Early history of Paba

Early settlement

Bābā (hereafter Paba) was founded in 633 AD 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 settlement on a bay in the south coast called Tamusur, meaning "by steps", as they planned to grow their settlement slowly but steadily from its base. Here, they grew rapidly northwards, killing any aboriginals they met who refused to convert to the Yiibam religion and lay down their weapons. 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.

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.)

Founding population

Paba was very ethnically diverse for its time. Near the peak of its power, only 15% of the population was ethnic Pabaps. Note that ethnicity and religion were mostly synonymous, so the concept of mixed ethnicity for the most part didn't exist. The only exceptions were such examples like the Pabaps and Tarpabaps who both mostly believed in the Yiibam religion, but did not consider themselves to be the same ethnicity because they did not intermarry with each other.

Ethnic groups

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 Paba was from its very beginning sharply divided into two major racial groups: the majority Pabaps and the minority Tarpabaps.

The Tarpabaps lived the equatorial rainforests of southern Laba, and were all very tall, thin, very dark-skinned people. They had historically survived mostly by fishing, and had a well-developed navy, but their land was flooding much more quickly than most others because it was almost entirely coastal lowlands, and the few mountains they had were inconvenient places to seek refuge from rising tides.

The Pabaps had some coastland, but mostly lived in the temperate mountains. They were quite short people, ranging from chest-high to belly-high against the Tarpabaps. They had pale pink skin, blonde hair, blue eyes, and distinct facial features. 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 Pabaps admired the Tarpabaps' large, healthy bodies, and figured they would be reliable soldiers in a war. The Tarpabaps admired the Pabaps' generosity, as all of the other settler nations nearby had ruled the Tarpabaps out of their settlements entirely. The ships kept coming, and the population of both groups increased rapidly. Pabaps remained a majority because the Tarpabap people were divided among their home nations in Laba, and only those who agreed to submit to the new plan was allowed to move to Paba. Other Tarpabap ships were permitted to use Paba's ports in Haswaraba, but not to move on from there to settle Paba.

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 appetites even for their body size, which put them at greater 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. Thus, most ethnic Pabaps did not join the military, but most Tarpabap males did.

Thus, the Pabap-Tarpabap alliance dominated early settlement of the new continent of Rilola for 860 years. 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 children 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 were called Sunflowers because they mostly had dark skin and blonde hair, at least by the definitions of those terms that Pabaps used. Sunflowers mostly married other Sunflowers, 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.)

The War of 634

The Pabaps settled many cities along the south coast of Rilola, the most important of which was Tamusur Bay (usually just called Tamusur). This was a deep bay with an abundant fish population. They found that Tamusur was already occupied by the hostile aboriginal Astyzzian people, a subtribe of the Sukuna who also lived primarily on fish and were not willing to let the Pabaps move in. The other early settlements were also preoccupied by other Sukuna tribes, but at a low enough population density that neither group saw the other as a threat, and did not even meet each other much. Other names for the Astyzzian people native to the area around Tamusur were Gê, Asetudi, Ahetùgi, Ahekuqhi, Ăheḳuki, Ahikui, Askʷ, Pasti, Basti, and Baste. All of these are actually different cognates of the same word.

The Sukuna were a very dark-skinned people, and the Pabap fishermen worried that they would be in trouble as their nation depended on the alliance of the tall dark-skinned Tarpabap people and the small light-skinned Pabap people. Pabaps worried that if the Tarpabaps chose to sympathize with the Sukuna solely based on skin color, Pabaps would be crushed.

Attempts at peace

Some Pabaps tried to make peace, but communication by human language was impossible, as the Sukuna were divided by language even amongst themselves and all of these languages had diverged more than 40000 years ago from that which was spoken by the Pabaps and Tarpabaps. The Pabap sailors had founded their new settlement without bringing any weapons, as they had not needed them before in earlier settlements along the coast or on Fox Island. They thus figured the surprisingly hostile aborigines present in Tamusur must indicate that Tamusur was of special importance to the Sukuna people, being perhaps their capital city, and that its capture would enable the Pabaps to settle the surrounding areas more easily.

As above, the Pabaps did not have weapons, whereas the Sukuna were a heavily armed people using spears, swords, and arrows to defend themselves. However, they seemed to be materially starved, as they had no body armor, and in fact no clothes at all on their bodies. Pabaps did not have armor either, but figured that since it was much easier to manufacture weapons than to manufacture armor, they could quickly catch up and perhaps even exceed the Sukuna people in military power if their peoples came to war.

Moreover, the Pabaps did have emergency weapons such as fishing spears and wood axes at their disposal. Fishing in this age was almost entirely accomplished with shallow boats and sharp spears, so anyone who fished for a living needed to make sure his spears were in excellent condition. The spears worked best when their bearer was pushing strongly downward, but against a human enemy that didn't even wear clothes, any sharp-tipped weapon could be fatal. Thus the Pabap troop decided to attack the Sukuna living in Tamusur Bay, offering any Pabaps who didn't want to fight the opportunity to board a boat and sail to the east or west, both of which seemed to be much more peaceful despite being materially not greatly different than Tamusur.

Early on, the Pabaps and the Tarpabaps had agreed that since Tarpabaps were so much taller and stronger than Pabaps, they should be at the forefront of the army, with Pabaps restricted to less dangerous roles away from most of the combat. The Pabap leaders were thus upseet when the Tarpabap leaders told them they would not participate in any war against the Sukuna people, saying that they preferred peaceful cohabitation even if it meant that Paba would never control Tamusur. This left Paba the choice of backing down from their war plans after all, or going to war alone against the taller, better-armed, and likely far more numerous Sukuna people all around them.

They decided to choose war, as most of the Pabaps who had preferred peace had already left Tamusur to live along the outlying coastal areas to the east and west. Those people had founded the settlements of Poppempa (west) and Panta (east), meaning that these settlements were actually slightly older than Tamusur.

The Pabap military leadership figured that the Sukuna could not possibly consist of just a single nation running all across the southern coast of Rilola, or even just the area of that coast that had been colonized by Pabaps. Although they realized that communication with the Sukuna was hopeless, they held off on declaring war just so they could send peaceful diplomats to the areas around them to see if the Sukuna had any enemies that would be willing to help Paba in its war. They thus discovered Nama before most of the other groups did. However, the part of Nama that they reached was uninterested in them, and many of the Pabap diplomats had lost their lives while trying to communicate. The survivors returned to Tamusur and told the Pabap army to attack the Sukuna immediately, saying that all of the nations nearby seemed likely to be further enemies of Paba, and that if they delayed their war any longer they would simply be obliterated by a wider alliance.

Declaration of war

The first battle was fought in the summer of 634. The Pabaps still did not have sturdy weapons, as they had no natural resources to build weapons other than wood, which was scarce, and they did not want to alarm their fellow colonists by asking them for weapons from Laba, knowing that all of the other colonies had so far expanded itself without the need to resort to a war. They took heart in the fact that the Sukuna living around Tamusur, despite being heavily armed, seemed technologically backward by comparison to the peoples they had observed in the aboriginal nations around them, suggesting that perhaps Tamusur was not the capital at all, but an impoverished, isolated settlement hated by even the other aboriginals.

The Tamusurian Pabaps had spent their first year mostly at sea. Since the Sukuna people would not let them set foot on Sukuna land, they had the choice of staying permanently offshore (there were some small islands that they could build forts on), or hiding out in thickly wooded areas just outside Tamusur that the Sukuna could not easily reach. Most chose the second option, and the Pabaps came to admire the protection that the dense forests around Tamusur gave them. Even the grass here was mostly much taller than a human height, and the Pabap settlements in the forest were thus literally invisible. Still, they needed to return to the sea frequently, since the forests in this area had been recently hunted to the point that fruits were the only available food for humans. The Sukuna's boats were essentially only good for fishing, and Paba realized that they could bump the Sukuna boats with their much larger cargo ships and thus destroy their way of life without having to kill any Sukuna, and thus without having to risk the lives of any Pabap soldiers.

Battle of Tamusur

The Pabaps realized that Tamusur Bay was an ideal shape for staging a naval blockade, only four miles wide for most of its length. Thus a blockade that could hold down the immediate coast could also hold down the entirety of the bay. The Battle of Tamusur began when Pabap cargo ships surrounded the Sukuna fishing boats and began pushing them back towards the beaches. Generally, any time a Sukuna boat hit the bumper of one of the ships, it was capsized immediately and the fishermen were usually pushed under the ship to drown. Thus the Battle of Tamusur began as no battle at all: it was simply Pabap sailors playing bumper cars with wholly unprepared enemies. The second stage of the battle occurred when the Sukuna who had survived rowed back to shore and alrted teh population of Tamusur what was happening.

The Pabaps had hoped the Sukuna people would surrender and let Paba take over Tamusur peacefully. But the Sukuna were unwilling to surrender, because they also knew that their forests had been stripped of their edible animal life, and that the sea was their only source of food. The Sukuna army marched out of their town and reached the beaches of Tamusur's southern coast, waving their arms at the distant Pabap ships in the hopes that they would hit the beach and be massacred by the Sukuna.

But although the Pabap sailors did bring weapons on board their ships, they were expecting the attack to come from inland. The SUkuna response of moving its army to the very edge of the shore had been unexpected, as it seemingly left the city of Tamusur itself entirely unprotected. They figured that some people in Tamusur would have weapons with them, perhaps for hunting, but they were pleased to see that their strategy of having the Pabap army roar down the hills around Tamusur and attack the Sukuna in their streets had suddenly gained an enormous advantage.

The Pabap army knew what was happening at sea even though they couldnt see it because they had previously communicated with the Pabap Navy on what day and at what time of day the events were going to happen. In early afternoon they thus marched out from under the flowers in their hilly hideouts and entered the city of Tamusur. They had expected the Tamusurian army to meet them perhaps halfway up the hill, but they saw no army at all before them, as the army had moved itself to the coastline expeecting the Pabaps to attack from there.

At first, the Pabaps were uncomfortable killing civilians. But they saw that the Tamusur civilians indeed did own weapons, and they were good ones for attacking humans. Thus the Pabaps did not consider their battle unfair at all, and lost many men in their battle. Moreover, they realized that the real Sukuna army would be after them before long.

The Sukuna population of Tamusur was about 22000, very large for its time. The Pabap colonists in and around Tamusur numbered only about 7000, but nearly the entire adult population among that 7000 had been militarized, as the pacifists had moved away and the Pabaps who fished the ocean depended on what had become the new Pabap Navy to get around.

The 4000 soldiers that entered Tamusur in the afternoon killed about 6500 Sukuna civilians, most of whom were women and children since the male population consisted almost entirely of fishermen or soldiers, both of whom were currently trapped on Tamusur Beach. The Pabap soldiers realized that even if they were later forced to retreat from Tamusur, the Sukuna nation of Tamusur was effectively dead, as it no longer had a significant female population to grow from. They knew that a few women were still hiding out in the city, but that they would be even weaker than those that had fought back, and would likely starve to death now that their food supply had been shut off. Meanwhile, the Pabap army set about occupying their city, and meeting up with the Pabap Navy just offshore.

The Pabap Army had two potential supply routes now: a difficult one back through the woodlands to their west, the site of the future settlement of Supi, and the direct route from the southern shore of the city of Tamusur to the Pabap Navy in its harbors. The only problem was that the Tamusur Sukuna army was still occupying that shore, still thinking that they were going to face an attack from the cargo ships.

Treaty of Tamusur

Most of the ordinary Pabap fishermen who had been expecting to be fighting a naval battle had slipped between the bumpers of the larger Pabap cargo ships now, and circled around to SUpi figuring they would soon be needed to deliver food to the Pabaps on the mainland if nothing else. This was only a distance of a few miles, and thus word of the unexpectedly easy conquest of downtown Tamusur had spread to the rump society of Pabaps (mostly women and children) still hiding out in the woods. These fishermen thus temporarily joined the army, figuring they would be needed for combat after all, but would be attacking from the north instead of the south. These people were all wearing blue and yellow clothes, which was significant because their presence in the city center would show the Sukuna that they were civilians.

The blue-and-yellow soldiers reached the southern shore of Tamusur, having killed only a few Sukuna people on their way down and losing none of their own. They were very well-armed now, as they had taken the few weapons that had been found in the city center as their own and did not generally have a problem wielding these new weapons. They brought a small number of captured Sukuna people with them, figuring that these would likely be the children and wives of the soldiers stationed at the beach. A few tied-up children were nailed to a wooden sign that the Pabaps had carried with them after they chopped it down. THey brought these children down to the beach as well, figuring that if the Sukuna soldiers saw their children being tortured by Pabaps they would be more likely to surrender without a fight.

However, the sight of the bleeding, crying children nailed to wooden boards and the Pabap soldiers kicking and slapping them to make their pain even worse told the Sukuna that Pabaps were unlikely to respect any surrender treaty. They realized that they had been outsmarted and were likely to lose their fight against the Pabaps, but figured that they had no purpose left in life but to do their best to avenge the murders of their wives and children. Acting as one, they made a desperate rush up the beach to meet the Pabap army. This was the third and final stage of the battle, and the only stage where Pabaps lost their men in proportionate numbers to the other side. But even so, there were only 5200 Sukuna soldiers on the beach, plus an additional 2000 fishermen who had been trapped on the beach with them, and they were mostly very hungry as their food supply had been destroyed. This against the new expanded army of 6000 Pabaps who were mostly better-armed was no fair fight. The Pabap army was willing to lose many bodies in this fight as they now considered victory to mean the death of the entire Sukuna population of Tamusur. Of the 6000 Pabaps, 3500 were dead by the time the last Sukuna resistor was finally killed.

The Pabaps declared their war over, having fought only one battle. They signed the Treaty of Tamusur with the other Pabap settlements around them, stating that Tamusur was now a Pabap city, and owned all of the land in the city of Tamusur plus all of the territory about 10 miles inland in all directions, except where previous Pabap settlements such as Poppempa had already expanded. The reason why they signed a treaty with other Pabaps instead of the Sukuna is because they still did not speak any Sukuna languages, and could not communicate to the Sukuna tribes living outside Tamusur what had happened. Sukuna people from other nations soon appeared at Tamusur's borders, confused as to where the people they'd expected to see had gone. Pabaps had to no way explain themselves, and did not even know if the surrounding Sukuna tribes would be angry, as they had still suspected all along that the Tamusurian Sukuna had been hostile to the other Sukuna, though perhaps not hostile enough that the other tribes would accept complete genocide and replacement by an alien people from across the ocean as an improvement. Many other blonde people had moved into the other Sukuna nations, but only the Pabaps had forced their way in through war.

Once the war was over, many of the Tarpabap people who had abandoned the Pabaps earlier moved back into Tamusur. The Treaty of Tamusur had forbidden them to move back, since they had refused to fight while thousands of Pabaps had died trying to secure the city, but the treaty did not prevent other Tarpabaps from moving in, and the "coward" Tarpabaps simply blended in with these. Likewise, some of the pacifistic Pabaps of Poppempa and Panta also moved into Tamusur.

Early outreach and trade

After the new nation of Paba had finalized its new borders, the Pabap royal family looked around for potential allies. Even though they had just destroyed the aboriginal Sukuna population of Tamusur, the Pabaps believed that their likeliest allies in their new homeland would be the aboriginals that still lived in the areas around them. They still held to their belief that Tamusur had been a nation and not merely a city within some other nation, and that it may have been a particularly aggressive one towards ints neighbors.

Tamusur was bordered by rivers on both the east and west; along the south coast, the two rivers almost run together. They thus were in a good position to defend themselves from attacks if their plans to make peace with the surrounding aboriginals went bad.

The other aboriginal Sukuna nations were accustomed to trading with what had been Tamusur, and although fighting amongst the Sukuna was well known they were unfamiliar with the idea of total war and thus could not imagine that the Pabaps really had wiped out the entire preexisting nation. As above, many other blonde colonists had moved into the Sukuna nations, and all of the other ones had been peaceful, so the Pabaps were able to claim that their migration had also been peaceful.

The Sukuna thus did not greatly fear the Pabaps, and many Sukuna people moved into Paba and married Pabap women. Once in Paba they hurriedly created a pidgin language called Ŋititina that was mostly verbal but relied on more hand gestures than a typical human language and thus could not be written down. THere were actually two pidgin languages, one for the Sukuna who moved into Paba from the east (known as Kăha, from earlier Kătʲa) and one for the Sukuna who moved into Paba from the west (known as Gaʕ or Gâ, from earlier Bʲàda). However, settlement from the east soon dominated, even though the east side of the divide was poorer. The Ŋititina people imported a type of very sweet wine into Paba, and showed the Pabaps how to grow grapes. In return the Pabaps showed the Ŋititina and the other Sukuna people how to sew clothes.

Kăha-Paba relations

The Kăha people were the first tribe of aboriginals to meet the Pabaps after the Treaty of Tamusur. As above, although Paba had decisively won its war against the Astyzzians, Paba's able bodied adult population was now more than 80% female, and was unprepared to fight another war. In fact, the males of Kaha outnumbered the males of Paba, at least those that were in Tamusur and outlying areas connected to Tamusur. Since most of the surviving men were engaged in fishing or hunting, the city of Tamusur during the day almost enreily female. Although many of these were war widows, others had never been married. Kaha's government saw this as a weakness and considered an invasion. They figured that the Kaha army, even if it lacked modern weaponry and armor, could easily defeat Paba's all-female society and take over the city before the few males in Paba had an opportunity to react. However, most Kaha men were more interested in love than war, and many Kaha men moved into Paba and married young Pabap women. They learned Pabappa, but mostly spoke a pidgin language called Ŋititina, as they were primarily interested in trading with their home nation of Kaha, where people only spoke Kaha, rather than trying to enter and compete in the Pabap fishing culture.

As they moved about Paba, however, they realized that the Pabaps really had killed off the entire preexisting nation, and were interested in growing still further. Kaha did not want the Pabaps moving into Kaha territory, even peacefully, so they made Paba's royal family sign a treaty ruling Pabaps out of Kaha, threatening invasion if they did not agree. They also warned that the Kaha people already living in Paba, though currently mostly unarmed, could easily find weapons and help the invaders if an invasion were to occur. Most Kaha living in Paba were already married to Pabap women, however, and Kaha realized that in the event of an invasion they would almost certainly fight on the side of their wives.

Thus they remained outwardly friendly, continuing acticely to trade with Paba and to use Pabap boats to fish and to explore other areas of the coastline. It seemed that Paba was for the most part content to let Kaha keep control of its territory east of the Epa River, but Kaha realized they needed to accept that their pacifism might be only due to a recognition that they were poorly equipped for a war. Many more Pabaps were immigrating into Tamusur, seemingly from Laba, and these were replenishing Paba's lost population. Even those boats that had been built on Laba seemed never to leave once they reached Paba, becoming part of the Pabap navy which was curling its way around the coast in both directions. Furthermore, Paba seemed to be ever more friendly towards their neighbor to the west, which they had renamed Nasa, and worried that Paba had managed to convince an aboriginal nation to be a full partner in a new military alliance against Kaha.

Biada-Paba relations

To the west of Paba stood the nation of Biada. Originally, they had been called Gâ, but because this was a homophone of the word for "pineapple", the name was reborrowed from the native language, in which it had changed little. Biada was a much smaller and weaker nation than Kaha, and its people were more willing to learn Pabappa and live in harmony with Pabaps instead of trying to compete with them. However, their territory had little room to expand, as all of the land around htem was already occupied by other Sukuna tribes, and Paba seemed intent on growing its Tamusur colony north faster than Biada could. Paba's eastward expanstion had been thwarted by Kaha, which meant that the Pabaps were looking at expanding west instead. Biada did not attempt to stop Pabaps from immigrating into Biada, and actually hoped that Pabaps would soon become the majority in Biada since the Pabaps seemed to have lost their interest in fighting for the time being.

Subumpam-Paba relations

About 60 miles west of Tamusur bay, another nation had been founded in a very similar bay. This nation callied itself Pipaippis. Its speakers were only distantly related to Pabaps, but spoke a related language. Their religion was also very different from that of Paba. To outsiders, however, the two groups were oftne confused, because their people almost all had blonde hair and very light skin, which set them apart from the very dark aboriginal groups that they had settled among. Pipaippis was the cradle of the later empire of Subumpam.

Unlike Paba, Subumpam fought no war when it first arrived. They stayed along the coast and fished the bay, growing their population through immigration only. They married many of the aboriginal SUkuna people, who partly overlapped with the Biada tribe, but stronmgly pressured the aboriginals to convert to the Subumpamese religion, called Sisnasi. The aboriginal tribes in Pipaippis were the Biada as mentioned above, who were found to the east, the Umba, who were found to the north and west, and the Tĭli further west and around the convex, almost circular coast to the southwest. Previously, their territory had been essentially owned only by the Umba, but the Subumpamese learned their languages and told the surrounding tribes that all of them were welcome in the new nation, not just the Umba. Still, these tribes had little in common despite being in close proximity to each other for thousands of years, and mostly kept to themselves unless they married into a Subumpamese family or converted to Sisnasi.

Nik-Paba relations

A new settler community arrived around 670 AD. The Nik were a very tall, dark skinned people from the west coast of Laba, an area which had been deprived of sea access in the preceding decades but was, all in all, better prepared than most of Laba to reach Rilola because northwest was the direction they needed to sail. However, their nation on Laba was small, and relatively few Nik people moved over. On Rilola, they founded a colony in southwestern Paba, and took their land from the aboriginal Biada people, who were now living in a state that Pabaps called Nasa and considered to be a part of Paba. (The name "Tamusur" had been revived for the original borders of Paba.) Like Paba, the Nik preferrred to live by fishing the coast, and were relatively less interested in settling inland. Thus the aboriginal Biada people did not, at first, see the new Nik colony as a threat. The Niks called their new nation Niklas.

However, Paba immedaitely declared war on the Nik, as Paba's male population had recovered since the Treaty of Tamusur, and Paba had assumed the duty of protecting Nasa, including its coastline. They saw the new state of Niklas as an occupationg of southern Nasa. Moreover, Paba's infant navy had already mostly encircled Nasa, and in all honesty considered the Nik invasion of Nasa to be more of an attack on Paba than on Nasa. They knew that in this war, mostly Pabaps would die, not Biada, because the Biada people were mostly hunters living inland and many of them openly admitted they did not object to the presence of the Nik. Furthermore, this area is also where most of the pacifistic Pabaps who had refused to fight in Tamusur had fled to, and their children were mostly of the same mind as their parents and grandparents. Thus Paba knew it could not count on even its own people to put up a competent fight against the invaders. However, they hoped that most of the fighting would be done at sea, since the Nik could not build a city on the mainland without first breaching through the Pabap Navy.

This was the first war in which Paba realiszed the height gap between the Pabaps and all of the other peoples could actually be an advantage. At sea, they needed far less food than the Nik and could thus fit a far larger crew on their boats. However, it was also a disadvantage, more so the closer the range of the combat. Pabaps had happily absorbed the various tribes of Sukuna people, who were taller than Pabaps but still marriably compatible. The Nik, however, were often three times the body weight of Pabaps and on land Pabaps imagined their soldiers getting run right through as they flailed ftantically against their enemies' leg armor.

On the other hand, the Nik had been aware of the existence of small people like Pabaps for a long time, and had specifically chosen to settle in Paba because they figured they would have an easy time getting in. They were not expecting a war and had not prepared for one. Howveer, it seemd as though Paba was not willing to cohabitate peacefully with the Nik colonists, so the Nik military leaders ordered their people to war.

The Fish War

Paba launched the Fish War by sending its land army down the hills of Nasa to attack the few Nik colonies that had been built there. The Pabap soldiers were frightened when they realized how large the inhabitants of these colonies were, and at first mistook them for Tarpabaps, even though the Tarpabaps have different facial features. But because these settlers were unarmed, they were a fairly even match, man for man, against the aggressive and heavil y armed Pabaps. Most of the Nik people died of stab wounds in their bellies or thighs from the Pabaps' spears. However, Paba was weak because its people did not have proper armor. Previously, they had lived mostly amongst nudists, to whom the very concept of armor was foreign, and even though their weapon technology had improved greatly in 70 years they were essentially unprotected apart from the practice of using a bladed weapon to block another bladed weapon. Thus, Pabap soldiers bled to death from wounds caused by stones and wooden beams that the Nik people hit them with in self defense. A few Nik people owned wood axes, as lumber was the main industry on land due to the need to build many new houses for the settlers. Also, some Nik soldiers simply took the Pabaps' weapons away from them, braving the risk of injuryas they grabbed the bladed end of the weapon and pulled it away. This brave military tactic was called embarrassment.

First battle

Paba had sent an army of 1400 soldiers down to attakc the Nik, holding many more in reserve. Of these 1400 soldiers, 850 were killed in combat, and the others surrendered and agreed to become slaves for the Nik. The Nik people had also lost a lot, but the settlements remained because, like Pabap cities, the adult males in Nik society were largely in the water at the time of the attack. The males that the Pabaps had killed had largely been working in the lumber industry, and were actually very well-armed, and some Pabap soldiers decided it was better to run away than to attempt to fight them. Thus, after the first battle, the male population of Nik had largely still survived, whereas Paba's army had been completely destroyed. Therefore the battle was a victory for the Niks even though they had come to battle with no weapons.

Naval encirclement

However, Paba planned its main attack to be a naval one. Mirrorring the stategry that they had had in the last war, they decided to send their largest ships along the coast of Nasa to bump the Nik fishing boats around in an attempt to capsize them and force the fisherment into the water. The water was deep here, and the chances of a capsize victim escpaing drowning were even lower than they had been at Tamusur. They scored many easy victories without their naval soldiers coming to any harm. They knew that, unlike the Sukuna, the Nik had a navy of their own, althouigh it was very small, consisting essentially only of cargo ships that doubled as settler ships. And likewise, since Pabaps were living in Nasa too, their own fisherment could come under threat from the Nik navy. Their government had warned the Pabap fishermen to stay out of the water, but Nasa was more than nine times the size of Tamusur, and its coastline was more than 20 times the length of Tamusur's. Thus with their primitive technology the message largely did not get out, and the Nik navy responded to the attacks on their people by counterattacking the Pabap fishermen all along the coast. When paba realized waht was happeninbg, they knew they needed to confront the Nik navy directly instead of focuing on weak targets. They disembarked most of their sailors, as they knew that they probably would lose most of their ships and thus most of their crew, and set sail patrolling the coast of Nasa for any enemy ships.

As above, even against the much larger Nik navy, the most prominent form of naval warfare was no more than bumping enemy ships around in an attempt to street them into a rock or another sharp oject. Since the ships were made of wood, each crew would attempt to throw flaming torches at the bottoms of the other shipos as well, knowing that the crew would not be able to put out the flames. Because Paba had decamped most of its crew, its ships were now much slower than the Nik ships, which was a disadvantage in a bumper battle. But they outnumbered the Nik ships by more than 3 to 1, and within five days they had eleiminated all of the Nik's watercraft, both large and small, and thus pushed all of the Nik survivors onto land. Here, they planned to entrap them by cutting off their fish supply from the south and pushing into their cities with a renewed invasion from the north that would also cut off their access to hunting land.

The Pabap military commanders were unsure about their chances of success. They had eliminated the Nik navy, which meant that Pabaps now once again had unrestricted rule of the seacoast and a reliable supply of food. But they knew a land war would be extremely difficult, and would almost certainly lead to attacks on Pabap civilian settlements, as mobilizing the entire Pabap army would mean leaving Pabap's villages in Nasa entirely undefended and with a mostly female population.

Stalemate attempt

The Pabap military leaders pleaded with King Pisfabbaim Paptupa to allow them to surrender to the Nik, or at least work out a peace treaty that would enable the two sides to try to frogive each other for the many recent killings. The king was shocked at the idea of Paba wanting to surrender in a war in which Paba had fought only two battles, one of which was a decisive victory.

A meeting was set up. The Nik commander said that his people had wanted peace all along, and had settled in Paba because they had heard it was a peaceful kingdom that welcomed outsiders while being itself safe from outside attacks. They were taken off guard by the unexpected attack, though, and could not simply ignore the many Nik soldiers and civilians that had been killed by the Pabaps. THe commander said that the Niks now wanted the Pabaps to get completely out of Nasa, including the navy along the coastline, leaving it as a kingdom for Nik people and Biada people only, with the Biada understood to be mostly inland. Since Nasa was nine times the size of Paba, even the pacifist Pabaps could not agree to this, although they realized that if such an agreement were evnetually forced upon them, the Pabaps could at least likely take shelter amongst the Biada people so long as the Nik people were not also living among them.

Paba argued that its people had the moral high ground because they were the ones who had been invaded, and that their attacks on the Niks were in self defense. The Nik counterargument was that their settlements were not invasions because even though they had settled in Pabap territory, the local peoples of the areas they had settled in, both the Pabaps and the Biadas, had welcomed them and claimed no loyalty to the aggressive Pabap navy.

Paba figured it still had the upper hand militarily because of its naval superiority. They held back on attacking the Niks on land now, because they knew that the Niks had only a small amount of land to themselves, and would likely run out of food if they could not quikcly build boats and reliably sneak back to the coast to catch more fish before being caught by the Pabap Navy. Paba also tightened security on its western border with Nasa, as they wanted to prevent news of the new war from reaching Kăha, as the only path between Kaha and Nasa was through Paba, and they didnt want Kaha to team up with the Niks. However, they knew that Kaha's intimate contact with Paba over the past two generations would make a true full scale invasion from Kaha unlikely, as the Kaha people in Paba would not take up arms against their own wives. Still, they worried that Kaha was growing suspicious of Paba, as Paba had essentially monopolized war since their founding, and figured that kaha could panic enough to delcare war even on the Kahans living in Paba if it seemed the only sure way to save Kaha itself.

Thus the Pabap Navy attempted to maintain a blockade of all of Nasa, cutting off the supply of fish to the mainland or at least making it more risky for Nik people to attempt to build fishing boats. They also had a softer blockade in the north, in the sense that it was not depriving Nik society of anything crucial for survival, but was attempting to prevent them from pushing their way northward into the territory held by Pabaps. In effect, the Pabap Army had ceded the Niks control of a huge amount of land, almost the size of the entire state of Tamusur. This was because the Nik settlements were spread out and the Pabap Army was unwilling to approach them closely for fear that Nik hunters would attack the Pabap military camps and try to cut off Paba's own food supply.

Meanwhile, the Nik commander would not back down. He stated that he had no rpoblem with Pabaps in general, and pointed out that some Nik people were now fleeing directly into Pabap territory, into cities such as Poppempa, Peplap, Lempa, and Sitsi. The Pabaps living there were willing to shelter them and protect them from harm. This was possible because the Nik settlements were so spread out that there were Pabap settlements mixed between them. These were all on the coast, and so generally were not affected by Paba's naval blockade, because their boats were exempt from the blockade. Thus the Pabap settlements in Niklas had a stable food supply and that helped the Niks who moved there survive.

Niks move to Pabap cities

As the stalemate wore on, more and more Nik people moved into the Pabap cities along the south coast of Niklas, and soon there were more Niks living in Pabap cities than in the Nik cities or the wilderness. Some Niks also grabbed Pabap families and put them to work fishing the coast in majority-Nik settlements, so that the Niks in those settlements would have a food source and not need to rely on supply routes from the other towns. Thus Pabaps now lived wherever Niks lived and Niks lived wherever Pabaps lived. Niks said now that they had defeated Paba's naval blockade, bexcause they were sure that Paba's navy would not deny food to the Pabaps living there just to also kill off the Niks. Paba considered forcing the Pabaps to collect only enough food for themselves, hoping to encourage them to chase out the Niks, but they realized the Pabaps in these cities were largely the children of those who had become committed pacifists 35 years ago, and that even those who weren't were living amonst pacifists and had no access to weapons other than their fishing spears, whereas the Niks who had moved in with them were often soldiers well equipped to fight a war.

Some Pabap navy ships actually began trapping Pabap fishing boats and forcing them to land on islands. Earlier, Paba had offered to move the Pabap population of Niklas to northern Nasa where the Niks had not yet penetrated, but found that few agreed, because they knw that doingso would force them into the Pabap Army to fight their friends and relatives in Niklas. But now Paba was considering forcibly evacuating the Pabap towns, figuring that if only the Niks stayed behind, the starvation blockade could proceed after all. By this point, the Pabaps fishing the ocean were desperate, as they were being forced to do all the work in their society while the Niks seemingly just moved from town to town claiming they were protecting the Pabaps from the Pabaps. In reality, the Niks were doing work, but what upset the Pabap fishermen is that they were forced to feed the Niks for free, which meant that they made money only when they sold thei catch to Pabap customers or to fish markets that in turn sold it on to Pabap customers. The Nik army said that they had no money and could not change this system.

Soon the Pabaps living in the coastal towns realized that the Niks had no self-interest in continuing the war, since they were already living happily off of the Pabap civilians' hard work. They figured that the Niks could easily invade northern Nasa and claim huge areas of land, since both sides of the war knew that Paba's land army was extremely weak. The only reason this had not happened, they figured, was that the Niks had realized they preferred to sit around stealing food and household effects from Pabaps while doing nothing to earn their keep. Slowly the Pabaps began to leave their towns and board Pabap naval ships heading for Tamusur. From here, they mostly got up on horses headed back to Nasa, but to a safer northern area behind the official Pabap Army's front line. The Nik Army realized what was happening and admitted that they honestly felt bad for the struggling Pabap pacifists, but repeated that the Nik Army honestly couldnt help out because they knew the Pabap Navy would not let them in boats to fish and they could not do any ordinary work in the cities without abandoning their military positions in the hills.

Thus, perversely, some Pabaps in Niklas now began to push for the Nik Army to attack the Pabap Army solely to increase the size of Niklas and better the quality of life for both Niks and Pabaps in Niklas. But it was more common for them to simply board Pabap ships and move to northern Nasa. The Pabap Army realized that by allowing Pabaps to leave Niklas, they were helping themselves lose the war by turning over more and more territory to the Niks, but the Pabap leadership still believed that a complete blockade was possible, and would leave the Niks no choice but to surrender after all.

Meanwhile, those Pabaps who were being boated to the safe spaces in the north almost all agreed that peace was their goal, and didn't mind if it meant losing access to their old homelands in the south, or even if it meant the Pabap navy had to peel itself away from the Niks' new territory. Paba still would not agree however.

Kaha enteres the war

Meanwhile, Kăha had learned about what was going on in the west, and decided to declare war on Paba after all. But they said that they would not send soldiers to fight the Pabaps. Instead, they wanted to do humanitarian rescue messages of Pabaps, Biadans, and even Nik people who wanted a safe space to live away from thge war. They thus rescinded their previous ban on allowing Pabaps to live in Kaha, and said that all along they had only been aiming it at keeping Paba's army out of Kaha. Thus Pabaps began to move to Kaha.

Even though Kaha promised not to fight in this war, they sent 4000 troops into Paba to show the Pabaps that they were serious about their position in the war and would not back down. Most of these troops were moved to the Pabap cities of Ablep and Ubem, which were just east of the Esempapa River, which was the border between the "old" Pabap homeland of Tamusur and its newer, much larger homeland of Nasa. They figured that if they joined the war, they could defeat Pabaps in their own home territory and force them to surrender entirely or retreat to Nasa, thus giving Kaha control of both rivers. The Kaha government now agreed that Paba had been correct all along that fighting for Tamusur was worth losing 75% of their males because any nation that controlled Tamusur could control all of the river traffic originating from all of the nations to their north. Most Sukuna aboriginals had essentially ignored the rivers, as they were not seagoing people and had little interest in trade with the north, so the importance of Tamusur had not been obvious even to the Astyzzians who had formerly lived there. But now Kaha decided its goal was to conquer Tamusur even if Paba survived by fleeing its people to Nasa. They still were not ruling out friendly cooperation with Paba, but realized that even cooperation would mean sharing their rewards.

When Kaha occupied the cities of Ablep and Ubem, they were careful not to abuse their power by forcing Pabap citizens to work for them, or give them their houses to sleep in. Instead they slept outdoors and were supplied with food by a supply chain coming from Kaha. This lack of abuse was unusual for armies in this era, but Kaha was quick to remind Paba that this was not, for Kaha, a traditional war. They had moved their troops to the extreme western boundary of Tamusur to demonstrate to Paba that Kaha could completely conquer Tamusur if they desired, since most of Paba's land army was stuck in Nasa, and to ensure that in any peace talks between Paba and Niklas, Kaha would be given a seat on the Pabap side of the table since they could threaten to attack Paba if they did not listen.

The Pabap military was embarrassed that a smaller and supposedly weaker nation had just stationed most of its army inside Paba and Paba had been unable to react. They were forced to pretend the invasion was friendly, and told the Pabap civilians in the occupied cities that the Kahan troops were there as peacekeepers to protect Paba if Paba were invaded from the west, and that Kaha and Paba had signed a treaty against Niklas. But now Kaha representatives followed Pabap diplomats wherever they went, and some Kahans were even present at meetings among the officers of the Pabap land army.

Preparation for peace

Paba's military commanders were now pondering what to do. They had successfully removed most of the "innocent" Pabaps living in Niklas now, which meant that they were no longer required to fish for food and then hand it over to the Niks. Some Pabap civilians had been kidnapped by the Niks, however, and the Pabap navy could not easily rescue these. One Nik soldier stood on a beach with a captured Pabap fisherman in each arm, posing them as if they were squirming fish waiting to be eaten. They erected "fish shops" on beaches purposely in plain view of the Pabap rescue ships, daring them to invade the land to tear them down. Paba considered Pabaps trapped in Niklas now to simply be war casualties, and though it was emotionally upsetting to admit it, realized that any Pabaps who lived in Niklas whom the Niks would not let go to sea were likely unrescuable. Thus Niklas was 100% Nik and Paba realized that if it did not invade Niklas at some point, it would have lost the war. They responded to the insulting "fish shops" by showing Niks on board Pabap ships enjoying a pampered life, hoping that the Niks would realize that losing a war to Paba would mean a better lifestyle than they would get under their own independent rule. However, it was physically difficult for these ships to broadcast their message to the Niks.

On the other hand, the Pabap naval blockade was working. Niks had essentially stopped fishing the sea now, knowing that even the most passive of the Pabaps living in Niklas now preferred to move back to Paba than to keep staring at the ever-present rescue ships and go on fishing. Fishing was a dangerous occupation, after all, and the Nik soldiers were angry when a Pabap fisherman came home empty handed. THus the Niks had to rely on land animals for food. Paba figured that if the Niks ran out of food, Pabap civilians would be next on the table, as the Niks by now had entirely lost their soft touch and considered any degree of brutality necessary to survive. Still, Paba was unwilling to launch a land invasion of Niklas either from the north or the south because they knew that Niklas would win. They mailed another surrender offer to Niklas now, saying that they would give Niklas independence if they would only allow the remaining Pabaps (and any remaining Biada who wished to leave) to move to Nasa. They also offered to allow the Niks to return to fishing so long as it was Niks doing the fishing and they respected the Pabap Navy's right to remain. Privately they were willing to make further concessions: they would allow the Niks to retain Pabaps as slaves after all, knowing that the Pabap army could not invade Niklas to ensure that they hadnt. But they did not openly say this. They also were willing to allow Niks to move into other Pabap territories such as Nasa and even Tamusur, just to prove that they weren't trying to trap Niklas between two walls of Pabaps.

The Nik side of the debate still held to their promise to rid their territory of all Pabaps, and wanted more territory to grow from. They told Paba that the original Nik settlers had considered even the idea of attacking a population of waist-high, pantless people a taboo, but not when those people were attacking them preemptively and demanding total control of lands far beyond their own settlements. They were willing to agree to peace only if the Pabaps were willing to move the Pabap army even further north, giving control of much of Nasa to the Niks. They also demanded that Paba turn over some of its ships to the Niks so that both nations could have a strong navy. Niklas promised to allow Pabap ships to use Niklas' harbors, since Pabap trade had already moved further west even than Niklas, but these ships would be under strict supervision whenever the stopped in Nik territory. On the other hand, they promised to return all Pabaps to Pabap territory, even allowing Pabaps to visit Niklas to ensure they were not secretly holding slaves, which even Paba had not demanded.

Kaha realized that a peace treaty would actually be a defeat for Kaha's ambitions to take over Tamusur, as their army had no legitimate presence in Paba so long as Paba was not at war with Niklas or any other nation. They secretly hoped to prolong war so that they could join the war as a supposed ally of Niklas and use that pretext to spread out their army in Paba and turn it into a full occupation force. Nasa had a long coastline of its own, though, and Kaha realized even if they took over Tamusur and controlled its rivers, the Pabap navy could simply blockade the harbor and essentially fight the War of 634 all over again, so they were not entirely sure what to do. They revealed to the Nik diplomats that the Kahan army had cut Tamusur completely in half without the Pabap army even mounting a resistance, which means that Kaha had troops on Pabap soil that could be used to help a combined Nik-Kaha team take over Paba completely. They offered all of Nasa to the Niks, and would allow Niks to share the Esempapa River with Kaha.

It had been obvious all along to Paba that Kaha's invasion of Pabap territory was a tool intended to intimidate Paba into allowing Kaha to have a voice in its affairs. It had not been clear until now that Kaha was intending a complete conquest of Paba, shared with the nation of Niklas to its south. But Niklas did not think they could conquer all of Nasa, and did not agree to the new expanded war. They said that they would allow Kaha to bite off as much of Paba's territory as it felt it could control, but would neither help Kaha nor help Paba in such a war.

Second round of peace talks

Paba looked at other nations such as Emneniskaneu for help. They were unwilling to give in to the Niks' demands, particularly the demand for the removal of their navy. They decided to risk their people in an all-out squeeze march that would attempt to trap all Nik settlements between the southward-marching Pabap Army and the northward-marching Pabap Navy. All navy soldiers used the same weapons as army soldiers, so for them to suddenly take on a land role was no inconvenience. Since ships in this era required physical manpower to move, all large navy ships needed crews large enough that they could dock in a harbor, leaving a few people aboard, and have the rest of the crew leave the ship to invade the land. Thus the Battle of Waplel began.

Waplel was an early Nik city that had been largely abandoned due to its poor food supply, both on land and at sea. The Pabap navy decided to take over the city, hoping to force the few remaining Niks in Waplel to cooperate with the Pabaps. Meanwhile, the greater Pabap army pushed downwards from the north.

The Pabap army by this time numbered about 7500 adult males, and they were attempting to occupy a land area of about 1000 square miles. They were coursing through the territory largely inhabited by the Biada people, who were still mostly friendly to Paba but did not care whether Nasa had a seacoast or not. They still refused to fight for Paba, because the Niks had promised the Biada that the northern border of Niklas would be set by a treaty between the Biada chieftains and the Niks, with no participation by Paba. The Nik commander thus said that peace could only come about through an expanded diplomatic committee made up of representatives from Niklas, Biada, Paba, Kaha, Emneniskaneu, and members of the minorities that lived within Paba such as Tarpabaps and the surviving Astyzzians.

At the expanded peace talks, Paba's diplomats admitted their situation was dire. They offered increased concessions to the various other parties in exchange for peace. They admitted that they were guilty of starting the war in the first place, because they had automatically considered the Niks to be enemies when they had wanted to share their coastland with Paba instead of owning it, but knew that their chance for compromise had been killed b y the war. They said that if Niklas would pull its army out, the Niks would be allowed to retain Pabaps as slaves in Niklas indefinitely, and could set the border of Niklas wherever the Biada tribeal leaders wanted it to be. They again repeated that the Niks would be allowed to move anywhere within Paba, including the capital city of Pambampa (Tamusur), and would be paid a stipend simply for living peacefully in Paba. To the Biadas, they also offered a stipend for agreeing to live in Paba peacefully, but as the Biadas already were considered allies of the Pabaps they did not think this would be a likely source of problems; they merely wanted to offer them a better deal than what they would get if they chose to change their allegiance to the Niks.

Likewise, Paba figured an alliance between the Tarpabaps living in Paba and the Niks living in Niklas was unlikely, but sought to sweeten the deal by offering Tarpabaps a monthly salary for the privilege of living in Paba, and the ability to move to Pambampa even if they had earlier been banned for refusing to participate in the earlier war to secure Tamusur. (But most of these people were now very old, and their children had not been banned, so this ban was essentially moot by this time anyway.)

It was Kaha that Paba was most worried about. Kaha, a previously powerful but friendly nation, seemed to have lost all respect for the Pabaps as human beings by now. Even the Niks, the only nation that Paba had actually attacked, considered Paba to have a right to exist as an independent nation with its own economy and military; Niks merely wanted Pabaps to keep their hands off of other nations' property and have no power over any other nation even by nonviolent means. Kaha, meanwhile, despite having never been attacked by Paba at any time in the past, now saw Pabaps as prey for the Kahans and seemed to be intent on total conquest and subjugation of the Pabap people. Kaha had invaded Paba with a force of about 4000 men and Paba had done nothing to stop this, which showed Kaha that Paba was very weak because it had been counting on Kaha staying peaceful. Only Kaha had a land army in Paba now, and thus, Kaha's diplomat claimed, only Kaha had the bargaining power to tell Pabaps what to do.

As the debate wore on, the Biada leader began to seem ever warmer to Paba, and Paba decided to go on ahead with the invasion of Niklas, in the understanding that even if the Pabap army was entirely consumed by Niklas, Pabap civilians living in Nasa would remain safe because Biada would hold its border with Niklas and protect the Pabaps living to the north of it. Meanwhile, they realized that they also had Kaha to deal with, but figured an invasion of Nasa from Kaha was unlikely, even though Kaha's troops were already massed on the Nasa-Tamusur border. So Paba sent its army down the hills into Nik-occupied territory. But they knew that they were very weak, and would need to tempt Biada into fighting alongside them if they wanted to truly defeat Niklas. So of the 7000 soldiers in Nasa now, only about 115 moved southward into Niklas itself. They were hoping to bait the Niks into attacking, then allowing themselves to be chased up the hills into a Biada-majority area of Nasa.

Early relations with Nama

Pabaps moved into Nama during the period roughly 1400-1700 AD to work in mining. This was a painful, dangerous occupation, but it was highly profitable. Nama had been living for 18000 years in these mountains without realizing they could extract the metals. Paba thus gained an early advantage in war because they had access to metal both in Nama and in their own territory, and could build swords and shields out of iron where others had only wood. They did not attempt to take over Nama, however, and immigration into Nama soon stopped as Paba increasingly oriented itself towards the tropics.

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 had led to revolts, whereas the Pabaps captured by a slavemaster would only smile and pretend their bleeding had stopped. 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".

Illegal slave raids

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.

The Marpa Wars

The Dots

In 1470, a segment of the Thaoan army broke away and called itself the Dots. The Dots rode into the Pabap state of Marpa and claimed it as their own. They enslved the Pabap soldiers and instituted a form of slavery on the rest of the population that was more severe than that which existed in Thaoa itself. At first, they had hoped Thaoa would accept the Dots and their invasion as legitimate, and allow them to become the new Thaoans state of Marpa. But Thaoa rejected them, and also blockaded their border to prevent them from getting back into Thaoa. The Pabap military also blockaded the rest of Marpa's border (the Marpa-Thaoa border was much longer than Marpa's border with the rest of Paba). They were hoping that the Dots would starve when they were deprived of all trade and all access to the coast.

The Dots countered by saying that if they were about to starve, they would make sure the Pabap slaves got the worst of it and that the Dots would only starve once the rest of the population was dead. Pabaps pleaded for Thaoa to invade Marpa and then give the territory back to Paba, but Thaoa's military commanders said that if Thaoa was forced to occupy the territory, then they would keep it as part of Thaoa and not sign it back to Paba. The Pabaps responded that they shouldn't have to use their military because Thaoa was the one who had sent the occupying army in the first place and therefore Thaoa was the one who had caused the problem. Thaoa's government publicly told the Pabaps that while Paba's commitment to pacifism was an admirable trait, they could not suffer an invasion and expect another country to bail them out while the Pabap army sat idly by simply because they were pacifists. But privately, Thaoa hoped that Paba would agree to let Thaoa take over, but did not want to preeemptively invade as they knew that their army would suffer heavy casualties from the Dots.

The diplomatic crisis was not resolved until 1474. Paba's army invaded the territory of Marpa, suffering many deaths at the hands of the Dot soldiers and slavemasters. In return, Paba agreed to send Thaoa thousands of slaves, consisting of both the Dots and various Pabap people from within Marpa, and to send a few hundred more each year for free unless Thaoa decided to seek payment in some other form of currency. Both countries then strengthened the military force along their borders, particularly the difficult southern section of the borders where the national governments of both Paba and Thaoa were weak.

The War of 1531

In 1531, relations between the two young empires were strained again. The sea level was rising, and Thaoa's land was nearly split in two at one point near their border with the Pabap state of Marpa. This was the same state that had been invaded for unrelated reasons sixty years earlier. Knowledge of Paba's pathetic performance in that war was still widely known, and Thaoa decided to stab them again in the exact same spot to try to fix the problem of sea level rise by giving themselves more land.

Again the Pabap commanders responded to the invasion by pleading with Thaoa to pull their army out, and promised generous concessions such as allowing Thaoa to build roads through Pabap territory if they would only agree to leave the borders alone and let the Pabap people live painlessly. Thaoa made a counter-offer: if Paba agreed to let Thaoa take over Marpa, Thaoa would agree to enslave the Pabaps living there instead of killing them. Reluctantly, Paba signed a treaty turning over Marpa to Thaoan control, but prepared for a war in private as many families had been split by the border (Thaoa had only occupied the more densely populated eastern part of Marpa) and Thaoa refused to reunite them unless the free side of the family agreed to be also enslaved.

Through trading with Nama, Paba had acquired weapons superior to those of Thaoa for the first time. Even though Pabap soldiers were reluctant to hurt people, the screams of tortured Pabap slaves they heard as they reentered the towns they once knew motivated them to strike mercilessly at the Thaoan army holding Marpa's people captive. Thaoa was surprised by the sudden change from total passivity to all-out war, and realized that perhaps Paba's military no longer considered it wise for its soldiers to meet their enemies' swords and spears with flowers and feather pillows. Thaoa no longer even had a sizable force in, figuring that since Paba hadn't attacked their encampments for more than two years (this was 1533), that they never would.

Thus THaoa surrendered and the land was returned to Paba in the Treaty of 1533. Paba considered going even further, attempting to occupy the coast and therefore break Thaoa in half once and for all, as they felt that such a move would show Thaoa that Paba was no longer a nation of sissies who responded to every violent invasion by inviting the invaders even further inside. But Thaoa itself was guarded by an army many times stronger than the small force which had been keeping watch over Marpa, and Paba was not prepared to juice thousands of Pabap bodies into blood in a quest simply to push their borders a few miles further east. Thus the treaty called for a total cessation of war on both sides, and put in place a system of checks and balances to make sure the two empires would not at any time in the future ever declare war on one another.

Back home in Thaoa, the military decided that if Thaoa needed to grow, it should stop worrying about building slave plantations in states like Marpa and instead move along the coast. Paba was already doing that, and doing it quite well. Fishing was now producing more wealth and sustenance for Paba than land-based agriculture, even with Paba's huge land area, and as sailing technology improved so could the distance out to sea that each fishing boat could travel. Thaoa preferred to expand aggressively eastwards, into territory populated by weak, war-naive Repilian tribes. These societies were mostly led by women and did not have up-to-date technology either in their military or in their civilian society. THus, the Thaoans were able to make a legitimate argument that they were actually helping the Repilians, even though they demanded military control of their nations. They offered to teach Repilians how to build boats and how to sail deep out to sea without worrying about being stranded. But they did not offer to suit and arm Repilians as soldiers in their army, either male or female.

Paba's government held a massive celebration of the new peace treaty in central Paba, inviting Thaoan government officials and ordinary citizens of Thaoan ancestry living in Paba to attend and make new friends. Note that at this time the official languages of the two empires were still mutually intelligible, and that the linguistic differences were in fact the result of many uneducated Pabaps from the north still speaking their ancestral Haswarabic languages.

War of 1539

In 1539, Thaoa invaded the Pabap state of Nansa Wipambim. They had sent many spies to the Pabap Peace Party in 1533, eagerly learning what Paba's greatest military weakness was. They realized that Paba had only "won" two wars against Thaoa recently by pushing the small Thaoan occupying force out of Paba's land, taking many casualties as they did so. But the Pabap army in both cases had stopped when they found themselves faced with the actual Thaoan army, which was much larger. Thaoa readily admitted that they had fallen behind in military technology and that Paba might actually be stronger than Thaoa overall. But the Pabap army was extremely passive, and Thaoa figured that even if they declared war and "lost" yet again, the Pabap army would be afraid to chase the Thaoans any further than their pre-existing border and therefore even in the worst possible scenario the Thaoans would come out of the war as if they had never fought it at all. Thaoa did not consider either of the two recent wars to have been Pabap victories, as all they had won was to get the Thaoan army out of Paba, in essence to get Thaoa to treat Paba as an equal.

Put another way, Thaoa now believed it could do essentially anything it wanted in Paba and Paba would never retaliate by attacking Thaoa; they considered removing the Thaoan invaders to be the most aggression they were capable of. Thus they invaded southern Paba in 1539 attempting to cut their way down to the coast and divide Paba into two, in much way Thaoa had been worried THaoa itself was going to be soon divided by rising seas. They chose Nansa Wipambim because it was an almost landlocked state, yet it contained all of the major roads connecting Paba's southeastern fishing-oriented states to the rest of Paba. Thus Paba could not fight the invasion by simply encircling Nansa with the Pabap navy; all this would do would be to hurt the states around it. Thaoa's invasion was thus entirely a land-based one.

Thaoa was delighted at Paba's reaction to the war. Paba's ambassador to Thaoa visited the embassy sobbing and pleading for Thaoa to stop the invasion and leave Paba alone. She promised major concessions for THaoa if they agreed, including the ability to set up slave plantations unopposed inside Paba's territory, and the right to hold posts in Paba's government, so long as the military was sent home.

Since Thaoa had invaded Paba only six years after they had signed a peace treaty swearing they would never again fight a war, Thaoa's government realized that they had scored a major diplomatic victory. From now on, they said, they would grow their territory by invading Paba and biting off important pieces of land, and then signing a peace treaty in which Thaoa was given extra money and slaves from Paba in return for promising to never take more of Paba's land. Then they would wait a few years to build up their armies, and then violate the new peace treaty in the most destructive possible way. They would repeat this process until they had cut Paba into tiny discontiguous patches of land which would each become large slave plantations for the Thaoans to rule over.

However, Thaoa's border with Nansa was much smaller than its border with Marpa had been, and they could send only a relatively small occupying force. Even as they realized the war might have been a bad idea, they were confident that Paba would not invade Thaoa because the same short border would slow them down if they invaded from Nansa, and the strong Thaoan army would stop them if they tried a surprise revenge attack anywhere else.

Organized slavery

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.

Indeed, Paba accepted slavery to such an extent that it paid money to support Thaoan slavemasters who wanted to move to Paba permanently and run their slave trade from the inside. They still were not legalizing slavery in Paba, merely taking the burden off of the states that were immediately adjacent to Thaoa.

In the early days of their cooperation, Thaoa had taken slaves primarily from the Pabap states of Nappi, Marpa, Pispa, Munsar, and Nansa Wipambim. These were not the only states that bordered Thaoa, but they were the ones that bordered Thaoa's choicest farmland.

The typical early Thaoan slave gathering was very organized. The Thaoans would tell Paba's government which city they wanted to raid, and the governors of the state would organize a community frstival in that city in an attempt to get as many people as possible out of their homes. They would also be very well fed. Then towards the end of the festival, the people would disocver that the Thaoan army had surrounded their festival, and they could not leave the city center. Then the Thaoan soliders would march into the gathering of people, picking out the ones they wanted to a number previously agreed upon by the governments of both nations. They preferred to take teenagers, since they would be the healthiest and most reproductively successful. Moreover they were unlikely to have children and most Pabap teenagers had moved out of their parents' homes. They would tie up each new slave and put them in a crate that was then towed to Thaoa by very aggressive horses.

The population of these states was upset by the slavery problem, but felt powerless to stop it. Typically during the height of the slave raid the mayor and other important officials of the city would be perched on top of a tall building overlooking the city center, thus preventing them from being mistaken for potential slaves and also from being targeted as the source of the slavery problem by the peasants that were being picked and sorted. After the raid was over the officials would apologize for the disruption and claim that because the slave raid had been sponsored by the Thaoan army, only Paba's army could get them back, and Paba did not want to fight a war.

Typically each raid would take away about 20% of the teenagers of the city, which led to decreased population growth and increased poverty since the most capable people had been taken away from them. Thus even pro-slavery Pabaps were upset that slavery was hurting their economy even though the money paid to the government really did generally go towards improving the lives of the people who had been spared from the slave grabbers.

Thaoa was not entirely happy with their setup, either. The community festival trap method was successful at getting them a huge number of slaves with relatively little effort, but since Thaoa wanted slaves msotly to work on farms, and farmers were generally uninterested in moving to cities, farm-ripe teenagers rarely reached the hands of the THaoan slavelords. However, Paba was strong about keeping its farm population protected, whether they l;ived on family farms that had been handed dwon for hundred of years or gov't-run farms where people worked for money. Thaoa sometimes resorted to illegal slave gathering in which Paba would not be paid.

Slavery reforms

Paba did not think itself weak for allowing other nations to enslave them. They said "we farm with hoes and plows, others farm with whips and candles, and we both do well." To solve their disagreements with Thaoa, Paba in the 1600s began paying Thaoans seeking slaves to infiltrate the rest of Paba and extract slaves from the general population instead of holding surprise parties near the eastern border. They wanted Thaoans everywhere to share the burden equally amongst all the Pabaps. Paba considered these Thaoans to be part of the municipal gov't of each city, and therefore granted them a salary and full police protection. To prevent outagre, these people would claim to be Subumpamese instead of Thaoan. Cities that had these people educated their children on the basics of farm labor, saving the THaoans the trouble. Pabaps who found themselves in debt were then sold into slavery rather than imprisoned. If they had children, the children were taken with them. Soon, many Pabap cities created special taxes that applied only to the poor, as they wanted to make it harder for the underclass to escape being sold into slavery. This ensured a reliable supply of farm workers for THaoa.

Thus, the new slavery reform had accomplished five key objectives that Paba wanted:

• It moved the focus of the Thaoan slave drives from the already struggling inland east areas of Paba towards nearly the entire territory of Paba, and reduced the disproportionate strain on areas that were infected.
• It took away the frightening "surprise party" method of gathering slaves in which the police in each city were forced to collaborate with the slavelords, and then go back to their jobs as if nothing had happened.
• It allowed Paba to solve its persistent overpopulation problem. Paba had always had a high birth rate and a low death rate, due to the relative lack of disease, famine, and war in Paba.
• It removed the need for the aggressive Thaoan land army to be present on Pabap territory. The Pabaps they abducted were unarmed, but often fought ferociously against the Thaoan soldiers, who typically needed 3 Thaoans for each Pabap. One soldier would grab the arms, another the feet, and a third soldier would march directly behind them typically with a spear sticking under the hapless slave's clothes.
• It ensured that the people being enslaved were now largely chosen by Paba instead of by Thaoa. Paba had always disliked the old method wherein a crowd of Pabaps was suddenly attacked and the Thaoans chose whoever they wanted, with no apparent way to judge them other than their physical appearance. Under the new system, Paba was spilling its waste population all over Thaoa, and Thaoa realized this, but did not object so long as violent criminals were still excluded.

Thaoa had typically preferred female slaves, even though they were less capable of performing the difficult labor associated with temperate agriculture. Paba however even under the old system would not allow the Thaoans to simply grab every teenage girl off the streets and cart them away back to Thaoa. But now under the new system most of the people being enslaved were men, because men tended to be the ones to go into debt. Paba knew that this helped them, because Thaoans were entitled to all of the children of their slaves, which meant that if Paba exported mostly men, Thaoa would need to keep coming back again and again to get more slaves, whereas if they had a large female surplus in each new generation, the slave trade could entirely stop before long. Thaoa realized this as well, and pressured Paba thus to create another system that would tip the enslavement ratio back towards teenage girls.

Paba pointed out that often the chidlren of a slave would be also exported as slaves, and so too would their wives. But Thaoa said that Paba wasnt trying hard enough, and promised that if Paba did not provide them a reliable supply of teenage girls that they would start adbucting teens off the streets and not pay fotr them. Paba did not take this threat seriously, as even though the Thaoan slave gatherers were heavily armed, the logistics of abducing a girl and getting all the way to Thaoa without being stopped were out of their reach, with the sole exception of those towns that were already on the border with Thaoa. As a precautionary measure, Paba created a buffer zone of about 15 miles from which no slaves could be deported, but did not publicize this as they didnt want Pabaps crowding into that border strip.

Thaoa suggested Paba fix its slavery problem by making a list of fake crimes that applied only to females, particularly young ones, and punishing people who committed these crimes with slavery. For example, girls caught wearing overly revealing clothing could be enslaved. Paba refused this as well, to Thaoa's dismay.

Paba decided to allow people to sell off their daughters to slave traders voluntarily, though they expected few people would take this opportunity. Sons could not be sold. However, they massively increased the price of a female slave to about 8 times what a male slave cost, figuring that a female slave could produce 8 children, and passed 7/8 of this price on to the family of the slave rather than keeping it for the government. The price needed to be high because Paba knew that few people would willingly sell off their duaghters, knowing they'd nevber be seen again. Paba tried to dress it up, saying that they were creating a "female army" to invade Thaoa and do hard work on the Thaoan farms. Like a traditional army, the life of these soldiers would be painful and dangerous, but they would be doing it for the good of their families anf their nation.

Paba had long been excellent at creating propaganda. A small number of Pabap families agreed with the new propaganda and sold off their daughters, though the Pabap gov't had hurriedly rushed in an amendment to the program stating that the girls had to be at least 13 years old and would be questioned before they left to make sure their parents were not coercing them. Paba also sent some government officials into Thaoa to make sure the slaves were not being abused more severely than Paba was willing to tolerate. Paba also took a census of all of the slaves, making sure it was jsut below the level at which Thaoan farmers would stop needing more slaves. All of this was paid for by Thaoa rather than Paba.

Paba looks south

Nevertheless, Paba realized that Thaoa was only a middle-sized nation, and although it was aggressively expanding to the north and east, most of the territory they were growing over was mountainous and did not seem like an ideal place to put up new plantations. If Paba wanted to continue to sell its bottommost people as slaves, they realized they might have to eventually find new customers.

Paba had long had a difficult relationship with the Star Empire on the western shore of the Gold Bay. For hundreds of years, Star Empire ships had been trading with Paba, generally bringing in tropical fruits that Pabaps loved while the Pabaps traded back wooden furniture and manufactured goods such as combs and silverware. But hidden amongst these friendly trading ships were pirates seeking slaves. They pretended to be normal trading ships, and would try to land near or between actual trading ships, and blend in with the other sailors. The scam would only be noticed when the Pabap merchants buying pineapples looked behind them and noticed their wives were suddenly gone. Sometimes, though, the pirates were even more aggressive, and would raid beachside towns at night stealing all of the people they could find and feeding them the absolute minimum amount of food needed to survive the long journey back to Star territory.

Paba figured that the Stars' repeated kidnappings of Pabaps despite the presence of other nations in between showed that the Stars strongly admired Pabaps and Pabap culture, and wanted to try to turn this into a positive and mutually beneficial relationship. Since the Star ships generally just beached on the coast and then left, this meant that the Stars were only taking slaves from the coast. They offered to open up the entire empire of Paba to Star slave traders if they only would follow the rules that had been put in place for Thaoa, which meant stopping illegal slave raids and paying higher prices for female slaves.

The government of Paba told the Star Empire that they both agreed that slavery was morally acceptable, and Paba would profit from an expanded slavery program because they would only sell out their poorest people, and money would be paid to the family members of the slave in compensation for their loss. Star Empire slave ships tended to land in the northernmost area of the Star Empire, as it was closest, but then take them on a long journey to the far south, to tropical rainforests, partricularly those of Katō.

But the Stars told Paba they were mistaken: the only Star ships taking slaves were illegal ones, and they were going to the equatorial rainforest, where the Star governmen was weak. The Star government itself did not actually need or even want any slaves because they, like Paba itself, had a wage-labor system on their farms and felt that adding slaves would drag down their economy.

Many additional illegal slave raids occurred, 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 Punsam and Pombi 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 fight amongst fishermen could result in more deaths than a small war. 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.

Recovery

Thaoa recovered from the famine quickly. Even though the summer of 1824 was also cold, Thaoa had shifted its attention towards the coast, including the coasts of nations to their east, and now ate a mostly fish-based diet. However, once the weather warmed up again, they were unsure what to do. Thaoans had literally eaten up all of their Pabap slave laborers, and were unwilling to work on farms themselves. They knew that they needed to go to Paba to get more slaves if they expected to remain self-sufficient without becoming dependent on other nations' fish supplies, as they figured that Repilian tribes would eventually take control of their own coastline.

Altogether, about 160,000 Pabaps had been slaughtered and sold in meat markets during the famine to feed desperate peasants in Thaoa. Thaoa thanked the Pabaps for their crucial role in preventing starvation in Thaoa but told them they needed to send Thaoa another 160,000 slaves so that Thaoa could regain self-sufficiency. Paba was surprised at the high demand, as this would be almost 1/4 of Paba's adult population. Even when Thaoa spiced up the deal by offering Paba their cherished recipes for braised human thigh, Paba was unsure they could manage such a huge population transfer. But Thaoa was desperate, and Paba quickly yielded to the temptation of the huge sums that Thaoa was willing to pay Paba's government for their complicity.

Previously, trade between Thaoa and Paba had been largely moneyless; Paba sent Thaoa slaves to work on plantations, and Thaoa sent Paba vegetables produced from those same plantations. Now, even though the famine was over, Thaoa knew that for at least a decade it would have no food surplus, and thus could not uphold the traditional trade agreement. But they needed food badly, and as above Thaoans themselves were unwilling to live a life of laboring on a farm, as even the lowest class of Thaoan society considered themselves above the Pabaps. So they were forced to pay Paba for its slaves by giving them armor and weapons, which were Thaoa's dearest possessions, and thus the most valuable of all. Thaoa thus knew that its military was now much weaker than Paba's military, as Thaoa did not have mountains and thus metal was not a renewable resource.

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 a woman named Afunyū pulled Pipaippis out of the Subumpamese Union and joined Paba. She was not the president, nor did she hold any political power, but she was the wealthiest person in Pipaippis and the official president, Kisapu, knew he had to do as he was told. Her organization, Teens For Tomorrow, served as a temporary government in the new state of Pipapi. Afunyū became a famous figure in Pabap history because she saved Pipaippis from conquest and thus gave Paba its new and very powerful state of Pipapi. Even though by joining Paba, both Kisapu and Afunyū had to relinquish much of their power, both leaders and the vast majority of the population of Pipapi agreed that they were much better off as a western appendage of Paba than as the center of economic activity in Subumpam.

The loss of Pipapi/Pipaippis 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.

The Star War

In 1989, Nama declared war on the Star Empire. The war was fought mostly in Subumpam, the poorest part of the Star Empire and the least well-defended. Paba officially had joined the war on Nama's side, but avoided combat for the sake of protecting Pabaps from a war that promised no possible good for Paba. They did invade eastern Subumpam, but only to protect the many Pabaps living in Subumpam.

When it became clear that the Stars were going to lose all of their territory in Subumpam, the Pabaps living in Subumpam began inviting the Star soldiers to move to Paba and live as regular citizens. Even though Paba was officially at war with the Stars, and had invaded Subumpam, they made it clear that they had only joined the war because Nama forced them to, and that Paba's army in Subumpam was a nonviolent one, present only to protect the Pabaps living in eastern Subumpam. Nama had occupied much of Paba, partly because they needed Paba's help getting supplies to soldiers in Nama, but partly because they were worried that defeated Star soldiers would spill themselves into Paba and surrender there because they knew the Pabaps would be much gentler to them than the Namans. Indeed, the Star navy had made it official policy to surrender their ships to Paba whenever possible, knowing that Paba would not turn them over to Nama. Once in Paba, the Stars pretended yo be aboriginals who had fled from Subumpam to Paba because they knew Nama was hunting Paba for Stars and knew that many of them would be found near the sea.

Nama's army killed every Star person they met, whether military or civilian. Paba welcomed every Star person they met and offered them a home and a stipend to live on so they could survive in Paba without speaking Pabappa.

Thus some battles in the war were fought in Paba. The Stars who moved to Paba tended to have their weapons and armor intact, meaning the Naman occupiers in Paba could not simply kill them on sight they way they did to Star civilians. Nama was angry that Paba claimed to be a strong ally of Nama while inviting thousands of dangerous Star soldiers into their country even while Paba was still officially at war with the Stars. They claimed now that Pabaps were the softest people in the world, and that even if Nama completely routed the Stars in both Subumpam and the Star Empire itself, their ally Paba would perpetually have a hostile minority within it eager for revenge. Paba claimed that their love for their enemies in wartime had in the past often charmed those enemies into becoming Pabaps themselves, and hoped it would happen again.

Nama demands action

But Nama was not interested in playing nice. They called for a diplomatic meeting between Nama and Paba, with no other parties present. At the meeting, Nama promised that the Naman occupiers would never leave Paba if Paba refused to hand over the Stars as prisoners of war. Paba claimed they could not do this, as even the small number of Stars they had managed to rescue were heavily armed and could defeat the entire Pabap Army if motivated to do so, given that much of the Pabap Army was had been ordered into Subumpam by Nama and the ones who had remained in Paba were poorly equipped and had no motivation to fight a war. In fact, the entire Pabap Army at home was occupied with the difficult task of finding the migrating Stars safe places in Paba to live where they could be free from the intentions of Nama's own soldiers in Paba. Paba thus had no soldiers left to mobilize. The Pabaps did not try to take weapons from the Stars, and thus the Pabap Army was exposed directly to the Star soldiers. Nama's representative was angry at the way Paba seemed to choose the most masochistic option whenever they were faced with a crisis, noting that Paba was seemingly not interested in rescuing Naman soldiers, but happily carried in thousands of heavily armed enemy soldiers and settled them in the most delicate parts of their nation. Paba said they were simply following their own philosophy of pacifism, which had served them well in the past. Paba admitted that there were so many Stars in Paba now that Paba was effectively a Star-occupied state, but predicted that all would end well for Paba because the Stars had no grudge against Paba and would soon assimilate into mainstream Pabap society, given that the Pabap civilians outnumbered the Star soldiers by more than 100 to 1.

Nama threatened to extend the war into Paba, with Namans fighting against everyone else. They had already occupied the western third of Paba early in the war, in order to secure a route to the sea and a network of land supply routes. But the Stars were being pumped into the eastern areas of Paba away from Nama's control. Nama saw that they were easily winning the war in Subumpam, and could afford to move some of their soldiers from Subumpam to Paba. Nama saw that Paba seemed to enjoy having heavily armed enemy soldiers running around inside them, and offered to double their pleasure by launching an all-out invasion of Paba from a new front in the north. They warned that the Naman army would be far more brutal than the Star army had been. In fact, Nama had already occupied the capital of the Pabap Empire, simply because this capital was near the western border.

Nama claimed that the Pabap soldiers were so weak that they could kill 100 Pabaps for every Naman. But Nama realized privately that Paba was much larger than Subumpam, and that even if they pulled out of Subumpam, they would not be able to put enough soldiers in Paba to hold their own against the combined team of the Pabap Army and the Stars. In fact, those few Stars who had elementary knowledge of Pabappa were joining the Pabap Army themselves, as they were almost all males, and Paba allowed them to form a battalion in the Pabap Army consisting entirely of Stars speaking their own languages with only a few bilingual commanders keeping contact with the rest of the Pabap Army. Thus, Paba had indeed managed to increase its own population and the size of its military simply by always being soft and gentle to its wartime enemy. Their "masochism" had paid off handily.

Stars move east

Paba promised the Stars that the government of Paba would protect them and provide them free food and a home to live in so that they would not ever have to get a job to support themselves. This was Paba's general policy towards immigrants with no fluency in Pabappa. Native Pabaps could not get this welfare, as they were expected to be able to find a job on their own and work hard at it. Thus, for 1400 years, Paba had been inviting people from all around the world to move to Paba and live off the hard work of the native Pabap people, never having to work at all or even be thankful for what they were given.

Paba's government considered this policy necessary because the native Pabaps preferred to have their army composed largely of ethnic minorities, as they tended to be hardier soldiers. Life in Paba was still a very good deal for these minorities because the Pabap Army very rarely needed to go to combat, instead spending much of its time performing manual labor considered too dangerous for civilians. But the soldiers were not always allowed to bring their wives and family with them to even the most peaceful parts of Paba's empire and therefore the life of a soldier was often more painful than the life of an underclass Pabap wage laborer or farmer. Moreover, occasionally Paba really did go to war, even if they were officially present in a non-combat role. Thus male Star immigrants who had stealthily moved from Subumpam to Paba, settled down, and in some cases married Pabap women found themselves suddenly forced back into Subumpam again to help the Pabap Army protect the Pabaps in Subumpam. Some Stars became resentful of Paba and its culture, seeing that they were being forced into a war in which their own family members, who had been unable to find a Pabap rescue road, were being murdered.

Some Stars now called for Paba to break its neutrality policy and declare war on Nama unless Nama offered to move all Stars into Paba. Thus, Paba was being pulled into war from both sides: Nama wanted them to stop rescuing the Stars and turn them over to the Naman army, which would kill them; the Stars wanted Paba to force Nama to turn the Stars over to Paba, if necessary declaring war against Nama. As it had in the past, Paba refused to do either of these things because they claimed that their army was intended for defensive purposes only and could not invade another nation except with help from a larger power. When the rescued Stars complained that they were being sent to war to fight Stars, the Pabaps offered the rescued Stars the option of simply rejecting their rescue and moving back to Subumpam. Few accepted this offer, as they realized that Nama was almost completely in control of Subumpam by this time and was killing all Stars, even civilians. Instead, these desperate people often piloted ships and joined the naval assault on Nama itself. But many simply remained in Paba, considering it the safest territory of all for the indefinite future, since they knew a full-scale invasion of Paba by Nama was extremely improbable. Since by doing this they were rejecting the orders of the Pabap royal family to join the military, these people lost their welfare benefits, and had to struggle to find work in Pabap cities amongst a people who were terrified of them and did not speak their language. But the Stars realized they were still the luckiest people in the world, as they had found their way into the only empire in the world that rewarded enemy soldiers with a life of luxury. They also knew that Paba was not actually pro-Star, as the Stars had killed Pabaps in the war, but that Paba's pacifistic policies had told them to rescue their enemies instead of fighting back. After all, the Stars were just one many groups in Paba that had been adopted this way.

In the end, most Stars agreed to move back to Subumpam and spend their time trying to rescue fellow Stars and move them to safe places in eastern Paba, near the border with Thaoa where Nama had no presence. Thus the war continued with the rescued Stars playing the same role as the pacifist Pabaps, even as they knew that most Stars were living in the west whereas the rescuers had positioned themselves with Pabaps in mind and were stationed entirely in the east.

Peace treaty

The war lasted until 2057, with Nama's total victory. Nama had driven the Star people not only out of Subumpam, but out of the wider Star Empire as well. The non-Subumpam part of the Star Empire had been named Lobexon. Lobexon was now a series of slave plantations in which Namans enslaved the Star people. They tried to create divisions among the slaves by cutting them into groups organized by religion, with names like Crystals, Gilgosi, Kampa, etc. which was partly successful. They abused their slaves so badly that even native Namans began launching rescue missions to Lobexon to bring the Stars back to a better life in Nama. Thus, Nama itself was now exhibiting the selfless "masochism" they had previously criticized in Paba, and Nama realized its own home territory would now be home to many thousands of Stars. They ended their military occupation of Paba, but retained a small nonviolent presence to make sure an invasion of Nama was not in the works.

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 compared Paba to a flower garden. Like flowers, Pabaps allowed outsiders to trample all over them, pick them off, and sell them in beautiful bundles to all the other peoples of the world. And even when many Pabaps died, the outsiders could simply revisit Paba the next year and find that their Flowers had somehow grown back and were ready to be picked again. Thus Paba was a perennial target of abuse from all the nations it bordered. The Gold diplomats 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, telling Pabap men that they had beautiful bodies, and telling Pabap women that they were sorely needed in the most violent area of the world's most violent empire. Even though the Treaty of 2057 had freed all of the Pabap slaves still trapped in Lobexon, no ships of freed Pabap slaves had 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. The Gold diplomats seemed to be all males, as even though Nama was known to Paba as a largely feministic empire, in its southern areas, this was not so, and the southern areas had most of the political power. A political organization of Pabaps called Pisimimbin ("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.

Pisimimbin 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, who thus did not seem believable candidates for running a foreign nation's government, but seemed to fit perfectly the ideal profile for slaves. The Goldies seemed to approach both males and females vigorously, and to be most at home when addressing a large crowd of Pabaps. The Gold diplomats had 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. Pisimimbin 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 Pisimimbin became impatient with their government's inaction. Some Pisimimbin 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. Pisimimbin 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 nine people who all had different ideas. They hoped that at least some of the Namans and some of the Pabaps could find common ground.

Debate

A team of Pabap diplomats traveled to Nama to debate the Gold government in hopes of finding a mutually agreeable solution to their problems. The Pabaps were sexually assaulted by the Naman diplomat team but nevertheless managed to win Nama's support for most of their positions. The Naman government invited the Pabaps back to Nama for the second round of the debates in which, they promised, the remaining barriers to their cooperation could be removed.

However the second debate also did not go well. Many members of Paba's first debate team were still in the hospital recovering from their injuries, so Paba sent different people, this time mostly male. A schoolteacher named Pubim, however, attended both debates as she had been the most valuable member of the Pabap team the first time around. The Naman team was also mostly different people, as the first team had been punished by Nama for attacking the Pabaps. But nevertheless one member from the first round was present: Tándō, one of the first people who had attacked the Pabaps and attempted to rape one of their women. That woman was not Pubim, but nevertheless, he recognized Pubim, and did not avert his gaze from her during the entire second round of debate, hoping to intimidate her so she would keep quiet. Security was much tougher in this second round, so the Pabaps did not think they were unsafe even though the security guards were all Namans, but the memories of the painful first debate remained. The second debate was closed very early by the moderator, who was also the same person from the first round. Nothing had been resolved because the Pabap team no longer respected Nama's debate system, and their new diplomats were almost as loud and uncooperative as the Namans.

Paba offered to talk directly with the government of Lobexon, rejecting both their own diplomats and those of Nama. 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 Pisimimbin 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.)