AlphaLeap

In 4108, Paba lost its war against the Gold Empire. Paba and Subumpam, along with a few outlying territories such as Sulasali, were taken over and assigned to the Naman nation of AlphaLeap (native name Nisundusa). AlphaLeap renamed their new colonies Halasala and focused especially on Paba, both because it was the easternmost and thus closest to AlhaLeap, and because Paba had for 3000 years had a reputation of being easily exploited.

Background

From the period of roughly 2057 to 4108, the gigantic empire of Nama contracted from half the world to a few weak, impoverished coastal settlements. They had always been weak; they just merely were never challenged directly in their earlier history because the climate was too cold to make Nama an enticing target for an invasion. Nama simply could not protect itself, and even though the armies invading them were very small and often militarily incompetent, Nama simply had no way to defend an empire of 7 million square miles with a population of less than 7 million.

Enemy nations such as FILTER set up huge military zones in the rolling plains of central Nama, denying Namans even the right to visit, or to cross through in order to reach the remaining free territories on the other side. Sometimes the Naman army accidentally stumbled upon an enemy encampment and quietly slipped away, warning any Namans living nearby that they would soon need to flee their homes. When Nama was invaded by a small army, they often did not react at all, preferring to focus instead on the much larger armies that were coursing through their wealthy northern lowlands.

When Nama declined so far that they could no longer protect Paba, Paba also became equally helpless. One difference between Nama and Paba is that Paba had, since the 1600s AD, considered itself a pacifist empire, and went to great lengths to prevent its army from ever having to fight a war. During one war against the Star Empire, Paba invaded Subumpam because Nama forced them to, but their soldiers did not fight and the Pabap Army even invited enemy soldiers to move to Paba in the hopes that they would calm down and marry Pabap women.

By contrast, Nama had never considered itself pacifist; they were merely a very large empire with a relatively small population due to their historically very cold climate. When Paba invited Star soldiers to move into Paba, Nama was very upset. Nama and Paba were both on the same side in this war, and this war was one example where Nama was actually winning handily, as the Star Empire had occupied an enemy territory, Subumpam, relying almost entirely on the Star navy, and had no feasible way to defend the occupation on land. Nama was rescuing Subumpam since even the relatively weak Naman army was superior to the spread-out police force that the Star Empire relied on. But just as it seemed like Nama was going to completely destroy the Stars, Paba took pity on them and decided to rescue the Stars by offering them new homes in eastern Paba. Nama was frustrated as they realized that the Stars would indeed get along well with Pabaps and thus could continue to harass Nama for thousands of years more.

But as Nama lost war after war, the few Naman nations that were not quite so pathetically weak tended to survive, and thus the more Nama shrank, the more it became able to defend its territory. However, for the most part, the unity of Nama had been destroyed because its territory was no longer contiguous. The strongest nation was named AlphaLeap, and it was on the east coast, thousands of miles away from Nama's original center of power. For most of its history, AlphaLeap had been very poor because its east coast was entirely icebound. But a warming climate allowed them to prosper while the mountains on their western border largely kept potential invaders out.

First years under the Leapers

AlphaLeap saw that Paba's people had become the world leaders in education for over a thousand years and had lots of knowledge to share with the world. AlphaLeap promised to erase that record, and immediately converted all of Paba's schools into detention centers. They said that under the Leaper government, Pabap children would be given no education at all. Anyone, child or adult, caught reading a book not written or approved by the Leapers would be killed immediately.

The Leapers handled their slaves badly. Despite the high birth rate, so many people died each day that the population actually fell during some months. Many Halasalans became convinced that the Leapers were guilty, for various reasons, of abuse of their powerful position, as they had been killing far more Halasalans than they needed to accomplish their goals. Most of the time the Pabaps who saw others around them being killed repented in fear and tried their hardest to obey their orders, but when they saw even the most Leaperistic of people tortured and killed for mistakes that weren't their fault, there began to rise, among some of the better educated Halasalans, people who, out of pure anger, publicly and fearlessly objected to this often blatantly sadistic misleadership. So in the late 4110's, a few of the Halasalans who were given positions of authority by the Leapers began to make independent decisions that went against the will of the Leapers. The Leapers did their best to frustrate these rebels, even to the point of kidnapping and torturing them. The rest of the Halasalans took this as a sign that the Leapers did not respect Halasala, pointing out that many Leapers seemed to actually enjoy watching the unexplainable accidents that seemed so frequently to take the lives of Halasala's children.

The Leapers had conquered more than just Paba. In fact, they had created a wht they called the Four Quarters Empire, since it was the union of the Crystal Empire, the Thunder Empire, the Pabap Empire, and Subumpam. They chose Paba to be the capital, as they figured that the Pabaps would be far more submissive than the other three groups, abd because Paba was closer to AlphaLEAP than the other three empires.

Revolt of 4123

In 4123, some Subumpamese slaves set fire to the plantations in the far western area of Halasala. Thousands of Leapers died trying to stop the fire from spreading, even though thousands of Subumpamese also died. One third of the Leaper governors moved to the center of the fire to stop it from spreading, and one female slave decided to close the gap and entrap them entirely in fire. When AlphaLeap found out what had happened, they disowned the Leaper government of Halasala and let Halasala become independent. Thus almost the entire Leaper population was dead and the Halasalans were free from oppression after only fifteen years of torture.

However, AlphaLeap also declared that "an unfinished Leaper government could mean disaster in the future", and decided to kill all of the people living in Halasala. They thus declared war on Halasala, including all of the states of Subumpam, Paba, and the Andanese diaspora. They sent about 40000 AlphaLeap soldiers into Halasala to massacre the unarmed civilians. Even though Halasala's population was much larger than AlphaLeap's, AlphaLeap expected an easy victory because their soldiers had dangerous weapons and thick metal armor and the Pabaps and Subumpamese were pantless and armed with cookware and vegetable knives. However, the Leapers running Halasala stopped firefighting so they could fight instead the invading AlphaLeap army. Thus Leapers fought Leapers, and some of the Leaper governors of AlphaLeap fled into a new breakaway nation called Puap, which had broken away from Halasala early on when it was revealed that AlphaLeap believed it needed to torture Subumpamese children in order to cement its power.

Puap actually also enslaved Subumpamese people, but in Puap, the ruling Leapers adored and exalted the Subumpamese people as fulfilling the ideal role that the ruling Leapers could only wish they could achieve. Leapers who did work, they said, were lazy and inefficient, whereas the Subumpamese held in place by whips and chains worked five times harder and never complained. Another important difference was t hat there was no ethnic division between master and slave in Puap; Subumpamese could be masters, and Leapers could be slaves (though this occurred only for criminals). Thus the Leapers fled into Puap, figuting the Puapians would welcomer them in.

War against AlphaLeap

Although AlphaLeap had denounced the Leaper government's abuses of its slaves in Halasala, it was common in this era to believe that the best way to end slavery was to kill all of the slaves. Thus the bleeding slaves and their abusive masters fought on the same side, against AlphaLeap, and together they eliminated AlphaLeap's soldiers one by one.

In 4127, the chaos of the war reached such a level that animals began preying on humans for the first time in 1400 years. The slaves sided with the animals, and told them to kill AlphaLeap's soldiers because AlphaLeap was invading them. The simple minded animals mostly obeyed, and many AlphaLeap soldiers were bitten and bled to death through their body armor. AlphaLeap was defeated and this caused the Halasalans to mostly turn against their Leaper governors. A few Halasalans who were loyal to the Leaper governors moved into forts with them, expecting to face the 15000 soldiers of Halasala's army soon. But Halasala had sworn off direct violence, and preferred to use forest fires and animals with sharp teeth for proteection instead of spears and swords.

AlphaLeap responded by making an alliance wiht the firebirds, specifically a species of firebirds that was much larger than average. These were called "20-ton rocs".