end in /p m s/.

Comparison of words:

4200 Babakiam peskavu sabayiuŋaus

6000 Babakiam pyskary šalergos

8700 Poswa pwaršalios

8700 Pabappa pospalerba "soap bubble wand"

Culture

Early settlement

Bābā (hereafter Paba) was founded very early by immigrants from Laba. Though later famous for being the most pacifistic people in the world, the early Pabaps were just like their neighbors. They landed and estabslihed a new city on the south coast called Panama. (Panama means "port, harbor" in Pabappa.) Here, they grew rapidly northwards, killing any aboriginals they met who refused to convert to the Yiibam religion. Some aboriginals tried to escape into the cold interior, but this was not often successful because the interior was already populated by Repilians, who had been their enemies for thousands of years, and were already taking kindly to the Pabaps who were doing that job that they had wanted to do for so long.

The Pabaps had come from the highlands of Laba, in which people rarely traveled outside their home village because travel through the mountains was so difficult. Thus they had a highly diverse culture internally. However, despite being confined to the mountains, they actually had an advantage in getting out of Laba because they had access to rivers which emptied into ports along the East Coast of Laba that were further north than the port cities of their primary antagonists on Laba. Thus, while one might have expected the settlement of Rilola to be dominated by oceanic Laban peoples such as the Tasnu, Pabaps had a far higher proportion of their population move over than did the Tasnu. Still, because the highlands were difficult to build large cities in, Paba's population was small compared to many other nations on Rilola.

Paba was sharply divided into two major racial groups. Far back in the past, on Laba, there had been an alliance between the ancestors of the Pabaps and the ancestors of the Tarpabaps. The Tarpabaps lived the equatorial rainforests of southern Laba, and were all very tall, thin, very dark-skinned people. The Pabaps had some coastland, but mostly lived in the cold mountains. They were quite short people, ranging from chest-high to belly-high against the Tarpabaps. They had pale pink skin, blonde hair, and blue eyes, but facial features not much different than Tarpabaps'. The size difference between the two races was so great that both groups agreed to a cultural taboo against forming mixed families. This held true even when they came to share the same religion, Yiibam.

When an asteroid hit Laba, every society was ruined. Seeking a way out, the Tarpabaps gave the Pabaps access to their many ships in return for Pabaps guaranteeing them safe passage along the northern coast of Laba so that the two groups could both leave Laba and settle a new nation on the continent of Rilola. Thus, both groups came to Rilola in far greater numbers than one would have expected, and in fact formed many nations instead of just one.

Once on Rilola, the two groups mostly stayed together. The new nation of Paba was formed, bordering Subumpam to the west and Thaoa to the east. The ships kept coming, and the population icreased rapidly. The settlers quickly agreed that their society would be better off if the two groups switched places: Pabaps would mostly live along the coast and focus on fishing and trade, whereas the Tarpabaps would move inland and focus on agriculture and the military. Large body size was no advantage at sea, except when rowing was the only means of moving, and the Tarpabap people seemed to have huge appetities even for their body size, which put them at grater risk of starvation. On the other hand, the Pabaps did not want to go to war against people that could step on and crush the puny Pabap soldiers while Pabaps flailed helplessly at their enemies' leg armor.

Paba (pink and purple states) between its neighbors. The unlabeled purple states above Subumpam are states that did not join any transnational unions but mostly consider themselves allies of Paba. (Although Maimp is here.)

Geography and early politics

Like a trophoblast, Paba divided into many states as it grew, but remained united. They had traditionally had a high birth rate, and mostly avoided wars, which is why such a large empire grew from a small founder population. Unlike Subumpam to its west, Paba was really a single nation that divided itself into 41 states over the years rather than an alliance of historically alien cultures that merged together. This is why there was never a name such as "Pabap Union" and never any wars between the various states in Paba.

In the 1700s, two western Pabap states seceded from Paba and joined the Subumpamese Union instead. Paba did not complain, because the Subumpamese Union was a multicultural empire where Pabaps were welcome and even dominant in some areas. From the 1700s to the mid-1900s there were 39 states in Paba. 25 of these were coastal states, and the other 14 all had waterways to the sea. Thus Paba was a very sea-focused nation even from its early beginnings.

Pabaps and Tarpabaps lived peacefully in Paba and the Tarpabaps mostly adopted the Yiibam religion from the more numerous Pabaps. Nevertheless, they still did not marry Pabaps. They did not disciminate based on skin color, but the very few chiuldren that were born from mixed marriages (generally involving a healthy Pabap marrying a Tarpabap who was malnourished or otherwise shorter than normal) were easily identified by their intermediate skin and hair color, and excluded from mainstream society. These people mostly married other mixed people, but their numbers never grew significantly. Note that unlike other empires such as Subumpam, in Paba there was no "bridge" population that was physically intermediate between the tiny Pabaps and the tall Tarpabaps. THe Pabaps had massacred the dark-skinned aboriginal Sukuna people, save those few that converted to Yiibam, and those few that did remain still did not marry Tarpabaps because to them, body type was more important than skin color, and that although they were taller than Pabaps they were still much smaller than Tarpabaps. (Note though that despite the huge difference in body types, Tarpabaps and Pabaps were more closely related to each other than to aboriginals such as the Sukuna, who had been living separately for tens of thousands of years.)

Relations with Thaoa

Paba was blocked on its eastern border by the nation of Thaoa. Paba and Thaoa had similar cultures, but Thaoa had rejected the alliance with the Tarpabaps. Thus they had no Tarpabapsbut a lot more Andanese people.

Thaoa was happy to border Paba because the Pabaps were small, physically unthreatening, and easily captured into slavery. The Thaoans had plenty of other cultures around them, but they did not generally enslave those people because they felt intimidated by them. Early attempts at enslaving Repilians led to revolts, whereas the Pabaps captured by a slavemaster would only smile and pretend they were being treated well. Thaoans referred to the Pabaps variously as "Lenians" (from Lenia, their name for Paba plus the unorganized territory of Pupompom to the north), or as Pilipupu or Sipuipmi, which are words respectively from Andanese and early Pabappa. Lenia is a transscription of the early Thaoa word Laenlat, meaning "land of simple childlike people".

Although Paba was militarily powerful, and could easily have burst into Thaoan territory and freed its slaves, and even made slaves of the Thaoans, they never did so, because Thaoa was also powerful and the Pabaps wanted to remain friendly. Pabap governors rarely interacted with the Pabap underclass, and saw the slavery program as a way to solve Paba's overpopulation problem, while at the same time satisfying the demands of Thaoa's farmers who seemed to produce much more food than the warmer but somehow less productive wage-labor farmers in Paba.

Slavery

Thus, Paba did not itself practice slavery, but the government of Paba believed that slavery was morally acceptable, and profited from the Thaoan slavery system because for the most part, Thaoan farmers only took slaves legally, meaning that they took people who were of the lower class, and money was paid to the family members of the slave in compensation for their loss. Thus, the slaves were willing participants in their abuse, a trait that the Pabaps would come to be famous for over the next 7000 years. Pabap slaves were even taken to faraway lands such as Lobexon whose pirates had skipped over many other nations to get at the people they felt would be the most submissive people of all. Here they tended to be found in the tropical rainforests, partricularly those of Katō.

But illegal slave raids were nonetheless dominated by Thaoa. Thaoan warlords abducted young Pabap children by force, figuring that child slaves would be even more submissive than adults, and Paba fought several wars against Thaoa to try to rescue these people and their descendants. Note that Thaoan slavemasters were fully entitlted to all of the children of all of their slaves, and did not need to continually pay money to the families in Paba from which they had been bred; thus, Thaoans tried to keep Pabap women pregnant as much as possible, and had an incentive to keep their slaves healthy and at least sometimes happy so that they provided Thaoa with a reliable supply of Pabap children. They figured that sexual intercourse was so enjoyable that even the life of a slave could be made happy by allowing them to procreate as much as they wanted. The Pabaps sent Thaoa a roughly equal balance of men and women so that the population of Paba itself would not be disrupted but yet the Thaoans could easily reproduce more and more Pabaps without having to worry about male slaves dying childless.

A farmer who found himself owning too many Pabap children could sell them to another slavemaster and make a handsome profit. Soon this became a source of money in itself and farmers became the wealthiest class in all of Thaoa. On the other hand, Thaoa realized they were rapidly infesting themslbes with an explosion of Pabap people who could threaten the government of Thaoa itself. They tried to sell the slaves to other nations, but no nations nearby were interested in buying slaves at the moment. The Star Empire was interested in Pabap slaves, but they preferred to simply go to Paba, which was closer. Moreover most Star slave boats were illegal. Thaoa generally did not want to simply let the slaves move back to Paba, as there were seemingly always farmers looking for more slaves even when other farmers had too many. If a slaveowning family died, the slaves were distributed according to the most recently living adult member's wishes.

One political group in Thaoa began to push for a law that would prevent the freeing of Pabap slaves, reenslave the free Pabaps living in THaoa, and allow enslavement of Thaoan criminals. Since this law would even apply to orphaned children, Paba told the THaoans they wanted an amendemnt that allowed Paba to take in orphaned children to prevent them from being enslaved. Thaoa agreed to this, as they knew that Paba was not as weak as they often seemed to be.

Another political group in Thaoa wanted Paba to let Thaoa take over its farm system and enslave even the Pabaps living in Paba. Paba refused, because they knew that Thaoa was only interested in enslaving Pabaps and not any of the other peoples living in Paba, such as the Tarpabaps.

Even though Pabap people were known to be soft and gentle, they were impressive whenever they mobilized for war, and Thaoa did not want to risk entering a war while sitting on a class of people who had every reason to disrupt the war and turn every victory into a defeat. Thus, Thaoa was careful to always stay friendly to Paba during wars, and on those rare occasions when Paba declared war on THaoa itself, Thaoa collapsed early on without mobilizing its whole army.

Exploration of the north

In Paba living standards were actually better in the cold, unsettled north, a land which had come to be called Pupompom. Paba by 1700 AD was already overcrowded, and although its people generally had enough food, they were dependent on networks of trade either from Pupompom or from various nations around them, and if any of these networks broke down, people could starve. They were not the only nation that suffered from overpopulation, but they were among the most aggressive nations at exploring the frigid north, hoping to find a place to live that had a more reliable food supply, even if it meant wearing fur coats all year long.

The Thousand Year Peace

Around the year 1700, Paba ceased fighting wars and entered the Thousand Year Peace (Paubabi Pumau Bapababe). This was a period where Paba was protected by its strong military from needing to depend on foreign powers, thus preventing Paba from being pulled into foreign wars it did not support, and from being invaded by other countries. They did not object when the majority-Pabap states of Miepabem and Fimpameinu left to become par of the Subumpamese Union. people in these states said they were not rejecting Pabap culture or religion; they were merely joining the Union because they accepted multiculturalism and wanted to enjoy the economic benefits of being part of a multicultural society led mostly by the Subumpamese.

Thus Paba had a foothold in a foreign nation without compromising its own, and soon came to dominate the coastline of Subumpam even beyond the historical Pabap states' borders. The city of Pipaippis became the wealthiest city in Subumpam and Pabap ships controlled its harbor. On the other hand, many Subumpamese and other peoples moved into the historic Pabap homelands, since the Subumpamese Union allowed free migration from any state to any other state.

The Famine of 1823

In 1823, a cold spell brought famine to the piney habitats of the Pabaps and their neighbors on all sides. Thaoan farmers, finding their plantations suddenly useless, could not produce enough food to feed the Thaoan peasant class. Many sold their Pabap slaves as meat to feed the peasants and then used the money to move to Paba in search of a more reliable food supply. Meanwhile, Nama had also sent people into both Subumpam and Paba to collect food. Paba cooperated with the Thaoans and Namans because they did not want to spoil their long period of peace. Pabaps called the invaders "rabbits" because like rabbits they bothered people only when they needed food, and seemed to be growing rapidly in numbers and molesting the Pabap popuilaton.

Thaoan refugees were generally self-sufficient once Paba gave them money to buy boats, but many Pabap fishermen were afraid when they learned that the Thaoans had financed their journey into Paba by selling Pabaps in meat markets. They did not want to live amongst a people who saw Pabaps as something to have for dinner if a fishing trip turned up empty. Fishing in this age was largely accomplished with boats and spears, so fishermen were essentially as well-weaponed as soldiers, but with no body armor, and a riot amongst fishermen could cause problems that even the army would have trouble with. Thus the Thaoans mostly stuck together in rder to avoid conflict with Pabap fishermen (the Pabaps had had to buy rights to the seacost from the gfov't). Meanwhile, Namans were all from mountain tribes unfamiliar with how to fish the ocean.

Paba nonetheless did not try to stop the incoming refugees, and even offered to take in the refugees that were spilling into Subumpam, figuring they couldat least hire them as underclass workers in Paba and thus free up their own underclass to do more profitable work such as piloting ships further out to sea in search of more fish. As it happened, though, Paba's government was unable to coerce the immigrants to work for food, and the Namans often chose to simply move back into Subumpam when they were told the free food was about to stop. Subumpam also required the Namans to work for their food, but the work they did was of very limited quality since they could not speak Subumpamese, and Subumpam considered itself to have been saddled with a problem even worse than Paba's.

Pabap diplomats told Nama that they were terribly sorry they could not feed the Namans for free, as they really did consider Nama a strong ally and did not want to even so much as drift to neutral, but they said Paba was already a famine-prone country and could not even feed itself without relying on buying food from other nations around them. They offered to buy food from the Star Empire and sell it to Nama, even though the price of this food after it had been through three empires would be very expensive. Nama refused the offer, since the journey was so long that they hoped the famine would be over by the time the new imports reached Nama, and Paba had demanded payment up front since it did not want to risk dumping unsaleable goods on itself if Nama backed out of the offer after the cargo ships had arrived.

They also offered to send Namans to the southern reaches of the Star Empire, where many Pabap people were held as slaves by the Star government and would work for them in plantations that were too tropical to be affected by the cold wave. Nama refused this offer as well, as they knew a Pabap ship would likely be refused entry and did not want to run the risk of being sold into slavery along with the Pabaps who had brought them there. the end, Nama held no grudge against Paba, saying it had tried harder than expected to help out and that Nama was the only empire who seemed to be unable to handle the famine on its own, as even Thaoa had regained self-sufficiency within a year.

Meanwhile, Subumpam declared war against Nama and occupied the region of Nama from which the refugees had been coming, which they named Wimpim. They had suffered much more than Paba because Subumpam was smaller than Paba and had had its food production drop much more than Paba but yet had far more Namans move in.

The War of 1952

Subumpam occupied Wimpim for about 120 years. Towards the end, as the Wimpimese were sniping at Subumpamese soldiers and making their continued occupation very painful, Paba endorsed a new law in Wimpim stating that the Subumpamese were unwelcome and needed to get out. They actually favored Subumpam, but Nama had long since recovered from the famine and was thus once again powerful enough to tell the Pabaps how to vote and which side they should support in a potential war. Thus Paba did nothing when Wimpim (taking back its old name, Maimp) invaded the much larger empire of Subumpam and cut their way down to the sea.

For a nation as poor and tiny as Maimp to invade Subumpam showed to the Pabaps that Maimp was very serious about its wars. Maimp had allies, however, in this war, and their allies kept them supplied with food and weapons when their homebuilt ones ran out.

Paba itself had been officially pro-Maimp in this war, but they had refused to fight, since there were many Pabap people living in Subumpam, and none in Maimp. Although they invaded Subumpam, they occupied only territories where Pabaps lived, and within those territories they dealt mostly with protecting Pabaps rather than Subumpamese. Nevertheless they rescued Subumpamese civilians who wer efleeing from other areas into the Pabap-occupied areas, seeing them as trusty allies. Also, many Naman citizens had remained peacefully in Subumpam throughout the entire 120 year long occupation, and some of these helped the invading Maimp soldiers (called Imps) invade Subumpam. On the other hand, after 120 years of being treated well by their Subumpamese hosts, many Imps living in Subumpam actually preferred Subumpam to their old home country, and fought instead for the army of Subumpam. Other Imps simply killed each other, seeing themselves as the true ultimate source of the problem.

Subumpam lost the war against the tiny nation of Maimp, and surrendered to Maimp in the Treaty of 1956. As Maimp was just one of the states of Nama, Nama ogt involved, and Nama punished the Subumpamese dearly for their war. They did not occupy Subumpam, however, but merely forced the Subumpamese to promise that Namans living in Subumpam would be to some extent treated as superiors in the effect that they could vote to overthrow the Subumpamese governemnt whereas the Subumpamese could not. This was what they called a "soft" occupation meaning that the Naman military was not physically present, but Namans living in Subumpam could provoke a Naman military invasion if they decided amongst themselves that they felt threatened by the Subumpamese living around them.

Namans living in Subumpam soon realized, however, that the Subumpamese were no threat.

Conflict with the Star Empire

In the 1950's, the Star Empire signed a treaty with Subumpam which annexed all of Subumpam to the Star Empire. Soon, Subumpam voted to abolish its military and let Star soldiers tell their people what they were allowed to do. The Stars built the capital of their empire in the city of Kaivi Maniyi, which had been the capital of the majority-Pabap state of Pipaippis. The Pabaps threw a riot and burned down their city because they swore they would rather have poverty than see their wealth controlled by the Stars. Then they seceded from the Subumpamese Union and joined Paba. THis was a shock to the Subumpamese particularly because unlike the other two states, Pipaippis had been Subumpamese territory all along, and was the wealthiest state of all. They now realized that signing a pact with the Star Empire had been a terrible mistake, but it was too late for them to do anything about it. They had gone from being slapped around by Nama to being tortured and abused by the Star Empire, but now were helpless to complain about it. Particularly humiliating for Subumpam was that their people had a voice in the imperial parliament, but the Subumpamese representatives were punished whenever they voted against the Star majority. If the Stars themselves disagreed on an issue, the Subumpamese representatives had to choose a side, knowing that they would be punished for their vote either way.

In 1989, war erupted in Subumpam, as the weaponless Subumpamese were being abused by the Stars so badly that Nama had decided to intervene. Paba joinbed the war on Nama's side, but only because Nama had ensured them that they would not need to fight. They merely were required to allow Naman soldiers to station themselves in Pabap territory to make Nama's invasion of Subumpam easier, and to allow their soldiers to be supplied with food taken from Pabap farms. The war lasted until Nama's total victory in 2057.

Relations with the Gold Empire

The "Crabs"

The Gold Empire was created by the Treaty of 2057. It stopped at Paba's western border, but the Gold people admired Pabap culture and invited them to move in, not just to their immediate neighbor Subumpam, but also to the tropical, slavery-based Star homelands of Lobexon. The Gold Empire sent diplomats into Paba to convince the Pabaps to move to the poorest parts of Lobexon and help the Macro-Repilian slave lords run their new government.

The Gold people were amazed at how Pabap people had been abused and tortured by all of their neighbors for more than 1000 years and had apparently never even considered a revenge attack on any of those nations, but yet somehow Paba had in all this time the strongest and richest nation in its vicinity, and perhaps in the world. They admired the simple Paba language, Babakiam, which seemed to be able to express all its people needed to say with just the two consoannts /p/ and /b/, and had a syllabary so small that there were actually more letters in the Gold alphabet than in the Bābā syllabary.

The Pabap people were generally not thrilled by the thousands of Gold people roaming the streets of Paba striking up conversations with Pabap civilians, and telling Pabaps how much they admired Pabap culture, particularly since everything good the Goldies had to say seemed to be thinly veiled descriptions of Pabaps as the world's most perfect slaves. Even though the Treaty of 2057 had freed all of the Pabap slaves still trapped in Lobexon, no ships of Pabaps ever arrived in Paba, as the Gold government said they still could not control what went on in the tropical jungles of far southern Lobexon, despite having conquered it completely. A political organization of Pabaps called Pisimimbrin ("stay home!") formed and became famous for screaming at the Gold diplomats in Pabap cities to go back to Nama and stop taking Pabaps off to the worst parts of their new empire.

Pisimimbrin pointed out that the Gold diplomats seemed to ignore all of the ethnic minorities in Paba, only targeting ethnic Pabaps, particularly those who were young and uneducated, and did not seem particularly likely to be able to help run a foreign government. The Goldies seemed to approach males and females indifferently, and to be equally comfortable addressing a single person or a crowd. The Gold diplomats seemed to have made harassing Pabaps their full time occupation now, and as they were being supported and housed by organizations partnered with Nama, did not need to rely on Paba's economy to survive.

Dilemma

Paba still considered itself an ally of Nama, but as Nama had essentially conquered Paba's main enemy, Paba realized it no longer needed to rely on Nama for protection, and began to worry that the new expanded Nama, through its aggressive Gold government, could become their new enemy. Pisimimbrin in particular likened Nama to a crab whose body was feeble but had two arms (Lobexon and occupied Subumpam) which were very sharp and dangerous, and was always groping out looking for more people to bleed. They began shouting "kill the crab!" whenever a Gold diplomat forced himself into a conversation of Pabaps going about their daily routines.

Soon Pisimimbrin became impatient with their government's inaction. Some Pisimimbrin members began wearing black hats, saying that the Gold diplomats only targeted people with blonde hair, since that was apparently their primary method of distinguishing Pabaps from ethnic minorities. In response, Gold diplomats promised to talk to all of the minority peoples as well, not just Pabaps, although the diplomats still refused to learn any new languages besides Pabappa. Even so, they generally avoided people with black hats, and the growing number of black hats on the streets showed the Pabap government that their people were angry.

Paba passed a law in 2060 stating that Gold diplomats were no longer allowed to stand in front of doorways or outside of schools or stores or other people's homes. They were still allowed, however, to walk up and down the streets all day, sometimes bothering the same person several times per day, and they were still allowed to disturb quiet gatherings of Pabaps and make it physically difficult for them to avoid contact with the Gold diplomats. Pisimimbrin said that this new law was not enough; Gold people had never been known to harass Pabaps in public bathrooms or block Pabaps from entering their own houses; they preferred to put themselves in the middle of crowds where they could be heard by many people at once, and the new law did not stop this. Also, many Gold people had been wearing out their voices, and now the streets were full of signs written by Gold tribesmen offering Pabaps a better life in a foreign land. In late 2060, a Pabap diplomat visiting Nama discovered written records of a debate between various Naman government figures on whether the Pabaps living in Lobexon should be entirely enslaved or not. About 42% of the Namans had voted to enslave all Pabaps, including any Pabaps that volunteered to come over on the new Gold cargo ships. Thus, the anti-slavery side had narrowly won the debate, but when news of the discovery reached Paba, Paba's opinion turned sharply against Nama.

Paba realized they needed to find a solution to the problem. Paba was still experiencing overcrowding, and this was the primary reason why Paba's government had so far refused to take any strong action against the many Gold people living in Paba. They called for a symposium with Nama, in which Paba would be represented by not just one person but rather eight people who all had different ideas. They hoped that at least some of the Namans and some of the Pabaps could find common ground.

Reform

Without trying to appear weak, Paba admitted that it wanted to allow the Gold government to continue take Pabaps away from their homes in Paba and resettle them in Lobexon in order to help solve Paba's persistent overpopulation problem. The new Pabaps being exported to Lobexon were to be called Pastip. But they had to place the well-being of their own people first, and their own people increasingly wanted the Gold people off the streets. Paba agreed to promise Nama a quota of 3000 adult Pabaps per year, a huge number that even Nama had not been expecting, as Paba's population was only around 870000. Gold diplomats were allowed to remain in Paba indefinitely, and Paba even agreed to pay for the costs of their remaining there (they had previously been living at hotels owned by Nama, and generally supplied with food taken from Subumpam). However Gold people could no longer so much as exit their buildings; the buildings were now both their homes and their workplaces, and they would now be owned by Paba rather than Nama. Paba promised to continue to advertise the existence of these buildings, which were essentially patterned after Paba's long-standing peacetime military recruitment centers, with the exception that the Gold people could not leave their homes; the Pabaps had to come to them. Nama protested that this would be unfair, and that the Gold diplomats would rapidly lose interest in recruiting people to live in Lobexon if they were so shut off from the rest of the world. After a long debate, Paba conceded ground on this point as well, but stated that individual Gold diplomats could nevertheless be grounded if they were seen too aggressive by the Pabaps, and implicitly outlawed many of the most obnoxious behaviors that Pisimimbrin had been complaining about. Furthermore, every word the Gold diplomats led their conversations with had to be approved in advance by Paba's government, and if they violated this, they could be grounded.

Originally, Paba had worried that its people were going to be badly abused in Lobexon. Although most Pabap governors believed the Goldies' promises that they were not merely trying to replace obnoxious Star slaves with docile Pabap slaves, and that Lobexon if anything had too many slaves already, Nama had made no firm promises about what would happen to the Pabaps other than that they would not be enslaved. The Gold diplomats openly admitted that they wanted to implant Pabaps specifically in the worst areas of Lobexon, since they figured Pabaps had a special talent for healing dangerous situations and could put that to good use in Lobexon. Paba also knew that Nama had sealed off all of its ports to traffic in both directions to prevent slaves pirating ships and sailing to freedom, and thus any Pabaps who agreed to move to Lobexon and then realized they had made a mistake would be trapped there and endangered by the natives, even if not enslaved. Paba wanted to solve its population problem, but not at the expense of endangering the lives of their people. Nama desperately wanted to take in many Pabaps, but they insisted on directing them into the problem areas of their empire, not treating them as fully equal citizens with the right to live wherever they wanted.

As the debate went on, Paba would not concede. Some Namans threatened that they could simply kill or enslave all of the Pabaps in Lobexon, and since Paba had no corresponding population of Namans under their control, they could not retaliate. But this actually brought more Namans over to Paba's side, as they realized they had no chance of securing an agreement with Paba if they were associated with people who were threatening a genocide against the Pabaps.

In the end, Paba had managed to equalize the situation somewhat: Pastip people would not, in fact, be settled in the poorest and most dangerous areas of Lobexon and simply be told "Fix this up!". Instead, they would be settled mostly in the wealthier, safer north, which is where most of Nama's own immigrants lived (other than the slavemasters, who were everywhere). Also, Nama agreed to allow Pabap ships to bypass the naval blockade, even if only at a few choice ports through which they were conducting much of their trade with other nations. Nama realized that importing Pabaps into northern Lobexon would do little to help the problems of poverty and violence in southern Lobexon, but the Gold party really did believe that Lobexon needed Pabaps in its government, even if they were not commonly found in the areas that needed the most help.

However, Paba was still unable to get the Gold government to release the Pabap slaves toiling away on pineapple plantations in the tropics; moreover, a new group of Pabaps called Pasulup who had been involved in trade and commerce, distinct from the Pastip people, had also become trapped in Lobexon due to the blockade, and these people were not allowed to use the Pastip ships to get back out. (Nama had early on offered to repatriate them, and many agreed; the Pasulup are the descendants of the ones who chose to remain.)

Later history

Immigration into Paba

Paba soon became a target of immigration from various Laban nations. The Andanese people moved from Laba to Paba and reached their highest population density in Paba. They did not convert to the Yiibam religion, which was a rare exception to Paba's policy of insisting that their new nation respect only the Yiibam religion. This was allowed because the Andanese in Paba had sworn to always be loyal ot Paba, effectively considering all of Paba to be Andanese home territory, rather than behave as they did in many other nations where the Andanese minority was aggressive and unwelcome and often collaborated with invaders during a war. And even though their religions were not closely related, they worshipped many of the same gods and began to exchange ideas about the spirit world and the afterlife.

Early on, the Tarpabap people were the second largest minority in Paba. They had come from the far south of Laba, including the equatorial islands that were being rapidly flooded by rising ocean waters as the glaciers of the interior quickly melted. They felt they needed a new homeland to settle in and chose Paba. Earlier, Paba had had river access to the most convenient port in all of southern Laba from which to embark on a sea journey to reach Rilola, but they had very few seaworthy boats because they had no coastland of their own in that area apart from a few cities in Andanese territory in which they had become a majority but not achieved formal independence. Thus the Tarpabaps, being all along an oceangoing people, gave Pabaps their ships in return for a formal alliance in which the two peoples would stick together. The Tarpabaps converted to the Yiibam religion more easily than the Andanese since their native religion had already been similar. Nevertheless, not all Tarpabaps converted, and those who stuck to their oreiginal religion from the tropics were treated badly by others in Paba, including the other Tarpabaps.

The Tarpabaps did not blend much with Pabaps because the two peoples were so strongly phyiscally different: Pabaps were among the shortest people in the world; Tarpabaps were among the tallest. Some Pabaps had intermarried with the taller, stronger aboriginal people, and formed an intermediate group. These generally converted to Yiibam and thus came to call themselves Pabaps.

Immigrants from the Gold Empire

There were also a few Subumpamese people in Paba. Subumpam bordered Paba on the west, and therefore there was a lot of potential for immigration, but Subumpam did not have a high birthrate, and few Subumpamese were interested in moving to Paba. Instead, Pabaps mostly moved into eastern Subumpam. The Subumpamese shared the blonde hair and blue eyes of the Pabaps but had facial fewatures and a body type more like the dark-skinned Tarpabaps, so in some ways they were a bridge between the two. Still, this led to Tarpabaps marrying Subumpamese, not Tarpabaps marrying Pabaps.

The Gilgosi were a people native to Lobexon who were famous for their history of massacres of Pabaps living in Lobexon. They claimed Pabaps were the enemy of not just the Gilgosi, b but all of the natives of Lobexon because the Pabaps used their naval power to dominate the economy and reach a status even the slavemasters on the plantations were jealous of. But Paba felt bad for the Gilgosi, who had alienated even their other fellow oppressed peoples in Lobexon and after the Treaty of 2057 found themselves afraid to identify themselves as Gilgosi for fear of arrest by the Lobexonian government. Thus Paba began rescuing Gilgosi people from Lobexon and moving them to Paba in the year 2061, hoping that if they moved to Paba they would get over their hatred of Pabaps and form a stronger nation for both groups.

Beginning around 2175, a large number of Crystals moved from Lobexon to Paba. Their name derives from their religion, which believes in a sacred treasure called the Four Gems of Tebbala. They seemed an unlikely fit in Paba, as in contrast to previous immigrant groups, they openly despised Pabap culture and religion and told the Pabaps they were stupid, impulsive, and closed-minded people. The Crystals simply wanted a safe place to live as they had been entirely outlawed in their old homeland of Lobexon, and Lobexon was a very large place, so there were a lot of Crystals that needed to get out. They figured Paba was a safe place to move because Paba had been entirely without war for 500 years and had a history of happily rescuing and adopting immigrant groups.

Once in Paba, the Crystals mostly kept to themselves. They did not send their children to school and preferred to teach only the very basic life skills at home. A subset of them learned Pabappa so they could communicate with the Pabaps around them, and some of these went on missions to try to convince the Pabaps to dump their Yiibam religion, which the Crystals called "the religion of fear", and convert to the Crystal religion. But Yiibam was indeed hostile to Crystalism and the Crystals soon learned that although the Pabaps were peaceful and altruistic in their approach to world diplomacy, when dealing with minorities in their own nation, particularly religious ones, they were a lot less soft-handed.

Paba did really believe that they were doing a good deed by rescuing the Crystals from Lobexon, as they had when they had rescued the Crystals' main enemy, the Gilgosi, from the same fate beginning about 100 years earlier. But the Gilgosi, despite being famous for their history of violence against Pabaps, had in Paba almost entirely been friendly and did not try to convert Pabaps to their religion. So Paba responded with a law banning the Crystal religion. THey still did not want to push out the Crystals themselves, but told them they were no longer welcome if their religion demnaded that they spend time attempting to convert other people to their religion.

Most Gilgosi living in Paba had essentially forgotten all of the politics of their old homeland in Lobexon and had no reaction to the new law. But a few of them, despite not being affected by it in anyway themselves, protested the new law on behalf of their ancient enemies the Crystals. For some of them, this was because they honestly felt the law was unfair; for others, they merely didnt want a law banning the Gilgosi religion to be next on the table. The Gilgosi had been saying all along that Pabaps were known as the world's most innocent people but had had a history just as bloody as their neighbors further back in history, and did not want those days to return since 500 years of peace seemed to have made Paba's military ever stronger.

Meanwhile the Crystal minority considered itself the world's bottommost oppressed group, and was surprised by the Pabaps' lack of sympathy for their painful existence. They generally did not leave Paba, because any of the nations they could go to would likely enslave them. They planned instead to work on developing an army in Paba which would be allied with Paba's own army, despite their mutual distrust, and could be used to invade Subumpam in order to secure a new nation for Crystals only along the coast of Subumpam. But this did not come to pass, as Paba's neverending population explosion soon pushed the Crystals into a desperate situation. They could not fish the ocean for food, so had to rely on hunting and farming, but they had so no land of their own, living instead only in places where Pabaps were the majority. This in turn meant that they were subject to being sold into slavery in Thaoa if they could not make a living in any other way, and Thaoa was happy to help out. To escape this, some Crystals actually moved to Subumpam, even knowing they were risking slavery even there since Subumpam had been forced to adopt slavery recently by the Gold government.

Thus, the Crystals' attempt to wrap all of Paba around them as a strong ally in their war in Lobexon had failed, and the Gilgosis had entirely assimilated to mainstream Pabap culture by this time, which meant that Paba had remained neutral in the war in Lobexon and was thus able to protect its people from being dragged into a foreign war with no benefit for Paba itself.

Tarpabap domination

Despite the importation of many groups of people from Lobexon, immigration soon came to be dominated by the earliest immigrant group of all, the Tarpabaps who were coming from the increasingly flooded equatorial rainforests of Laba.

Many Tarpabap settlers in Paba figured that since the Pabaps were so small and physically delicate, they would be afraid of the Tarpabaps, and that the Tarpabaps, despite being a minority, would soon be in control of the government of Paba. But they found that this was not so. Neither did they have success in dominating the Andanese minority, who were even smaller and more physically delicate than the Pabaps due to a lower amount of body fat. Both Pabaps and Tarpabaps were prone to violence, and they realized that they would be better off as allies than as enemies. Likewise, the Pabaps enjoyed bringing Tarpabaps into Paba, and kept sending out ships to Laba to encourage ever more people of both races to move to Paba.

However, as both groups had high birthrates and there were generally no wars, the population was persistently overcrwoded. Some people in Paba began to explore other nations on Rilola, but found that essentially all land had been occupied. Although they had easily massacred the aboriginal population of Paba just a few hundred years ago, it was not so easy anymore because most of the land around them had either been settled by fellow Laban cultures that were materially successful but mostly hostile to accepting even more Labans, or by aboriginals who had never been as weak as the ones living in Paba because they were not cut off from the rest of the world by mountains.

Expansion

This problem is one area where the Pabaps and the Tarpabaps tended to break apart culturally. The Pabaps preferred to live along the warm southern coast, and if they ran out of land, they planned to settle other tropical areas even if they were controlled by hostile powers that would only allow Pabaps to move in as an underclass. This was because Paba had in its short time on the continent already become a master of naval trade, and its people felt comfortable living under foreign powers because they would often live better lives than their supposed dominant cultures and because their mastery of sea power would give them an easy exit if the host nation turned suddenly hostile.

The Tarpabaps, meanwhile, typically preferred expansion into the much larger and more open northern territory of Repilia, even though Paba was walled off from Repilia by the world's tallest mountain range. Tarpabaps were not happy being simply a minority in another nation's culture; they wanted a country of their own. Thus the two peoples had essentually switched places: Pabaps were descended from rural mountain peoples with extremely low living standards but had become the masters of sea power and among the richest peoples in their new home continent, while the Tarpabaps, who had come from the hot wet jungles of Laba's equatorial maritime region, had mostly already forgotten how to build boats and dreamt of clawing out a huge invincible mountain nation for Tarpabaps only.

Early Tarpabap settlements in the interior focused on Repilian territory, as Repilia (labeled simply as Nama on the map above) hugged Paba's northern border from end to end. In 2144, the nation of Tarwas was founded. This led to revenge attacks against Paba and strained relations between the Pabaps and the Tarpabaps. Paba always had been an ally of Repilia, even if for morally questionable reasons: the early Pabap settlers had attacked the native aboriginal Sukuna people, who had been the blood enemies of Repilians for thousands of years. Thus there was never any animosity against Paba from the Repilians, and Paba had welcomed Repilian settlement into Paba, giving Repilians their only access to the south coast. But now Tarpabap people were cutting their way through the mountain passes and setting up shop in the choicest pieces of land, even daring to launch preemptive attacks against Repilian settlements in order to increase the security of their own.

Since Paba itself had a second nation, Pubapi, inside Naman territory, and Repilia was a part of Nama, the Namans tried to put pressure on the Pabaps to stop Tarpabapla's explosion into Repilian territory, saying that they would shut down Pubapi if the attacks on Repilia did not stop. But even Nama knew that they were in a very weak position, because other nations were stabbing their borders as well, and they had up until now seen Paba as a strong ally and specifically as a naval ally.

In Pubapi, the Pabaps told the Naman diplomats that Paba's army was not as strong as it seemed; they were afraid that if they tried to stop Tarpabaps from settling Nama, the Tarpabaps would turn back around and attack Paba. Since Tarpabaps were now much stronger than the Pabaps, they were worried about total conquest. Indeed, when Repilians did launch revenge attacks into Paba, they targeted ethnic Pabaps, not ethnic Tarpabaps, because even though the Pabaps were basically innocent they tended to be unarmed and therefore much easier to kill. Already some Pabaps had begun to fear that Tarpabap conquest was inevitable and decided to move to the Tarpabaps' new nation, Tarwas, and essentially become Tarpabaps themselves. Tarwas allowed Pabaps to live in Tarwas despite earlier saying that it would be a nation for Tarpabaps only, because they too had weaknesses and did not want to alienate a culture that provided them their only access to the sea, and was still actively importing more Tarpabaps from Laba. Some believed that in the far future, Tarwas would be strong enough to rush back down the mountains, conquer all of Paba, and become the world champion of military power both on land and at sea, since they would take control of the Pabap navy and learn from the Pabaps how to build ships. But even the most aggressive and optimistic Tarpabaps realized that this could only happen many hundreds of years in the future, if at all, and that Tarwas' best military strategy for the time being would be to consider itself an absolute inseparable ally of Paba. The leaders of Tarwas told themselves that their people had been living in Paba for many generations, and had never attacked Pabaps, whereas Repilia had, and yet the Pabaps still considered Repilia their ally. This was also their argument to Paba to convince Pabap to stay loyal to Tarwas even if meant losing the support of Repilia and Nama, which were much stronger.

Reform in Paba

However, the Pabaps became uncomfortable when they realized they were now threatened just going about day to day life in their own home country. They did not call for a slowdown of settlement of the tropics by Pabaps, as they felt that few of them would return voluntarily. They merely wanted to better strengthen Pabaps in Paba so that they did not have to worry about beign attacked by Tarwas or Tarpabaps within Paba (even Repilians living in Paba were attacking Pabaps now, although they mostly went after Tarpabaps).

Paba was unhappy at the problems caused by the cultural differences between them and the Tarpabaps they were hosting in their nation. Paba wanted to settle outworld areas in the tropics, which led to expanding Pabap power overseas but very little growth at home even with rapid immigration from the Pabaps' home area in Laba. Meanwhile, few Tarpabaps left, so their population in Paba grew rapidly, approaching 30%, and they actually had a majority in the army now since the Pabaps were focusing mostly on their navy. Paba was worried about an ethnic conflict arising within its own army, with the huge Tarpabaps massacring tiny defenseless Pabap soldiers, if Tarwas decided to invade Paba. Tarwas was still a strong ally of Paba, but Paba felt that this was largely because of the Pabaps' strong assistance they were giving to Tarwas, even going on missions to Laba to gather boat after boat full of Tarpabap people desiring to immigrate to Paba.

A small subgroup of settlers spoke an early branch of the Pabappa language that had eliminated the letter /p/, drastically changing the sound of the language. They persisted with this language for several hundred years but as time went on and more settlers arrived it became increasingly pressed down by standard Pabappa.

Settlement of the north

However, some Pabap settlers had essentially given up trying to settle teh tropics, and moved northward just west of the Tarwastas. They were much stronger than the Repilian people that had been there before, and provided a check on westward expansion of Tarwas. Even though they were also invading Repilian territory, they had better relations with the Repilians and were much less violent than the Tarpabaps, so their settlements tended to prosper. They actually reached the north coast of Rilola in 2412, but did not settle very much there because the climate was still too cold, with the harbors frozen most of the year apart from a few narrow inlets where the ice thawed out into "lakes" surrounded by land on one side and the polar icecap on the other. The average temperature in winter was about 18°F, and in summer about 50°F. Penguins were the dominant life form, as there were far more fish in the water than one would think for such an isolated area.

Nevertheless, the new countries of Ŋapkamša, Šim, and Paemža were created along three natural harbors. These three soon came to think of themselves as nations, as travel between their new homes and Paba was impossible. Their religion, Yiibam, worshipped gods that were physically present in Paba, and although Yiibam did not discourage Pabaps from leaving Paba, these new settlers had cut themselves off from their parent society in a way that had not been done for thousands of years. The settlers in the three new nations expected their climate to warm up in the future, although they knew from studies of their own history back in Paba that it would likely take hundreds of years for the water to become navigable. Thus they had not chosen these nations specifically for their waterfront. In fact, they had earlier intended to go even further north, but were stopped because they did not have the means to build more ships due to the lack of trees in the area, and the knowledge that the ice would force them to abandon the ships in an unknown location and then strand them on an icecap.

Tarwas considered these nations to be intrusions on their territory, as the part of Repilia they had chosen was already claimed by Tarwas, but held off on declaring war. Tarwas had actually been a very peaceful nation outwardly despite their killings of aboriginals, and was unprepared for a war. THey actually called their territory Abilo or Abilas right now, and it was rich in natural resources, and was uphill of its neighbors. They had a tiny amount of ocean in the north, but it was unusable because the climate was too cold.

The Tarwastas preyed on the inhabitants of Šim, the largest of the three nations, and imported them into Tarwas as slaves. Thus Tarwas adopted slavery. However, perversely, the people of Šim cooperated with the slave masters, and profited from exporting their people to Tarwas. Generally the ones chosen as slaves were chosen by the Šim people rather than the Tarwastas, and were commonly new arrivals to the colonies who had no family ties to the existing inhabitants, and were so emptily poor that even slavery was a better life for them than staying in Šim.

Many Subumpamese people moved to the three new colonies, and FILTER exported its people as well, adding an element of Feminism to the new countries. They also brought in the Sisnasi religion, and many Pabaps converted to Sisnasi, a very unusual occurrence helped in large part by their isolation from their ancestral homeland. Nevertheless, Pabappa remained firm as the language of all three nations and the dialects spoken in Mabimbižip differed only slightly from that spoken in Paba itself.

The blending of Pabap and Subumpamese culture helped solidify the identities of the new nations as being non-Pabap, and they formally unified into the Mabimbižip Alliance several years later. Mabimbižip means "soap bubbles" but it is not related to the Bubble Party or any of the other soap-related names that Pabaps came to use for themselves in later years. The use of the name "soap" had actually begun with FILTER, and was originally a Subumpamese word, mayinī. (They later changed their name from Soap Bubbles to just Soap to avert confusion.)

Conflict with Tarwas

Tarwas actually blamed the Mabimites for the slavery problem, saying that because Mabim was selling its people to Tarwas for a profit, Mabim must also be practicing slavery, and had imported its slavery into Tarwas. They declared war on Mabimbižip and occupied all three nations during the winter of 2421. Until this time, Tarwas had only adopted slaves from Šim, not from Ŋapkamša or Paemža, as the other two were more distant. Now they enslaved all of the Mabimites, and said that henceforth the Mabim slave labor would be provided to the Tarwastas at no cost. THey promised to eventually free the slaves, not because they felt any sympathy for them but because they blamed slavery for dragging down northern Tarwas' economy in the last decade before their invasion. THey also believed that Mabimbižip was an illegal settlement to begin with because it was on Tarwas' land. Nevertheless, they were worried that Paba would discover that they had attacked, so they did not kill any of their new slaves.

To their surprise, they found that Paba was actually sending inspectors to the new nations to make sure everything was okay. They learned of this only when one Pabap official was seen in the open and a group of Tarwastas assumed he was an escaped slave. Even though Paba was very far away, transportation had been improving and it no longer took several years to get from Paba to Šim. They realizsed that if they killed the captured official, or made him a slave, Paba would know something was wrong, and if they let him go, Paba would also know something was wrong. They nevertheless decided to enslave him, to set an example to the other Mabimites that their rule was strong. Nevertheless, the official did eventually escape, and arrived back in Paba several months later.

Tarwas realized that they were still officially an ally of Paba but had just directly attacked and enslaved three nations that were direct descendants of Paba and worried that the news would reach Paba soon and Paba would be angry. Since Tarwas realized a war with Paba might be imminent, they considered asking Repilia for an alliance, even though they were still finishing off killing those few Repilians still living in southern Tarwas. They claimed that the Mabimites had occupied Repilian land, and that through an alliance with Tarwas the two huge powers could crush Mabim and give the land back to Repilia. The Tarwastas thus now admitted that their own claim to the land was invalid. Repilia refused the alliance, although a small number of Repilians, acting on their own will, moved into Mabim to help Tarwas' military keep control of the slaves.

Soon the slaves in Mabimbižip, backed up by surrounding armies of Repilians, began to fight back against their dominators. They started fires in the woods, making the land useless for the lumber industry, hoping to chase out the Tarwastas. Since one of the slave tasks that the Tarwastas had forced the Mabimites to do was to plant trees, this was a direct insult. However, as they had only been enslaved for a few years, the trees that they were destroying were preexisting ones. The Tarwastas responded to the forest fires by torturing Mabimites whether they were the ones setting the fires or not.

The Mabimites saw that their "soft" warfare that deliberately avoided violence did not work, so they launched a conventional war and began to allow killings. They let loose a swarm of parasitic worms and a plague, both of which affected Tarwastas more than they affected Mabimites. Even though their attempt to fight a war by burning down trees had not worked, Mabimites still insisted that they wanted to fight without weapons, and focus on "messy" warfare, in part because most of them were too small and clumsy to comofrtably use the weapons that they captured from Tarwastas, and in part because they had had success in those methods in the past. Nevertheless, Mabim did have an army of conventional soldiers with arrows and body armor, which was part Repilian and part Mabimite. Soon the war spread back into Tarwas, and the occupiers in Mabimbižip were forced to leave to go defend their homeland (they had been mostly soldiers, which meant that northern Tarwas had been unusually weakly protected). Even though Mabimbižip was now a wasteland, they were being provided food by Repilians in exchange for allowing Repilians to move back into Mabimbižip.

Mabimbižip then invaded Tarwas itself, although they made clear both to their soldiers and to the Tarwastas that they were not intending to permanently occupy even a small portion of Tarwas. All they wanted was the release of any slaves still in captivity in Tarwas. Tarwas was a very large country, and they could not simply cruise throughout the entire perimeter looking for anyone of their kind. Since most slaves were at work in farms, they could not rely on hidden messages from the captives such as Subumpamese words written on tools or clothing. They again released a plague that spread by infected fleas biting humans' feet, which meant that going barefoot was the easiest way to spread the disease. However, fleas occasionally bit humans higher up on their body, or while they were sleeping, so simply wearing shoes would not stop the spread of the plague. Various animals could also get the disease. Tarwas insisted that they were against slavery and that no slaves had ever been taken into Tarwas, but the Mabimites were not satisfied. Eventually, as farmers died, slaves appeared and tried to escape to freedom. Even though many of these were also dying of the disease, and others were simply killed by other Tarwastas, enough escaped slaves made it back to Mabimbižip that the Mabimites were able to convince themselves that they had won the war. They pulled out their army but kept a very strong force along the southern border, intending to keep Tarwas permanently landlocked.

The westernmost of the three Mabim states, Ŋapkamša, had a city that later became Blop. It was also the state with the strongest Subumpamese influence (rather than Pabap). Thus Blop arguably started out as a Subumpamese colony, albeit one that was politically aligned with Paba rather than Subumpam. (Its original name was Paaba, which did not lead to confusion because the name of Paba at this time was Bābā.)

Tarpabap treaty with Paba

Tarpabap settlement of the interior had reached a new phase where instead of explosively spreading out all over the place they built cities and forts in their strongest areas and did not generally expand far beyond them. They had acheived their goal of creating a new nation for Tarpabaps only, and they had chosen the best land available to live on. Their new nation, Tarwas, split Repilia right through the middle, meaning that Repilians wanting to travel from "West Repilia" to "East Repilia" and vice versa would need to go through Tarwas (unless the ice along the north coast melted). Tarwas was happy now and did not want to expand further. Thus even though the Tarwastas had killed many Repilians and destroyed their culture, the Repilians living just shy of the borders of Tarwas began to believe that perhaps they were at least finally safe from a Tarwasta invasion.

Likewise, the fear in Paba of a Tarwasta invasion also began to subside, as even though the Tarpabap minority in Paba had reached 35% (and about 15% Andanese, 20% Repilians, 25% Pabaps, 5% mixed) the Tarpabaps in Paba no longer considered themslves kin of the Tarpabaps in Tarwas (who had come to call themselves Tarwastas).

Ships from Laba continued to bring Tarpabaps to Paba, but now the majority of Tarpabaps stayed in Paba instead of moving north. Those that did move went to other tropical areas since Tarwas itself was no longer interested in drawing in much more immigration, and the other cold northern lands were becoming steadily more difficult to invade. Thus the population of Tarpabaps in Paba began to grow and soon became a slight majority. On the other hand, the new generations of Tarpabaps mostly stayed near the coast and often did not consider themselves Tarpabaps. Unlike the mainline Tarpabaps, they retained their original Laban languages instead of learning Pabappa, which led them to be increasingly isolated not just from Pabap society but also from each other. So instead of calling themselves Tarpabaps, they retained their original tribal names and considered themselves simply minorities within Paba. Yet thse people considered themselves citizens of Paba only, and did not want independence.

Colonies grew along the south coast of Paba, one for each Tarpabap nationality, with one more for the new-Tarpabaps that had chosen to learn Pabappa after all and one more for the Pabaps themselves. These were not strictly racially segregated habitats, but rather religiously and linguistically segregated. Still, the profound difference in body types between the Pabaps and the various Tarpabap groups led to relatively little intermarriage.

Tarpabaps who learned Pabappa found themselves better off economically than those who did not, and although they mostly preferred to stay in Paba for now, some of them moved to neighboring countries such as Subumpam and Thaoa, or even to Nama. Not as many moved to Lobexon, even though the government of Lobexon promised them immunity to its slavery laws, because the Tarpabaps preferred to live in places where Pabaps also lived.

Later divisions and separatism

Because of the settlement of the north, economic conditions along the coast actually began to decline. Tarpabaps reached 55% of the population of Paba, with Pabaps only about 20%, and began to complain. Some wanted total control of the government; others wanted a multiethnic coalition government. Paba decided to shut off immigration from Laba for the time being, except for a few "Paleo-Pabaps" that were suffering from famines in their ancient homeland. Pabaps were becoming worried about being trampled in their own capital city. Yet they still had total control not only of their own coastline, but also the coastlines of every nation to the east of them, and quite a few to the west. They decided to cement this control by passing a law stating that the only navy allowed eastward of Nama was the Pabap Navy (Vaapami). They threatened war on any nation that did not comply with this rule, even if they had been previously an ally of Paba. They then told the Tarpabap diplomats that they had been extremely generous for hundreds of years, and in fact that they had allowed Tarpabaps representation in government so long as they converted to the Yiibam religion, but that they were now shutting down this system as well, saying that the Tarpabaps had been unfaithful to Yīa (the god of Yiibam) and that many of them were not even pretending to believe in Yīa. They even threatened the Andanese, who had previously been immune to Paba's religious doiscrimination laws.

Tarpabaps were upset. They had a strong majority in the army, and considered erupting a civil war against the ruling but largely weaponless Pabaps in the city center. But they still had a strong cultural taboo against killing small people, and Pabaps were still very small compared to Tarpabaps as there had been almost no intermarriage. In fact, they had become slightly smaller over time since the ones marrying out tended to be taller than average, and because of a small amount of blending with the Andanese. Average adult male Pabaps were belly-high to chest-high measured against adult male Tarpabaps, about the same as an average Tarpabap 9-year-old. This is the main reason why Tarpabaps were so overrepresented in the army to begin with. For the time being, the Tarpabaps worked out an agreement not to seek power in Paba even by nonviolent means so long as the Pabaps would pay them money to fix their economy and also let the Tarpabaps open holes in the naval shield so they could carry on independent trade without relying on the Pabap ships.

Still, the Pabaps realized that they had a problem with their army. Their standing army was now almost entirely non-Pabaps: it was about 80% Tarpabaps, and the rest mostly Andanese. There were actually far more Pabaps living over the border in Subumpam now than in Paba itself, but those Pabaps were increasingly loyal to Subumpam rather than Paba, despite maintaining their religion. They contemplated the radical idea of dissolving their army, becoming entirely undefended on land, even though they knew that the last country that had voted to dissolve its army (1950's Subumpam) was immediately invaded and conquered for more than a hundred years. They figured that this could work if they could find a trustworthy nation to defend them, in return for an alliance at sea. But Pabaps did not want to submit to Nama, as they had survived several disastrous wars that Nama fought in right on their borders without themselves suffering any significant damage. They also contemplated ending themselves altogether by marrying into Tarpabap families and essentially handing over their power. But this would put them at odds with the many Pabap minorities that had settled other nations, and at risk of losing the alliance with Nama. Even the Tarpabaps realized this, and had long preferred the face of their diplomats to be Pabaps. They also contemplated splitting the army into sections corresponding to each geographical area of Paba. Previously, they had deliberately blended everyone together so that there would be no possibility of religious or sectional infighting in their army. This had always worked well. The capital city of Paba, Biospum, was located in the state of Yakīs, for example, and if Yakīs had its own army, there would be no possibility of Yakīsian Pabaps being attacked by foreigners serving in their army. They could then dwindle the proportions of the non-Pabap areas of their state without significant objections from those areas. But they did not want to disrupt a system that seemed for the time being to do well. And so the Pabaps held off on making any changes to their army, while publically telling their soldiers that they would in the future try to bring more Pabaps into the army, and more Tarpabaps into the navy, and might decide to split the army along geographical lines.

Shift of power

A famine swept Paba in the 2500s, and showed the people that the navy was the true source of Paba's power, as it was only the navy that could bring in food from the tropical areas of the Star Empire. Even though the Pabaps had decided to fully embrace the Tarpabaps as true allies now due to the famine's stress on both of them, they could not help their innate tendency to give more aid to fellow Pabaps, and some Tarpabaps starved. Tarpabaps required more food to survive even proportionally to their much higher body weight, so a meal for each Tarpabap had to be four times the size of a meal for a Pabap. This led to very painful social conflict, since almost all of the people delivering food were Pabaps, but 93% of the food was delivered to non-Pabaps, with almost all of that going to Tarpabaps. They did deliver the food, but charged high prices which bankrupted the Tarpabaps and left them wondering if they would be better off moving overseas as slaves than remaining in Paba where a year's worth of wages bought them only enough food for a week.

Thus, to escape the famine, Pabaps and Tarpabaps together immigrated into Lobexon under the impression that Lobexon would not suffer famines. Pabaps living in Lobexon now were an unquestioned upper class, above even the slavemasters, though the standard of living of everyone in Lobexon now was far worse than it had been 500 years earlier. Paba had now gone a full 900 years without a war, and its population had kept expanding throughout all of this time and its navy extended its reach now throughout the entire east coast of the continent, and much of the west. THus Paba controlled most of the world's trade.

The Vegetable War

During the Vegetable War, Paba was invaded by the impoverished nation of Litila. Litila had signed an alliance with Thaoa, which had always been poorer than Paba and despite a history of naval conquest, had been trapped on land by the powerful Pabap navy for hundreds of years. But the invasion came from the tiny and aggressive nation of Litila, as Thaoa had become too frightened to even agree to participate in the war.

The Vegetable War got its name because it was so destructive that people were reduced to eating vegetables after it was over, and even this was difficult due to the war tactic of poisoning the soil and water and burning forests. Paba lost most of its population, and most of the ethnic minorities moved west to Subumpam, leaving Pabaps in control of only other Pabaps, and in many ways reverting their nation to the situation it had been in a thousand years earlier as a young, poor, but once again rapidly growing empire.

Peace comes to Paba

Paba realized that Subumpam was going to be a strong military power and that it would not be happy with a previously existing treaty signed by the Subumpamese government which had promised that Subumpam would allow Paba to patrol Subumpam's entire coastline and never attempt to build a navy of its own. Although the new Merar party promised that Subumpam would be an ally of Paba, the fact that the government itself was military showed Paba that their thousand-year reign of military supremacy was now over.

Still, the Pabaps were satisfied that at least Subumpam did not force the Pabaps to abolish the treaty entirely. They merely divided the world into two hemispheres: one for Subumpam, one for Paba. Subumpam took naval control of their own coastline and everything to the west of it, including the hot moist tropical rainforests of Lobexon where many Pabaps lived. Paba was granted control of its coastline and everything to the east of it, including the islands of Laba from which both the Pabaps and the Merar had come. Both nations were still dependent on outsiders for food; for the meantime, Lobexon was the greatest supplier of food. Largely they provided Pabaps and Merari with pineapples and coconuts, since those were the foods that were best able to survive the journey across the sea; but they also exported live animals, some of which were killed upon arrival and others kept in farms to breed more of them. Since these animals also needed to be fed during the journey, the Pabaps came to subsist mostly on an unusual variety of animals sharing in common the ability to survive long journeys without food. Many of these were snakes.

Economic developments

Even though they had won the war, Paba promised its people that they would take no part in sharing the benefits of the military victory. Paba insisted that it was a pacifist nation, and had only fought in that war because they had been invaded, and that they therefore deserved no new land or money for their efforts. However, Paba of course freely allowed people who disagreed with this idea to move to Subumpam, where a military dictatorship had taken over and had made no promises other than that they would avoid slavery. Paba had gone over a thousand years without a war, and grown ever stronger during that time, and they planned to go at least another thousand years without a war in their new government.

Most of the ethnic minorities who had remained in Paba during the war moved to Subumpam soon after the war was over. This meant that almost all of the tall people had moved out now, leading Paba to consist mostly of Pabaps and Andanese, the two shortest peoples in the world. Meanwhile, the three large nations around them --- Tarwas, Meraria, and now Thaoa --- were ruled and largely populated by the tallest people in the world, averaging three times the body weight of the average adult male Pabap. (The remaining borders were with Nama, whose population in this area was nearly as tall as those others although they were a different race of people.) Even though they had won the war, Pabaps began to fear for their safety. Increasingly, Pabap diplomats visiting nations around them were laughed at and their opinions not taken seriously even by the Merar people who shared their language and religion with the Pabaps.

There was no serious threat of war for the time being, and Paba realized it could afford to significantly downsize its military to focus on cleaning up environmental problems and reestablishing agriculture. But they still worried about a war in the far future in which their soldiers would be literally crushed underfoot by their neighbors. They tried to work out an agreement with Nama, figuring that even if Nama had had a mixed history militarily they were still very strong, and had no reason to abuse any relationship with Paba.

Military realignment

The Namans who lived immediately north of Paba , known as Ihhai, happened to be taller than average, and they were mostly true Repilians, meaning that their women were far taller than their men and dominated all levels of society including the military. A female occupying force of Repilians in Paba would be a strong protection, Paba felt, against an invasion by any of the other countries around Paba. And even if this occupation force turned hostile, the Pabaps could rest in the knowledge that at least the ancient nightmare of Pabap soldiers flailing helplessly at their enemies’ leg armor had been replaced by Pabap soldiers groping desperately at Naman women’s gigantic breastplates.

In the 2710s Nama agreed to the terms of the agreement wherein Paba would allow itself to be occupied by Nama, but told Paba that they were very poor and needed these soldiers to be paid very well. Paba was also very poor, just having come out of a war that ate half of their population, and so they did not have the money to hire a large force of Repilian women to patrol the streets of Paba at this time. Thus although both parties agreed to the arrangement, they also agreed it would be better for both countries to focus on trade and rebuilding their economies for the time being instead of worrying about stopping potential far-future military invasions. Nevertheless, a few Repilians moved into Paba at their own behest, expecting no money for their service since they were not specifically asked to come. This had happened before, mostly in the 1900s when Nama was shipping heavy furniture and weapons from Repilia through Paba to get to the seacoast more quickly, but these Repilians had been mostly eliminated during the early stages of the Vegetable War, even before the crabs attacked, because they had originally intended to fight for Nama and Paba was at that time insisting that it would stay neutral.

Most of these women did jobs involving heavy lifting and reaching long distances, since htey were much stronger than the native Pabap men and even stronger than some of the ethnic minorities who had chosen to remain in Paba. They turned out to be generally good at fishing expeditions once taught the basics of how to move at sea. At first the male Pabaps were embarrassed to meet women who could lift them out of their boats and carry them off if they so desired, but they came to see each other as friends and Paba as a whole began to see itself as a feminine nation, in contrast to the violent, unstable masculine nations around it. They thus aligned themselves even more closely with Nama, and with FILTER, which had started a raging war in the interior that even turned Feminist armies against each other. Whereas Paba wanted to go 1000 years without a war, it seemed that FILTER's strongly female-led society wanted to go 1000 years without making peace with any of the nations they were fighting against.

Paba was more friendly to an army of frighteningingly violent women than an army of frighteningly violent men, but preferred peace to both. They signed a pact with FILTER but did not allow FILTER to actually occupy Paba, either on the mainland or the coast, while still retaining that privilege for Repilia, a much more peaceful Feminist tribe. By this time, the Crystal army had been a strong ally of FILTER for several hundred years, although they did not consider themselves to have merged, and Paba was worried that its Crystal minority could turn violent in the future if FILTER told them to. FILTER had no problems with attacking Feminists, it seemed; indeed most of their battles were fought in Nama against tribes whom the Pabaps had previously wanted to make an alliance with. Many of these tribes had submitted peacefully at first and then been attacked when one of their leaders disobeyed a commandment from the FILTER supranational government.

Paba finds a purpose

Paba decided that perhaps they could no longer be the world's strongest military power, or even the world's strongest naval power. And they realized that perhaps they simply were destined to be ruled by people much taller than their own, whether they be an all-male occupying force from Tarwas or an all-female one from Nama. But, they figured, Paba could still be #1 in other ways. The new government of Paba decided to use the new time freed up by cutting the military to become the world's foremost educational power. For the first time, they promised, the entire nation would go to school. Previously, school had been a matter of how much time a child's parents could spare on their farm or workshop or wherever else they were. Thus, education was mostly for the upper class. And even this was more education than most people in the rest of the world got. But now Paba promised an entire nation of scholars, to be used for their own benefit and those of the neighboring nations above them.

As they were surrounded by nations of people much taller than themselves, Pabaps began to stereotype foreigners, even Repilians, as essentially good for manual labor only, and said that the Pabaps were destined to become the world's smartest people simply because they were too weak to be much good in any physical labor task. Since most Pabap slaves in the surrounding nations had either been killed or freed during the Vegetable War, there no was no stark counterexample of Pabaps forced into underclass positions by foreign slavelords while the Pabap royal family looked up happily and sent the slavelords cart after cart of even more slaves.

This new ralignment also led to an increase of Pabaps moving to Nama. Previously, Pabaps had essentially settled every nation around them except Nama, because Nama derived most of its wealth and power from tropical nations around it while the center of Naman territory had become a military powerhouse but remained materially poor. But now Pabaps wanted to live in Nama to put their newfound education to good use, whether it be helping Nama run its own government or more concrete ideas such as figuring out the best places to put roads in the Naman highlands. Pabaps in these areas married readily into the tribes they settled among, and in the eyes of many, ceased being Pabaps since Pabaps now were willing to learn foreign languages and put Pabappa behind them. By 2856 with little opposition Pabaps had peopled themselves all over the cold Naman highlands, and their common language was Khulls rather than Pabappa. They thus helped Nama's most deprived region unify itself under a common banner and improve its strength both economically and militarily. A ring of Naman states including Maimp, Kava, and Litila, all became strongly tied to Paba now, and although Nama would not allow them to formally become part of Paba, with their military alliance Paba had managed to completely encircle Subumpam on land.

Paba-Qoqendoq relations

At teh end of the Vegetable War, Paba's army had occupied not only Thaoa, but also a series of countries that Thaoa itself had previously colonized. The warmest of these, in a position geographically similar to Florida, was Qoqendoq. Qoqendoq was a stopover for people moving from Laba to Rilola or vice versa and thus was economically powerful for more than just its climate.

Many Pabaps had moved to Qoqendoq in the afterrmath of the war, hoping to escape being dominated by the Tarpabaps. Although the Tarpabaps had occupied both Thaoa and Subumpam, the situation after the war was greatly different in the two empires. In Subumpam, the native population had mostly been killed during the war, and most of these casualties were eaten alive by crabs. The conquering Tarpabaps found Subumpam barely habitable but chose to settle there and marry Subumpamese women. They thus made Subumpam their new home, and most made no attempt to ever reconnect with their families back home in Paba. Thus the Tarpabap population of Paba had lost an entire generation of males, and dropped quickly from a 60% majority before the war to little more than 5% a generation after it had ended. However, they had been pulled in both directions. When the Tarpabaps took over Thaoa and its colonies, they also mostly wanted to settle down and make Thaoa their new homeland. The native Thaoan women were happy to be rescued but found intimate relationships difficult due to problems of anatomy. Moreover, the Thaoan male population had been scarcely touched by the war, and was not happy to see men three times their size moving an and flirting with their women. However the Tarpabaps nevertheless married Thaoan women and became Thaoans themselves. Often, these women were of aboriginal tribes who tended to be taller than the people in the lowlands who formed the majority. Others, however, did neither of these things, and instead boated back to Paba to reunite with their families, and found that their wives had in almost every case remained single and were happy to see their husband still alive. These families then moved back to Thaoa. This was possible because Thaoa shared a land border with the part of Paba where most of these families lived, whereas Subumpam was on the other side and was much more difficult to reach.

Since Qoqendoq was the furthest of the Thaoan colonies, it had the least settlement from the occupying Tarpabap army. Moreover it had had a significant Pabap minority even before the Vegetable War. So although they had a hard time pronouncing the name, Pabaps began moving from Paba to Qoqendoq in ever greater numbers hoping to build the world a second Paba in a safer area. Qoqendoq's 20 states were in combined area about the same as Paba's 39 states, and had a slightly milder climate, and due to the influence of global warming the new well-educated Pabaps predicted it would eventually become tropical rainforest, although they knew that this might not happen for thousands of years.

They were distressed, however, when Paba's government declared itself pacifist, and swore off all of the access rights to the countries they had conquered, leaving Qoqendoq an independent nation as both Paba and the Tarpabap government of Thaoa had declared that they were no longer interested in Qoqendoq.

Links with Subumpam

An informal "Berry Alliance" was signed, since Subumpam was now famous for its production of cranberries and similiar fruits while Paba was famous for its production of grapes, raspberries, and strawberries. (The word was actually "small fruit", in contrast to the true tropics where pineapples and coconuts predominated.) Large animals had not yet returned to the area because for that to happen, they needed to regrow their forests and repopulate their lakes and rivers with fish. Paba rebuilt itself strongly around wine production, as wine grapes grew easily in the areas that had been burned down and the climate had been favorable for grapes all along. Since Paba had considered purple its national color for over a thousand years, the new wine industry received even more attention and pride than it otherweise would have. However, purple was associated primarily with the Yiibam religion, not with Pabaps specifically, and so was also popular in the new empire of Subumpam.

Raspberries and strawberries were also important products. The harvest of raspberries in particular was a very painful occupation, as the thorns on the raspberry bushes carved open wounds in the arms and legs of the harvest workers, which could then in turn lead to fatal microbial infections. They thus were the most highly paid agricultural workers of all, and this allowed them to rest during the remainder of the year since they had usually already made eniough money during the harvest season.

In Lobexon, which had also suffered during the vegetable War despite nominally being the winner of the war and not having had to deal with crabs, the new treaty spurred mixed emotions as they now realized they were likely all going to be slaves for the Merar in Subumpam or at best economically submissive in the sense that they would be forced to export most of their food at low prices and get little in return. Subumpam was now exporting wine, including the pricy Pabap raspberry wine, to Lobexon, but it was aimed mostly at the new settlers rather than the natives. In 2689 they formally annexed Lobexon into Subumpam, thus creating the Star Empire III.

Paba soon began to learn what it was like to be a minor power instead of a major power. With the annexation of Lobexon into Meraria, Paba realized that they would likely never control the tropics. Lobexon still had many Pabaps living in it who were now, they realized, probably all going to be enslaved. There were still tropical locations even further south than Lobexon that had not been annexed, but the treaty gave Meraria's navy control of all known land to the west of it, and that included the entire continent all the way to the equatorial jungles.

Figuring they had to turn away from their dreams of the west now, Paba busily settled southeastern nations such as Qoqendoq (which they renamed Kakamšap) hoping to put a buffer between their tiny people and the tall-people nations of Merar, Tarwas, and Thaoa. Qoqendoq was largely Pabap already, with the remainder of the population being other small people such as Andanese and a few Repilian aboriginals who were taller but more feminine than most other people. Since it was on the southeast corner of the continent, it was often the first stopover for travelers from Laba (although the very first Laban settlers had not used that route. ) THey also resettled Fox Island, which was east of Qoqendoq. They figured that since Tarpabap people had taken over Thaoa, and Qoqendoq was a subject state of Thaoa, even Qoqendoq might not be a safe haven for them for very long. They figured in the end an island might be the only place left where Pabaps could live in peace and safety. But Fox Island was already overpopulated, and the Pabaps were not looking to start yet another war even though they still did have naval supremacy.