Gold Empire

The new Star Empire was sharply divided into two groups of people: native Stars and everyone else. The conquering Namans introduced the Stars to the imapa (also imepo, imapala, i mappa, imupu, imaqpag, etc.) system of government, a political philosophy that had been created by the World Utopians, who had shaped their philosophy to make it appealing to the frightened Stars so that they would let the Namans abuse and control them. The World Utopians had found success with imapa in other nations, too, and had come to dominate the Gold Union well before the induction of Lobexon. Once Loexon was opened up, imapa became a reality, as it was to the Stars a welcome alternative from the many violent factions that had fought for control of Lobexon for all of their lives. Besides imapa, the conquering Namans also forced the Stars to register themselves in the universal census, in order that the government know exactly how many Stars there still were. The Stars were allowed to have some representation in the government, though slavery continued.

Even though the Stars were no longer in power, Lobexon was still relatively wealthy because much of the Stars' technology had survived the war so far. This was imapa's version of utopia: instant gratification and avoidance of pain, even at greater future loss of pleasure. Imapa often upset Star-stytle gov'ts, which were now protected by the Star army and thus prevalent even in Lobexon.

Some Laban nations came looking for a truce with Nama, hoping the two ruthless military powers could learn to make amends. But the problem of Lobexon was so great that no solution could be reached. In 2057, the coast was opened, and Nama sent legions of Lenians down to Lobexon to take over the government. The Lenians introduced the Stars to a form of government known as Lapiwa, which was a special version of imapa that applied only to Lobexon.

However, life in Lobexon after its induction into the Gold Union was nothing like what had existed before2057 because of the exclusive dominance of Lapiwa. Lapiwa had through Lobexon's advanced technology become a symbol of affluence, satisfaction, and hedonism. Lobexon's laws grew more liberal every year.

Naman occupation

However, the central government in Nama held off on celebrating its victory. Although Lobexon had suffered many deaths, their population was still higher than all of Nama, even the expanded Nama created by their victory in the war. They did not want to make a military commitment to defend all of this territory. Indeed, Nama's central government had had little role in the invasion; they at first merely called for soldiers to help occupy the land, not expecting whole villages from the north to empty out and build places to live there. Moreover, even afdter teh war was over, some Naman warlords continued fighting, making the Stars believe that Nama had no interest in enforcing even the unfair treaty that they had written. Furthermore, Nama also had a problem with Naman warlords leaving the Star Empire altogether to set up even more new countries in the tropical rainforest to the south and west of Lobexon, where they would be totally out of reach of Nama and responsible to no higher authority.

Nama realized it would be advantageous for them to retain direct control over only the coastal areas of the former Star Empire, and leave the inland areas the choice of whether to cooperate or not, but in any case refuse to defend them militarily. The central government of Nama made it very clear to the warlords living in Lobexon that although Nama considered them their allies, they would not be granted automatic help shoudl their slaves rebel, or they be attacked by a third party such as Kxêl.

Note that the Namans occupying Lobexon were generally Macro-Repilian implants from the cold north, and shared little in common with the ocean-facing parts of Nama that had most of the power. In fact their culture was closer to that of the slaves they were ruling over than to that of southern Nama. Also, as above, the Macro-Repilians stood apart from the others in that their women were taller than their men, and that their women had almost all of the power in society. They saw this as a uniquely Repilian trait (there were no Andanese here), and did not try to impose it on the male-led peoples they now ruled over. As was common in later tall-femaled tribes such as the Moonshines and Poswobs, the Macro-Repilians ruling Lobexon generally permitted men to physically attack women. The Stars living in Lobexon adopted this trait, which led to a sharp increase in the occurrence of rape and wife-beating.

Divisions among the slaves

The Stars figured that in the far future, they might still be able to make an alliance with Subumpam, but it would have to come about as a result of Nama being so abusive of both Subumpam and the Stars that the Subumpamese would forgive the Stars for their previous abuses of Subumpam. Indeed, Nama saw the strategic advantage of controlling both sides of the Gold Sea as far down the "legs" as possible, and now actually controlled and arguably oppressed Subumpam even more strictly than it controlled Lobexon. However, they did not attempt to enslave the Subumpamese or any of the minority groups living amongst them, whereas by 2057, all of Lobexon was enslaved.

Dreaming of Subumpam, the Lobexonians drew up plans for how to overcoming their now very poor, unorganized society to expel the 5% of their population that consisted of Macro-Repilian slaveholders. The neations around Lobexon refused to blame Nama for sending the abusive slaveholders, or to sign an alliance with Lobexon to help get them out. This remained true even when some of the Repilians began to punch holes in Lobexon's borders and spill out into the even warmer, wetter, tropical rainforest nations to the south and west.

Appearance of pro-slavery slaves

Other Stars wanted to make an alliance with Nama itself, essentially surrendering to the slaveholders but arguing that Nama should take more control of the slaveholders and punish the most abusive ones. They took advantage of the fact that almost all slave owners were from Repilia, and the rest of Nama got little out of it. They figured this would be easier than trying to push through the Naman blockade of their ports to try to befriend a nation they themselves had massacred. The main entry route for Stars to get into Nama was humanitarian missions from Nama from people who were looking to rescue them and give them a better life in Nama. This was possible because the Naman ships that rescued the Stars were trading ships that had a lot of other reasons to be there, and thus were not blocked. However, only a tiny portion of the Stars was rescued in this manner, since they could only rescue escaped slaves, and most escaped slaves were hiding out well inland.

The pro-slavery LID party, whose membership consisted entirely of slaves, received support from Nama here, although LID merely overlapped with those Stars wanting an alliance with Nama.

Star migration

A third group looked westward to the nations of Kxêl (also known as Kêl, Kaʕīl, Kxesh, Kahiha, Kažu, Čayū, etc) for support. Although Nama had blockaded all of Lobxeon's ports, just the way Lobexon had blockaded SUbumpam's ports 100 years earlier, Nama did not go so far as to seal off all the land boundaries as well. So some Stars were escaping into Kxel, even though they would still be considered an underclass there. Kxêl was not an organized empire, so Lobexonians figured political opinions could vary from one Kxêl nation to another, and they looked for a nation that would let them in and allow them to openly develop armies for conquering back Lobexon.

Foundation of Kuhilani

The alliance of Kuhilani was formed, and Lobexonians began settling in Kuhilani. THey promised to confine themselves to the wet but extremely poor highlands of central Kuhilani both because these areas were generally unwanted and because they would be the ideal locations to set up forts from which they could march down and dominate Lobexon. Also, they figured that if they ever became a majority in central Kuhilani, they could use their position to control traffic between North Kuhilani and South Kuhilani, and make life difficult for the people who had rescued them. However, they wanted to remain friendly as long as possible in case they chose to pursue a war against the people around them.

Settlement of other areas

However, many Stars moving to Kuhilani decided that life in upland Kuhilani was not as bad as they had imagined, and put off plans for moving back down to the lowlands to fight. They thus became a permanent minority group in Kuhilani. Some of these even moved to Kuhilani's lowlands, which were even hotter than the tropical lowlands of Lobexon, and established new lives as Kuhilanian citizens. Others moved to the tropical rainforest along the south coast, which was already overpopulated, but nevertheless blended in with society and established new lives as citizens of the many small independent nations along the south coast. However, Naman slaveholders had also explored much of this territory by boat, and they at times ended up as slaves after all. Some Pabaps were also here; this is where Pabap civilizations such as Bomblipa were founded many thousands of years later. A few refugees also moved to Baeba Swamp, a hot, wet, and very crowded city located about a thousand miles across the Tempy Bay, but found themselves a permanent underclass.

Nama tolerated the escapees, seeing that the population of Lobexon had begun to decline, and the population of the Naman overlords grew rapidly to make up the difference. They had been a 5% upper class at the end of the war, but within forty years, they were 15%, despite almost no new immigration from Nama. Thus they began to realize that they had less and less to fear from potential slave revolts each year, and that they might well go on to rule Lobexon permanently. Furthermore, most of the slaves escaping were the most martial types, and the ones left behind were both physically weak and lacking a will to fight back or to better their situation. Still, they did not remove the blockade of Lobexon's ports.

THe rulers of Lobexon considered themselves independent from Nama now, although they were largely dependent on Nama to keep up the naval blockade, so they came to refer themselves as Kàke rather than Namans.

To the amazement of all, the leaders of Subumpam willingly entered into another alliance with the Star Empire, the same people who had invaded them, abused them, and enslaved them less than a hundred years ago. But this time it was the Naman-led governments of both territories that had signed the alliance. Although the new "Star Empire II" was still part of Nama, Nama had begun to make a distinction between its home territory that had been settled by Namans for thousands of years and recently captured outlying territories such as Subumpam and Lobexon.

The ruling political party in SE2 was the Gold party, which had traditionally embraced liberal politics. Since political parties and religions coincided, the slaves in Lobexon considered themselves members of the same Gold party as their slaveowners, and hoped they would soon be freed.

Nama had redrawn the state boundaries within Lobexon to give every state access to waterways and prevent the slavemasters from being jealous of each other. A side effect of this was that the long-standing phenomenon of every Star state having just a single monolithic culture, religion, language, and ehtnicity was no longer true. However, the Namans introduced their language, Khulls, to the people and this led to people in the suddenly multiethnic states of Lobexon uniting under the banner of the Khulls language anyway.

Slavery

Slavery had been largely introduced by the conquering Macro-Repilians from Nama, who had imported it from their homeland. Some of the conquerors were slaves themselves in their homelands, and wanted a way out. THe slavery was of a type that only operated in a particular geographical area. Everyone had to sign a census form, and each town had a list of slaves and whom the slaves belonged to. It was even possible, though uncommon, for two people to both own the same slave.

Slavery in Amade

In the tropical region of Amade, Stars had been enslaving Pabaps and other Lenian tribes for several hundred years. These slaves generally lived in areas where the powerful Pabaps with trading ships did not go. The Treaty of 2057 had legally enslaved all of the Stars and freed the people that the Stars had been enslaving, but Nama's rule was very weak in the tropics, and most Naman warlords who reached Amade enslaved both groups unashamedly. Still, they did not want Pabap trading ships finding out that they were so grossly violating the terms of the treaty, so the areas that held enslaved Pabaps generally did not trade directly with Paba and thus were much poorer than areas further north with harsher climates. In other areas of Amade, the Stars resisted the Naman warlords, and continued to enslave Lenians, but opportunities soon arose for these Stars to abduct and enslave other Stars, which they falsely claimed were migrants from Kxesh.

The Namans created the Diver party to represent the Lenian slaves that the warlords refused to free.

NOTE: There were likely other tribes besides the aboriginal Stars, but they may have come to identify as Stars during the preceding Star Empire era.

Vegetablization of farmland

The Naman slavelords ripped apart Lobexon's agriculture system to make it less self-sufficient. Nama had lots of wild animals, but was a very difficult place, despite its immense geographical extent, to grow vegetables. Naman slavelords decided that Lobexon would therefore become a giant vegetable garden for Nama so that Namans could learn to eat a little bit healthier. But also, they figured that they would likely eventually be thrown out of power, and figured that if a new independent Lobexon found that its farms were only good for producing vegetables, they would be dependent on Nama for food aid even while independent. This is why they killed off all of the livestock and produced fake pro-vegetarian arguments saying that those farm animals had been the cause of all previous famines.

However, an even higher priority for Nama was to end Lobexon's alcohol production, given that the tropics were great places to produce "banana beer" (kōxi) and "palm wine" (tákʷ). Then Nama banned alcohol entirely for the slaves except with permission of their masters. The only alcohol available now was grape wine, mostly imported from Paba and Subumpam, and a few quickly-consumed gallons of apple cider imported from Nama. The slavelords considered alcohol to be sinful even for themselves, but considered that the life of a slavelord was so stressful that sometimes they needed an escape. With its alcohol production shut down, the new enslaved Lobexon actually was more self-sufficient than before.

Political parties

Lobexon was now a very diverse area. As in Subumpam and Nama, political parties and religions were one and the same, so to change ones politics meant to change one's religion. Many religions were essentially confined to specific ethnicities, so these parties were monoethnic as well. And yet, one ethnic group could have several religious divisions, some of which would combine with the divisions of other religions in an alliance without actually merging.

Major groups in Lobexon in the 2100s were:

Gold

The Gold party was the ruling party and the only legal party after the Treaty of 2057 ending the war. The Gold party made it clear that it considered itself to be already multicultureal and openminded and that all other parties represented just a single point of view and were thus inferior. Some non-Gold parties were tolerated, and even welcomed openly, but they were still denied any government power. Other non-Gold parties were not even tolerated; anyone admitting belonging to them could be enslaved or killed. The Gold party was multiethnic and even multireligious in the sense that it did not ask its members to abandon any traditional religious beliefs they had had previously. Nomimally, Gold was itself a religion, but this was just a product of the government system in which people associated with others of the same religion and worshipped in the same buildings. The Gold religion did not ask its members to abandon their old traditional religions, be they Yiibam, Emon, Sisnasi, Kâ, Calacila, Macro-Repilian traditionalism, or anything else; they just demanded that their members pledge allegiance to the Gold government and not the minority parties being set up by those other religious groups.

Note that any minority group confined to Nama, such as the soon to be infamous Litila, associated with the Gold party rather than forming their own. These included some groups that were very hostile to slavery and went on missions to rescue slaves from Lobexon, something no one else could do because only the Gold people had full access to the coastline and the right of way throughout all of Lobexon's roads. However, they could not simply steal the slaves from their masters. So they had to either buy them in the fair market, which was expensive, or focus on freeing escaped slaves who had already been abandoned, which was difficult because they tended to be found in the most remote parts of the Empire. Nevertheless, the Gold government tolerated this because it was their own governmental philosophy that allowed it, and for the Lobexonian slavemasters to revoke the right of Gold people to disrupt slavery would mean that they themselves were no longer Gold.

The Gold party had been brought in by the slaveowners from Nama. Most of the slaves were sympathetic to the Gold party but wanted to be released from slavery. It also favored opening the ports of Lobexon to settlers from Paba, seeing that wherever Pabaps went, the standard of living improved, and wherever Pabaps were absent, the society was very poor and violent. They promised the Pabaps that they would be immune to the slavery laws even though they knew that three tiered societies with slaves, slavemasters, and outsiders had had a history of being extremely unstable. They considered Pabap culture the only human culture in the world deserving of respect, as Paba was the only society that had been violently abused by all of its neighbors for thousands of years and never fought back except to rescue their own people from their captors; and yet remained so welathy and strong that Paba had come to dominate half of the world's coastline. Paba was wary of the kind words of the Gold philosophers, as in the past, whenever their people were praised as a culture, it was praise from slave traders who found Pabaps to be the world's most perfect slaves. Nevertheless, many Pabaps moved into Lobexon in Gold-dominated areas. Becuase Paba still insisted that no foreign ships be allowed to enter Paba, Lobexon was forced to allow Pabap ships to enter Lobexon, though they were strictly governed.

After the war was over, the Treaty of 2057 abolished all non-Gold parties in Lobexon, even for the ruling class. They claimed that the Gold party was itself a diverse, open-minded, multicultural organization, since it was the party that was in control of all of Nama, and that therefore opposition wasn't needed. In fact they said all opposition parties were threats to their free and open society since the minor parties all believed they alone had the truth whereas the Gold party was open to education. Yet, all of these minor parties that were banned in Lobexon were legal in Nama.

The ruling Gold party kept tight control of their slaves, killing anyone who deviated from the Gold philosophy or religion. For this they were compensated by the government. Yet the Crystal movement seemed to be spreading. The Crystal slaves looked for power outlets such as a slavemaster who might convert to Crystalism, or help from the parent empire of Nama, which was still as politically diverse and welcoming of foreign ideologies as ever. The slaves themselves would have been allowed to move to Nama if not for the naval blockade of their ports. Individual escaped slaves could still get to Nama by first moving to Kuhilani and then getting on a boat headed from Kuhilani to Nama, but because Kuhilani and Nama were located on opposite sides of Lobexon, this journey was several thousand miles long, and generally required the ships to stop in Lobexon along the way. Thus few slaves attempted this.

In 2095, a ship of people from both Nama and Kxêl, who all considered themselves citizens of Kxêl, set sail from Kxêl territory in northern Kuhilani and landed in Baeba Swamp. They thus completed the journey that the Subumpamese had attempted 100 years earlier, but been stopped by pirates from succedding. The Stars heard about this and hoped that they could blend in.

Meanwhile, the Crystals preferred to work among their own kind, and even though they still believed that all the slaves should be freed, they focused only on helping other Crystals, and told the pro-Gold slaves that they were no longer allies, and that if the Crystals achieved victory, they would even consider enslaving both their former Gold slavemasters and their loyal Gold slaves. The Crystals were moving through the unguarded western border of Lobexon into cold territory populated mostly by Repilians, who despite being of the same tribal identity as their hated slavemasters did not consider themselves part of the slave machine and therefore did not hate the Crystals. But even so, the Crystals did not mix with these people, they merely declared that they wanted to live in peace with them.

Crystals

The Crystals were the last group to surrender to Nama in the Star War, and considered their defeat to be due to the other groups' betraying them. However, they had always been a small minority, even before the end of the war. The Crystals were almost all slaves, but they had a few allies in the upper class. They were explicitly transnational, meaning that they were sending diplomats to other nations in the hopes of finding allies there. They also admitted that their situation in Lobexon was so dire that they might well find their first success in another nation such as Subumpam or Kuhilani rather than in Lobexon. They also said that although they wanted to free all the slaves in Lobexon, they would fight only for themselves, and would not feel guilty about letting the Stars remain enslaved, since by staying in the Star party those people had explicitly rejected the Crystals' help.

The Crystals had actually been founded around the year 1550, and thus had a history even deeper than the empire they called thier home.

The Treaty of 2057 had made it illegal for any Crystals or Stars to leave Lobexon. However, the Gold gov't only enforced this on the coastline, figuring the rugged interior was impossible to blockade without occupying more Gold soldiers than there were people in all of Lobexon. Unlike the Stars, the Crystals considered themselves transnational, which meant that they often used this open border to move to other nations, hoping to raise armies among the foreigners that would help them get back in and dominate Lobexon. They also swore that their only allegiance was to other Crystals, and would not bother trying to rescue Gold slaves, or even Star slaves, though they would expect at least some of these people to convert to Crystalism if the Crystals began winning military battles near their homelands.

A few Crystals hid out in the highlands, in land that was within Lobexon's territory but had not been claimed by any slaveowners, and essentially became free. They invited people from Kuhilani to move in with them, though they were careful to avoid overpopulation, as the highlands were not good farming land even though their climate was wet for its 17N latitude. They trained their children to use weapons at an early age so that they could not easily be abducted and dragged down the mountains into slave plantations. And they were even worried about being attacked by slaves, as they had already alienated themselves from most of the other slaves by promising not to rescue them if they did not first convert to Crystalism.

The Crystals had recently sprouted a transnational political organization (often abbreviated as CRY) that drew its power mostly from slaves in Lobexon, but had allies amongst the ruling class and in other nations. However, even though they wanted to free the slaves, most of the slaves rejected the Crystals. The Crystals wanted to overcome their problems by studying and improving their technology, including but not limited to weapons technology. They figured that Nama had dominated them despite being numerically small because they had far better technology than the native Star slaves, and that the Stars could easily push out Nama if they could only pull themselves up to Nama's level of technological advancement. During the time while the war was still going on, the Crystals had been the strongest holdouts against surrender, but in 2040, most Cyrtsals agreed to surrender against Nama. Still, teh fighting went on for another seventeen years as Nama was not yet satisfied.

However, the Crystals also attempted to make allies in other nations such as Kuhilani that had played no part in the Star Empire War. Other people in the world were suffering too, they realized, and they predicted that they might actually liberate some of the other peoples in the world before they liberated themselves.

The Crystals admitted that they were guilty of abusing and exploiting the innocent Subumpamese people, and that they deserved to be punished and so did their children. But they believed if they fought aging their majority, they could be forgiven. In self defense some Crystals moved to the islands of Sulasali, as even though Sulasali was within reach of Nama's new expanded navy, the islands were tropical enough to allow them to survive. Sulasali was also known as Kʷoxʷudas, "land given up to God".

Stars

The Stars were a fork of the Crystals who rejected transnationalism and wanted to fight purely for supremacy of Lobexon over all other nations. As a tribe, they were much older than the Crystals, but before the rise of the Crystal party, the Stars had had no need to form a party of their own. Both the Crystals and the Stars recognized that the Stars were older than the Crystals in this sense, but the Crystal party had been formed more than 400 years before the Stars.

The Stars wanted to free all the slaves, not just the ones who voted like them. And although they looked for help in other nations, they expected that any help from other nations would lead to yet another exploitative treaty with the people of Lobexon at the bottom. Like the Crystals, the Stars were mostly slaves, and even the ones who were free were legally barred from exiting the country, while also being barred from any positions of power, which meant that they were in an uncomfortable state of having to work much harder than most other people, even harder than slaves, just to get by. (Slaves were provided food, water, shelter, clothing, and even medicine for free; their only fear was that if they did not work hard enough, they could be rejected by their owner and even killed. Free people had to find all of these things on their own, and although most were far better off than slaves, unlucky freemen often had to work very long hours merely to buy themselves the things a slave could get for free.) They considered themselves a majority party in Lobexon, saying that if the slaveowners were thrown out, essentially none of the former slaves would vote to have them come back in and start up slavery again, which is what the Gold party and thus the many pro-Gold slaves seemed to support. Neither would these people vote Crystal, as the Crystals had specifically promised not to rescue any non-Crystal slaves if they were to achieve power, and seemed to many to be liable to become just yet another slaveowning minority that enslaved all of its enemies with no regrets. Furthermore, Gold slavemasters typically required all their slaves to be Gold, or else face punishment including death. Meanwhile, any non-Gold slavemasters were persecuted by the Lobexonian government itself, so they were afraid to publicly convert. Thus the Stars figured any slavemaster who did not force all his slaves to be Gold was a likely Crystal or Star sympathizer, and of these two groups, most slaves would likely favor the Stars because the Crystals were not promising them freedom whereas the Stars were.

Strengthening the Stars' claim to be a silent majority was that the Crystals did not make a similar argument to claim that they too were a majority; they actually agreed that the Stars were a majority, and were the true descendants of the original Star party, even though the Stars had originated as a fork of the Crystals. This was because before 1989, there had been no need for a Star "party" for people to belong to; the entire population was Stars and needed no organization to identify itself with. The Crystals had merely created their political organization earlier than others, and the Stars consisted of people who preferred the old Star way of life but had joined the Crystals at first because the Crystals had the only functional anti-Gold organization at the time.

The Star party was seen by the Gold party as the most dangerous of the major parties, and was thus banned, although for the time being the individual Stars were not punished by slavery (if currently free) or death, which meant that most Stars were open about it in public and they could thus be easily spotted. The few free Star people tended to be economically powerful, and in many ways similar to the Big Hearts, except that the Stars were not allowed to get on a boat. The Hearts thus admired the Stars, and wanted to make friends, but it just so happened that the Stars were vehemently racist against the Hearts, seeing them as even worse than the Naman slavelords because the Hearts and other Pabap tribes seemed to dominate the economies of every nation they went to, pushing even the slavelords into middle-class status and intoxicating the governors with their potent raspberry wine. Thus the Hearts' love for the Stars was a difficult one.

The Stars in the tropics were mostly kept apart and worked in non-agricultural slavery, and thus led lives different from the other Star slaves further north. Stars who escaped often joined nearby nations since they could blend in with the dark-skinned aboriginals whereas the Divers could not.

The Stars, being aboriginals, were enslaved throughout the entire empire, and had no reason to want to escape into the north where conditions could even get worse for them since the slaveowners had much tighter control over their slaves there. Thus escaping Star slaves usually preferred to hide out in the highlands or move into Kuhilani. Other Stars converted to the Diver party, seeing slavery as evil but admiring the Gold government and preferring nonviolent means of coming to power. These people generally wanted to leave Lobexon, however, as they could not simply follow the blonde Divers northwards because they would be arrested and put back into slavery. They saw the blonde Divers as allies, not enemies, but also wanted to be the allies of every other group that was at the bottom of society, even if those people were extremely anti-Diver.

Divers

The Divers (DIP) were slaves of Lenian ancestry living in the equatorial regions of the empire, out of reach of Nama's police force. Pirates from Lobexon had begun abducting them, mostly from Paba, in the 1700s, though Paba had also sold some of its people into slavery to pay debts. Other Divers were descended from Lenian settled who had formed early colonies but were soon overwhelmed by the Star aboriginals.

The Divers had been formally freed by the Treaty of 2057, which also made their owners into slaves. But Nama's rule was very weak here, and the new incoming Macro-Repilian slavemasters often chose to simply enslave both groups indiscriminately. Mixed marriages between the Stars and Divers were severely restricted.

The tropical rainforests were very poor now, even poorer than the deserts of Taryte, because it was difficult to farm the land and there were few other national resources. They also did not benefit much from trade with Paba because they did not want Pabap trading ships to dock on their shores and see Pabap people being horribly abused. They traded with Paba, but only indirectly through areas of Lobexon that were further north and did not enslave Pabaps. Arguably the slaveowners in the tropical rainforests were worse off than some of the slaves in the far north, which had been enriched by commerce, and where slavemasters prevented slave revolts by making their slaves' lives more comfortable even if they still refused to free them. Occasionally a slaveowner living in the Equatorial zone would simply abandon his slaves and plantation to move with his family to the north, becoming simply a free citizen with no slaves. Thus these slaves would be freed. At other times, slaves simply escaped, since even though the rainforest was very poor, it was one area that was easy to survive off the land in, and the life of an escaped slave was not much different than the life of a slaveowner in terms of meeting basic needs.

Divers who escaped their plantations and fled into the safer parts of the empire usually chose one of the other parties to belong to. Those who escaped but could not get out of the rainforest tended to sympathize with the Crystals, but very few of them actually converted to the Crystal party because the Gold Empire had declared the Crystals illegal.

The Divers supported freeing all of the slaves, not just the ones who joined their party. They admired the stable government of Nama and believed that problems including slavery could be solved by nonviolent means. Thus unlike the Crystals and Stars, the free Divers living in Lobexon did not try to arm themselves or participate in sniping against members of the other groups; they wanted to rise to power fully in line with the Gold party. Indeed, their opinions on almost all issues other than slavery were perfect matches for those of the Gold party, which put them at odds with the other Pabap groups.

Life in Death

Life in Death (also known as Kaxʷūxʷa or Kafūfa) was a group of dark-skinned aboriginals enslaved by the Treaty of 2057 and mostly living in Amade. Unlike other slaves, LID members actually supported slavery and some hoped to one day buy themselves freedom and then continue to earn money. For their disloyalty, they were frequently attacked by escaped slaves and even bound slaves whenever the opportunity came about. LID agreed with the Gold party on all the other major issues as well, and the Goldies promoted LID at every opportunity.

Slavery in Amade was unstable, and slaveowners often left their plantations seeking a better life in the richer north and thus freed their slaves. Although formally banned from becoming slaveowners themselves, a small upper class of LID members managed to for all practical purposes recreate slavery on plantations that they had inherited or bought from other slaveowners. The loophole was that a landowner could forbid other people from entering or leaving their property, thus allowing them to force other people to work for them in order to be fed and housed. They were thus restricted to agricultural slavery only, unlike the new types that had begun appearing in larger cities where slaves performed manual labor of other types with their master not always physically present.

Feathers

The Feathers were Lenians, mostly in Subumpam, who opposed slavery but otherwise mostly allied with the Gold party. They had no government power. They mostly kept to themselves and did not object to being oppressed. They considered themselves allies of the Gold party but tried to avoid endorsing the Gold party's positions on issues related to slavery, since they saw slavery as an import from Lobexon which at best could only hurt Subumpam.

The Feathers had refused several offers from the Goldies to introduce slavery into Subumpam, even when promised that it would be only ethnic minorities who were enslaved. Nama allowed this, but soon passed a law criminalizing anti-slavery protests, and thus Feathers who actively campaigned against slavery became slaves themselves, with Goldies as their owners. However, only a small number of Feathers were enslaved; Nama realized that the Feathers might have been correct all along that slavery was bad since Subumpam had been economically successful for over a thousand years without any slavery.

Vampires

The Vampires were Andanese people who lived in parasitic colonies scattered across Feather territory. They typically sent their orphans into the care of Feather families, and then reclaimed the orphans when they were old enough to work.

Soft Hands

The Soft Hands (SLP) were Pabaps who had previously been trading between Paba and the Star Empire, but were trapped on land by the Treaty of 2057 as their ships were taken over by the Naman navy. The Treaty was friendly to them, and allowed them the choice of moving back to Paba if they wanted. The Soft Hands were the descendants of those who had chosen to stay and make a life as normal people not working in the shipping industry. Despite their ancestry, the Soft Hands mostly spoke Gold, learning Pabappa only to conduct business with other Pabap-descended groups. This helped them gain access to the ruling class in Lobexon, and even to the ruling classes of Nama. Nama chose the party's name for them, intending to remind them that they were expected to be nonviolent and leave handling weapons to the Goldies.

The Soft Hands were open to intermarriage with other tribes, but Nama defined their party as an ethnic group, and therefore any Soft Hands who married the darker-skinned people around them automatically lost their membership in the party. Some Softies married into the Gold slaveholder families, thus becoming Gold themselves. Lobexon's government had no reaction to this unexpected phenomenon; they let individual families handle it. Thus the marriages were generally allowed, In a few ways marrying into a slaveowning family actually took their status a step down in society because they had married into the class seen by almost all outside nations as the ultimate oppressors, and thus were not treated kindly when traveling overseas or even to many of the more liberal areas within Lobexon. Nama refused to allow the Softies to marry slaves, but some Softies bought slaves and then freed them so they could marry.

The Softies understood the purpose of Nama's government system better than many others because they had had some experience with it in their homeland of Paba, and had also been living in the best-educated part of Lobexon for a while. They were aggressive in promoting their interests in the imperial Gold government, despite being a tribe represented in only a small part of the empire. They understood how to turn Nama's vast size into a weakness: wherever Nama opposed them, they could search for some other part of Nama that would support them.

The Soft Hands had convinced Nama to allow them to build a second nation in northern Nama, called Paesapam, and Paesapam served as a second Paba since it almost always agreed with Paba in Nama's Mirror government. And thus the Hands could on occasion even defeat the Gold party in Nama's legislature if there was an issue in which most other parties were neutral. Nama granted the Soft Hands voting power in their legislature that was equal to that of the Gold party because the Goldies refused to allow the Hands to visit Paba, and therefore the Hands defined themselves as a minority living only in Lobexon, which was the only necessary criterion for full parliamentary representation. Furthermore, this also allowed them an entire second nation of their own carved out of Nama's own territory.

The Goldies soon realized that the Soft Hands had outsmarted them and essentially had three nations to themselves now: Paba, Pubapi, and Paesapam. And thus, through their two votes in the Naman parliament, the Soft Hands could void and even invert any of Lobexon's Gold Party's votes. They used this power even on issues entirely unrelated to the wellbeing of the Soft Hands to try to win concessions for the Softies elsewhere. To Nama, it didnt matter at all that there were only about 10,000 Softies in Lobexon versus several hundred thousands of Gold; all that mattered was that there were two tribes living there.

Big Hearts

The Big Hearts (PST; also known as Protection) were a group of Pabaps who had been created shortly after the 2057 Treaty. They were voluntary immigrants from Paba whom Nama promised to treat kindly so long as they worked hard in Lobexon to help improve the economy and the government. The Gold people knew that Paba was a pacifist nation, and had been violently assaulted by every one of its neighbors for over a thousand years, but that despite all the abuse, Paba survived to become the strongest and richest nation in the world. They believed that the Pabaps were pacifistic by nature, and noted that Pabaps had established themselves as a minority in many other nations throughout history and had never made threats to overthrow the governments of those states. Therefore the Gold people did not fear that the Pabaps they were inviting in would overthrow the Gold government. Nama chose the party's name to remind the Hearts that they were moving to Lobexon to help out, and would be required to live in dangerous areas of the Empire where their talent for making peace was most dearly needed.

The Big Hearts were humiliated by the Goldies' praise, as they did not consider being badly abused and taking it quietly to be a trait to be proud of, but nevertheless many agreed to move in, since Paba was perpetually overpopulated. Nama was pleased that only a few Pabaps chose to become Hearts, because they figured those people would be the most submissive of all, and that there would be no danger of a Big Heart revolt no matter how bad life in Nama became.

The Gold navy promised to allow Heart ships to sail in and out of Gold harbors, as the Hearts were expected to mostly be working in trade and other naval occupations for the time being, and because Paba still refused to allow any non-Pabap ships to enter its own ports. However, there were only a very few ports were the Heart ships were allowed in, and they were overseen very strictly to make sure Hearts were not freeing slaves and smuggling them out of Lobexon along with their much-needed cargo. Further, the Gold government made it clear that they wanted to soon get the Big Hearts off of the ports and onto the mainland to work in more traditional occupations as Lobexon had plenty of international trade already.

Attempts to rescue slaves

The Big Hearts felt bad for the aboriginal groups, and offered to adopt them and settle them in Paba or any other safe territory they could reach. Although the Big Hearts wanted to rescue slaves, for the most part this was impossible and would get the Hearts killed, so they focused their efforts on rescuing the free Star people and inviting them aboard their boats. The Stars were puzzled at the Big Hearts' efforts, because the Stars were strongly opposed to Paba, and many had become openly racist against the Hearts and other Lenians. The Stars who accepted the Hearts' offer to move to Paba were, nevertheless, primarily those who were friendly.

Paba's own military questioned the perverse decision of the Big Hearts to rescue only the one people living in Lobexon that had become famous for its violent massacres of Pabaps, and hoped that this new mission would be another Pabap "miracle" that seemed at first to be a dangerously masochistic idea but would in the end bring the Big Hearts and their killers into a close friendship. Although these rescue missions were illegal, for the most part, the Gold navy did not capture or harass the Hearts because they were only rescuing freemen, which actually helped the Gold party as these were the people most likely to be violent in the future. The Gold government had been wanting to simply enslave the entire Star tribe, but could not get its people to vote to do that because even some Gold people sympathized with the Stars. Indeed, Nama had been worried about letting any more Hearts into Lobexon for fear that they would immediately start doing good deeds such as rescuing slaves, but they were pleased when they realized they had found a solution that both groups took pleasure in: the Big Hearts enjoyed rescuing people and settling them all over Paba, whereas Lobexon enjoyed dumping their most violent and disruptive people all over Paba.

As it turned out, most Stars moving to Paba simply converted and blended in with Pabaps, forgetting altogether that they were originally foreigners. Those who did not assimilate were still welcomed, but were confined to the lower class because they could not fit in even with other minorities and therefore ended up mostly being sold as slaves to the still unrepentant Thaoa. Thus ironically Paba had rescued freemen and delivered them to slavery.

Settlement of Atlam

A third group of Stars were not taken to Paba but to new colonies in the rainforests of Atlam in the far southwest, where Paba hoped to establish fully independent nations that would give Pabaps the power to dominate the equatorial zone. The Hearts knew that every other attempt by Lenians to establish a settlement in the rainforests had led to the enslavement of those Lenians, but they were undeterred and hoped that they could arrive peacefully and sell their plans to the locals so that both sides would see the benefit of cooperation. Atlam was the southernmost point on the continent and had the longest and wettest rainy season of all the tropical areas.

For the most part these new societies did not work out well, as the aboriginals simply declared war as soon as the settlers arrived. These were not organized wars, however, and Pabaps continued to arrive, promising each time that they preferred to live peacefully and would not enslave or attack aboriginals unless the aboriginals struck first.

However, the Hearts and their Star companions were outnumbered by the aboriginals, and Repilian slave lords were also exploring this area, which meant that often these people also ended up becoming enslaved. Some Stars attacked the Hearts, because they had been expecting to live in Paba, but were unaware that the government of Paba often required its people to settle new lands and the incoming Stars were disproportionately affected as they were the lowest class. But even here, many Stars decided to stay, realizing they would end up as slaves if they tried to get back to Lobexon. In their new habitats they married Hearts and started new families and forgot all about Lobexon and its problems.

NOTE, there were probably other tribes in Atlam besides the aboriginals. See Tropical_Rim#Tapilula_to_Old_Atla_.28.7E1400.29.

War of 2131

These new countries soon became very prosperous, although it was a short lived prosperity. The Empire of Kuhilani in 2131 declared all of the new Heart-Star nations to be Kuhilani territory, as they saw the new civilizations were very young and yet already doing very well, and Kuhilani wanted more wealth and power for itself. They sided with the aboriginals and stated that they would deliver the land back into the hands of the aboriginals if only the aboriginals would agree to obey the laws of Kuhilani. Then Kuhilani's army, which was much larger and more organized than the aboriginal armies, invaded the colonies and began attacking Hearts and Stars.

The colonists surrendered immediately, as they were trading colonies with no militaries of their own living in a very military part of the world. However, Kuhilani soon realized that its dream was not to be, as when Kuhilani annexed Atlam, Lobexon immediately shut off the trade routes with Atlam, and Atlam became even poorer than Kuhilani had been. Paba did not give up on its plans to settle the equatorial zone, but they soon lost touch with what had been their colonies and all that remained when the next Pabap ship arrived in the area were a few curious-looking aborigines with blonde hair and stone tablets written in a language they could no longer understand.

NOTE, it is possible that Kxesh preserves the Diver-like culture of the Lenian immigrants, just as they did when the Oysters started moving in. It depends on their cultural attitudes, and whether they were based on tribal affiliation alone or on body types (the Oysters being not just a different color but also a different body type).

In any case if the Diver-like Lenians (DLL's) were assimilated it implies that they were submerged in just 26 years, assuming that Kxesh secedes again in the year 2155, and that the Diver-like Lenians and the Stars did not intermarry shortly after they arrived. Such a quick assimilation could only be done by force, even if it were 80 years instead of 26.

Western Pabaps

Yet a fourth group of Pabaps began moving into Lobexon in the early 2100s, the difference this time being that they did not seek citizenship and preferred to think of themselves as Pabaps. This was a change in behavioral habits for them, as Pabaps of all types had previously been passive and allowed everyone else to treat them as inferiors. These Pabaps came to Lobexon claiming that living in Lobexon was their unpaid reward for their ancestors' role in the war against the Stars, which involved a 70-year occupation of parts of eastern Subumpam. They were not much different than the Big Hearts, which had been painstakingly invited to move to Lobexon; the difference is that these new Pabaps were not invited, and they expected the Gold navy to let them come and go as they pleased, whereas the Hearts had to stay on land except when specifically told to go to sea.

Naming

The Western Pabaps refused Nama's attempt to assign them a traditional party name and identified themselves as the Pūgàya tribe (WPB) or simply as Pabaps. They noted that Nama's earlier choices of party names for the Pabaps had all been belittling; the Soft Hands and the Big Hearts implied that Pabaps were meant to serve other races, while the Divers were given a nonviolent name even though they lived among and had allied with the Swords. Though the WPB members were also intending to be nonviolent, they refused to adopt a name that made them seem like easy victims. The tribal name Pūgàya meant "lazy palms", because of a tribal emblem featuring two slanted palm trees that cross in the middle. Yet the same word pūʕ "palm tree" also meant "delicate; requiring a luxurious lifestyle" and had come to be a term of abuse.

Role in society

WPB became a middle class mostly dealing with shipping, since the Pabap navy was still strong in its home territory, and since the Treaty of 2057 had established that blonde-haired tribes would neither be masters nor slaves if they were to move in. The Pabaps wanted access to the addicting tropical fruits that could only grow in warm climates such as Lobexon's. In return they brought in temperate climate products that were already available in Lobexon due to their connection to Nama but were nonetheless cheaper when transported across an ocean than when transported over the mountains blocking Lobexon from Nama.

Nama tolerated the Pabap presence because they were at least strongly loyal to Nama if not specifically to the Gold party. Once the Pabaps were well established, some Subumpamese people also began to move in. Previously, despite being the winners of their war, they were afraid to move into Star territory for fear that they would be physically abused by the Star slaves. But with the success of the Pabaps, they decided to blend in with the Pabaps. Meanwhile, the birthrate in both Paba and Subumpam was high enough that Nama realized if the new immigrants really were repatriated, theír home nations would have overpopulation problems.

Zenith

Among the Crystals' foremost enemies were Naman aboriginal nations like Nitāga which divided the world into halves. Nitāga's ruling Zenith party put on one side the Lenians, so addicted to self-abuse that they bowed down and let other people exploit them both at home and abroad. On the other side they put the Crystals and Stars, so violent that their men lived even shorter lives than the Lenians. They compared the Lenians to an all-female society, saying that the only men in the Lenian nations were the immigrants who had arrived to exploit and abuse the Lenians. Likewise, they said that the Crystals and Stars were so masculine that their women were merely smaller versions of their men.

The Zeniths offended nearly all of their potential allies with this argument, but the loudest response came from the Crystals. The Zeniths claimed that this proved them right, and further declared that the Crystals would never change. The Zeniths believed that one's body type determined their personality, and that all light-skinned people were submissive by nature while all dark-skinned people were violent by nature. They put themselves in the middle, saying that with their moderate skin tone they were between the two extremes of the others. Nitāga wanted no allies among the major armies in Lobexon, not even the Gold slavemasters; they preferred to rule directly from Nama.

Intra-Pabap relations

When WPB found that they could come and go as they pleased, all of the other groups in Lobexon realized that perhaps the Gold slavemasters were not as all-powerful as they claimed. The three other Pabap-descended groups still claimed loyalty to Lobexon now, but were relieved that they could now visit Paba instead of being forever trapped on the mainland. Even now, however, Nama still considered the Soft Hands to be a nation of its own, deserving of a separate seat in Nama's parliament, which meant that they continued to frustrate Lobexon's Gold party.

As each year went by, the power of the Gold government in Lobexon seemed weaker and weaker. Lobexon's Gold government began to consider that perhaps the importation of so many Pabaps had been a mistake. They had been expecting to soften the rough spots of their vast nation with the world's most peaceful people, who would work hard to clean up the messes Lobexonian slavelords made and as a reward expect only the permission to find new ways to scrub even harder. Although many of the Pabaps really were more peaceful than the people they settled amongst, as their numbers grew, their power grew even faster, and this growth was at the expense of the Gold party rather than the Gold party's enemies.

The Gold party had divided the Pabaps into four major ethnic groups, and hoped that these four groups would at least occasionally fight each other and thus weaken their power, but they were embarrassed when they realized that the four Pabap groups were reliable allies, and that those who had the most power happily shared it with those who had none. Furthermore, the Goldies attempts' to provoke their other minority groups into attacking the various Pabap groups had mostly failed as well. Their Pen program, advocating a complete removal of all non-aboriginals from Lobexon, had essentially won no allies; the only people calling themselves Pens were Gold slaveowners in disguise.

The Stars were the only group that were prone to violent attacks against Pabaps, but they had been so for a long time, and held no allegiance to the Gold government. And even their numbers had been greatly reduced in recent years as the Pabaps had reacted to their attacks against Pabaps by adopting them and resettling them in Paba in the hopes that they could get along better in a nation with no slavery and no wars.

Pabaps isolate themselves

The various Pabap groups had been trying to stay out of this emerging conflict, having become more selfish and cynical the longer they stayed in Lobexon, and now figuring that a Star vs Crystal war might be just what Pabaps needed if they wanted to secure a lock on power in Lobexon. Fifty years earlier, Pabaps had been rushing into battle scenes with flowers to try to calm down the soldiers on both sides, but as life in Nama continued to prove difficult, the Pabaps drew closer to each other and some began to think of themselves as loyal to Paba instead of to the Gold Empire.

The Pabap military planners figured that the Stars and Crystals could wipe each other out, thus depriving the Gold slavemasters of most of their slaves, and leaving the four Pabap groups entirely unharmed. In their hearts, many Pabaps strongly admired the Stars, or the Crystals, or in many cases both, but they did not want to officially sign up as allies of either of the two groups because they knew that every Pabap who signed up to either of those parties would be at best consigning himself to slavery for the rest of his life, and at worst being drafted into one of their armies and sent off to kill his own family members.

At the same time, however, the Pabaps generally also refused to join the Gold Party, because even though that would give them direct access to the power structure of Lobexon's government, it would endanger their safety, as the Goldies were the one group that made both Crystals and Stars unite in an insatiable hunger for blood. Nama's government, which was still nominally in control of Lobexon and all its many slave plantations, made it difficult for new political parties to be created, but even harder for them to be abolished. Gold slaveowners in Lobexon now were telling Pabaps that their four political parties were all illegitimate, and that they were winning political concessions due to a loophole in the Gold parliamentary system that had originally been intended to help minority coalitions overrule one-party majorities.

The Gold people could not understand what had gone wrong. Their political system had worked well in Nama for thousands of years, but in Lobexon the Pabaps seemed to have found a fatal weakness that enabled them to push around even the upper class of slavemasters into handing over ever more power to the Pabaps. The only potential conflict where the Goldies still had a clear advantage over all of the Pabaps was an all-out war in which the Goldies would be forced to overthrow their own government, and secede from Nama, thus using their still all-Gold army to force the Pabaps to hand power back to the Gold party. This, they knew, would cost them the support of Nama, because even though Nama was also led by the Gold party, the Gold party considered it unforgivable to overthrow a Gold government, even if the party claiming power was also Gold and was doing it to preserve what they felt was the best government in the eyes of Nama. Thus even Nama was turning against the Gold slavemasters now.

The Goldies decided to focus their efforts on dividng the slaves amongst each other.

There were also some minor parties. The Doorstops wanted to escape all of the problems around them and move to Laba, saying that life on Rilola was so bad now that they would be better off moving back to the hot, wet, overcrowded jungles of Laba. The Litila wanted to escape all of their problems by putting humans under the control of animals, particularly the worm-like liui. They had been a major voice in Subumpam before they were taken over by the Star Empire and then by Nama. It was said that people like the Litila could only take power in human nations that were under severe distress, and they would disappear once the nation became more healthy. The president of Litila was assisted by thousands of slaves. Their acronym is NAN because they had an alternate name of Naana. The Litila had almost no support from even the most desperate of the slaves in Lobexon, and were seen essentially as foreigners whose philosophy was a cross between masochism and superstition. During the war, the Stars had worried that if they lost, they would be put under control of the Litila, as the Litila had support within Nama. But this did not happen.

Conflicts among the slaves

The Gold Party had been unsuccessful at promoting divisions amongst the slaves they ruled over, but soon realized they might not need to try. By the early 2100s, the Stars were beginning to win allies even amongst their traditional enemies. As the Stars regained power, the Crystals hiding in Sulasali felt increasingly threatened. Most Crystals now moved away from Sulasali, and those who remained were physically abused by visiting groups of Stars, who were not punished by the Gold government.

Thus, even though the Gold slavelords considered the Stars the most dangerous of all of their enemies, they tolerated and occassionally even promoted Stars into power in the hopes that it would lead to a civil war of slave vs slave that would leave the mutual enemy of all slaves relatively unharmed.

Crystal-Star relations

Soon, a secret army commanded by the Comet (an ex-Crystal turned Star) became powerful and focused on attacking Crystals at every opportunity. This army was frequently attacked by the Gold government or, occasionally, by the Crystals themselves, but it survived these frequent attacks and when it declined, it was due largely to a shift in military power towards another secret army, commanded by Old Faithful, another anti-Crystal.

Another major change was the fact that the Stars, too, had become the target of an army. Here, however, it was the regular Gold army that did the greatest share of battling the Stars. The Gold party followed the Pabaps through their parliamentary loophole by declaring the Stars were the true majority in Lobexon, which meant that the Goldies were a minority and all future votes in the Parliament would be stacked against the Stars.

A third change was the fact that Crystals from FILTER (a feminist group) now openly helped the Crystals on the islands of Sulasali, despite increasing violence from other groups. As FILTER helped the Crystals, Lobexonians' sentiment shifted even more against the Crystals. Feminism in this context refers to a biological adaptation of some tribes of humans in which women are much taller than men, and cultures with this trait tend to have their women rule over their men and dominate them in every way. This was seen as dangerous by even the females of the traditional tall-maled groups because it upset their power structure. Thus, even though the Crystals were very weak, the fact that they had allowed themselves to live with and enroll Feminists into their party made them the most alien group of all, and therefore the most hated. Feminist cultural traits had begun to filter into even the mainstream Crystal population now, meaning that they often elected female leaders and considered their men to be less important than women in some ways. It also meant that they were less prone to seeking to gain power through violence than they had been until even very recently, as they saw violence now as a masculine, and thus Stars, trait.

Also, because the upper crust of the upper class was itself Feminist, the tiny Feminist Crystal men were seen as collaborators in the abuse of all of the other groups, making their position the very bottommost of all. Star men became more aggressively masculine now, seeing feminism as a trap to castrate them and force them to submit not to their own wives, but rather the women of the slavemasters who were intent on abusing them for the next 10000 years.

Thus, even though the Stars wanted freedom from their Gold slavemasters, they devleoped a secret army which attacked the Crystals whenever the Gold army couldn't stop them. Thus, a "triangle war" had emerged — the Crystals, the Stars, and the Gold slavelords were all against each other.

Some Crystals asked the Stars for an alliance, but the Stars refused, despite the fact that they were now being as badly abused by the Namans as were the Crystals. The Stars refused to humiliate themselves by giving in to the much more submissive, feministic Crystals. The Crystals were still biologically masculist, and knew that they would be for a long time, but they were electing female leaders as they created a "slave democracy" that idolized the bottommost people into power and said that women were purer than men and should be in control of all men.

Thus, although some Stars were now secretly defecting to the Crystals, the two groups remained separate, and both groups remained victims of the oppressive Gold government which they all had earlier fought to put in place! This was one reason the Stars didn't trust the Crystals. Another was the fact that the Crystals were openly corrupt; for example, they stole money and offered it to anyone who would vote Crystal. They justified this by saying that it is still better than gaining power by force, and therefore was more ethical than what the Stars supported. Finally, the Stars didn't trust the Crystals simply because Crystalism was a very "worldly" movement, which meant it would not be valid in the future. Since Crystalism would not work in the future, they said, any Crystal who would try to stay in power would really be obstructing progress, which is what the Crystals were accusing pro-anata people of.

On the other hand, the Crystals didn't trust the Stars for other reasons. They said that the Stars were nationalists, whose allegiance was to an authority no greater than Lobexon. The Crystals, on the other hand, belonged to no particular country; they were everywhere. Also, the Crystals accused the Stars of ethnocentrism and ruthless bursts of violence. Coming from a group who for years had unsuccessfully tried to gain political power through violence, this signaled a surprising shift in policy — it seemed the Crystals had given up trying to be violent and had adopted a more covert method of gaining power.

However, this was a time of terrible vexation for the Crystals. The Crystals blamed themselves for their failure to take over the Empire, saying they should have foreseen the war and built up a military before the other groups did. However, the Crystal army was much smaller than Nama's.

In Sulasali the Crystals taught that their task was to peacefully spread Crystalism to the rest of the world, and at the same time ensure its noncorruption (although this stance was taken only because they were so weak militarily that it was their only hope). The Sulasalians by now had split away from the outworld Crystal parties completely as part of their anti-corruption effort. They wanted to attract people to their party who were looking for God's army, so they worked hard to clean up their image.

In fact this cleansing rebirth did attract the attention of the outworld, but it was in a fashion the Crystals had hoped to prevent - their new image now shone in the world as a stark contrast to the abusive Gold philosophy, and Nama's Gold party vowed to destroy the Crystals. As a result, the Crystals were forced to shield their islands from the outworld as virtually all other parties, even fellow oppressed parties in Lobexon, began to boycott their philosophy.

The Crystals' most strident enemy was the Zenith nation of Nitāga, a "leap" nation which was also deeply involved with the Lobexonians' unique faction of the Gold doctrine, called Lapiwa. Lapiwa allowed the Lobexonians to cling to the freedom won by imapa without renouncing national sovereignty, as mainstream Gold ideology demanded. Nitāga had no ethical reason for their habitual abuse of the Crystals; they did it because it was fun. Yet some could not help observing that it seemed the Crystals had stumbled upon the path to real world peace that the rest of the world had blindly been trying to find for all of history.

Stars-Pabap relations

The Stars who had not moved to Paba had, for the most part, been unaware that the Stars who had moved to Paba were doing well and were far more prosperous than the ones who had stayed behind. Thus they didn't realize that they had missed the opportunity of a lifetime, and that Pabaps had really truly wanted to be the best friends of the Stars. Thus, these ignorant Stars had continued hating Pabaps all along, and even attacking Pabaps, and by 2140 the two groups had little contact with each other as the Pabaps had become a lot more fearful now and also a lot more assertive of their interests.

Star people had much more contact with Crystals, and thus hated the Crystals even more than they hated the Pabaps. Nevertheless, they began to see the Crystals and Pabaps as having a lot of traits in common, and said that if the Star Empire were ever to reborn, they would consider Crystals and Pabaps to be the same people.

The Pabaps had little interest in befriending Stars anymore, but the Soft Hands declared that the Pabaps, if forced to choose a side in a Star/Crystal war, would choose the Crystals, as only the Crystals considered them even potentially to be allies. The Soft Hands were just one of four Pabap party organizations in Lobexon, and were actually the smallest of the four, but they had the most political power.

Crystal-Pabap relations

The Crystals considered themselves the weakest and most oppressed of all the groups now, even below the slaves. Their own hideout on the islands of Sulasali was now controlled by "two ugly dogs", they said, and they couldn't survive even there, so they needed to move to an entirely foreign nation to escape persecution.

The Crystals believed that Pabaps were at heart a helpful people, and wanted to ally with them in the future, but knew that due to Lobexon's legal system, essentially no Pabaps would even consider converting to Crystalism, since it would make them automatically slaves, and that Crystals could not simply convert to one of the Pabap parties because they would be an obvious ethnic misfit amongst the blonde blue eyed Pabaps. Even if the Pabaps appreciated their help, any Crystals wishing to hide amongst the Pabaps would have to stay indoors or else be detected by the government of Lobexon as an escaped slave. (Even though Crystals had expanded more rapidly overseas than any other group, and became quickly the most ethnically diverse party in Lobexon, all of the people they had drawn from as of yet were geographic neighbors of Lobexon and thus all generally were very dark skinned people.)

The Crystals wanted to move to Paba to strengthen themselves in preparation for a future attack against Lobexon in which the Crystals would use the Pabaps living in Lobexon as allies to make the war easier. But preparing for this would take serveral generations, and would at first need to be done entirely with Pabap ships and Pabap money, as the Crystals, even the ones still living on the islands of Sulasali, had no ships and almost no money of their own to draw from. And at present Paba was too overcrowded to accommodate yet another group of immigrants and was not interested in consigning itself to being involved in what seemed likely to be the most dangerous nation in the world for the indefinite future. But even so, a small number of Crystals did manage to move to Paba. These generally were ones who were living on Sulasali rather than the mainland, as even though Nama's navy had thickly encircled Sulasali they were less suspicious than Lobexon about allowing Pabap ships to visit. The Crystals hiding out in the western highlands generally moved even further west rather than trying to get to Paba.

In previous decades, the very thought of a Crystal-Pabap alliance would have been disgusting to the Crystals, but so many other problems had surrounded the Crystals now that many chose to move to Paba. Yet, the Crystals who moved to Paba quickly alienated themselves by proclaiming that the Pabaps were a stupid and primitive people, even though the Pabaps had been traditionally well-educated while the Crystals refused to allow their children to even attend school.

Nevertheless, the Crystals tried to hold their tongues in the hopes of making a Crystal-Pabap alliance a reality. They said that their primary enemy was not Paba, but Nitāga. Nitāga's main quarrel with Sulasali was the ideology of the Crystals. The Crystals nonetheless encouraged people to join their group as they felt in their hearts that it was the only right thing to do. Meanwhile, they began to transform their own people into an army.

The Crystals soon began to teach that the Crystal party had suffered abuse because they had the moral high ground and thus made easy victims. They predicted even tougher times ahead as they prepared to turn against the entire world. Thus they encouraged their people now to think nothing of risking their lives for the sake of their country. Still, as they were to others essentially harmless, they encouraged peace whenever possible, but began rapid development of a secret military.

The Crystals thus presented to the world a peaceful face, intended to win over the outworld by compassion, but in reality were preparing for a cataclysmic war against the rest of the world and the people in it who were to blame for the Stars' defection from the Crystals during the earlier war.

Relations with Nama

Nama was a very large and diverse empire. Though the Crystals were illegal, Nama also had plenty of potential allies for the Crystals. The Crystals had their own Mirror nation in Nama, Ḳīʕʷí (hereafter "Kīvi") which Nama promised to protect at all costs even though the Crystals in Lobexon were seemingly trying their hardest to disrupt Nama. FILTER also seemed friendly to them, and although the Crystals did not want to commit to an alliance with an ally even more potentially violent and yet hopelessly outnumbered than themselves, the very fact that FILTER had asked them for help showed that they might in the far future make a team.

Attempts to settle Baeba

In 2095, a group of 5,949 Stars attempted to establish a settlement of Baeba Swamp. The sailors hoped that the swampland creatures would provide them a source of food and shelter so that they could live there, and hopefully eventually spread out.

Many of the Pabap ships that they sailed were wrecked off the coast. The sailors had landed near their destination, which they now called Baeba Swamp, but they soon discovered that the animals living in this swamp were very dangerous to humans, as the first person to step out onto the land was attacked and killed by a sea snake within the first minute.

Note that this was nevertheless considered a successful migration, unlike Subumpam's earlier attempt in which they failed to even reach Baeba.

As huge as Lobexon's population was, Nama's population was much stronger, and their powers made them too strong for the Stars to ignore. Even the small percentage of Macro-Repilians that traveled to Lobexon was enough to hold down the now-united Stars' desperate attempts at rebellion. The Stars never surrendered but they were soon subdued by the much more powerful Macro-Repilians. Although this action caused almost all of the Repilians' allies to declare war on them, for the meantime these other Naman countries were to weak to save the Stars from their coming doom.

Adoption of Star refugees

As the Stars ramped up their war against Nama, many Namans began sailing humanitarian missions to Lobexon to adopt Stars into the Naman population. The Namans could not attack these ships because they couldn't see them. Although many of these missions failed, enough succeeded that Nama had adopted a sizable minority of Stars (including the Polotta) within a few months, and these Stars soon joined the war against Nama.

When the Zeniths in Nitāga learned what happened, they declared that the Namans were almost as masochistic as Lenians, and that they would never form an alliance with ethnic Namans even though Nitāga was itself a part of Nama. They claimed that this, too, proved them right, as Nama was not merely too submissive to fight off an enemy in the very core of their empire, but had in fact duly imported another enemy to their shores.

The role of Subumpam

Northern ("Uphill") Subumpam at this time was dominated by fundamentalists of the religion called Sisnasi. Nobody in the Susubmpamese government took seriously nyone who did not back up all their political opinions with Sisnasi scripture and philosophy. In southern SUbumpam (Bipabum), a scandal involving the Sisnasi priesthood, combined with the liberality that came with its greater affluence, had caused the population to question Sisnasi and move toward a very secular government, with atheists competing for power at the highest level. They also practiced Emon, a sun-worshipping religion that had been imported from Lobexon.

The Subumpamese, though they had been at peace for more than a hundred years now, were still frightened of the seemingly ever-changing war in Lobexon, and responded by uniting under the banner of Sisnasi and declaring all of Subumpam to have just a single religion and a single political party. They were not attempting to suppress dissent; they just didnt want to become a player in a war that would likely hurt Subumpam even more than it would hurt the other armies. They realized that Lobexon was where all the violence was found, and therefore Lobexon made things happen and Subumpam merely reacted. They figured that if they purged their territory of all of the parties which were causing problems in the western half of the empire, they would not soon need to clean up those problems in the eastern half.

THey were afraid that Subumpam was liable to be swamped and essentially consumed by any party in the war they happened to alienate, since it would be easy for them to invade Subumpam. They realized they could be overwhelmed even by an ally, if that ally decided Subumpam was the perfect pillow on which to lay its army to rest as they fled defeat in Lobexon. Thus, they said, for the meantime the only thing protecting them from being eaten up and thrown out by Lobexon was Nama's continued naval blockade. And that was getting weaker every year.

THus, even though Sisnasi was not particularly friendly to the Gold Party, they considered themselves strong allies of the Gold Party, as it was what was protecting them from all the other groups. Every break in the GOld Party's power, such as the Pabaps' discovery that they could penetrate the naval blockade, was a loss for the Subumpamese. Meanwhile, Pabaps living in eastern Subumpam were becoming interested in forming political organizations of their own patterned after the ones they had in Lobexon. Subumpam looked for a way to reassure themselves that their empire was not set to become the stage for yet another major war fought by two foreign armies that were hostile to each other but cared not at all for the welfare of the Subumpamese whose homelands had become their battlefield.

As a concession to the Subumpamese complaints of being yoked to and run over by larger powers in the Star Empire in previous centuries, the Namans had enrolled Subumpam as ten states in the new Gold Empire, rather than just one. In essence, the preexisting government structures of the individual Subumpamese states had been restored, and were now treated as being on the same level as Lobexon's eight states rather than treating the whole of Subumpam as just a ninth state. Nominally, thus, 55% of the voting power in the Gold Union was in the hands of the Subumpamese. In practice, however, votes were determined by political parties, not by population counts or the number of nations participating in a vote. The Subumpamese, being entirely Gold, were thus still the strongest party, but the problems and thus the attn of the GOld party was definitely not in Subumpam. Note also that Subumpam had not regained the port territory of Pipaippis in the Treaty of 2057; this was still securely Pabap territory. Thus sea trade in the eastern half of Subumpam was still mostly controlled by Paba, rather than Subumpam or Nama. This had the effect of making eastern Subumpam much poorer than western Subumpam.

Decreasing living standards throughout the decades actually solidifed the Gold Party's dominance in Subumpam, and by 2140 Subumpam was effectively a one party state with no tolerance for dissent. Note that the Gold party had been the only legal party for Subumpamese people since 2057 anyway, because the Pabap parties only admitted Pabaps. But dissent movements had been much more widely tolerated here than in Lobexon. But by 2140 any evidence of membership in a party other than the Gold party for a Subumpamese person was a crime. All of the non-Gold parties were restricted to ethnic minorities (mostly Pabaps) and had no government representation, not even the power they had in northern Lobexon. Religion had submitted to politics now; the Sisnasi religion was allowed to be practiced openly, as it had seen the Goldies as the lesser evil all along, but atheism was the public face of the Gold movement now. Even though many people claiming to be atheists were not actually atheists, they did not consider it blasphemous or sinful to hide their religious beliefs in these circumstances, because they felt that they could at least use atheism as a means to unite people who would otherwise fight. Still, atheism was not the primary motivating factor behind the GOld party; politics was. They merely found atheists easier to deal with since they did not generally have to weigh their allegiance to their god against their allegiance to their political party. Thus a religious conflict between the Sisnasian Subumpamese and the Yiibamic Pabaps was prevented.

Conflict in Amade

Around 2127 the Macro-Repilian slave lords created a new political party they called the Pens. The Pens opposed the blonde Lenian tribes, including captured slaves, and promised to remove all Lenians from any territory that they controlled. They also opposed dark-skinned Merari immigrants who were taller and physically distinct from the dark-skinned aboriginals. The Pens hoped that their many dark-skinned slaves would side with their masters in opposing the Lenians and immigrants.

By organizing people along racial lines, the Pens' ideology closely resembled that of the Zeniths in Nitāga, but the Pens were hoping to win the support of the dark-skinned aboriginals, which the Zeniths had rejected. The Zeniths upheld their promise to seek no alliances with outside parties, and classified the Pens as too violent.

Massacre of 2140

In 2140, the anti-slavery Reader party (Daslāl) took control of Amade. They stated that they had been reading literature written down by lost generations and had decided that slavery was immoral.

The Readers then killed all of the LID, Diver, and Star slaves in their territory. Thus slavery was abolished. Those who escaped fled northwards into the desert. These people called themselves the Buoys. The Readers claimed they were morally superior because they had eliminated their slaves and relinquished the yoke the slaves had imposed on their economy. However, Amade was much poorer now, and needed to rely on help from other nations in order to produce enough food to feed themselves. At the request of the panicking farmers whose slaves had been massacred, Amade purchased some new slaves at high prices from surrounding nations, saying they would return them when they were self sufficient again. This pushed the government of Amade into debt. Meanwhile, slaves living in other nations were horrified and became much more loyal to their masters than they had been before.

Buoy migration

The escaping slaves spoke the same language but were divided by race, with most Divers being blonde and blue-eyed and all LID and Star members being very dark-skinned. Since the dark-skinned members could blend in with the locals, some migrated back to Amade and pretended to be Readers. Those who remained stayed close by the Lenians, and all three groups soon came to think of themselves as Buoys rather than maintaining their externally assigned party identification.

Rise of the Mediums

The increase in wealth in Lobexon seemed to bring an increase in political liberality with it. Lobexon's laws grew more liberal every year. This was especially true in Larados, the wealthiest state in Lobexon and also the wealthiest state on all of Teppala. The two poorest regions, Amade^tentative and Taryte, were also the two most politically conservative. Some of the other poorer parts of the union, such as Maheal and Nitāga, were also fairly conservative, but they were conservative in a way that served to advance the agenda of the liberals in Larados because their conservatism was opposed to the old conservatism that Larados had previously embraced.

In 2141, a faction of the Gold party calling itself the Mediums (Tutīʕda) took control in Larados for the first time and launched a very ambitious program designed to make their dream empire a reality. Gold ideology did not allow the Gold party to split, so power rotated periodically from one faction to another.

Counting of votes

The Medium ideology allowed its believers to refuse to integrate themselves politically into Nama, and also allowed them to refuse to allow slaves and certain other minorities to be represented in the government, whereas mainstream Gold ideology demanded that even slaves be allowed to vote. Because they operated within the Gold party framework, the Mediums needed to use several loopholes in the Gold party constitution to discount the slaves' votes. First, they created new states for the slaves, overlapping the territory of their masters, and pooled all of the slaves' votes into these new states so that they could not vote in the same elections as their masters. Then, these states were removed from the union so that, although they were still nominally under Nama's jurisdiction, they could only vote on issues affecting their state, and not on the nation as a whole. Lastly, they declared that all of the slaves — even those who differed starkly in appearance from fellow slaves — were of the same tribe, and therefore would be afforded only one representative in Nama's Imperial Parliament.

The Mediums declared that all of the conquered territories that Larados had won in the last war were part of their empire, and could be best served by cooperating with Larados' government. Larados finalized the name Lobexon for its new empire, which now included 19 states stretching from Bipabum to Maheal.

The Mediums planned to build the largest nation in history, and said that they would be able to do it only because it would be a diversitarian empire, doing its best to please everyone. The type of government that Larados was spreading over its empire was largely derived from the Subumpamese system of government, and the Mediums told the Subumpamese that it was as true that Subumpam had conquered Larados as vice versa. The Mediums believed that Nama/Subumpam's dissenter system was superior to Larados' old democracy, but they didn't actually abolish the democracy because they felt that if they did so, Laradosans and others would complain and revolt because they would feel that their power had been taken from them and given to an unaccountable elite. In Subumpam, a fake democracy was installed to mollify these same people, but all the real decisions were still made by unappointed officials whom the Subumpamese believed to be better able to govern than the people themselves.

In 2148, Larados outlawed tribal alliances and passed a law giving most minorities (but not Andanese or certain groups of Namans) nearly equal rights with Laradosans.

Slaves achieve freedom

In 2155, a new law was passed that freed all slaves in the entire Empire, but for those who belonged to illegal political groups such as the Stars and the Crystals. The forced importation of people from Subumpam or any other region was also outlawed. Close relatives of captured Subumpamese slaves were allowed to settle in Larados. Because the Lenian slaves had been already freed by the 2057 treaty, the primary beneficiaries of the new emancipation were the pro-slavery slaves in the Life In Death party.

To be freed, Nama told the remaining slaves that they would need to provide proof of a sincere conversion to Goldism, but warned that the Gold government stated that no conversion made in the knowledge that it would free one from a lifetime of slavery could be sincere. Nama then declared that all people not known for certain to not belong to one of the illegal groups would remain a slave. They said that anyone who had been so determined to bring down the government as to join a group such as the Star army could never repent and be freed. They thus declared that only the children of converts would be awarded freedom, and they would still be denied the right to inherit money or property and would thus be the poorest among all freemen.

Ethnic redistribution program of 2161

In 2161, the Gold party introduced a massive resettlement program designed to smooth out the distribution of minorities across the empire. They wanted to end racial conflict by ensuring that members of each tribe were well-represented in every state of the Empire. This program only applied to free people; the slaves in the tropics were not allowed to move to the Lenian nations of the east. However, Lenians were encouraged to move to areas of the tropics where they had previously rarely ventured, and the dark-skinned tribes like LID were encouraged to move into Lenia.

Many states, such as Taryte and certain Subumpamese states, nullified the ethnic redistribution proposal. The states who accepted the proposal immediately received large numbers of immigrants, primarily from the upper classes of the other states, and in addition, were rewarded by the Gold government with large amounts of extra money intended to help their economies prosper. The Gold Party figured that those states who refused to adopt immigrants would be economically left behind and blame themselves rather than the Gold Party for their misfortune.

National language edict of 2162

In 2162, Lobexon revoked the sole official language status of Gold and allowed most minorities to speak their own native languages, although they had to also be fluent in Gold. The only illegal languages were those that were closely related but not intelligible with Gold.

Secession movement in Taryte

The Tarise tribes, who had mostly remained in the nations of Taryte, rejected the modern reforms that the Gold Party had pushed on them and the rest of the Gold Empire, such as feminism, the teaching of the Gold language, and the ethnic redistribution program. They said that the only legal immigrants would be of the same dark-skinned racial type as the native Taryteans. Thus, the Tarises banned all Lenians and Namans from Taryte, and did not expect their help. Thus, the Tarises joined the Zeniths and the much smaller Pen party in discriminating against outsiders along racial lines, and like the other two groups, they thought little of the blonde, blue-eyed Lenian people that had quickly won Nama's favor.

Because the Tarises ruled out all Lenians and Namans, most members of the ruling Gold party were forbidden even to visit Taryte, and could no longer collect taxes or enforce global laws without risking a civil war. The Tarises allowed the Gold party to exist and take censuses in Taryte, but its representatives were drawn from the native tribal population, not recent immigrants.

Claiming that the Gold government placed the interests of ethnic minorities above those of the natives of Taryte, and knowing that they had alienated themselves from the rest of the Gold Empire, the Tarise party threatened to secede. However, the government of Taryte offered money to prominent politicians of Star descent who wished to settle in Taryte and become Tarytean, saying that by doing so they would be joining the winning side in a future war. They promoted this program especially to the pro-Gold LID party.

Gold reaction

The Goldies did not want to let Taryte secede because it would leave the Gold Empire's territory almost pinched in half, with only a thin strip of mountainous land connecting the richer states of the north with the rainforests in Amade. Furthermore, they realized that much of Amade was already beyond their grasp and that Taryte's secession would effectively confine the Gold Empire to the territory north of its border with AlphaLeap. This area, called Lobexon, was much richer than the rainforests of the south, but would be difficult to defend in a hypothetical future war. The Gold party knew that they would need to control the rainforests if they wanted to secure the Empire's existence into the distant future.

Soon the Gold government threatened to bar the Tarise states from their parliament if they did not agree to cooperate with the northern states. The next month, the secessionist party, which called itself the Palmtree Stumps (Susyìho), became the majority party in Taryte, and these Tarises encouraged secessionist movements in other areas of the empire to side with Taryte. They claimed that they did not hate other ethnicities, but merely wanted every ethnic group to live in a homogeneous state.

The Stumps argued that the Gold Party's plan to eliminate racial conflict by making every area racially diverse was exactly wrong, and that it would instead greatly increase racial conflict. They said that a nation with no ethnic minorities, by definition, would be free of internal racial conflicts and that it would not hate neighboring nations either because those nations would not have any of their people antagonizing the natives of the home nation. Regarding the relative prosperity of Nama and Subumpam, which were more diverse, they claimed Nama's success was due to its military strength and Subumpam's success was due to its military ineptitude. That is, Nama's people were happy because they were allowed to invade foreign nations and oppress their people, whereas Subumpam's people were unhappy but too afraid of violence to do anything about it.

Stumps move to Subumpam

Over Subumpam, which was ethnically diverse and had many mixed-race people, the Tarise secessionists claimed no authority. But they nevertheless looked for allies in Subumpam, to seize power away from the Subumpamese liberals that were helping the Gold government. A small number of Tarytean secessionists moved to Subumpam, fully aware of the perversity of immigrating into a Lenian nation when they had just banned Lenians from their own nation. They planned to create a new political party in Subumpam that would unite all of the Subumpamese people who rejected the Gold Party. They hoped the Subumpamese would open their mouths and express their freedom to openly criticize the Gold government. This, they felt, would weaken the Gold Party's strangehold on power in Subumpam, which would indirectly help Taryte. However the Subumpamese overwhelmingly adored the Gold government, and refused to cooperate, although they did welcome the Tarise immigrants as Subumpamese citizens.

Secession movement in the tropics

However, the Tarises were gaining ground in the equatorial zone: the tropics, an unorganized territory sometimes called Tùdia, elected a secessionist government in the next month. This had been done without Taryte's support, because Taryteans had never even considered that they might have allies in the areas to their south. The ethnic stock of this area was similar to Taryte, but there had been more immigration than in Taryte, and the tropicals promised their citizens that they would not seek to expel recent immigrants or people of different racial appearance.

Gold electoral victory

The tropical secessionist government was afraid to act against Lobexon, because it was geographically isolated and extremely poor compared to much of the rest of the empire, and also militarily helpless, so they knew that they couldn't really secede. And due to internal dissent, the tropical government changed hands again the next month, putting the Gold party in power. This was a rare example of mass conversion to the Gold party, whereas previously the Goldies had mostly relied on allied parties such as LID to shore up support among the aboriginals. When in the following month the Tarise government also turned liberal, a group of Tarise conservatives declared that they would form a paragovernmental organization within Taryte and try to live on their own without actually seceding.

The handover of power in both Taryte and the tropics to pro-Gold liberals allowed money from the rest of the Empire to flow into these areas, which were now by far the poorest states in Lobexon, and it allowed the conservatives to feel that they had succeeded at least in part. Thus, nearly all conservatism the Gold Empire had now been destroyed by the Gold liberals.

But the liberals who claimed that ethnic diversity would eliminate ethnic conflict couldn't completely get along even amongst themselves. The Medium ideology appealed to minorities of all types, and these minorities had been drawn from a diverse stock, and their interests conflicted with each other. Some of the Mediums were really poor, underprivileged minorities who were almost as conservative as the Tarises, but whose mild conservatism was allowed to pass for liberalism because it was opposed to the Tarise extreme conservatism.

Dukeluta

For example, the Subumpamese state of Dukelŭta had passed a law stating that only the Dukelŭtans could serve in its local governments, and that the Dukelŭta language was the only language allowed to be spoken in public in Dukelŭta. This was not a racial distinction but a legalistic one; they were rejecting the Gold Party's government, which was run mostly by immigrants. The Gold Party also allowed Dukelŭta to discriminate against foreigners and discourage them from settling in Dukelŭta. This weakened the Goldies' control over Dukelŭta, but the liberals in the Gold Party embraced it because the Dukelŭtans were strong supporters of the Gold Party it served the Gold Party's best interests to antagonize all non-Gold movements.

Similarly, they refused to do anything to better the status of married women in Atlam, Subumpam, and the unorganized territories of the equatorial tropics, or the oppression of non-native people (including even Amade's Gold Party) in the tropics. Much of the tropics was in fact controlled by local tribal governments, with the official tropical government being too afraid to enforce its laws. Some of these tribes fought against each other, and others teamed up to fight against the Goldies.

Economic reforms in Lobexon

Lobexon had a strongly capitalist economy, and the government of Lobexon refused to improve its global welfare system to provide its poorest citizens a standard of living comparable to that which Kxesh's poorest citizens enjoyed, even though Kxesh was much poorer than Lobexon.

But some states in Lobexon introduced their own welfare systems, taking the money needed to run them from taxes. Often, recent immigrants from Larados paid a disproportionate amount of these taxes. This was partly because the states blamed Larados for lack of support, and partly because local sentiment was anti-Larados anyway, and the people were glad for anything that helped their own states gain at the expense of Larados. Larados' government, the most liberal in the empire, assumed that these acts of hostility were being caused by the imbalance of wealth between Larados and all the other states, and they did not try to retaliate. Many liberals began to believe that a less capitalist economy was necessary to equalize the wealth imbalance, but the liberals that were in power in Larados held to their inherited belief that capitalism was always the best path to future prosperity. They poured money into local economies to help alleviate their problems, but they never aided the poor directly, as this was contrary to their philosophy.

Revolt of Shuppa

Meanwhile (April 2166), the distal end of the Empire, called Šŭppa, was beginning to deteriorate. Although in the northern part of the tropics, businesses were developing and people were getting richer, Larados' economic aid was not able to reach the southern tropics or Atlam. The conservative population distrusted the Lobexon government and didn't believe it could solve their problems. Thus, even though it looked as though formal secession would never happen, the southern part of the Gold Empire was becoming a loosely organized group of tribal communes reminiscent of the tropics in the pre-Star era. Even Stumps began to move to the tropics now, hoping to get out from under the thumb of the new pro-Medium government that had taken all the power in Taryte.

Civil war in Taryte

To the alarm of the Gold government, the Stumps who had remained in Taryte soon set up the nation of Xwulăswu within Taryte's borders, without the consent of any government. The Gold government based in Nama voted to let the Stumps secede, since they had chosen land with very few non-Stumps on it, and they had chosen to cooperate with Lobexon and not plan a war. They had no coastline, so the Gold Empire was not being pinched in half. But Taryte's own Gold government would not allow even this smaller territorial secession, and threatened to enslave the Stump leaders if they continued to cause trouble.

Atlam, which had a very libertarian government, invited the Stumps to settle in Atlam, and promised to let them have almost as much freedom as they would have if they were an independent nation. The Stumps felt uncomfortable amongst the Atlas, and few agreed to their offer. Those that did move mostly did so because they were members of a group of Stumps that believed that their lives were worthless unless they were dedicated to overthrowing the entire Gold Empire.

Walking Girls revolt

The Gold party was itself undergoing a civil war. From early on, a feminist faction of the Gold army calling itself the Walking Girls (Palsĭdu) had carved out a bubble of territory within Lobexon where they were in power and the Mediums were not. The Walking Girls were aggressively feminist, and physically fit; they derived their name from a game involving walking side by side and pushing men out of their way. Their name specifically described them as girls, not women, because most of their members were young.

By this point, the Gold party had lost much of its control over the tropical regions of Atlam, Tùdia, Amade, and Taryte. Thus, their empire was rapidly contracting towards its northern border with Nama, and the Goldies worried that the Walking Girls would soon do to them what the other four areas had already done. Furthermore, while the previous lost territories had been rainforests primarily populated by dark-skinned tribes of Star ancestry, the Walking Girls were fellow Namans who had originated within the Gold party.

Both groups considered themselves Gold, and therefore both groups considered themselves the legitimate rulers of Lobexon that had been sent down by Nama in 1989 to stop the oppression of the Subumpamese people by the Star Empire. Because the Gold party did not allow its factions to claim exclusive rule over a specific territory, the Walking Girls' nation was illegal, and the Medium faction of the party declared war on the Girls.

The Girls moved near the southern edge of Lobexon. However, Nama's own army was still moving southward, and rather than fight the Girls, they bypassed them and continued moving south. Thus the Girls were positioned midway along the coast and were surrounded by the mainline Gold army on both sides.

The Girls wanted a society of their own. The Girls had chosen to attack these people merely because they wanted to ruin the Goldies' plan of a utopic civilization in Lobexon, and didnt enslave the people they conquered.

The Walking Girls did not tell their newly captured subjects of their motives, but even so the people around the Girls revolted and attacked them. The Girls were not nearly as strong as the Mediums, and they were forced to move slightly southward and start over. This time they did what the Mediums had done right away: enslave the people, and force them to fight the others. Both the Girls and the Mediums had come by sea, and neither group was willing to arm their slaves, so the war was fought with very few weapons and mostly involved hand-to-hand combat.

The enslaved Medium army, consisting now of enslaved people from all over Lobexon, fought the enslaved Walking Girl army in a relentlessly brutal war while Nama's enemies tried desperately to reach Lobexon so that the people could be saved. They were unsuccessful, however; Lobexon was so firmly within Nama's sphere of exclusive dominance that the humanitarians realized they would need the help of the Lobexonians themselves to allow them to escape, and since they were all enslaved, this could not happen.

Before long, the Mediums realized that there was going to be no end to the war until the losing army was defeated, and the Girls had managed to outwit the Mediums and repeatedly won their battles, as despite the Mediums' superior skills, the Mediums were not the ones doing most of the fighting.

Reaction in Nama

The Medium army announced in 2172 that the Girls had won the war, and that the Mediums planned to introduce plagues and famines in order to kill the entire population of Lobexon, including the Girls. At this, nearly all of Nama's own Gold supporters defected to the Walking Girl faction, and the Walking Girls became the ruling faction of the Gold party. The Medium faction thus lost the right to the name "Gold", and most members soon founded yet another new party, the Slingshots (Taʕiḳ). They did this because the Medium ideology had still retained many Gold principles, but the Slingshots abandoned Gold ideology entirely.

Since Nama's navy was required to have a single foreign policy, the navy thus also came under the command of the Walking Girls, and they immediately canceled their new war before it could begin. The Slingshots responded by seceding from Nama and declaring war on the Walking Girls again. However, they had no territory in Nama with which to secede; the only territories under Slingshot control were a few small campgrounds outside of Nama. Thus the secession was a symbolic gesture intended to provoke Nama into coming after them and potentially drawing third parties into the conflict.

Although they had no land, the Slingshots still had a sizable fleet of ships. Many Naman naval captains had chosen to side with the Slingshots, and there were thus two navies competing for control of the Gold Sea. None of this benefited the nations around them, and many nations began to close their harbors to all foreign ships, as they could never be sure which Nama they were meeting with.

Slave rescue missions

Nama's internal struggle broke the previously impenetrable naval barrier around Lobexon. Then, humanitarians from many small, pro-Girl nations in Nama sailed to Lobexon to adopt the locals and help them start new lives in Nama. Even though the Walking Girls were in charge of both Nama and Lobexon, many Namans were opposed to slavery, and saw no harm in invading the Walking Girls' slave empire in Lobexon. The Girls could not attack these ships because they couldn't tell them apart from their own.

Although the Girls' navy destroyed many of the slave rescuers' ships, the rescuers were very efficient, and enough missions succeeded to make slavery inefficient for the slaveholders. Soon, Girls began to desert their plantations and move to Nama, and these women were given influence in Nama's government. However, some of these were pro-slavery, and therefore their migration to Nama helped turn the sentiment of the Walking Girls in Nama back towards slavery. (Lobexon could not directly vote in Nama's internal parliament.)

Meanwhile, the Slingshot navy was still attacking Lobexon, but they were now having trouble penetrating the Girls' navy, and life could not get much worse than it already was for the people still in Lobexon. As Nama began to lose control of their colonies in Lobexon, they increased their control over Subumpam.

At first, the Girls had lost most of their battles, but slowly the tide had turned, and in 2172 the Girls achieved complete victory and a treaty was signed in which all of Lobexon and Subumpam was turned over to the Girl army, which renamed itself simply the Gold army, and the losing side of the battle was allowed to remain if they chose but they would neither be enslaved nor armed. Most in fact chose to flee to Nama, figuring it would be safer there.

The Walking Girls were largely descended from immigrants from Laba, and some Merari people who had moved to the area in recent years. However, even among the Girls, there was a thin upper class consisting of Macro-Repilians just like the ones who made up the other side of the army.

The Treaty of 2172 voided the law in 2155 that had freed all of the LID slaves in Lobexon. Thus, they were back to slavery again as if nothing had happened. Nama's naval blockade reacted to the change in power by simply remaining in place ,as they nominally belonged to Nama rather than Lobexon, and thus had not been thrown out of power at all. (Even though Lobexon's coastline was more than 20 times longer than Nama's, the navy had long been allowed to remain under the control of Nama as the Macro-Repilian slavemasters had essentially all come from high mountain regions and were not interested in learning how to live at sea.)

Feminist Islander revolt

In 2175, the DRG navy invaded Oyster Island, and the FILTER army was reduced from 151 soldiers to only 14. FILTER was an organization of feminists who had seceded from their homelands and settled a small tropical island with oysters. They had also set up a colony in the cooler upland forests of Nama, but wanted their main nation to be in the tropics. FILTER's people were descended from Lenians who had absorbed a small number of Repilians, and their leadership was entirely female.

FILTER wanted to create a society without any violence by putting women in control of men in all aspects of life and stopping any attempt by the males to pursue equality. They felt that violence was so severe of a problem that preventing it even overruled other virtues such as treating all people equal.

FILTER's people called themselves Feminists and said that Feminism was nothing more than the state of having women be taller than men and therefore physically capable of controlling men. They said that if necessary they could create parallel Feminist forks of all of the other major parties, e.g. Feminist Gold, Feminist Crystal, Feminist Star, etc, but for the mean time they were a very small population and just called themselves Feminists. They realized that if they did split up, they could potentially convince Nama to give them a new nation for each of the many forks of their philosophies, but did not want to rely on this, as those other nations could simply forgo Feminism and join with their outworld parties.

Although FILTER was friendly to the Repilians, they were for now living on a tropical island and had no direct connection to any Repilian nation, nor did they expect to have room to allow immigration from Repilia. Furthermore, they believed living conditions in Repilia were far better than their own, and that few Repilians would want to join them.

When DRG transported the surviving islanders to the mainland, they refused to integrate themselves back into the society of Lobexon, and swore that even with an army of 14 people they could defeat all of the millions of people in all of the other nations on the planet. Lobexon brought the Islanders into court and tried them as criminals. One of the four male survivors was accused of wifebeating, because they had seen him hit his girlfriend, even though she was much taller and stronger than him. In fact, she broke through the jail her boyfriend was put in and got him free.

Emperor's defection

In 2176, the Emperor of Larados, Tepe Bemalamya, announced that he was defecting from the Crystal party to the Gold party.

Migration to the east

The victorious Walking Girl faction of the Gold army continued most of the mainline Gold party's policies, but their army had been greatly weakened by the war, and they could no longer competently patrol the sea. In 2175, two rebel armies moved from the tropics to the Lenian nations of the east. Both groups were hostile, but the Gold navy could not stop the movements, and warned the Lenians that they would need to either absorb the migrants or declare war on them. The first group was the Crystals, who at first moved mostly to Paba. The Crystals told the Pabaps that they were impulsive, stupid, and closed-minded, but also good hosts, and therefore these Crystals chose to make Paba their new home.

Because the Crystals refused to attend school, they had no skilled laborers. Furthermore, most did not speak the languages of their hosts. The Crystals were heavily armed and often blocked roads in Pabap cities to extract tribute from the locals. Paba's pacifist government told the Crystals that they were welcome in Paba, and that Paba's only retaliation for their abuse would be to deny them the government benefits disbursed to other citizens, and that Paba's army would never attempt to disarm the Crystals.

At this point, the Star people who had earlier moved to Paba became wary of Paba's intents, and worried that their own benefits would be the next to be shut off. Nevertheless, the Crystals began migrating westward into Subumpam when they realized that Paba was not going to feed them, and Paba's government never made any similar threats against the Stars.

2175 Subumpamese government raid

The other tribe of migrants were the Stumps who had originated in Taryte. In 2175, a battalion of the Stump army moved into the pacifist nation of Dukelŭta along the south coast of Subumpam and built a series of forts, hoping to damage mainstream Subumpamese society as much as they could before Subumpam formed an army to smother them. They declared that they would identify themselves simply as Stars when they arrived, and claim that they were survivors of the long-ago aboriginal inhabitants. They figured their disguise would ultimately mean little, as the Stumps were planning to kill the entire Subumpamese population and then unite the Subumpamese states into the new unified state of Čìpalas. But they knew that there were too few Stumps at this time to be able to do that, so they wanted to grow slowly under disguise and wait for the right time to attack.

When the Gold government discovered what the Stumps had been planning to do, they arrested them and put them into slavery in northeastern Subumpam. They then forced all states to sign an agreement endorsing the Walking Girls faction of the Gold party and forbidding the construction of any internal empire within the Gold Empire. Even the most conservative of the anti-Gold parties agreed to this, because they wanted to be sure to be seen as friendly to the Gold government so that the Goldies would send them more money.

Construction of slave camps

Most of the Stump terrorists were moved to Puripup, Punsam, and Pombi. All of these were places dominated by Pabaps. Thus Subumpam now had slavery, although the slavemasters were not Subumpamese but Repilians with a few Pabaps cooperating. Subumpam now realized that Nama was increasingly unable to protect them from outsiders, even outsiders from other parts of the Gold Union. They had refused to adopt slavery several times and had now had it forced upon them. A new party called the Cranberries was founded to unite the efforts of the Subumpamese people who opposed the slavery of the Stumps.

The Gold government of Subumpam told the Cranberries that they were wrong to think of slavery as immoral, and that it was simply natural that some people were born to serve others, and that the Subumpamese themselves were in effect servants of the Gold government, even if not enslaved. In 2176 a new law was passed which made it illegal to disrupt a slavery operation or protest against it, and the punishment for this action was to be indefinite slavery for the protestors and all of their children. Thus many Cranberries were soon enslaved on the same plantations that the Stumps had been, and the slaves started to fight amongst each other. Lastly, a small number of recent Crystal immigrants were also placed in the slave camps.

Paba had no moral misgivings about slavery, since they had been selling their own people as slaves to foreign nations for over a thousand years. But now some Pabaps were tempted to take in the slaves from the Pabap-dominated lands of eastern Subumpam into Paba itself.

In 2180, the Star minority in Paba began to assert its own interests, and saw no harm in criticizing the Pabaps, but they still promised to remain nonviolent and to never sign an alliance with the Crystals. By this time, almost all of the Crystals in Paba had either moved to Subumpam or hiked into the wilderness to live independently.

Pabap slave camps

Wolf in Wool

In 2183, ownership of the Wolf in Wool campground, where many slaves had been housed, was transferred from Nama to Paba. Although the slaves were still within Subumpam, they were owned by the nation of Paba itself now and not merely Pabaps who lived in Subumpam. Thus Subumpam realized that they had now become the world's ultimate victim, an epithet that had been placed on Paba before but had never been true in such a way as it was of Subumpam now.

Due to a legal technicality, Nama's ruling Gold party considered Wolf in Wool to be a new political party. This was because their leaders were of the Pabap tribe, but they lived only in Subumpam, and could not return to Paba without risking the escape of their slaves. This was Nama's definition of a nation, and therefore, the tiny Wolf in Wool party was given full representation in Nama's parliament, and they promised to nearly always vote in agreement with the Gold party who had given them life. (The Gold Parliament afforded each nation equal representation regardless of size.)

When the Gold party realized that their voting power had suddenly increased, some Goldies proposed making dozens of similarly tiny nations and enrolling them all as separate political parties. But the Gold mainstream refused to take this step, as they believed that the stability of Nama's ancient government depended on the minority parties' perception that the reigning Gold party was more than fair to its rivals, and avoided obvious power grabs such as this. Even so, they retained Wolf in Wool because they claimed that they had not created the nation explicitly to increase their voting power, and they noted that Wolf in Wool was free to take positions that opposed the Gold party. Furthermore, they pointed to a claimed enrollment of 2,600 adults in the Wolf in Wool party, which was within the range of the smallest of the parties in other areas of Nama.

Broken Shields

For the most part, though, the slaves were kept apart so that they would not fight each other. Paba did not want its first experiment with slavery to fail so soon. They created a micronation called the Broken Shields (Yīyū (or Yīʕdūḳ)) which was surrounded by Punsam on all sides, not bordering Paba, and put their slaves in it. This was in the mainline territory of Punsam, not a campground. Thus, Paba was now directly controlling eastern Subumpam to such an extent that they could build new slave campgrounds, and even an entire slave nation, inside Subumpam's territory, and neither Nama nor Subumpam could stop them.

A security guard at the camp, Hə̌ha-yùna, attempted to rape a woman but was beaten up. He vowed to rape or assault at least one slave every day and stated that slaves who joined him would receive protection from the rapes and assaults.

Hahayuna helped set up a sporting tournament in the camp in which the slaves and masters would compete for prizes, including tickets that slaves could use to buy themselves a day free of beatings. The entire camp was the arena, as the game involved lots of distance running. However, on the first day, some of the slaves entered an area of the camp where people who had not joined the game were standing, and the guards of this area beat them up. Thus, the masters won the first match and none of the slaves escaped beating that night.

A different guard that night announced awards for beating up slaves, and that slaves could spare themselves from their own beatings by earning the awards. They announced that there would be only one award per day for the entire camp. Hahayuna was given the first award for his failed attempt to rape a slave woman that day.

The camp guards set up a school for all camp residents, slaves and masters alike, to learn to speak the Gala language.

A slave named Latās (all slaves were given derogatory names; his meant "masturbator") convinced a slave named Lăro (the name of a faraway nation) to join a gang inside the camp called PMP. The leaders of the gang were the security guard and a judge. PMP sent Laro into the retail area of the camp to buy supplies for the other members, saying that if he failed to do so, even the other slaves would beat him up. The security guard followed Lăro into the store and stole food and other materials for himself in plain sight of Laro, who was helpless. The store owner instead arrested a slave woman, saying he wasn't sure he had seen the event clearly but figured that a slave would be more likely to steal from him than would a security guard. Later, the security guard robbed Laro of all of what he had bought.

The next week, three guards cornered Laro in his room but they insult each other while ignoring him. Laro attempted to break up the argument because he was afraid of fighting, but by doing so he triggers them to stop their verbal attacks and instead attack him physically. The one who hit him first won that day's award. Then, the guards announced they would hold a party in which all are invited, and that anyone who showed up would be considered a member of PMP. A slave woman who had earlier refused to learn Gala now hesitated to show up at the party.

The next day, Laro rescued a small boy from an attack by a security guard. In revenge, a team of security guards surrounded him, but he promised to make up for what he had done by delivering them the female slave who had earlier hesitated about joining PMP. He slept outside that night. A male guard raped a female guard, and the victim beat up Laro for sleeping outside instaed of protecting her.

The next day, the woman who had refused to learn Gala, whose name was Hīkah got beat up by a guard. He was about to rape her, but she promised to join PMP. The slaves criticized her for not wanting to join PMP, saying that PMP was a good way for slaves to protect themselves from the guards. Laro then attacked her, but she beat him up. This caused a fight which spread across the entire camp. The guards won and one of them, Hahayuna, started attacking children. At this, even the other guards expelled Hahayuna, saying that attacking children was a red line.

When PMP held its party, another major fight erupted, because some PMP members wanted Hahayuna back in, saying that while attacking children was indeed a crime, even inside a slave camp, the fact that he had done it would help him intimidate other children. Two men fought for the right to rape Hīkah, so she ran away and the men sent the slaves to look for her. But she ran away too fast, so the guards simply beat up the other slaves. Then, Hahayuna showed up at the party and said that he was readmitting himself and would only abuse adults in the future. He then beat up a man who had greeted him happily earlier.

Laro hoped he could win an award by tracking down Hikah. The original two guards had followed him and thus found her. Nevertheless, he won the award and thus did not get beat up that night. Another gang called Natagal was created, and one of the guards declared himself a member. Laro apologizes for not doing more to prevent the expulsion of the man who had attacked children, so another guard chases him out of the room.

A female association was formed between slaves and the female guards, since both were becoming victims of rape, but even within this group, the guards abused the slaves and simulated rape on them. Laro attempted to start a slave revolt, but he could not find any slaves who were on his side except Hikah. By this time, Natagal had taken over the camp, and PMP became irrelevant. Then, two Natagal guards rape Hikah while the other slaves watch helplessly. Soon, the slaves protest against Hikah for causing all of the problems, but when the guards asked the slaves where Hikah had fled to, they said they didnt know, so the guards beat up the slaves again. Then, they pushed the slaves into a patch of thorn bushes which cut their skin but not the guards' because only the slaves were forced to work with bare thighs.

The next night, Hikah found a few female slaves who promised to help fight a revolt. A guard attacked teh women and they beat him to a draw. They agreed to both go on trial: the guard for raping Hikah, and Hikah for tempting him by running away. The guard won the trial and the slaves were all forced to adopt new, more submissive standards of behavior. Hikah fled into the wilderness even though it was cold. Then, the same guard (who was in Natagal) attacked what remained of PMP, and PMP blamed Hikah for the attack, even though it soon became clear tat it was Natagal. A guard who was not in Natagal or PMP then attacked the first attacker. Then, they expelled the Natagal guard.

A few days later, at a stage performance, Hikah showed up and the entire audience started chasing after her. She escaped yet again and thge guards began attacking the slaves. Some bystanders of the Zenith tribe then attacked both sides, saying that they had been neutral before but had decided to invade teh camp because one of the guards had attacked a Zenith outside the camp. The Zeniths enrolled the slaves and say that only the toughest slaves will be allowed to have weapons. But the Zeniths were so cruel that the slaves revolted and attempt to flee back into the hands oftheir former abusers. The Natagal guards pushed the Zeniths back out pf te camp, but some Zeniths carroied some slaves with them to freedom.

Hikah and Laro attacked Nataga but injured nobody. A group of slaves, Lahalga, who had earlier been judged strong by the Zeniths broke away from the other slaves and declared they would fight only for themselves. Some of these were Pabaps who had been enslaved for unrelated reasons. They then attacked Natagal and killed severalguards. They siad this was the first true slave revol at the camp. Natagal launched an organized attack against all non-members./ Butm, the nexty attack is by the Lahalga, and they kill several more Natagal members. They then said that the other slaves were so weak that they would become slaves for the slaves. A group called the Rabbits split from the Lahalga, captured dozens of slaves, and said that they wer eon the side of Natagal. The Zeniths joined the alliance and all of them surged out of the camp and captured many more slaves.

A Stump slave set fire to a building in which many Cranberry slaves and their Pabap masters had been sleeping, and most of them died. The slavemasters asked the slaves who had survived for help at locating the arsonist, but were unsuccessful. When a funeral for the victims was held several weeks later, the same man turned up and started massacring the mourners before he himself was killed.

Atlam-Subumpam trade agreement

The Gold government in Nama had spared themselves from being attacked by Stumps by pushing them deeper into Subumpam, but they knew that they still had the chaos of the far south to deal with. The government of the region of Atlam had officially signed a petition condemning the takeover of Subumpam by the Star Empire in the 2140's, and Atlam developed its own trade policy. They had also become openly hostile to the nearby Empire of Kxesh, even though they had until recently been a part of Kxesh. Kxesh blamed the Goldies for the problems, and the Gold Party considered destroying all of Atlam.

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Soon a small number of Goldies began to respond to the Crystals' outreach efforts. Disillusioned with the profanity of everyday life in "LobexonLoop", as they called it now, they renounced their faith in the government's Lapiwa system to become Crystals, though they knew the coming war would cost many converts their lives. These people called their new philosophy Popasopa, and their leaders were the descendants of priests who had been defeated in an unrelated war that had been fought in 1753. They had had a plan for world government compiled in 1753 by the universal debate center.

It wasn't just that the Crystals wanted a fundamentalist government because it was their own preferred way of life; Lapiwa was actually dividing society and through its lax mores weakening the friendly fiber which had for so long bound LobexonLoopians together, and the Crystals saw that it was indeed an evil plague that they needed to get rid of for the benefit of the world as a whole. The Crystals, a minority in the Gold Empire composed of a nearly equal percentage each of SLobexonians and LobexonLoopians, spoke out against Lapiwa. However, their message was distorted by the majority of citizens, and these people thus became even more convinced that Lapiwa, not Crystalism, was the path of truth.

The Crystals became known in the Gold Empire as the "people of the night". In reality the Popasopists both enjoyed and despised their new name, as in reality they often carried lamps to show that they believed light was love, faith, and all that was good.

The Crystals were a tiny minority in the Gold Empire, and as they looked to cataleptics and xenophobes for advice, they were considered brainwashed by the majority of citizens. One project that the Crystals engaged in, however, drew frightened reactions from Nama upon its discovery: the construction of a fort out in the wilderness — a safe haven for Crystals, and a place where the hard-working believers had spent the last few decades dedicated to the construction of a superior army, one that could conceivably, if not destroyed immediately, grow strong enough to defeat the entire rest of the planet. They called this LobexonLeap.

Later history

Sometime after 2200, Kxesh invaded the Gold Empire and bit off a piece of tropical lowlands that caused Amade and Atlam to split into two. Amade remained part of the Gold Empire in this war, but Atlam was cut off from it forever.

From 2398 to 2417, a very violent government ruled the Star Empire, killing many innocent children. This was done by the Star party, but the minority parties took no action.

In 2544, many people of the Merari tribes moved from Paba to Lobexon. These people had their own language, but many could also speak Gold.

In 2661, Kxesh declared war on Lobexon and invaded from the southwest; thus the Oyster War began.