Soap Bubbles

The Soap Bubbles (Khulls: Î; Pabappa I; usually called Bubbles) were a party founded in the year 3842 in the Thunder Empire as the Thunder Empire was being conquered by Dreamland. The Thunderers here had decided to collaborate with the Dreamers, as although they preferred independence, they felt that the Dreamers at least were rescuing the Thunderers from their previous oppressor, the Crystals. The Bubbles were the ones who refused to collaborate. Although both the Bubbles and the submissivist Thunderers agreed that they preferred independence, the Bubbles differed in that if their destiny was to be oppressed, they preferred Crystal oppressors to Dreamer oppressors.

Early history

Naming of the party

The Soap Bubbles were not related to the Soap Bubble Societies of the 2400s despite originating in nearly the same geographic area. Since that earlier name was still in use amongst the descendants of those nations, as two of the three nations had in fact survived, they occasionally referred to themselves, at least in that part of the world, as the Snow (Khulls: Xà; Pabappa: Šap). Snow had actually been the original proposed name for their party, but it had been changed to Soap before the official founding date in 3842, as they wanted a name that would be less inviting to the Dreamers and Dreamerized Thunderers who seemed to feel that the whole of nature was their bathroom.

Conveniently, the word for "bubble" in both Khulls and Pabappa, the two primary languages of power in their world, was just a single letter long: Khulls î; Pabappa i. Particularly in Pabappa, this new name lent itself to much wordplay, as Pabappa was a very vowel-heavy language at this time, and many words began with the vowel /i/. The Soapies were thus able to claim that any word beginning an /i/ denoted something that belonged to them. For example, the word for pine trees (ipe), was reanalyzed as "(that which) embraces soap bubbles" (i + pe). For anything they found unacceptable, they created a new word by prefixing an i- to the word. They claimed that they would soon bathe the monstrous Dreamers around them and thus turn them forever into Wet Dreamers.

With such a simple name, the Soapies sometimes had a difficult time making themselves understood. Even though the word i did in fact mean "bubble" in Pabappa, it also meant "little", "baby", and "buoy". Except for "buoy", these other meanings were restricted to compounds, but were understood nonetheless as words. The Soapies thus were forced to sometimes use a longer name, Mabimi, lest their enemies start calling them the Little Baby Buoys.

Murals and propaganda

The Soap Bubbles sometimes used nonviolent imagery to appeal to their enemies; whereas all of the other armies would slice people up with swords and stab them with spears, being conquered by the Soap Bubble army would merely make people feel refreshed and a ltitle bit prettier. They painted murals of their people dressed as soldiers, with giant white soap bars in place of swords. However, they knew from history that such claims to innocence bought little sympathy from stronger armies, and that if they ever wanted to be anything more than the bottommost group amongst an already oppressed people they would need to behave like normal people and establish a conventional army with swords and shields.

The Third Empire

In 3785, the Crystals got tired of cooperating with the Thunderers in running their Empire and conquered the Thunder territory (known then as Altotta) completely. The Thunderers had been getting weaker for centuries because they did not have a warm-water coastline, and even though the climate was warming up, they were still dependent on the Crystals for much of their food supply. Though the Thunderers were more militaristic in general than the Crystals, they were far poorer than the Crystals and could not afford to keep a sizable standing army in their half of the Empire while maintaining a secure food supply since they needed nearly the entire male population to work on farms and fisheries just to feed themselves.

The victorious Crystals claimed to be the first politicians in Altotta, and that the Thunderers who preceded them were primitive people who could not see beyond the present day in order to plan for the future. Because they wanted their rule to be as stable as possible, the many Thunder nations that had been set up over the past few hundred years were allowed to retain their governments, and were still referred to as nations, but on top of each government was an additional layer of government that answered only to the Crystal colonists' organization in Baeba Swamp. Thus the Thunder government did most of the work, and the Crystals stepped in only when the Thunderers tried to vote for something the Crystals didn't like. This allowed the Crystals to devote most of their attention to their military occupation rather than the time-consuming and largely unproductive work of running the civilian government.

Under the Crystal occupation government, which was often referred to as the Thunder Empire III or Third Thunder Empire, the Thunder religions were suppressed and Thunderers were encouraged to convert to the Crystal religion. As they had in Paba and Subumpam more than 1500 years earlier, Crystal people stood on street corners in Thunder cities blocking the path of Thunder citizens trying to go to work or take care of their necessary daily tasks. They put up signs on the streets insulting the Thunderers and warning them that in the future there would be a major war and they would lose. Yet on top of all of this they encouraged Thunderers to move to the Crystal Empire, promising that although they would be discriminated against there too, they would be safer because the Crystal Empire was solid and impenetrable to all potential invaders.

Dreamers invade Altotta

After about eighty years of being oppressed by Crystals, the Thunder Empire was invaded by the neighboring nation of Dreamland. Dreamland had invaded the Crystal Empire about 300 years earlier, and the Crystals had never forgiven them. The Dreamers considered the invasion of the Thunder Empire to be another step in their goal of conquering the Crystals, as the Thunderers had been denied the right to own weapons for 80 years and both sides considered them to have no role in the war. The Dreamers figured that if they pushed out the Crystals, they would have won the war and could begin oppressing the Thunderers just as badly as the Crystals had.

They were wrong; although the Crystals had denied the Thunderers the right to build a military of their own, the native Thunderers outnumbered the Dreamers by a wide enough margin that, even though they had almost no weapons, they were able to hold off the Dreamer invasion for two years. After two years, it became clear, however, that the Thunderers were going to lose their war, and that their Empire was merely going to change hands from one oppressor to another. In 3884, the Thunderers signed a surrender treaty turning over the whole of the Empire to the Dreamers and promising to help the Dreamers eliminate the last few rural strongholds of the Crystal armies.

The Soap Bubbles were a fork of the Thunderers who refused to surrender. Many of them were immediately killed, since they were just a tiny fraction of the Thunder population, and were thus outnumbered far more severely than the wider Thunder army had been. The Dreamers classified them as Crystal sympathizers, because they still refused to recognize that the Thunderers had any rights of their own and that there were more than two sides in this war. They considered eliminating the Bubbles a lesser priority than eliminating the Crystals, however, because like the Thunderers, the Bubbles were mostly unarmed and even those who had managed to steal weapons were untrained in how to use them properly and were thus poor fighters.

Because the Dreamers were focused on tracking down Crystals, many Bubbles escaped into the territory of the Crystals. Thus, the Soap Bubbles were saying that given the choice of two oppressors, they preferred the Crystals, whereas the Thunderers preferred the Dreamers. The fleeing Soapies said that they would even agree to be slaves for the Crystals if it would somehow help the Crystals eventually throw the Dreamer government back out of power. However, they knew that the Crystals had sworn off slavery 2500 years ago and showed no sign of returning to it ever again.

The Crystals at first considered the Soap Bubbles and the Thunderers to be the same, as the only difference between the two was that one had surrendered to the Dreamers and the other had not, and therefore considered the Soap Bubbles their enemies. They did not try to stop the flow of Soap Bubbles into their nation, however, just as they had never tried to stop the Thunderers from moving in during the previous era. They merely stated that the Bubbles would be the lowest class in their society and would have to work unpleasant and low-paid jobs such as scrubbing people's clothes with soap and extracting salt from the bubbles of the sea.

However, the Crystals soon realized that the Bubbles were now true allies, and the Crystals increased the civil rights of the Bubbles living in Crystal-held territory. This caused most of the other Thunderers that had been living in Lobexon to also convert to the Bubble party, seeing that to refuse to convert would be tantamount to endorsing the Dreamers' war against the Crystals. Meanwhile, the Soap Bubbles were being quickly washed away in the areas of the Thunder Empire that had been their original homelands. Thus, they soon became effectively a refugee minority living amongst the Crystals, despite having come to them from the Thunderers.

Thunder government returns to power

When the Thunderers overthrew the Dreamers in 3884 and established a racist government that oppressed Crystals moderately and Dreamers severely, they invited the Soap Bubbles living in Crystal territory to move back in, encouraged the few Bubbles who had hid out in Altotta to unmask themselves, and allowed mainline Thunderers to change their allegiance to the Bubbles. However, although the Thunderers legalized the Soap Bubble party in Altotta, and promised safety for those openly identifying as Bubbles, they warned the Bubbles that only mainline Thunderers could hold political office in the new nation since it was a one-party government.

Hearing this, the vast majority of the Bubbles, including the party leadership, did not reconcile. They stated that the Thunderers had drifted so far apart from their original belief system by this time that the Soap Bubbles actually preferred to live with the Crystals, and said that they would forever be allies of the Crystals. The Bubbles reminded the Thunderers that the Bubbles were the true descendants of the original Thunder party, because while the Thunderers had changed greatly under the Dreamer government, the Bubbles, having not been corrupted by the pain of abuse, had not changed at all. Likewise, they pointed out that the Thunderers were avowedly racist against the dark-skinned Crystal people, and that many of the Bubbles had married into Crystal families while living in Crystalland, and that their children were thus no longer welcome in Altotta. The Thunderers told the Soap that any Soapies who had married dark-skinned people had married dirt, and were no longer clean and thus no longer Soap.

Hearing that their party's name had been perverted into a racist metaphor, the Soap Bubbles signed a nonbinding transnational agreement condemning racism and committing to the overthrow, by violence if necessary, of the racist Thunder government of Altotta. They thus signed an alliance with the Zenith, a minority in the Thunder Empire which had in turn allied itself with various other minorities. The Thunderers did not enslave Zeniths, but they saw all minorities as potential enemies and that included the Zenith.

At a conference in Crystal territory, the Thunder party (which was still legal in Crystalland) argued to the Crystals that the Bubbles were trying to hide their racist past. They pointed out that the original name of their party had been the Snow, which was quickly changed to Soap because they apparently realized that although snow and soap were both shiny white things, snow often absorbs dirt and becomes dirty itself, but soap repels dirt and remains clean. Taken aback, the Soapy representative admitted that there were several theories about the origin of their party's name and he did not know which, if any, was the correct one, but affirmed that the Soap Bubbles had never been racists and never would be. The Soap speaker realized that the Thunderers were trying to turn the Crystals against the Soap by making them believe that the Soap had come to Crystalland because they thought the Crystals needed a bath, when they had in fact come as political refugees who were open to anything the Crystals wanted to do to them and were glad when the Crystals warmly welcomed them as equals. The Soap Bubbles declared that even though most soap was white, there were many colors of Soap and some were even black.

The Soapies countered the Thunder speaker's claim by claiming that the Thunderers had not been racists until 3884 and had only become such because they could not get along with the ethnic and political minorities in their territory because they were so unlovable that all of the minorities had turned against them. They tried to justify the fact that they had so many enemies by claiming that the Thunderers had started the many hatreds by declaring themselves racists and stating that the other groups were merely jealous.

The Bubbles tried to explain to the Crystals that they felt the Thunderers had not generally been racists in the recent past, but were driven into it out of desperation after being attacked by all of the nations around them and, in particular, by the Crystals that they had invited into their nation during the Crystal takeover of 3785.

The role of STW

See STW.

In 3915, an organization named Save The World was founded in the Thunder city of Lypelpyp. STW was aligned with the Zenith. The people of Lypelpyp thought this was a curious choice because almost all of the Zeniths lived on the other edge of the empire, thousands of miles away, and for a new organization to declare itself pro-Zenith in an area where no Zeniths lived seemed to be opening themselves up to attacks from the Thunderers in Lypelpyp.

But STW soon revealed their plan: they were illegal immigrants from the Crystal Empire, and their power base would be further illegal immigrants from the Crystal Empire and those who signed over their allegiance to them. Immigration into the Thunder Empire was entirely illegal, except for other Thunderers. Suddenly the previously 100% Thunder city of Lypelpyp was almost half Crystals and the city center was overpopulated and simmering with racial tension. The Thunderers could not understand why their government had allowed so many heavily armed Crystals to move into their city, after promising them year after year that their Empire would be forever a Thunder Empire and that any Crystals found within its borders would be immediately enslaved, and keeping that promise for thirty years.

The STW members were not interested in violent conquest, although they were heavily armed and very intimidating towards the Thunderers, even though the Thunderers in Lypelpyp were also heavily armed. Instead, STW was interested in dominating the economy of Lypelpyp to the point that it would be nearly irresistible for the Thunderers to sign allegiance to STW and thus destroy the power base of the non-STW Thunderers. Yet again the Crystals took to the streets, blocking the path of civilians trying to get work done, harassing people at public gatherings, and in general not trying to make friends. But this time they were not trying to get the Thunderers to convert to Crystalism, but to join STW. They avoided targeting children this time, because they had a new weapon to use against children: children. STW was a very child-focused organization, and it enrolled children as soon as they were old enough to walk as full members. STW considered the least of its members superior to the ruling class of the non-STW people around them, meaning that a 20-pound baby with an STW membership and a wet diaper would be given priority in STW's economic resource allocation system over the monarch of the Thunder Empire. That is to say, if the Emperor and a baby both entered an STW-run store and both wanted the last pineapple on the shelf, if the baby had an STW card sticking up out of his diaper, he would get it and the Emperor would have to go home and cry. Children in STW got out of school and chased after non-STW children bragging how much better they were treated at STW school than the other children were treated at the normal Thunder school.

As a technical matter, STW required its members to drop their outside party allegiances, so the Crystals who were immigrating into Lypelpyp to join STW became Zeniths when they did so. But they were dark-skinned Zeniths, and therefore by their mere presence in the Thunder Empire they were violating the Thunderers' laws and according to those laws the Thunder army was supposed to swoop in and enslave them. The people of Lypelpyp could not understand why this had not happened.

Lypelpyp adjusts to STW

The Lypels soon learned that STW's plan to seize power was extremely complicated. They required STW members to become Zeniths, meaning that once inside STW, the distinction between Thunder and Crystal was lost. They were allowed to keep their spiritual beliefs rather than adopting STW's official religion, Yiibam, but their political beliefs had to match STW's perfectly. In this time period, religion generally dictated politics, so to become an STW member was to effectively convert to STW's religion, even if one's mind differed on non-political ideas such as the number of gods or the location of the realm of the afterlife.

STW enraged the racist Thunder government by filling what had been an entirely Thunder city with thousands of illegal dark-skinned immigrants from the Crystal Empire, most of whom did not respect the Thunderers. Although the Thunderers had officially made peace with the Crystals, relations were tense. The Crystals were dismayed to see that they were not welcome, even though they had known all along that the Thunderers had outlawed all Crystal immigration. The people of STW were proud to admit that they simply didn't care whether the Thunder government wanted immigrants or not because they were going to get immigrants anyway. STW had decided to set itself up in Lypelpyp, and Lypelpyp was going to become the world headquarters of STW whether they wanted it or not.

As above, though, while the people of Lypelpyp referred to the dark-skinned STWers as "Crystals", simply because to them the Crystals were effectively a race of dark-skinned people rather than a religion, in order to join STW these Crystals had to become Zeniths. So, too, did the Thunderers who decided to side with STW against the increasingly angry non-STW "plain" people of Lypelpyp. Lypels soon learned that the STWers hated the non-STW Crystals even more than they hated the non-STW Thunderers, since they saw Crystals as their primary power base, and any Crystals who refused to join were doing even an greater disservice than the Thunderers, whom the STWers sympathized with since it was their country that was being invaded.

Still, they were looking to set up STW bases only in Thunder territory, never in Crystal territory, at least for the time being, as they felt the warm climate and mostly flat territory of the Crystal Empire would make it more difficult for STW to establish the monopolies that they needed to seize power. For example, Lypelpyp was in a valley surrounded by mountains, with only one road leading west and one road leading east. STW planned to soon seize control of both of them and starve out the city unless they all surrendered to STW.

Three-party setup

For hundreds of years, the dark-skinned Crystals and the light-skinned Thunderers had hated each other and each had taken turns abusing and oppressing the other, trading places every few decades as to which one was on top. STW had come to put an end to all of that by seizing control and oppressing both of them. But the Crystals and Thunderers also had a shared hatred of Dreamland, since Dreamland had stolen land from both of them. STW had declared war on Dreamland on the very first day of its existence, and motivated its people to fight by painting murals of STW members chasing off an invading Dreamer army. In reality, in STW's first years, its membership consisted almost entirely of young children, because since they were a corporation, it was difficult for them to get adults to leave the workforce and join STW. Thus they did not actually fight, but built weapons and provided supplies to an army called the Scopes who did almost all of the fighting. STW did have a traditional army, but it was for self-defense, and this army still did not intend to fight the Dreamers.

3919 coup

In 3919, the racist Thunder government was overthrown by dissenters from within. The coalition of STW, the Soap, the Zenith, the Crystals, and many other smaller minorities had succeeded in pushing the racists out of power and setting up their own government.

Since the Soapies were the only one of the many minorities that was descended directly from the Thunderers, they had hoped that they would be given priority in the new government and perhaps even total control. But they were disappointed as they realized that even the rebels still called themselves Thunderers, and still held to many of the Thunder ideals. The new Thunderers were significantly Soapier than before, but refused to allow a multiparty government either with the Bubbles or with the old racist Thunderers they had overthrown.

Thus the Bubbles still did not make peace with the Thunderers. Nevertheless, the Thunder Empire was a very large place, and some of the Bubbles did start to move back in to their old stomping grounds now that they were no longer excluded by race or any other means. They found places to live in Altotta in which they could live amongst only their own kind, protected by small but powerful Soap Bubble militias, a tactic they had learned from living for so long surrounded by enemies, something even the Thunderers had never experienced. Meanwhile, the Thunderers freed all of their Crystal slaves, but not the Dreamer slaves, since even the rebels still hated the Dreamers.

Being a minority, the Soap Bubbles had always emphasized the need to prepare themselves for a war despite being traditionally nonviolent, and thus were actually, per capita, both better armed and better educated about military strategy than the Crystals. Thus, they were better soldiers than the Crystals. Nevertheless, the newfound similarity in political ideals between the Soap and the Crystals led many Bubbles to convert to Crystalism over the years, and few the other way around, so the Bubbles remained a small minority amongst the Crystals.

Later history

The Bubbles nevertheless became known as the least violent of the many mutually hostile armies during the chaotic period between the last days of the Thunder Empire (4108) and the beginning of the Swampy Empire (4149). Indeed, they had remained completely nonparticipant in any violence, although because they were so small and weak, they at times entered into alliances with the Crystals in which the Crystals promised to protect them.