Matrix

The Matrix was a political party founded in 4177 as a more militant offshoot of the already violent Raspara political party. The Matrixes promised to enslave all non-Matrixes, but focused their efforts on physically small tribes such as the Swamp Kids since they were easier to intimidate. They legalized all forms of crime against non-Matrixes, and then limited party membership to males; therefore all rape of women was legal.

The Matrixes chose their name to symbolize their approach to politics. Whereas other parties such as the Raspara and the Crystals believed in a coherent political ideology, the Matrixes rejected ideological commitments in order to ensure that they could always be on the winning side of every war. Their only loyalty was to the Matrix.

The founding population consisted of a mere 3200 soldiers, but they quickly captured more than 100000 slaves.

Language

The Matrixes had no common language. Most were native Play speakers, but their reign as a political power was so short that the non-Play speakers never had time to finish learning their leaders' language. The non-Play speakers were geographically concentrated well to the east of the Play-speaking majority, and also had different political aims.

Adoption of Late Andanese

The Matrixes were better known for their use of ciphers based on the Late Andanese language. Very few Matrix soldiers were native Andanese speakers, and indeed the Andanese had been officially abolished as a tribe in 4175, two years before the foundation of the Matrix party.

However, Late Andanese was in common use as a military language and, to a lesser extent, a language of diplomacy, sea travel, and international trade. Since the Matrixes defined themselves as soldiers by definition (party membership was restricted to adult males), they believed it was in their interest to learn the Andanese language.

Andanese was fairly easy to learn in a classroom, unlike the famously difficult Play language. But because there were no native Andanese speakers left alive, learning materials were difficult to obtain, and even the STW school system's Andanese curriculum focused on only the aspects of the language that were important to the immediate needs of its graduates: mostly dealing with business and trade.

Therefore, fluency in Andanese was out of reach, and the Matrixes had to work together to figure out the language from the scattered knowledge they had inherited. This, however, did not get the Matrixes the knowledge of the ciphers that the Players had created and which therefore kept Play military communications out of reach for even those few enemy spies who had learned the Late Andanese language.

Politics

Partition and managed republics

Both Baeba Swamp and the Anchor Empire underwent partitions around this time. At the time, Baeba Swamp was controlled by the Leapers, while the Matrixes controlled the Anchor Empire. The Matrixes actually outnumbered the Leapers in Baeba, but were underrepresented in Parliament, while the Matrixes were themselves just a tiny minority in the Anchor Empire, but had the strongest military and thus were greatly overrepresented in Parliament.

Partition in Rapala

In September 4205, the Matrixes had forced their enemies to sign a treaty partitioning the Anchor Empire into three areas, one each for the Matrixes, Crystals, and Bubbles. The Anchor Empire was renamed Rapala as it came to consider itself once again sovereign over Baeba Swamp.

The Matrixes assigned the new Republic of Saġʷùpa to the free Crystals; it was also known as Ŋinkʷanaxàma.

The Matrixes awarded the Soap Bubbles the district of Lihatasăro. This small Soap Bubble territory was largely run by STW, since STW had legal control over various Soap Bubble leaders. Although the Soap Bubble territory was described as being very small in the treaty, it was still larger than the district of Pavaitaapu in which the Soap Bubbles' Clover dynasty had earlier ruled.

The remainder of Rapala was assigned to the Matrix party, and non-Matrixes could not vote in its Parliament. This territory, which was for all practical purposes equivalent to the whole of Rapala, was called Mataŋal.

The Matrixes created a system in which the new fledgling democracy, outside of the Matrixes' own holding areas, was effectively run by children, figuring that the adults would waste so much time trying to convince their children to vote for realistic policies that they would give up and ask the Matrixes to establish an autocratic state.

The Matrixes had gotten their idea from watching the rise of and fall of the Clovers, a group of children to whom STW had given control of the northernmost third of Baeba Swamp. The Clover children had been unable to rule effectively because various groups of adults slaughtered them whenever they tried to exert their legally bestowed powers. The Matrixes promised that, despite their history of cruelty, they did not want to see children being slaughtered every time they defeated the adult population in an election; therefore the Matrixes promised to protect the children during elections.

This strategy of claiming the moral high ground by finding an even worse enemy had served the Matrixes well in the past. Indeed, the Matrixes had become interested in the Clovers largely because they felt it was so obvious that the Clovers were being abused by the traditional adult powers of Baeba Swamp. The Matrixes' plan was to move in and steal power from the Clovers, figuring that the Clovers would welcome them in simply because all of the other outside powers were doing that already and then killing any Clovers who protested. Further back, the Matrixes had made an alliance with Nama, an alliance of aboriginal tribes with no army, who had for thousands of years been abused by the people around them. The Matrix plan was to claim an alliance with Nama simply because they shared an enemy, and then force Nama to do most of the fighting and then invade Nama once the war was over to finish them off.

Creation of independent republics within Baeba

In 4206, Baeba's ruling Leaper party donated parcels of land within Baeba Swamp to weak, landless parties in the hopes that an army with land of its own would not seek to invade neighboring lands. Three republics were founded in poor natural environments, called Tahifòka,Tahalmana, and Sahahămi. The first two of these simply meant "South Tâ" and "North Tâ" in Leaper.

The Matrixes claimed jurisdiction over Baeba Swamp, and their territory of Mataŋal included most of Baeba Swamp; the rest was given to the Crystals. The Leapers decided to take the land for the new republics from the Matrix territory, knowing that the Matrixes had by far the most land to give up, and did not have military control of the areas the Leapers were donating anyway.

These new republics were given exclusively to the Doll tribes, who were mostly slaves, and who had previously never had a nation of their own. The various Doll groups were divided by political ideology, not tribal identity, but the Leapers referred to the groups as tribes in order to justify the creation of three nations rather than a single nation with three competing political parties.

The combined Doll population of the three new republics was only about 7,000; most Dolls remained in slavery, and could not move to the new republics. Baeba expected that even the free Dolls would immediately submit to their enemies, as they were poor soldiers and had in the past put up little resistance to capture by hostile armies, but they considered this preferable to having the Dolls scattered around other nations as a slave class.