Camia

This page refers to the conworld I had when I was young. I started fantasizing when I was about three years old, and even from that very young age, I was interested in outer space and large planets. From the age of 3 until my early 20s, all of my writing went into this one futuristic science fiction scenario. On top of all of their technology, some of the people also had magic powers.

As an adult, sometime perhaps in my mid-20s, I switched it all to a single-planet, low-tech, no-magic world called Teppala where the human population is in the low millions and technology progresses so slowly that from one end of the timeline to the other things just really mostly stay the same and not even the greatest military powers can do something as destructive as what small teams of renegade soldiers did in the rayguns-and-spaceships world. I am very nostalgic for my childhood fantasy world, though, and I've decided it deserves at least a page or two of its own. Moreover, a lot of the events in the two worlds are linked, for reasons that will be explained below. Essentially, the childhood world, which I'll call Camia, is still "true"; it's just that the details changed immensely when I moved everything from an extremely high-tech to an extremely low-tech environment. For the meantime, I'm working on both worlds, but the Teppala world has a much higher bar of realism than the Camia world.

Sources

As above, most of what I'm writing here is taken from stories I wrote when I was in grade school. The very oldest ideas were from when I was 3 years old, and the most recent ones were from when I was in my early 20s. I've still been writing "new" things since then, but they are almost all "fine details" stories involving small numbers of people and thus wouldn't fit in very well with the history-book type of writing I had done when I was younger.

The notebooks

Most of what appears on the Camia/Characters page refers to writing I did roughly from age 9 to 13, and most of what I remember about it is only because I happen to have saved a red notebook full of ideas all this time. There was also a green notebook and a purple notebook, but those have been lost to time and I remember nearly nothing about what was in either of them. Even though my parents had given me access to their computer and even though I was typing and printing stories at the age of 6, I still preferred handwriting most of the time and didn't really make the switch until my late teen years.

Dreams

Some exceptions to the rule of not writing ideas that I've come up with more recently include dreams I've had about my conworld, particularly when I have trouble sleeping due to pain and start fantasizing to try to make myself feel better. Some of these are more likely daydreams ... at night ... than true dreams.

I know from operating a website in the past that pages like these do get substantial readership, so long as they at least appear in Google, though it's likely that the vast majority of the readers were looking for something else and may not read the whole page, or any of it at all beyond the few words it takes to realize it's not the page they wanted. So my writing it abit sloppy, and since I pull from different sources that I've written at different times, sometimes things don't quite match up.

Spelling

For example, I have a hard time sticking to a single spelling for a foreign name, particularly a name that lasts a long time and undergoes sound changes. Is it Tebbala or Teppala? I've never decided, because both are valid names for the planet from two different stages of the same language. I've also spelled it Tīpala, Tipala, Tippala, and Theppala. Those are all names from just one language, Thaoa. The same word is reflected in all of the other languages in many other forms, although despite the fact that Thaoa is not a particularly widespread language on its planet, I have decided to stick with the Thaoa name for my planet.

In some cases, the sources I'm copying from are computerized, and most articles mix different sources, so the spelling can change from one paragraph to the next. For example, Xema is called "Xama" for a few paragraphs in the Swamp Kids article, and then changes to Xema for the rest of the page. I will probably stabilize these eventually, but only if I'm rewriting the paragraphs for other reasons. It's more important for me to change inconstistencies where a whole name is substituted for another, for example calling Anzan "Vaamū" or vice versa (both are names for the same Empire, but from two different eras).

Universal canonicity

One rule I've always held to is to never reject any of my ideas at all. Everything I've written since I was three years old is now and will forever be canonical. When one idea contradicts another, they are either both true at separate times or one of the names is changed. Since creating a nation called "Camia" when I was 11 years old, I've had several more Camias, thus explaining how "Camia" can be utterly destroyed by one of its enemies and then a few hundred years later be on the verge of conquering the world.

I did not hold to this rule early on. I just now found a note to myself "Remember, the plots of the book are completely detached from the comics, which gave way to the book in Nov '93."

Comically overpowered child superheros

Influences and ideas

A few ideas taken from video games exist in my conworld, but most are in the "short stories" I wrote when I was younger and will not be publishing here or likely anywhere. Essentially, all of the stories were about child superheros, aged 3 to 13, who traveled around the universe fighting enemies of all types. Sometimes they fought against conventional armies of soldiers with guns and rocket launchers, sometimes they fought supervillains who themselves had superpowers and used their own powers against them, sometimes they fought robots, and sometimes they fought less intelligent beings such as mutants and the occasional pack of predatory animals, though these latter two types of battles occurred only at the whim of a supervillain.

The superheros were invincible, as it seemingly never occurred to be that they might somehow get hurt. They were entirely immune to sharp objects, never bleeding when they were hit with weapons or bitten by a sharp-beaked predatory bird, let alone losing a limb. They could be crushed by their (generally much larger) enemies, but even this would not permanently hurt them, they would be simply unable to get up until someone else on their team freed them.

Self-insert character

In my very early stories, the star was always /Characters#Teddy, a realization of the person I wished I could be. He had many flaws, but always overcame them. He was one of the most powerful adventurers, though there were some powers he lacked, and thus he needed to rely on his allies in most battles.

Teddy was also among the kindest of the many adventurers, even going so far as to rescue a man who had hours ago beat him unconscious when the two of them found themselves both being attacked by a third party. However, even in my early years I soon began to write stories that did not feature Teddy.

Character list

See /Characters for a list of people, places, and organizations in the Camia stories.

Superheros

Since I started writing when I was three years old, and did the bulk of my failed attempt at writing a novel when I was 12, and since I've held to the promise to keep everything I've ever written inviolably canonical, a lot of the characters in my stories even today are children between the ages of 5 and 12 years old. Five because that's when I started writing stories, and twelve because that's when I stopped. I find my early writings amusing in that I wrote mostly about war but never even considered the possibility that one of the small boys that was cruising around the universe, fighting battle after battle against enemies that were not only invariably bigger and stronger than the boys but also heavily armed as well, might actually someday get hurt. They were always inexplicably invincible not just to death but even to being injured, and I never came up with an explanation for this except impossibly good luck.

In one scene on planet Namma, an 11 year old boy named Teddy, a member of the TCT superhero league, is cornered in his own spaceship by four aggressive enemy soldiers. Three of the men pinned the boy to the floor of the ship while the fourth started kicking him and stomping on him. The boy's reaction to this was to pull his radio out of his pocket and call for his copilot to come into the ship to rescue him. Realizing that this was impossible because the ship was now in motion, he jumped up to free himself from the four men and attacked the fifth man who had come inside to pilot the ship. Then he subdued the other four attackers and brought his spaceship back down to the planet.

A few weeks later, his spaceship was again invaded by enemy soldiers. This time, Teddy was outside the ship when it happened. He responded by rushing through the crowd of soldiers and into the ship, and then slapping away the soldiers until they were finally all on the ground. Then, hearing that his hometown had been invaded by the army of planet Xema, Teddy flew home with three other kids and the four of them defeated the Xeman army in close range combat. Later, their teacher told them they needed to destroy the Earth because it was bothering her that the universe had an Earth in it, so the boys left for Earth in a brand-new spaceship, kicking off their new war by invading Seattle.

Contacts with Nanuko

The people of Namma understood that the TCT kids were trouble. On (I believe) their very first visit, two TCT boys named Teddy and Zach landed in a village and were greeted by a soldier, Nanuko, who immediately banished them from the village and ordered them to leave immediately. Then he assigned a young boy to the task of going to all of the other nearby villages to tell them to keep out Teddy and Zach. Teddy and Zach decided to follow the boy to each of the villages so the villagers could meet the people they were supposed to be keeping out. Of the many villages they had been banished from, the boys chose to settle in Torushi Village. They spent their first night on Namma sleeping in a small inn, taking the money needed to pay for their beds from one of the villagers.

A few months after that, while visiting planet Namma, Teddy ran into trouble once again. This time, one of the citizens of Torushi, a boy named Treba, cornered Teddy with a sword, demanding to be given access to Teddy's "dream machine". The ever-heroic Teddy grabbed the sword and rushed to find Nanuko, who was now friendly towards Teddy and the other children. He then forced Nanuko to turn the government over to Teddy and Nauri (a girl whom Teddy had met recently and become quite fond of). The fact that Treba had been pressing a sword against Teddy's abdomen just minutes ago didn't matter at all; he considered Treba so insignificant that he didn't even want revenge. However, Treba was a kunma (see below), and thus even weaker than most of Teddy's other attackers.

The "supervillains" of Xema

The boys fought against two types of enemies: the first type was conventional armies, sometimes enormous ones representing an entire nation but also often small invading forces that had been sent out by a foreign nation not wanting to risk losing its entire army in one battle.

The other type of enemy was the "supervillains" one might expect to see more of in a comic book or a novel originally based on a comic book. For example, Dr. Zāme threatened the kids day after day with all types of enemies, being particularly fond of enormous building-crushing mutants. Often, the boys would be sitting in sixth grade happily doing their schoolwork when the teacher would call them up to the front desk to tell them that Dr. Zame had just threatened their city with another pack of mutants and it was up to the boys to save the city by fighting off the mutants with no weapons or armor to protect them.

Most supervillains the kids faced lived at least part of the time on planet /Xema, "a planet where all villains could go to live without persecution". Villains on Xema did not necessarily like each other, and did not often cooperate with each other, but neither were they allowed to attack each other. Thus, Xema as a whole was not capable of launching a war against Camia or any other nation, but Camia knew that if they were to invade, all of Xema's masterminds would unite and could easily crush the Camian army. Since Camia realized it could not afford to lose its best men in a direct invasion of Xema, they only sent children to fight the Xemans. For example, one a day a young boy named Zachary was told to go on a mission to Xema in order to singlehandedly defeat Dr. Zāme, Dr. Roc, and another villain calling himself "Pain". They figured Zach's chances of success were abysmal, but felt he would be better at taking the hits in the resulting battles on planet Xema than the traditional Camian army soldiers would be. Zachary refused the mission, however, and handed it over to a much smaller boy named Treba.

First snake battle

One year, on the 24th of June, when the noontime temperature reached a scorching 10 degrees above freezing, Dr. Zāme himself called up the boys on their telephones before school to let them know they had a big surprise waiting for them in the local battlefield. The boys' parents wished them well as they converged on the park in the center of town. Long before they arrived, though, they caught sight of their big surprise: a snake so gigantic that even its tongue was longer than the boys were tall. A sportscaster named Bob showed up to watch the children try to fight off the snake, but refused to participate in the battle himself. The snake kept crushing them and trying to poison them but the boys kept slithering away. On the other hand, none of the weapons the boys had been throwing at the snake were able to get through its skin.

Eventually one of the boys decided to freeze the snake with cold weather spells, knowing that snakes shut down in cold weather. Five cold waves soon showered the snake, and then at the climax one of the boys switched to a hot spell in order to shock the snake into a state of distress. This killed the snake. When they returned from the battle, their teacher was so happy that she gave them the day off from school to celebrate.

Missile attacks

At other times, Dr. Zāme preferred more conventional methods of attack, such as shooting anti-aircraft missiles at the kids' spaceships or larger missiles at the buildings in their hometown (although this type of attack required coordination with other people; Dr. Zame couldn't do this by himself.) Although early ships that the boys had flown had been equipped with weapons systems, later models, perhaps at the insistence of Camians who were tired of seeing one ship after another crash and burn, were completely defenseless. Thus, Dr. Zāme and other enemies of the TCT kids could get as close as they wanted to improve their aim, and not have to worry about retaliation; on the other hand, most of the TCT'ers had superpowers that would let them temporarily survive in outer space even if their ships had been blown apart, and those who didn't were generally quickly rescued by those who did.

Nevertheless, Dr. Zāme knew how to fight. Once, when three of the boys were on planet Theta for a political conference, in which they were deciding whether or not to launch an invasion of Earth, Dr. Zāme decided to hit the boys with an interplanetary ballistic missile more than a mile long. The missile succeeded in destroying the building the boys were in, but the boys themselves survived, as did the aliens they had been negotiating with. When they returned to their home planet, the boys were attacked by a flock of gigantic man-eating birds which had been imported from the planet Xema. When they hid from the birds, they were ambushed by Dr. Roc, who had been cooperating with Dr. Zāme.

Battles in Wamia

Some of the children occasionally were captured by enemy soldiers, since although they were quite strong their powers were primarily defensive rather than offensive ones. One boy, the same "Teddy" from above in fact, "got caught" by his enemies while spying in a foreign country and was thrown in jail near the city of Buga in his nation's enemy, Wamia. He decided to break out of the jail by drilling through the floor with his "cocoon" superpower. Then he climbed into an invisible spaceship and flew for some reason to Fort Calamity, a fortress of about 20 square miles in the arctic tundra, for protection even though he was already free and safe as soon as he got into the ship. Once TCT learned what happened, they joined him and brought supplies so that they could hide out in the fort for as long as necessary.

Dr. Zāme soon also learned what had happened, and figured this was as good a time as any to invade the kids. He gathered up his guns and ammunition and aimed his armored spaceship at the dome of Fort Calamity. Although the fort was well-defended, Dr. Zāme crashed his spaceship right through its protective walls and started shooting at the TCT kids inside the fort. But soon after he literally crashed their party he "fell into a booby trap and disappeared". Then, a girl named Jen destroyed the "radar computer" (I'm not sure what I meant by that) that Dr. Zāme had used to track them down.

Attacks on other planets

It was not just the boys in TCT that were targeted by supervillains; generally, anyone they befriended also became a target. When TCT found friendly allies on planets like /Namma and Earth the supervillains responded by attacking those allies as well, at least the ones that were young children traveling in spaceships.

Trouble seemed to find the kids wherever they went. On Earth, they were attacked with interplanetary ballistic missiles and well-worn military weaponry familiar to Earth itself. On Teppala, they were attacked by wild animals and gigantic mutants as well as alien invasions bringing the same dangers they faced on Earth. As soon as they found a safe place to stay on planet Namma, a supervillain tracked them down and poured upon them the same trials even there. The Namman military campaign against the kids was mostly headed up by a man named Lilâl. Like many supervillains, Lilâl was an immigrant from planet Xema. Unlike Dr. Zāme and Dr. Roc, however, he chose to live on /Namma, a planet that was mostly out of the picture in interplanetary affairs because although it had a high standard of living its technology was far behind all of the other planets. Lilâl thus had a powerful advantage on planet Namma, since the people he attacked were even more defenseless than those on planet Teppala or planet Earth. Lilâl did not use a "Dr." name such as Dr. Lilâl because on Namma it would've been meaningless. Nevertheless, Lilâl had not appeared on Namma until the TCT kids started visiting Namma. As soon as TCT established a foothold on planet Namma in and around Torushi Village, Lilâl began destroying those villages with mutants, much like Dr. Zāme had done on planet Teppala, and seemingly cooperating with invading armies from other planets when they, too, raided and destroyed villages on planet Namma.

After one particularly long battle, two TCT boys and several other kids whom they had befriended decided to build themselves a paradise in New Zealand (presumably with slave labor) where they could stay and enjoy a pampered life away from all of the gigantic mutants and interplanetary missiles that so troubled them everywhere else they want. They hoped that they would never have to deal with the supervillains ever again.

After a few days in their new private luxury resort, one of the kids, a small girl named Nauri, contacted Lilâl and told him that she was living in paradise in New Zealand. She invited Lilâl to move into the resort with them now that the kids were no longer tied down fighting mutants. He quickly agreed, but once let inside, Lilâl decided to convince the kids to join his new organization, CRWY. Lilâl admired the paradise the kids had built for themselves but felt that it could use some minor reforms.

CRWY seemed like a good idea, so all of the kids in the resort except one joined up. That one was Treba (see below), who at that time was officially the king of Torushi Village, though he was staying in New Zealand along with the other kids. Once Lilâl had secured the allegiance of the kids in CRWY, Lilâl and the kids abandoned their resort and warped back to Namma in their spaceships and began destroying Torushi Village. They decided to bring King Treba along as a slave so they could have someone to wait on them and fetch them food and water while the cottages burned to the ground. Nanuko (the only adult in the kids' organization other than Lilâl himself) spoke out against the destruction of the village and the enslavement of King Treba, and the kids responded by kicking Nanuko out of CRWY and making him a slave. They also enslaved a young girl named Anitak because she had previously been very rich, but complained when the others took away her money and torched her home.

Once Lilâl realized that all of the kids were dutifully obeying his orders, he moved on to the next stage of his attack plan. He sent out a pack of mutants to massacre the young children who had just days earlier invited him into their tropical resort, joined his private organization, and faithfully flown with him to Namma in order to help put him into power. The kids were upset that Lilâl would send out mutants to kill them after all of the good things they had done for him, and they decided in a private vote that they didn't really want to help him anymore. They decided that destroying the village where most of them were living and making everybody homeless hadn't been such a good idea, but realized that before they rebuilt any of their homes they first had to get rid of all of the mutants that Lilâl had sent after them. They formed a private agreement that whoever beat off the most mutants would get to be the new ruler of the village. They knew that Teddy and Nauri were the best fighters amongst all of the CRWY members, and that one of them would likely win. That way, the kids were assured of one small victory amidst their great defeat: even though they had lost their homes and betrayed their families by signing away their power to a supervillain who had only wanted to destroy them all along, at least once they had finished fighting the mutants, their eternal punching bag, Treba, wouldn't be the king anymore.

The preschoolers

There was also a league of preschoolers, the Lemon Shop League, who lived in the Northeast Woods. I did not give them a defined age in my early stories, but wrote that they were so small that they could sit side by side in one seat and not overlap the edges. They appeared from time to time, mostly helping out the TCT kids fight off mutants rather than trying to involve themselves in interplanetary politics. They were not as enthusiastic about their missions as the older kids were, and sometimes had to be pulled into each battle. However they were quite powerful; one girl, who went by the name Rainbow, had the ability to conjure up weapons and then throw them at the animals. One day when TCT was trying to track down Dr. Zāme, she destroyed a turtle that was trying to step on the children by throwing an axe from a safe distance just as the turtle was pulling its head back out of its shell.

The Lemon Shop children were repeatedly humiliated and treated like trash even by their allies, simply because they had the same basic physical limitations that other toddlers had. One of them had a difficult time even standing up. They needed adults or at least the older children to help them get around, and the older children were not keen on taking on a parenting role when they still had to be in bed by 9pm each night.

Although the Lemon Shop kids were valuable warriors, they often left a battle scene partway through because they needed to rest or even take a nap. They tended to fight from behind the other kids, using them as shields, and send out attacks only when they had a clear line of sight. Since most of them were skilled with distance attacks, they preferred when possible to stand on a hill just behind the others. They would stand far enough back that they could throw their attacks over the older kids' heads, but close enough that they could hide behind the older kids when the counterattacks came.

Adults are useless

The national government seemed uninterested in reining in Dr. Zāme, or even tracking him down; they simply resigned themselves to the fact that every few weeks there would be a major disaster in their capital city and it was up to a small group of young children to bail them out. Even the boys' parents were unhelpful, soberly telling their kids that they could not go out and play until all of the 20-ton slugs occupying the shopping mall at the other end of town had been eliminated.

All of the enemies the boys fought were adult males. Not once did one of the boys break ranks with the rest, even when I realized I had intended all along for the boys' superhero league, TCT, to be just one of many, thus opening the possiblity for competition or even open warfare between the leagues. Very rarely did the kids have any help from adults in their missions. Nanuko is the best example of an adult character actually helping the kids out in their missions directly instead of just ordering them around from battle to battle and then collecting their reward from the children when the children returned.

But Nanuko was far from ideal. At first he looked like a perfect fit in TCT, but when he realized the kids had moved their bedtime from 9pm to 8pm he threw a temper tantrum hoping to be allowed to stay up a bit later. Nanuko had hoped he would be able to keep up his party life while traveling with TCT, but after many nights of keeping the children awake complaining about the lack of alcohol in their forts, the children told Nanuko that he needed to sleep somewhere else.

There was a few other adults that were helpful, actually, such one of the 2 characters named Bob. He had a habit of telling lies and pushing his way through crowds of people in order to start fights against unsuspecting victims, but he never wavered from his position of supporting TCT. However, whereas Nanuko joined the kids' adventures and flew in their spaceships just as if he was one of them, Bob worked on his own and made no alliances with anyone except TCT.

The other Bob was not helpful towards the kids, and saw them primarily as a source of income for his reality TV shows about the kids fighting their enemies. He had made a pact with Dr. Zāme such that Dr. Zāme would allow Bob to follow the kids around, even if it meant following them into one of Dr. Zāme's hideouts in order to film Dr. Zāme. Dr. Zāme even allowed Bob to direct Dr. Zāme's battles to some extent, solely for the purpose of making his TV show more interesting. The only benefit to Dr. Zāme out of all of this is that by doing so, he was able to get Bob to agree never to help the children in their fights against Zāme no matter how dire their situation became.

In the end, however, Bob actually joined the kids' adventure league and began going on missions. He thus broke his pact with Dr. Zāme and became a target of Dr. Zāme just as much as the kids were. However, even then, he focused mostly on raising money with his TV shows and his wrestling arena back on planet Tebbala.

Adults are obstacles

Were it not for the superheros' apparent invincibility, the world they lived in would be extremely cruel to them. Adults, even their own parents, seemingly existed only to push the kids around, generally into fights against other adults, and then when the kids defeated their oversized enemies their leaders would reward their job well done by assigning them an even more difficult job. And the children happily offered to adopt each enemy they defeated and happily made it their duty to solve the problems their former enemies caused them after they had nominally sworn allegiance.

For example, Nanuko as above had originally been an enemy of the TCT kids who vowed to track them down and if necessary kill them all. But one day the kids surrounded him and he agreed to enroll in their class and shuttle to Teppala so their teacher could meet her first adult student. From then on, the kids helped Nanuko with his schoolwork, patiently teaching him the basics of their language and the other subjects they studied while Nanuko complained about the hard work and wondered how hard it would be to sneak back to his home planet and hide out for the rest of his life.

However, the kids were so kind and gentle that they were easily exploited. On early missions, humans from other planets would often either block the kids' path into their spaceships or climb aboard when the children weren't looking. Space travel was very expensive, and these people saw the kids as a free ride to the planet of their choice. The kids generally decided they could deal with their uninvited guests, but once in a while the hitchhikers became hijackers and simply kidnapped the children who had kindly welcomed them aboard.

Even the evil masterminds such as Dr. Zāme took heart in the seemingly bottomless generosity of the TCT kids, and hoped that if he should ever finally be defeated once and for all that he would be allowed to make a peace treaty with the TCT kids in which they forgave him for every time he had kidnapped them, wrecked their spaceships, sent mutants after them, and simply beat them up in exchange for a promise that he wouldn't do it anymore.

Like stereotypical humans trapped on an alien planet, the TCT children assumed that any children they met anywhere in their missions were their allies, even if they met them on a planet with which Camia was at war. And they were right; never once were they attacked or even betrayed by any child or teenager they met up with. The only humans who ever attacked the TCT children were adult males.

After the first major kidnapping was reported on the news (Channel 38), the mainstream Camian public couldn't understand how the most powerful soldiers in the world could be brought to their knees by a single civilian with no ties to any foreign military power. Some began to question Camia's strategy of sending unaccompanied, unarmed children as young as 3 years old to fight difficult battles in space while the conventional, heavily armed, adult male soldiers stayed mostly in forts at home and focused on defense.

Children in power

But given that, aside from their arch-enemies like Dr. Zāme, all of the adults the kids met up with lacked superpowers, the children in TCT and the other leagues were merely being their nice little selves and could have in most cases simply murdered anyone who was even the least bit unkind, but abstained for the good of their country and their people.

Indeed, when Teddy and Zach found themselves a comfortable place to live on planet Namma, their teacher Nancy realized she could no longer order them around anymore, and needed to find replacements. They still remained friendly to Nancy, and retained their ranks in /STW, but once they settled in on Namma and started enslaving the villagers around them they became the masters of their own fate.

The fact that Teddy and Zach were hilariously incompetent leaders didn't stop them from holding onto and increasing their power, because everyone else around them was incompetent as well, and the boys tended to win any conflict with an outside power, be it a thousand-man army from the planet Xema or Nanuko trying to get the kids to do his math homework for him.

Superheros' self-image

The kids often called themselves adventurers, a word they had adopted from their teacher. They did not use the word superhero. Camia's mass media often referred to them as celebrities, in a purposeful attempt to get the other Camians to identify themselves with the kids instead of with traditional media stars such as singers and supermodels.

I find it interesting that in my early writing, the main character (Teddy) never once referred to himself or his fellow TCT members as a "child" or even a "kid", and only occasionally as a "boy". This even extended to the adults around him: the general who wouldn't let the kids into the battle against Xema wasn't stopping them because he was afraid that "the kids" would get hurt, but because one of the four kids was a girl. Once the others convinced him that she was a very strong girl, he had no problem. Dr. Zāme was a minor exception, as he fondly addressed the kids he called on the telephone with epithets like "little ones", but this was largely (HA!!!) because he identified himself with his gigantic mutants and the gigantic ballistic missiles he shot at the kids rather than what he himself was as a man.

Interaction with common people

Everyone in Camia recognized the power of TCT and the other kids' leagues. They began to think of the kids as their nation's celebrities, proud that their nation, uniquely among all nations on known planets, idolized homegrown superheros instead of supermodels.

STW as a whole, but especially TCT, was so politically powerful that Camian adults whose children attended STW's school became themselves more politically powerful due to their children's connections to the power wielded by STW. Thus, in many ways, the children "out-parentsed their parents" and their parents waited eagerly for their children to come home from school each day so that the children could teach them something new and perhaps even give them some money that they had earned while out on a mission.

TCT kids often drove cars to get from place to place, and presumably in their country all of the other kids of at least 10 years old or so could legally drive too. It didn't occur to me that a 10 year old would be too small to reliably drive a car, even one designed with "small adults" in mind. For that matter, the kids never had a problem physically reaching the controls in their spaceships either, and it never occurred to me that they should. I suppose perhaps this may be because I started out writing believing that the ships the kids flew had been designed especially for them, but later changed over to a more realistic idea that they had instead been stolen from enemies, particularly Earthlings, as spaceships were very expensive even in this world and the ability to conjure up money was not one of the kids' superpowers. At any rate, the problem could be solved by saying that if kids in Camia were regularly driving cars, there would be adaptations in the design to allow smaller people to drive properly, and that even if kids weren't regularly piloting spaceships, two or more of them could simply cooperate in order to fly properly, which is what they often (but not always) did.

I did have one scene where the hero struggled to reach the controls of a computer and had to jump up in the air waving his arms in order to be acknowledged by its integrated camera, but this took place on planet Theta, whose majority population was a species of gigantic spider-like creatures with full use of all eight arms, where an average-sized adult or even an unusually tall one would have had the very same problem. (If I had been writing this in this decade instead of the early 1990s, I'm sure I would have made it a touchscreen computer which required the use of eight limbs, sometimes simultaneously, as the spiders had a peculiar body shape that indeed allowed them to sit down while lifting all eight of their legs in the air (albeit some much lower than others (think of piano pedals)) and remain comfortable while doing so. Then, a human would have to race back and forth across the screen pressing various software buttons with his hands.)

Vocabulary

Using "belittling" words such as children and kidnap was one of the hardest things for me to avoid when I tried to pick the unfinished novel back up many years later, and why I've completely abandoned that attempt altogether and just returned to the original 44-page stub that I wrote when I was 11 years old. In fact, I just now found an attempted rewrite of the DSAS novel, which I called DSAS3, which I had abandoned in early Chapter 2. I was 14 years old at that time, and already I had started peppering my writing with phrases like kids' club that I hadn't used even just three years earlier.

Yet, Teddy referred to many of the younger children around him as boys and kids (still never "children" though). This shows that the mindset I had at the time was one of complete invincibility and independence from all outside authorities. Teddy literally had no fear at all and saw nobody as his protectors; he was the protector of everybody else. I also seem to have avoided the stereotypically childish word "grownup"; Nanuko was identified as an "adult" and a "man" before Teddy learned his name.

Other superpowers

I use the word conjure in the specific narrow sense of creating an object from nothing. I learned this sense of the word during a brief time in my life when I was interested in learning magic tricks. Thus, I'm not using the word in its wider, more common sense of magic in general.

In my early comics I often drew the kids conjuring weapons with the use of props that I had taken directly from the video game The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. This game inspired me a lot. I may or may not have been already writing about conjuring weapons and "generating water" before I had played the game; it's impossible for me to find out now. However, even then, if asked, I'm pretty sure I would have said that the kids really were conjuring objects and casting spells directly rather than using Link's tools such as the Cane of Byrna, the Cane of Somaria, the Ice Wand, the Bombos Medallion, and so on, since sometimes I drew the kids without the props. Also, one would have to wonder where they put the props when they were not actively using them.

Long lifespans

I just found a sentence in which Teddy says that his grandfather moved to planet Teppala 1600 years ago. I honestly don't know if that was a mistake or if I was intending his family to have developed Methuselah-like lifespans. I do know that in my very early writing, I did indeed have people who lived 2000 years or more, but I thought I had dropped that by the time of the story I just found this sentence in. I believe this power was limited to the Camians but was not considered a superpower.

Hypnosis

Some of the kids could hypnotize their enemies, even enemies that were animals. Sometimes, they could prevent a battle entirely by convincing their enemy to run away or even switch sides. At other times, they were only able to convince the enemy to attack just one of the children, generally the most invincible one.

Conjuring water

When one boy developed frostbite on his hands, another boy named Zach "generate[d] some water" for the other boy to heal himself with. While most people can only "generate water" in one manner, I do not believe that I would have used such an idea when I was 10 years old even playfully. I was in pure fantasy mode. Most likely I was thinking of an elemental spell, a concept I had borrowed from video games, but on the other hand, I had not had much experience with those types of games when I was 10.

Conjuring weapons

Enemies who captured TCT children often noticed that the TCT'ers didn't seem to mind handing over their weapons to their captors. This was because at least some of them could make their own out of thin air. Once, a team of giant spiders from planet Theta stole Camia's national treasure, and two TCT boys invaded Theta in order to get it back. However, the spiders quickly captured both boys and put them in a torture chamber where many other humans were being held hostage. Despite just having been disarmed, Teddy decided at one point to rush directly into a crowd of spiders and hold up a bomb as he did so. Teddy then threw the bomb at the wall , which destroyed the wall and hurt many of the humans that were held hostage, but did not harm Teddy at all.

This power came into use more often when fighting mutants or large animals than when fighting humans. With their various low-level superpowers, most TCT children could overpower a hostile adult, but all of the animals were simply too large to be injured by the TCT adventurers without the use of rapid-fire "weapons" such as bombs that they pulled out of thin air rather like a video game hero might do. Even guns were inadequate in battles like these.

Of all of the kids in their many superhero leagues, the one who was best at conjuring weapons was Julie, a 4-year-old girl belonging to the Lemon Shop superhero league who focused on fighting mutants. While most toddlers fought Dr. Zāme's mutants very cautiously, hiding behind shields for most of the battle, Julie was far more active and actually contributed a lot to the offensive portion of the kids' battle strategy.

Invisibility

A few of the children could turn invisible, and some could turn others invisible as well. While invisible, even their shadows disappeared, but they still left footprints and other marks on the ground, unless they were also making use of their flight superpower.

Unpowered flight

Most of the stronger TCT kids could fly in the air. In my original writing the self-insert character simply takes to the air during a battle without bothering to explain to the reader previously that he was even a superhero, let alone a flying one. This power was difficult to control, because it was powered by muscle strength only, and they were often unable to prevail against strong winds and would end up getting blown into a tree or, if in a city, a large building.

Some children could control their flight very well. The power to hover, making no movement in any direction, while resisting air currents was a highly prized ability. Adventurers who combined this power with invisibility (whether from their own repertoire or another's) could thus move about completely undetectable.

Force fields

One of the most powerful weapons that some TCT'ers had was the ability to create a force field. Some of their enemies, such as Eddy, also had this power, which made them very difficult to handle. All force fields were invisible, even to those who had just cast them. Essentially a force field was a passive wall of resistance that could not be broken through even by sharp projectiles such as bullets. Often, an enemy such as Eddy would throw a force field around one of the kids, trapping them inside a bubble from which they could not escape. (Some of the adventurers could still break through by digging through the floor with another superpower, but this was a rare ability.) A force field could not be simply canceled by another force field. However, force fields wore down in strength over time, and a TCT child entrapped in a bubble could eventually pop his way out without needing to use any superpowers.

Paralysis

This may or may not be the same as the force fields. In early missions, Teddy fought his way through crowds of taller, stronger adults not by punching and kicking them down, but by simply freezing them in place and attempting to find a clear path through the maze of statues. Their enemies often used guns to accomplish the same thing, at least the enemies that were "supervillains" who were seen as the most evil people alive but yet never stooped to actually physically harming any of the children directly.

One weakness of this power was that, given that the TCT adventurer's super strength was related to their force field ability, and that a force field could not be canceled with another force field, adventurers who were surrounded on all sides could not use paralysis to escape because they would then risk being trapped. Even the brave adventurers who pushed away throngs of enemy soldiers did not have any special ability to lift heavy objects off the ground. Early enemies of the kids who knew this weakness would simply stand in front of a door and block their path. They did not have to be particularly strong in order to do this. For example, when Bob heard that two 10-year-old boys were about to leave on a mission to planet Theta to recover the treasure that the Thetans had stolen, he located their spaceship and stood in front of the door so he could hitch a ride. He knew that the kids could simply kill him with a bomb, but correctly theorized that they would be unwilling to commit violence against an ally even on such an important mission. The kids could fit around his body and reach the door handle, but because the doors to their spaceships always opened outward, Bob merely had to lean against the door to ensure that it would stay shut. Realizing they had no choice, the boys admitted him aboard and tried to ignore him. After a few minutes in the air, the boys and the man were all abducted by Thetans and brought into a torture chamber.

Occasionally, even a dead mutant or large animal in their path could bring a mission to an early end. On this same mission, one of the boys was fighting a battle against the giant spiders of planet Theta and realized that he could not fight his way out because even though he was on the inside this time, and this door also opened outward, the doors in the torture chamber were so narrow that a dead spider in front of the door would be an obstacle too wide for him to squeeze by, and he was not strong enough to move even a dead spider out of the way.

Cocoons

A few adventurers had the ability to create cocoons, which were thick green pupa-like structures that could block out all outside attacks. Generally, the boys would fully encase their body inside a cocoon when a battle was reaching the point where they could no longer fight back against the many enemies attacking them from all sides. While in the cocoon, they were invincible pacifists, because they could not be harmed, but the cocoon prevented them from launching any attacks of their own, even magical ones, unless they deliberately let part of their body remain outside the cocoon. Often, the boys wrapped cocoons around other fighters instead of themselves, typically weaker ones such as the preschoolers who traveled with them to fight mutants.

Cocoons could be used as a weapon, although they were an inefficient one. The material they were made out of, mappa, was impenetrable by all other materials and thus could harm people who came into contact with it. It was even possible, though difficult and slow, for one boy to drill through the floor with his cocoon when he was captured and placed in jail.

Ice

Most of the stronger kids had the ability to conjure ice and water. Ice could kill their enemies in three ways:

• Paralysis An enemy, human or animal, that was encased in ice would be unable to move unless they first broke through the ice. Although the kids generally only fought against enemies that were physically strong by comparison, the kids could throw ice on top of ice until they reached the point where even the strongest man (or animal) could no longer punch their way out.
• Suffocation An enemy entrapped in ice, if their entire body was covered, would quickly run out of air and die of oxygen deprivation.
• Cold Lastly, an enemy encased in ice, if not killed by the other two methods, would eventually freeze to death. This happened mostly with animals, especially reptiles, that were much too large to be fully covered by ice even if the kids showered the animal dozens of times in one battle.

Sometimes the kids cast cold water spells instead of ice spells, but these were generally less effective at causing damage and were used mostly to put out fires.

Fire

While the boys lived in a cold climate and identified themselves strongly with cold weather, some of them also had the ability to make fire. They mostly reserved this superpower for battles against large mutants, because even when they were tempted to light one of their many human enemies on fire, they knew that even if they immediately followed it with a water spell, there was always a chance that the fire would get out of control.

Limits on superpowers

The children's superpowers were of limited strength. A large alien could burst through their force fields, and even a strong human could "pop open" a force field after a certain period of time.

While the children were seemingly immune to being injured, adults in close contact with them often beat them up, sometimes knocking them unconscious. This was because the boys' immunity was in fact due mostly to the fact that they could heal each other when they were injured, no matter what type of injury had been sustained.

Superheros without superpowers

The Kunma Kids

My earliest comics were Garfield-style wax paper strips that had no titles. There were only two characters: the me that I hated to be, and the non-existent person I wanted to be. The purpose of every single comic was to let the person I wanted to be torture the person I really was and for the real me to “watch” from outside the comic, seeing each strip from the viewpoint of the idealized me.

Treba

Even those children who did not have magic powers were often expected to behave as though they had. There were actually two types of magic in my early conworld, TCT's type and another weaker type called "Tanta spells". One poor misfit boy, "Treba", lived on a planet (Namma) where all the people around him had many Tanta spells and he had none. Yet for some reason he was expected to defend the entire village he lived in, while all of the stronger magical people around him reclined in their hammocks resting comfortably in the knowledge that their one-boy army was out in the fields fighting off the men in tanks with his miniature battle-ax.

This boy happened to be a slave, so in the middle of a battle he was often forced to take time out from fighting the enemy soldiers to serve his masters a luxurious meal or take their laundry down from their clotheslines. One day, after helping repulse an invasion of men in tanks (and getting bumped around and repeatedly run over in the process) he returned home to find out he had been banished from the village for cooperating with the other people who had beaten off the invaders. However, he was soon back in Torushi anyway because Teddy and Zach forced their way in and brought Treba with them.

TCT took pity on this boy, but nevertheless, shortly after they rescued him they sent him to take on the supervillains on planet Xema, including Dr. Zāme and Dr. Roc, again with no weapons or armor to protect himself, and no knowledge of how to pilot a spaceship.

Later, a girl pays Teddy 2 days' wages to beat up Treba, then a different girl, Nauri, sentences both of them to slavery for violating the prohibition against fighting. Soon, though, Teddy is released from slavery and Treba is transferred from Nauri's property to Teddy's so Teddy can beat up on Treba legally.

I've made a word for this type of character: kunma (also wumma, kunama, etc). A kunma is a character who resembles and represents me, but whose existence is so painful that he is inarguably worse off than me. Sometimes, a character who represents me but is far better off in life gets his joys by attacking and tormenting the kunma, but other times protects him. I think I've only created two such characters in my life, Treba and another boy named "Gary" who I suppose I could mention below.

Gary

Long before I created Treba, I created a boy named Gary to beat up on. I believe I was 7 years old when I drew my first-ever comic strip, and all I remember of it is a bunch of children at the lunch table in 2nd grade laughing at Gary for saying something embarrassing. I had assumed those comics were long gone, but stumbled across them one day many years later. But, due to a flood in our house in 2007, after which we simply threw things away without looking inside at all the soaked papers, they've probably been gone for real for 8 years. Ironically I think I drew on laminated paper with crayons at the time and it might have survived the flood whereas all of my later comics would have been ruined.

I named Gary after cartoonist Garry Trudeau, even though in the pre-Internet age I didn't know anything about Garry Trudeau other than that he was a cartoonist. I was not intending there to be any similarity in personality or any other trait between the two people. I more or less picked names at random when I was young. In fact, I'm pretty sure that Gary's original surname was simply also Trudeau, as when I was seven years old my repertoire was even more limited than it was a few years later. Recognizing the problem a few years later, I a clumsy made-up surname "Tissenson", but then changed it to Ziegler, which is the name I consider canonical now.

When I was 10 or so I drew some comics on construction paper with a pen. (I dont think I ever used a pencil.) In one story, Gary and Teddy found out they were the only two students to have failed the last test. Gary was happy that at least he was not alone in his suffering. But Teddy responded by beating up the teacher, and the teacher agreed to change Teddy's grade to 100. Then the teacher dismissed the class and Gary walked home depressed.

Then, on the way home, an older boy picked Gary up and started hitting him, demanding Gary give him all his money. Then, Teddy stepped into the fight and threw away the boy that had beat up Gary. Thus, Teddy had shown his power: he could be a school bully and a rescuer of bullying victims in the same day, and he always won his fights.

Five days later, Gary got beat up again and this time Teddy wasn't there to protect him. The day after that, Gary got beat up again. The day after that, Gary got beat up again. People began to tell Gary that he was getting attacked because he was a Wamian immigrant whose parents had decided that it would be a good idea to move from Wamia to Camia at the height of a bloody war between the two nations, but that most Camians weren't cool with it and therefore for the rest of his life he would just have to simply face the facts that he would be getting beat up over and over and nobody would care.

However, Teddy still considered Gary useful enough to bring him along on missions. One day, when Dr. Zāme had threatened Teddy and a few other boys with a herd of gigantic building-crushing mutants, Teddy decided to bring Gary along to use as bait for the animals. Gary ran around on the ground letting the animals chase him from place to place while the other boys knocked the animals out of place just before they were about to eat Gary. They killed all of the animals except one, which they decided was too harmless to bother with since it was just a gigantic slime mold. So, the slime mold survived and started lurching around the city as a symbol of how helpless the military of Camia would be if they didnt have the TCT boys to pick up the slack for them.

In another battle, Teddy told Gary to participate directly by trying to kill an animal that had rolled over onto its back and couldn't get up. But he was unable to harm the animal, so Teddy killed it with a bomb. In yet another battle, while the other boys were casting magic spells and splashing the predatory firebirds with fire and ice, Gary decided to run in and punch one of the birds directly, but he hurt his hand on the bird's beak and later on the bird bit him, incapacitating him for the rest of the battle. Then, one of the other boys accidentally hit Gary with a water spell, causing him to nearly drown. Then he healed Gary with a magic potion.

Soon, Gary switched schools to a "Wamian school" to isolate himself from the bullies around him. On a hot day in late May, Teddy and another Camian boy invaded Gary's new school and took one of the teachers hostage. They said that they were doing it in the name of their homeland, Camia, and that the Wamian school was unwelcome and was trying to brainwash Gary. The teacher pled with the boys to let him go, and promised to prove that they were not brainwashing their students. When Teddy looked at the textbook the teacher had been reading from, he agreed that it was not anti-Camian propaganda and apologized for invading the school. But still they took Gary out of the school and went home.

Two weeks later, Teddy and Gary were walking in the woods. A woman was walking close behind the two boys as they approached a very polluted river. Teddy told the woman to leave them alone, but she refused. Then, when she was facing the other direction, Teddy launched himself on the woman and started kicking and punching her. Then he just walked away, figuring she'd learned her lesson. But the boys stopped at the riverbank, and the woman soon reappeared behind them. She pushed Gary into the polluted river and then stepped back and smiled at what she'd done. Teddy ignored Gary and started fighting the woman again. He gave her quite a thrashing, and decided that it was a good time to search the polluted river for what remained of his friend Gary.

Gary survived, however, and soon recovered. Later that summer he challenged a Camian boy to a race and won. The prize was $100. The other boy, however, attacked Gary and took most of the money away. Gary went home sad but at least happy that the other boy had let him keep a part of his winnings.

Other Kunmas

There werent really any other true kunma characters. A few kids showed up in few strips and were targets of verbal abuse, but not physical abuse. Most of them had magic powers, after all, and could simply throw their bullies out the window but calmly decided to just simply deal with it.

The preschoolers

For example, the children in the Lemon Shop superhero league (Rainbow, Donald, etc) were all preschoolers, and were made fun of by the other leagues because they were so small even compared to the other kids that they seemed more like toys than people. Yet, these little children were just as powerful as the older ones and they all knew it.

Richie

Some characters were extremely unlucky, such as Richie, but were not kunmas because they do not resemble me in any way. For example, Richie was portrayed as so annoying and useless that he didn't even get sympathy from the enemies of the TCT kids who enslaved him, let alone from the other TCT kids.

March

I wrote a story called "March's Adventure" in which he teamed up with a girl named Gloria to help fight mutants, but she verbally humiliated him, stole his money, and forced him to take most of the hits in their battles. It may have been an attempt to get more characters into Treba and Nauri's sphere of influence, as Nanuko existed in this story and therefore March could have known Treba and Nauri. But, March never appeared outside this one story, not even in my later writings when I was pulling up characters I hadn't touched for years as possible TCT recruits. Given that this was on Namma, I'm not sure why the two young adventurers had non-Namman names.

Lucy

I suppose Lucy of "Larnac & Lucy" (possibly my first ever comic, from when I was 7 or 8 years old, unless the laminated wax paper ones were older) could be considered a kunma, since every time she appeared she got pushed around/sat on/etc by Larnac, until the very last comic when she reversed the situation and made it clear that it would stay that way. I never really identified with Lucy, though, as at the time I was at the age where I could not visualize myself as a girl no matter how I tried.

Once in a great while, Teddy and his friends were themselves bullied by larger kids, but these bullies had no magic powers and could not actually harm the TCT kids; they merely assumed that since the TCT kids were small that they would be weak.

Wamia

Arguably the entire nation of Wamia consists of kunmas, as they lived in a much more bountiful environment than the Camians but were so stupid that they polluted their country to the point where children were born with defects and being mentally retarded was so common that it came to be considered normal.

The Cleanup Corps

There was also the "Cleanup Corps", a group of eight elementary school children who went around the Earth cleaning up environmental problems while being attacked by snipers and bombers as if they were the greatest threat yet to the civilization around them. I blame Captain Planet. These children did not even have magic powers or advanced technology; they simply went around the world cleaning up toxic waste spills while dodging machine guns and torpedos. (Because they lived on Earth, they were not in the "gun-free" paradise world that most of my writing takes place in.) The Cleanup Corps is quite possibly the most absurd idea I've ever had.

From my "red notebook" I see that I had originally intended the Cleanup Corps to have literally singlehandedly saved the entire Earth from destruction because another group of eight children, a subgroup of TCT, had been ordered by their teacher to singlehandedly destroy the Earth. Those eight kids did in fact destroy much of the Earth, but when they met up with the Cleanup Corps they suddenly switched sides and the two groups of kids befriended each other. After the Earthlings learned that the Cleanup Corps had saved their lives and stopped the destruction of the Earth that Earth's leaders had previously been unable to even slow down, the leaders decided the time had come to finish off the Cleanup Corps once and for all. TCT decided to rescue them and move them to planet Teppala, where at least only a few people such as Dr. Zāme would shoot them. Thus, the environmental cleanup missions stopped and the Earth became messier again.

Apparently, once TCT had rescued the Cleanup Corps and moved them to Teppala, they became mostly independent from their teacher Nancy, and Nancy reacted to this by adopting the Cleanup Corps as "the new TCT" even though they didnt have superpowers. At the time, replacing the world's strongest superhero league with a group of younger kids who had no powers at all and were less than four feet tall seemed perfectly reasonable to me. What could possibly go wrong?

Reflection on Teppala

I might rationalize this idea by saying that the children were merely a wing of a larger organization that mostly employed adults. Also, the Cleanup Corps was not a kunma because none of the characters resembled me.

Direct borrowings

Archie

Further back in my childhood, I used Archie Comics characters as well. I remember one story that had Archie, Jughead, Betty, Veronica, Dilton, Reggie, and myself. My character was very much like Jughead. Although I generally wrote myself into my stories as the age I was at the time, I seem to have made an exception for Archie. Instead of being 9 or 10 years old, I made my cahracter 18 years old, to match the other Archie characters. I only wrote a few of these stories. I remember that Reggie and Veronica were "bad", and Archie usually was, but Betty, Jughead, and myself were "good". These words here signify both fighting ability and personality traits, but not moral alignment. The "bad" adventurers were not actually enemies of the "good" ones; they all teamed up with each other to fight their many enemies. However the "bad" ones had undesirable personality traits such as cowardice. Dilton did not play a large role in the stories, but he would have been on the "good" side for sure.

Jughead had superpowers, and was the strongest of the bunch, whereas Archie, Reggie, and Veronica seemingly had no purpose other than to take hits for the other fighters (and then get no thanks for it because they were "bad" anyway).

TMNT

I borrowed some ideas from TMNT, which was owned by Archie at the time, but no actual characters. Ace Duck was the only character to even be mentioned, and he never actually appeared.

Tibbo

An obscure science fiction book called Barney on Mars, starring a boy named Tibbo, also found its way into my Archie stories, with Tibbo simply being an additional character who only appeared in stories where the Archie characters also appeared.

Eddy

I abandoned the Archie concept early on, but Dilton hung on into my later stories in the form of "EDDY", a being created by Dr. Zāme as an Evil Duplicate (hence the name) of Dilton. Im not actually sure whether Archie itself featured "evil duplicates" or if I made the idea up myself. I think it's more likely that my idea was original even if the character being cloned wasn't. Actually, now that I think of it, I'm pretty sure I was inspired by the battle against "Dark Link" (though he wasn't called that then) in the second Zelda game for the NES (the one that's partly a platform game). Dark Link was like Link, but was "perfect", and whenever the two Links touched, Link got hurt and Dark Link didn't. Thus, EDDY (later just called Eddy) was this sort of video game archetype, a character who automatically hurts everyone he touches, and can only be defeated by being outsmarted. Why I chose Dilton as the character for Dr. Zāme to obsess over, I can't be sure. Perhaps Dr. Zāme sympathized with Dilton for being the smallest and weakest of his team (as above, even though I was 9 or 10 years old at the time, this was an exception to the rule I normally held to about writing myself in as my current age ... my character never hung around with groups of adults, or even teenagers, when I was that young.)

Unification of characters

About ten years or so after the Archie fanfics, I was in my early 20s and began work on unifying everything I had ever written into one single long plotline. For the stories to make sense, I knew I would have to recast all seven of the characters as children instead of 18-year-olds. This didnt bother me, however, as I had never really used the Archie characters' personalities, except for Dilton. In pursuit of this, I unified Dilton with "Simon" and Archie with #Gary. Unlike the Dilton/Eddy connection, there was no physical resemblance between Dilton and Simon or between Archie and Gary.

I did not seem to make the connection between Jughead and Zachary at that time, even though the resemblance between Jughead (as I had depicted him) and Zachary was the most perfect of them all. Really, it is only just a few days ago (the original stories are now 25 years old) that I've finally realized the subconscious connection. Here, too, there was no physical resemblance: Zachary was very red-haired, at least before he dyed his hair black and renamed himself Zack Black.

I left the other three characters (Betty, Veronica, and Reggie) unassigned. None of those three had played important roles in the stories anyway, so this did not matter much. Actually, apparently I created an independent character named "Betty" in 1993 and then promptly forgot about her. I only realized it now when I noticed that I had find/replaced the name Betty at some point, probably in the late 1990s, to change it to the more original and exotic-sounding "Jina", and inadvertently changed both Betty's instead of just the Archie fanfic one.

If I were to reassign the characters, I would have to make new ones or remember names I used in my teenage years:

Jughead ---> Zachary

(self-insert) ---> Teddy

Dilton ---> Simon ("Dana M.")

Betty ---> Stacy

Veronica ---> Callista

Reggie ---> Michael

The last two entries are for characters that I never used in stories, but which nevertheless had distinct personalities in my head. As above, they were essentially used by the other children as pillows to protect the more important children in the army from their enemies.

Calvin

In fact, I just now remembered that even Calvin made an appearance in my comics, though only as Spaceman Spiff. He had no magic powers, but did have his "mertilizer" gun which put him on a level with the other superheros. Calvin was the only superhero who carried a gun, and the others were thankful for his unique presence. Stupendous Man never appeared, nor did the obscure Capt Napalm or just the "regular" Calvin. The strips that featured Calvin came after the stories that had had Archie characters in them, but as above, Dilton was still indirectly present because Calvin often fought armies of Eddys. Technically this makes some of my early comics Calvin-Archie crossover fanfics.

Spaceman Spiff was usually referred to as "Calvin" by the other characters. In one strip, the Teddy character mistakenly referred to him as "Gary", which, due to my using a pen, I could not undo. I fixed the problem by immediately adding Gary into the plotline (it was a battle scene) alongside Calvin.

My early comics were quite Calvinesque, the kind that the "real" Calvin would have read, except that mine always had much worse artwork: I didnt even realize birds had beaks at first, I just drew mouths. I also was fond of depicting conversations as taking place mostly or entirely outside the panels, so that it was literally just speech bubbles within each panel, colored according to which person was speaking.

Video games

Early on I had some direct borrowings, such as from Mystic Quest. This game features an unusual art style with tiny humans fighting animals literally thousands of times larger than the humans, such that even an enemy named "Basilisk" (an insect) is able to "scrunch" (presumably meaning to crush) the players, and humans attack by jumping up at the enemies' feet. (Note: I might be misremembering: it was either a Basilisk or a leech that crushed me. Or both.) Likewise, a slime mold attacks humans with a pseudopod because the humans are so tiny that even an amoeba can cradle one with just a tiny part of its body.

This led my early comics to feature humans (mostly boys around my age at the time) fighting off gigantic mutants created by the Zāme clan. True to my inspiration, most of these animals fought the kids by crushing them instead of using sharp teeth or claws against them, even if doing that would have been far more effective. For that matter, essentially all of the animals the kids fought could simply have swallowed them whole, but never attempted it. Even the snake whose tongue was bigger than the whole bodies of the kids who were fighting to take it down merely poisoned the boys by sticking them with his tongue (!) but failed in the end because the boys kept healing themselves, and then later put on some shields.

Female characters

A few girls did appear, but I just now realized that most of my female characters were also based on video games I was playing at the time. However, video games in the early 1990s didnt have much room for personality development in their characters, so really I was being original after all because I was giving personalities to the otherwise very flat characters in the games. I did have some female characters that were entirely original, but most of them appeared in backup roles or in typical female roles such as teachers and people's mothers. (Only very late in my comic career did I begin to introduce "girlfriends".)

As above, although the national government of Camia was helpless to track down Dr. Zāme or any of the other men who kept making life hard for the TCT kids, they were seemingly okay with going after women. For example, in the year 4190, Camia declared war on a middle school teacher living in the Northeast Woods. Most of her students were already imprisoned, but two girls were still at large because for the most part, girls were left out of the most dangerous missions. Thus, the two girls flew to Wamia to free the other kids. When they arrived they broke open the prison and let out the six kids being held prisoner, and then the eight of them flew to Earth to rescue the rest of the kids. Then, they all flew to planet Namma to get away from the war that their own nation had started with them.

"The Power"

Many years later, I came up with an explanation for why the kids would always emerge squeaky clean from each battle that also explained some of the other oddities in my early writings. All of the supervillains the boys fought seemed to have the same uncanny ability to survive every battle unscathed, even battles they "lost", as did the kids. This is a common staple in comic books and video games alike, and also movies and TV shows ... there might even be a TVTropes entry for it. In the video games I played when I was younger, the designers used one of a few explanations for this:

• The superhero defeated the supervillain, but the villain miraculously "got away" at the end of every battle (Sonic the Hedgehog is a good example of this).
• The superhero never actually fights the villain, but only bosses that the villain puts in his path. (Secret of Mana is a good example, in that the players never actually fight Thanatos, they just fight one gigantic animal after another, culminating in the final boss fight in which Thanatos is nowhere to be seen and the story is explained as a fulfillment of a prophecy entirely unrelated to Thanatos.)
• The villain is just stand-up invincible. This is probably confined to video games, particularly the type where players and enemies alike can "die" hundreds of times and then reappear instantly as though nothing had happened. Link may have died 626 times to defeat Ganon, but it doesn't matter, because Ganon can die hundreds of times too and keep coming back. After all, the very first thing you see in front of you after you defeat Ganon in LTTP is Ganon inviting you back in for a rematch as if all was well and good between him and Link. Likewise with Mario/Bowser and probably literally at least a hundred others that I'm not aware of.

I never chose which explanation to follow. The supervillains in my stories definitely surrounded themselves with mutants and other large animals which served as both their primary means of attacking the kids and their primary means of assuring that the kids would never actually get through to attack the actual villains. I only wrote comics for about two years, and worked on a novel for another year after that, and thereupon dropped the superhero/supervillain concept entirely, so I dont have dozens and dozens of examples to pull upon, but it seems that all in all the pattern I was unconsciously moving towards was the second pattern, in which the villain, though clearly prepared for an all-out battle against the superheros, goes to great lengths to prevent one.

One exception to this pattern of my mastermind villains being forever just out of reach of the superheros is that in the very first "mutants vs. humans" story I wrote, Mr. Zāme (sic) threatened the boys with man-eating birds and gigantic slime molds, and then, when those were gone, tempted the boys into entering his heavily guarded fortress. In the fortress, the five boys tricked Mr. Zāme into letting them all pile on him at once, and they KILLED him with a bomb.

Two months later, "Mr. Zāme" threatened the kids with mutants again, this time right after they had finished defending themselves from an attack by a man-eating firebird. As I wrote the comic, I realized Mr. Zāme had been killed off, and corrected it by adding "His brother, actually." (I drew in pen at the time, so every mistake stood. It kind of helped the realism a bit.) I soon renamed this brother character Dr. Zāme. However, it seems that my original intent was to have them be the same person, so I am sticking with that explanation, and using the "Dr." form of the name for the combined character. This would mean that the kids really had attacked Dr. Zāme in straight-up hand-to-gun combat (Dr. Zāme always carried a gun when he went to battle), and Dr. Zāme didnt run away in fear at all, but actually fired on them and absorbed all of their magic attacks and yet somehow survived.

Attempts at explanations

In my later writing I contemplated the idea that the supervillains were in fact merely grown-up superheros who betrayed the team, and that the children were being misled by their leaders into believing all of the missions they were being sent on, even missions that killed thousands of people, were entirely morally good, and that the many adult male "supervillains" who kept on disrupting them were entirely morally evil. The fact that not even one adult male still sided with TCT gave the adults a strong argument that they were right to attack TCT.

The invincibility was explained as being a natural innate power of the superhero children, which stays with them when they grow into adults and thus turn on their former teammates. I remember also an idea that the invincibility power that the children and the supervillains shared also prevented them from killing each other, because "the Power" could not attack itself. They could only restrain each other and send indirect attacks such as mutants and missiles at each other. When Dr. Roc attacked the boys in a cave on Hurricane Island, he didn't kill the boys, he merely put them to sleep.

I don't remember the full details of this expansion of my idea however, because I no longer include magic or space or superheros as part of my writing. I do believe that at this time, I had decided that the TCT members and the supervillains in fact could die by conventional means, they simply could not kill each other because their Power would not permit them to destroy one of their own kind. In fact, I'm pretty sure that I had always intended the kids to be normal mortal beings, not invincible, but that they simply really did extremely lucky and did foolishly brave things that could easily have killed them many times over.

It should be noted, though, that this explanation doesn't entirely fit with my original ideas, because Dr. Zame and the other supervillains did not have magic powers in the early comics. However, if the four superheros mentioned above (one of the five boys was Gary, who had no superpowers and thus never attacked anyone) cornered Dr. Zāme and yet were unable to kill him despite their best attempts, that would mean that Dr. Zāme definitely did have some superpowers of his own.

End of comics and novel attempts

In 1994, I drew my last comic, "JEPARODY", a parody of all of the comics I had drawn up until that point. It started as a Jeopardy game, but when one contestant (probably Teddy) got a question wrong he responded by crushing Alex Trebek and then turning on all of the other contestants as well. Every character was badly drawn, and most of the panels consisted of people fighting or people talking in speech bubbles while remaining outside the panel.

I had outgrown my hobby.

By this time, I had also stopped writing my novel, although I did not intend at the time for that state of affairs to be permanent. I just never was able to pick it back up again. I've tried three times since then to finish the novel, and even have quite a long plotline mapped out, but I jsut don't seem to be able to do it. Thus, since resuming writing in late 1998 I've essentially only written in "history book" format, writing about whole nations' thousand year histories instead of the affairs of individual people over a span of a few weeks.

Reflection on Teppala

Note to self: do i even need this section?

The remnant of the child-superhero scenario in my current writing is that Save The World (STW) sees itself as a very child-focused organization, despite being almost entirely devoted to war and enslavement of its enemies, and is led primarily by females with motherly instincts because adult males are frequently kicked out of STW. With very few adult male members, STW must fight its wars in very subtle ways. In my early writing I had no problem pitting a 12 year old boy against an army of 12000 heavily armed soldiers, because I knew that the boy would always win. In my current writing I have to come up with more sensible explanations.

I *just now* realized, after 24 years, that the name Swamp Kids is a symptom of this as well. I dont know why I had to dream in order to remember this, but it worked. Although it's true that the Swamp Kids, due to their high birthrate, did in fact consist largely of children, and although it's also true that they were well below the average body size for the empire they lived in, and were painfully aware of it in every one of their very many wars, the Swamp Kids had abolished child labor on their first day in power and thus relied strictly on a traditional adult-led (in fact, male-only) hierarchy for both their military and their government. The name "Swamp Kids" was merely a symbolistic cultural way of thinking that stressed the virtue of obedience to authority: the ruling class was still allowed to call its people "men", the rest of the people were merely "boys" or "kids".

Geography and climate

Camia's planet (Teppala) was only slightly larger than Earth. In my oldoldoldold stories I drew up maps full of countries with names like "Gunther" and perhaps "Bornovia" but I'm not sure that I even at that time had a Camia. When I was 10 years old I came up with a map of Camia with a shape based on my bedroom. Most of the settlements were on the east coast, which is where my bed and later on my computer was. The bedroom closet was a separate state in the far north. Since all of the superheros in TCT and other leagues such as the Lemon Shop League were from Camia, Camia was by far the most important country on the planet. In chapter 1 of my novel I mentioned another location on planet Teppala called "South America" (!), showing that my imagination for creating names had not really evolved very far at that point, but put no effort whatsoever into developing the other countries on the planet except for Camia's enemy, Wamia.

Wamia was shaped like a "fat" Vietnam, meaning that most of it was near the (south-)east coast, but it had some land further inland than anyplace in Vietnam. Nevertheless, the Wamians were a very sea-oriented people, and since Camia kept them from expanding further inland, they pushed out to sea. The Wamians even tried to build cities underwater (despite seemingly backward customs like driving cars, this was a far-future setting) to get away from the Camians.

In my late teens, I came up with the idea that perhaps the other countries on Teppala simply didn't exist, since it seemed irrational for a country as powerful as Camia, or even one as powerful as Wamia, to sit content with such a small portion of their planet's land when they could have easily conquered the many other continents around them. I decided that since Camia was by far the more powerful of the two nations, any such conquests would go to them, and there would in fact be only two countries on the entire planet: Camia with 97% of the land, and Wamia with the remaining 3%. However I still held to the idea that Camia's population was very low, and that most Camians lived in the "traditional" part of Camia which represented the "northeast" corner of my bedroom. This contradiction hasn't bothered me a great deal, although it is one of the few contradictions I can't simply wave away as being from two different times since the novel takes place in the "late" era (c 4208) and yet clearly still other countries existed, even if only one was mentioned, in only one sentence, in the entire book. One possible explanation would be that the kids had to travel back only from another continent, which could mean they were still within their home country. After all, what other country besides Camia would call up a group of 11 year old boys to make world-changing decisions about international politics? Unless they were just vacationing there, of course. I don't remember what I was thinking.

I wrote a story in my late teen years (I seem to use that expression a lot) in which the hero of the story travels to Atlam, a nation which Camia "controlled". That is a possible middle ground, in that perhaps Camia does not actually stretch across the entire planet, but it fully controls most of the world and merely lets other nations be self-governing to save the Camians the trouble.

The Cold Wind gives us power

The very foundation of "Camia" was the power of cold. On top of Mt Washington at 10 years old I stood in the middle of summer and experienced 50mph winds at 45°F (about 8°C). Thus "Camia" was born: a country, an entire empire in which the middle of summer was still cold and the rest of the year was colder still. Some years later, I found myself walking uphill a mile to school in -33°F (-35°C) weather and thus topped even the very most exaggerated stereotype of the "in my day we had it hard" story many kids hear growing up.

In my late teen years, I went overboard and started drawing climate maps of Camia where great metropolises were built in areas of the country with average temperatures around -170F. I've rejected that and gone back to the early canonical Camia whose major cities are built in a belt around 45N where the temperature is nonetheless sharply colder than any place at Earth, even high altitude ones, at 45N. The climate instead is similar to the southern rim of the coldest tier of Siberia (see Irkutsk) or the very northern tier of Canadian frontier settlement (see Dawson Creek, whose temperature stats are almost exactly in line with what I had originally mapped out for the city that became #Lewiston).

What was important is that Camia chose to settle its people in cold climates on purpose. Camia stretched almost to the equator, and had plenty of tropical land available for its people, but only a few people moved there. It is as if Canada took over what would have otherwise become the United States and much of Latin America around 1800 AD and then nonetheless decided to leave the warm lands more or less alone and build its major cities in places like Winnipeg and the above-mentioned Dawson Creek. Camia fiercely defended its tropical possessions from Wamia and other outside powers, but did not itself make any significant efforts to settle its people there.

The focus of Camian settlement was on the northeastern part of Camia, similar to where in the United States I was living at the time. (Even though I was right on the coast, I put nearly all of the action further inland. I think I believed it was colder inland (which it is) and didn't want my superheros to miss out on the joy of being slapped in the face repeatedly by ice particles stirred up from the surrounding air by 50mph wind gusts.)

Climate of Camia

I gathered the climate data below by taking my Teppala climate data and renaming the cities to English-like "Camian" names instead of Poswa, Pabappa, etc. In most cases the Camian name is a full or partial translation of the native name. Poswa and Pabappa could theoretically be repurposed as aboriginal languages and thus leave a few place names unchanged.

Temperature in Camia

City	Latitude	Longitude (east)	Elevation (feet)	Winter		Summer
				Max	Min	Max	Min
Fort Clement	58	52	3537	—30	—47	23	14
Happy Valley	58	58	473	—29	—52	27	17
Manito Bay	54			—3	—18	30	23
Checkerboard Palace	54	42	0	—2	—23	33	26
Escape	52	48	402	—1	—26	36	26
Edna	45	18		38	24	65	44
East Cape	45	~76		37	24	62	47
Top City	44			20	—5	38	30
Lewiston	44			26	4	47	33
Danbury	43	20		37	24	77	51
Fort Calamity	43	53	404	16	—1	37	27
Pineapple	40	62	509	40	18	81	55
Foxtown	37			56	43	85	57
Big Step	37	53	5250	18	—8	72	33
Scholarville	37	55	10749	6	—8	40	24
Almondville	35			46	33	77	59
Apple Valley	30	50	573	49	27	89	64
Hammer	28			63	44	93	68

Note that even in the coldest cities, which are actually located on top of glaciers, the winter temperatures are not as extremely cold as those found in parts of Siberia and Greenland on Earth, and much warmer than those found in Antarctica. This is because there is almost no land above 60N on planet Tebbala, and therefore the Arctic is not as cold in winter as one might expect from looking at the temperatures experienced in the middle latitudes.

The planet is generally cold. e.g. "Big Step" is at 37N, which is further south than Denver, and is about the same altitude as Denver, but is much colder than Denver.

Because Lewiston is sunnier than Top City, it is warmer than Top City despite Camians in general loving cold weather.

When I was young I imagined that Camia would have a city somewhere in its south, preferably the southwest, that consisted almost entirely of a gigantic underground nursery where babies are born, and whose mothers mostly move out when they are done having kids. I'm not sure why I felt that it would need to be underground. I originally called this city "Nursetown", but I decided it needed the more masculine image provided by its new name of Hammer. Citizens were able to rapidly move between this southwestern area and the Top City/Lewiston area by the use of some sort of pneumatic^? tube mechanism that made it easy even for people who could not afford to get on a spaceship.

Hammer's ideas went into Paba, which for its entire history was militarily impotent and had a masochistic foreign policy powered by a government that often responded to invasions by mobilizing its army to the task of helping the invading soldiers settle down and marry local women Paba. Even when not at war, the government of Paba often encouraged its women to marry foreign men because they claimed that their own countrymen were too physically small to satisfy women. Yet Paba survived as an empire for over 3000 years because it simply absorbed its invaders and they mostly joined the native Pabap people in having an extremely high birthrate.

Climate of Wamia

Temperature in Wamia

City	Latitude	Longitude (east)	Elevation (feet)	Winter		Summer
				Max	Min	Max	Min
Uterus	36	58		53	42	78	68
Placenta	33	54	414	57	39	88	67
Endometrium	29	57	0	66	55	80	68

Applying Teppala's climate to Tebbala's city map results in a Wamia that is not actually very warm at all for its latitude, as it essentially matches up cleanly with Camian cities such as Almondville that are further west at about the same latitude, and is in fact colder than Camian cities that are even further to the west than Almondville. However, I've added urban heat islands of various strengths now to make it more realistic (and therefore more perverse).

It seems that many Camians live in "Uterus", which again is a contradiction to my childhood concept of it as a place that was so horribly polluted, violent, and overcrowded that even the worst-off Camians would prefer to simply live in poverty in the woods in Camia.

Despite the common theme of the Wamian cities, I didn't imagine Wamia as having a particularly high birthrate. However, neither could it be very low, or else its cities would not have been so overcrowded. In my late teen years, I realized Camia was essentially a Marysuetopia and that realistically life in Camia for anyone would be so horrible that millions of refugees would want to spill from Camia into Wamia. However, as an adult I'm ambivalent about whether Camia is actually a dystopia or a childlike utopia because I'm only interested in writing about the world from the viewpoint of the TCT kids, whose lives were a mix of extremes of pain and joy. Essentially, their magical powers made possible the always-at-war lifestyle they lived in without it being so painful that they would want to flee.

States of Camia

Camia had about ten or so states. I honestly never came up with a map of the entire territory, so I never knew the total number. The state in which the action takes place took up most of the northeast corner. (Due to the way my bedroom was shaped, it was almost a square.) I at first called this state East Camia, but later changed the name to Nevada. Soon after, I realized that Nevada wasn't a very likely name for the Camian settlers to want to use, and changed it back to East Camia.

As above, most of Camia's land was cold. Camia had land southward almost to the equator, but even the southernmost areas of the country were inexplicably colder than areas closer to the North Pole in Wamia. For example, I wrote a story that took place in a deep valley in Camia's desert southwest. Even though it was near sea level at a location further south than Phoenix, AZ, the average temperature in summer was only 60°F, about the same as it was back home in Lewiston. I'm pretty sure I fashioned this area of Camia after America's Rocky Mountains, particularly the area just west of the highest peaks in Colorado and New Mexico, such as a town called Eagle Nest, New Mexico, where the average temperature in July is, sure enough, 60°F. The only difference between America's cold spots and my own was that in Camia that same climate was somehow magically transported down to sea level and the mountains nearby were thus even colder.

Climate comparisons

This kind of "colder than it's supposed to be^{: )}" climate setup has been a favorite of mine for essentially my entire life, including my adult life. I still find it interesting to note, for example, that Flagstaff, Arizona is colder than Cheyenne, Wyoming, even though Flagstaff is much further south and is only slightly higher in elevation. In fact, Cheyenne, Wyoming is warmer than almost the entire state of Florida if its temperatures are reduced to sea level at the adiabatic rate of 5.5°F/1000ft.

Things like that are all over the place in my work, and the only concessions I've made in my newer work are to have more realistic borders between nations so that even the "cold" nations such as Pusapom have territory in "warmer than it's supposed to be" areas that are necessary for them to carry on trade with neighboring nations. Thus Paba, for example, which is located in a similar location to the 60°F desert canyon town above, is instead 80°F in summer, which is warmer than cities located in other nations which are otherwise stereotypically warmer. I did do a few things like that in my early work, but they were weaker and less realistic. I think I mostly just allowed "warm spots" in Camia for the sake of variety, as I knew that it would be impossible for all places within the nation to be equally "maximally cold for the latitude". For example, East Cape and Hurricane Island were warm enough to occasionally see rain during winter.

The center line of settlement

The Camians did not establish a lot of settlements in the coldest parts of their empire; most of the cities were near the "middle" around 45N (I expanded Camia beyond my bedroom and into the bathroom : ) where the climate was "perfect" ... perfect, that is, in the eyes of the Camians. Any winters averaging warmer than about 15F were too warm, but anything much below 0F was getting a bit too cold. Nevertheless, cities did exist in the cold north, which was shaped like a "tall" Canada, meaning that it extended even closer to the pole than Canada, but was narrower from east to west. Temperatures in the "bathroom" area were generally even colder than those in Camia, since it was further north, but there were nevertheless some surprisingly warm and wet areas available. Indeed, some areas suffered frequent unpredictable floods and pollution problems.

Battles in the Bathroom

The inhabitants of the bathroom area, "Manitoland", were for the most part not Camians but a series of aboriginal tribes that at the time I called "Manitans".

Looking at a map (none online yet, sorry : ) it would seem plain that the "bathroom" country is Canada, and I even said up above that it is shaped like a taller, narrower Canada complete with a Hudson Bay and little islands at the top. But at the time, I considered the primary division between Camia and Manitoland to be a cultural one, with the white Camians on the south side of the line and the aboriginal "Manitans" to the north. I told others that the Manitans were similar to American Indians, in that they had established an independent society of their own long before the white settlers got there, and that it was nearly perfect, but when the whites arrived and declared their new country "Camia" they began massacring the Manitans around them even though the Manitans had never done anything to harm them and lived only in the wilderness whereas the Camians were interested in building new cities.

Because Camia was a fantasyland Marysuetopia where everything was and had always been perfect, the Manitans accepted their new relationship with the white settlers and decided to let the whites massacre all of the Manitans living south of 50°N, whereas the Manitans living north of 50°N would accept the white settlers and the two races would live in harmony unless one of the white settlers had a bad day.

Once the Manitans had been more or less finished off, the two races signed a binding peace treaty stating that they were henceforth allies and would always help each other out in any wars the Camians got into. Manitans began to move back south, into the areas they had been ethnically cleansed from a few decades ago, and built new settlements on top of the mass graves. They were thankful for the chance to live in a country like Camia which had grown past racism by simply killing the all other races and forcing any survivors to try to hide themselves by if necessary living in caves in the mountains.

Problems with the new map

If I were to repurpose the map I have of Teppala for Camia, throwing out the old "bedroom and bathroom"-shaped country, I would have to make a difficult decision on where to place the capital city and other important cities such as Lewiston/Baeba/NE Woods. Planet Teppala has several historical "Camias" occupying different areas of land and speaking different languages. Anzan at its peak covered most of the land in the world and had its major cities on and near its southern coast. The Crystal Empire was based in a tropical city named Baeba Swamp. Lobexon was also a Camia, and also had a tropical climate. Kava was definitely a classic example of the spirit of Camia, though not so much that it deserves its name (Kava is from an earlier *Kamèa.) Lypelpyp corresponded to a city in Camia, although the rest of the state was very weak. Sàfiz was also a Camia, and the only one of the bunch to have a predominantly cold climate.

However, none of those fit the northeastern model of settlement that has emotional associations for me. Lewiston was named after Lewiston, Maine, and moving it to one of the other five Camias wouldn't feel quite right. Three of the five were tropical, after all, and the only one that was genuinely cold was simply a small country near the northwest corner of the continent that didn't border any "Wamia"-like lands. So if I want to borrow backwards into Camia from the newer conworld, I would have to put Lewiston in a place like Wabbubo, which is at 44°N on planet Teppala in the medieval-like conworld. If I were to also borrow the climate — which would make sense, because the map includes glaciers — then the boys' hometown would be even colder than I had originally imagined it ... far colder than Dawson Creek, and indeed colder, at least in summer, than any inhabited settlement I'm aware of on the entire planet Earth including settlements such as Eureka and Alert in the far northern areas of Nunavut. Then, of course, since this is only the "average" region of Camia, half of the boys' home country would be even colder.

Lewiston

Lewiston

Lewiston was the town most of the TCT kids lived in at the time of the climax of the war. Though a small town, it had a hugely outsized role in the war and events involving Lewiston dominated the politics of the large nearby city known as #Top_City.

However, I originally called it the Northeast Woods, and then later "Lewiston" (named after Lewiston, Maine, as the general area the kids lived in was similar to Maine.)

I renamed the town "Baeba Swamp" in the last years before I switched from the Camia storyline to the Teppala storyline. Baeba Swamp is actually the largest city on planet Teppala, however, not a small town.

Top City

TOp City was a large city near Lewiston.

Demographics of Camia

I never really thought about race and religion very much when I was young. I knew that Camia was a perfect utopia that was entirely free of racism, but it never occurred to me that Camia was free of racial conflicts because everyone living there seemed to be white. Lewiston had some "Japanese" immigrants, but they were seen as Camian citizens only, not Japanese-Camians or Camian Japanese. The rest of the nation, however, was entirely white. Meanwhile, in #Wamia, there was a wrestler named "Mr. Tranh", but I believe, at the time, that I didnt know that this was a Vietnamese name.

I do not believe I chose this setup out of racial prejudice, it just seemed plain to me that a nation defining itself by the spirit of cold would draw people from cold climates only, and that despite hundreds of years of interplanetary migration, people living in cold climates would still be mostly white. Even though I also wrote later that Camia had a 40% minority of aboriginals, who were descended from a separate migration thousands of years before the Earthans arrived, even these aboriginals considered themselves white. I may have subconsciously created this situation simply because I wanted the aboriginals to have many people with blonde hair and hair of other light colors. I remember writing that even among the "regular" white Camians, very few people had dark hair.

In my earliest writings, I gave most of the white Camians Greek surnames, because I was simply imagining Lewiston as being similar to the town in which I was growing up in real life. Even then, though, most of the white Camians had light hair, and it didn't occur to me that this would be statistically odd. This doesn't bother me a great deal, and for the time being I'm just giving the formerly "Greek" characters Northern European surnames, to match the decision I made in my teen years that Camia was settled entirely by people from cold climates.

Conquests in the Kitchen

However, if Camia were to be expanded to cover 97% of the planet, it would no longer be an all-white nation, because many black people lived on the continent of #Bornovia, although Bornovia was a racially segregated nation in which all of the people had voluntarily pushed themselves into "homelands" set aside for each race. In some cases, these racial groups were further divided by religion. For example, Jews lived separately from all other groups. In at least one case, these racial and religious groups were themselves further divided by politics: there was a separate territory in Bornovia for "Rebels", a political group I don't remember much about. It's tempting to think that the Rebels were the ones who wanted to end segregation by mixing themselves with all of the other groups, but I'm pretty sure that if that had been my intention, I would have remembered it even now.

It is also tempting to think that Bornovia was inspired by South Africa, which at the time, as far as I knew, was still under apartheid (my information was a few years out of date; apartheid was actually being repealed at the very time I was writing about Bornovia.) I remember reading about blacks moving to their homelands in South Africa, and believing that the migration was voluntary. But I don't think Bornovia was inspired by South Africa even subconsciously, because Bornovia was supposed to be a "bad" nation for segregating its people and I did not realize at the time that the migration of the blacks into their homelands under South Africa's apartheid system was coerced.

Politics in Camia

Borrowing from my other timeline, I could say that Camia represents the final stage of the Swamp Kids' empire, after they had been beat down in their original homeland but victorious in their new adopted homeland of Baeba Swamp. Thus, the Raspara, the Zeniths, and the other minor parties were not a problem for them. Instead, the two main political parties in Camia would thus be the Tinkers and the Soap Bubbles, with a possible third party called the Crystals depending on whether or not the dark-skinned people that the Tinkers conquered are considered to be Camians or not.

Views on war

The Tinkers were the majority party and often ran unopposed in local elections. They were a strongly militaristic party, seeing no problem with declaring war on a planet while already at war with another. At times they brought Camia into as many as six unrelated wars.

By contrast the Soap Bubbles were pacifists who wanted to clean up their enemies' nations instead of destroying them. They promised the Tinkers that they would never make an ally of a planet or nation that the Tinkers had made into an enemy, nor make an enemy of a planet or nation that the Tinkers had made an ally, and therefore would cooperate fully with the Tinkers in all of their wars. However the Soap Bubbles preferred to handle their enemies by making sure the enemy soldiers were well-fed and had plenty of medicine and easy access to a safe place to rest. They generally went into battles without weapons or armor, meaning that their enemies could easily tell the difference between a Soapy and a Tinker soldier, even if both were Camian.

The Soap Bubbles taught their soldiers that bravery was essential, as their soldiers were often targeted by Camia's many enemies since they were easier to kill than Tinkers, and a Soapy soldier marching into a battlefield carrying water and medicine to feed his enemies could never be sure whether he was about to be welcomed openly onto the enemy front or shot dead on sight.

When the discovery of the many child superhero leagues in Camia spread to the adult politician population, the Soapies were more likely than the Tinkers to support the superheros as they considered them a superior type of soldier that the mainline army was unable to provide. However, they often wanted the children to become pacifists as well, meaning that they expected the kids to run around battlefields cooking meals for the enemy soldiers and cleaning up the messes they made, using their superpowers for self-protection only. Most of the children in TCT and the other leagues were very good-natured and willing to perform selfless deeds of kindness, but none was willing to go so far as to do what the Soapies were telling them to do.

Views on race and religion

The Tinkers strongly opposed racism but were blind to the fact that 40% of their nation consisted of people who belonged (at least partially) to an aboriginal racial minority with inferior social status and no land to call their own. They saw racial diversity as a goal in and of itself, and invited foreigners to move into Camia even if they were from nations that Camia was then at war with. However, they refused to give foreigners full citizenship rights, as they worried that if too many foreigners moved in, they might vote for the Soap Bubbles or form a third party of their own that would throw the Tinkers out of power.

The Soap Bubbles sympathized with the immigrant groups but did not significantly differ from the Tinkers with respect to immigration laws and which rights they were willing to give to ethnic minorities. Since they had no power at the national level, Soapy politicians limited their influence to proposing new policies and let the Tinkers decide whether or not the ideas were good. Thus, Soapies avoided being blamed for any of the problems with the Tinkers' immigration system.

The role of women

Later in my life I came to realize that the Camia I wrote about when I was younger was an extremely masculistic society. It wasn't such that women were oppressed or subject to physical abuse by their husbands, but that the society in general was so strictly focused on masculine values that women were simply seen as a lesser type of men.

Physical appearance

Girls in Camia were essentially all expected to be tomboys who spent most of their time exercising their muscles and not worrying about their physical appearance whatsoever. When they grew into women, they became somewhat more moderate, but were still expected to prioritize physical strength above beauty in every possible way. If beat up by another woman, they were expected to be embarrassed. I dont have a good way of expressing this in words. I remember imagining a story wherein an adult Camian woman found herself in Wamia and was attacked by a crowd of men and she beat them all up despite having no weapons or superpowers to help her out. She was unattractive because she saw herself as an "animal" (zewan) and focused on being strong and healthy so she could defend herself rather than on being pretty in order to attract men. Somehow Camian men found this aggressive and masculine body type attractive.

Perhaps this ideal isn't realistic even for a fantasy world, but it could still work if it were applied only within a group such as TCT which really was dedicated entirely to warfare. The other superhero leagues (STS, Lemon Shop, etc) would presumably follow suit, with the tendency towards tomboyhood being stronger the younger the girls within it.

Contrast with FILTER

The above scenario is a realistic version of what a society that pushed all women into physical combat might be like. When I was in my early teens, however, I worked on what was essentially a sexual fantasy world in which girls were all in combat, but they were all extremely beautiful and the ones with the most tempting figures seemed to be the strongest of all. This was because their strength derived mostly from their magic powers rather than their muscles and weapons. Still, in FILTER, most of the girls were taller and physically stronger than the boys.

The role of children

Camia as a whole treated its children unlike any other nation. Perhaps the existence of the child superheros influenced them, or perhaps my mind just wanted Camia to be a place I would fit in.

I was a very obedient child, and I may have wanted Camia to be a nation in which almost all children were obedient and happy about it because their parents were benevolent and never wrong. This doesn't make a lot of sense when I look at people like Nancy who basically existed to turn every child's happiest days into bad ones. But I think a lot of Nancy's abusive tendencies can be explained as my inability to think any other way. I simply believed that the natural role for all adults, even benevolent ones, was to tell children what to do and the role of all children was to do it, no matter whether they were doing it happily or reluctantly.

Where will be go?

But many Camian children did not need adults to tell them what to do, because they were already doing it. One day a group of five children, each about six years old, was walking to their elementary school, as they always did, because they lived close by. When they arrived, they realized the school was closed. One girl, possibly Stacy, said "Where will be go?" (sic) Soon the children came to an agreement: they turned around and walked through the woods for about three miles to a different school so that they could get their schoolwork done. These children were called Tačês. (Note: I will probably simply unify this isolated story with the TCT children as a whole, meaning that they were Stacy, Zach, Teddy, etc. before they became famous as superheros, but emphasize that "normal" children were just as enthusiastic.)

Camian children all seemed to enjoy school and did not have to be forced into it by their parents. Being "cool" was synonymous with studying hard in school and getting good grades. Some children even went to two schools, just to make sure they were getting the most of their education. While some people thought that attending two schools every day was the mark of someone who was desperate to learn only because they were intellectually disadvantaged, being stupid was not seen as morally inferior, and even the people who really were stupid were praised by others for what they were able to do.

Attitudes toward computers

The Camians applied this same "work is fun" attitude to computer technology. Everyone in Camia was a computer expert, from toddlers to 75-year-old great-grandmothers to billionaire investors to street sweepers. Being skilled with computers was seen as the mark of a good person and nobody was given a pass if they chose not to learn. People were not all required to enjoy using computers, but merely to be skilled with using them because Camia had decided to save money by letting its government-authored operating system, Lilahaa, be far more powerful than Wamia's by being far less user-friendly.

Cybernetic warfare

Because of the way both countries ran their Internet connections, it was possible for Camians to enter Wamia's computer network, but not the other way around: Wamia needed to allow its citizens to access Camia's network in order to conduct business with Camia, but for this to happen, Camians needed to be able to send traffic in the other direction. Additionally, Wamia's government frequently spied on its citizens, and therefore required that all Wamian computers must allow computers from the Wamian government to snoop around on the computers of ordinary citizens. By contrast, Camia did not allow even its government to spy on its citizens, and therefore Camian computers generally could not be hacked even by Camians, let alone by Wamians. Some Camians did hack other Camians to prove it could be done, and were considered heroes for doing so, but even the most successful among them accomplished far less than the typical hacker who went after Wamians.

Camian hackers typically chose to present themselves as the Wamian government in order to gain access to private citizens' computers. However, the best among the hackers could hack the Wamian government itself.

Camia held a nationwide hacking competition every year on April 12 in its schools, where Camian students would be provided Camian computers connected to Wamia's national network, and compete to see which of them could hurt Wamia the most. The general public was invited to compete, and many adults sat down amongst the many children and fought their war on an equal level. Males and females caused similar amounts of damage, but male competitors somewhat outnumbered females because they were more likely to be interested in hacking Wamia even after they were out of school (or in some cases before they had even entered school).

Because the hacking was on the same day every year, Wamian citizens prepared themselves for it by turning off their computers. However, Wamia still needed some computers to stay on at all times in order for the country to run properly; when Wamia's government once tried turning them off, the students stayed in their chairs all night, eating meals donated by local restaurants, and then when the sun came up the next morning and the Wamians figured it was safe to turn everything back on the students began the hacking. From that point on, Wamia agreed not to attempt to evade the hacking holiday, and left its essential computers turned on.

However, the very fact that fewer computers than normal were operating every April 12 meant that those computers were more likely than ever to get hacked. Wamia's government tried to encourage its citizens to leave their home computers turned on, hoping that some of the Camian students would pick easy victims and leave the government alone, but Camia responded by promising higher rewards for students who attacked the generally better-protected Wamian government computers. During one competition, 41 Camian students simultaneously hacked into the Wamian central government network from 41 different entry points. With so many illegal outsiders running around inside them, the Wamian computer security team was forced to admit defeat and try to make compromises with the hackers in order to lessen the amount of damage they were causing. The winner of the competition that year was a teenage girl named Ginger who managed to get into the Wamian government's tax collection service and raise everyone's taxes by an enormous amount. Because Wamia used instant electronic debt collection to collect its taxes, the government computer believed that the entire nation owed the government money and withdrew large sums of money from the bank accounts of every citizen instantly, putting many into bankruptcy. Then, she transferred the money into her own bank account and realized that she had become (in 2010 US dollars) a billionaire. Wamia tried to reverse the transaction, but found that Ginger had immediately spent much of her money on tangible goods and therefore ensured that the money could not be recovered.

Technology and links between the two worlds

My world now takes place in an environment roughly comparable to medieval Earth but with a lot fewer humans than the Earth had had even in that era. This is partly because sapient animals are also present, and have kept humans from growing too strong. Thus, human technology progresses so slowly that it remains nearly static for the first 20000 years after the first settlements on Rilola. Some ideas are discovered and then abandoned because the only civilization making use of them collapsed. I even want to have guns on Teppala, but to have them be so very weak that arrows remain forever the preferred weapon among the elite armies of the world.

Because of universal canonicity, I have a hard time integrating my ideas from the science fiction world I worked on for the first 20 years or so of my writing career (roughly age 3 to age 23 ... i was always into space, from the very very beginning. Maybe that planets-and-stars themed potty training toilet had something to do with it).

The invention of the incubator

In earlier writings, around the year 2001, I wrote sentences like The population of Camia rose back from less than 3000 after the Tinkers' killings in 3827 to over a million in 3833. I dont remember it, but Im pretty sure that I was assuming that the Tinks had invented and perfected an incubator to give them babies, freeing up their women from the difficult and painful role of womb-service so they could focus on actually raising and nursing the babies. Such a birth rate would be impossible with womb birth alone. This may also be why not only the Tinks, but most of the societies that attacked the Tinks during their time in power were seemingly all males, never having to worry about protecting their women at home when they sent their entire male population off on a new military conquest.

Birth control

I seem to have repurposed the phrase "birth control" around the year 2001 to mean birth by an incubator. I only just now realized this, having probably forgotten it about ten years ago.

Dress and battle uniforms

I put very little thought into how the TCT kids dressed for battle. My early comics show that at least sometimes they carried shields, which seemingly they were able to conjure up out of thin air. But they had no battle uniforms and no armor to protect themselves from their enemies.

One might think that the Camians would wear shorts so they could enjoy their bitter cold climate even more, but I seem to have always depicted everyone with long pants even when they traveled to hot climates. However, on planet Namma, at least some of the people had on shorts.

In my early comics, I tended to give each boy a shirt corresponding to their favorite color ,but this was really only because my drawing skills were (and are) so bad that I couldnt distinguish them any other way (and I drew everything in pen for some reason). However, it makes sense that in battle, even if they were fighting in tanktops and shorts, they would want to dress in distinct colors so they could more easily tell each other apart from a distance. Thus, they would have no official battle uniform.

In later stories, the Swamp Kids had an official battle uniform featuring kneepads and elbow pads, but the Swamp Kids and TCT are not the same entity. Instead, the Swamp Kids, despite their name, are the reflection of the entire nation of Camia.

The need for kneepads

I've imagined the Swamp Kids explaining to their rival parties that they wore kneepads so that if they fell down, they wouldn't injure themselves on the hard and often sharp-edged ground beneath them. Like the legendary Brother Juniper, the Swamp Kids seemingly never even pondered why all of the other people around them, who lived in the same dangerous environment, did not also need kneepads.

Homosexuality

I havent put much thought into this. Stereotypically, I could see Camia as being the very sort of country that would say "In Camia, we dont have homosexuals like in your country." But I think that stereotypical Camians would also find it insulting to pass a law against homosexuality, since it would be embarrassing to admit to seeing homosexuals as a threat to their society. I think the best solution for Camia thus would be to tolerate homosexuality, perhaps even allowing gay marriage, simply because anyone pressing for homosexuality to be outlawed would be seen as a weak and easily frightened person, the very sort that Camia needed less of.

This argument wouldn't apply to alcohol because the Camians saw alcohol as being poisonous and harmful even to its consumers, not just to other people, and therefore those favoring a continued ban on alcohol are not seen as weak but as caring people who are trying to protect the weak.

Heterosexuality

Planet Namma

Likewise, for almost the entire time I was drawing comics and writing narrative stories, I never really had a single sexual thought whatsoever. Only at the very end of my career did I introduce a girlfriend, and she was for the main character (Teddy) only. Actually, she was simply a remaking of an earlier character, Nauri. The original Nauri was a young girl, much shorter than Teddy and stereotypically childish. The "later" Nauri was taller than her boyfriend and decidedly stronger both physically and in terms of her superpowers than him. But she was from Namma, and very rarely appeared on Tebbala even though she was officially a member of the TCT superhero league which was based on Tebbala.

In my later writing, I renamed Nauri "Xouliey" and wrote that she raised an army on Namma and eventually took over most of her planet. She gave her boyfriend no power whatsoever in her empire and he liked it that way. At this time, I was dating a girl who was about four inches taller than me and very much into athletics, so many of my girlfriend's characteristics became transferred to Xouliey and stayed that way after my real-life relationship was over. Nauri had always been short and blonde, but Xouliey was tall and dark-haired, with red the dominant color of her typical clothes.

On Namma, women were often taller than men. I seem to remember deciding that the height ratios would vary from one zone of Namma to another. That is, in some areas men were taller than women, in some areas women were taller than men, and in some areas they either varied a lot within the population or were about equal. Later on I came to call the areas where women were taller than men "Feminist" (always capitalized). The later Nauri, a.k.a. Xouliey, was from a Feminist section of the planet.

Planet Namma also had a zone called Repilia, which was so extremely Feminist that full grown men only stood as tall as women's hips or thighs, essentially being half the height of their wives and daughters. This inspired me to create a Repilia in my other world (Teppala) where the situation is similar, but less extreme. Women in the Repilia on planet Teppala are about 12 to 18 inches taller than their men, but they are so tall as a people in general that even their men are taller than the men of some of the surrounding peoples, and Repilian women really do stand so tall that men of some neighboring tribes only stand as tall as Repilian women's hips. These people were part of the founding population of the Moonshine Empire.

Power & Eartha are everywhere!

Shortly after creating the "tall" Nauri but before I recast her as Xouliey, I wrote a series of very short stories about a league of superheros that consisted of 11 girls and 3 boys. At first the league was called The Islanders, but later I changed it to FILTER. (The FILTER stories are named after this league, even though in the context of the Teppala timeline a name like FILTER makes no sense.) All of the FILTER members were of Northern European descent and more than half of them had blonde hair. It was difficult for me to tell them apart in my drawings, and I eventually settled on using slightly different head shapes to distinguish them. (When I had been younger, every character had looked literally identical, and I used colored speech bubbles to tell them apart.) Many of the characters had very unusual names, both the girls and the boys: one of the most powerful girls was named Ice, and another very powerful girl was named Coldwater. Like the Camians, FILTER identified itself with cold weather and envisioned a global empire with FILTER ruling the world from a palace on top of the Greenland icecap. They lived in a town called Truro (named after Truro, Massachusetts.)

I really really liked this idea but I was just beginning puberty and I literally couldn't sit down and write a paragraph without drifting off into a teenage fantasy about my girlfriend beating me up. This is why the stories were so short. The self-insert character in this world was named "Power", and his girlfriend was named Eartha. Eartha was taller than him, stronger than him, and had a lot more superpowers. She had a very hot temper and Power struggled every day to try to calm her down when she got angry.

The Y Store

In one story, Eartha and Power went on a shopping trip and after a while they entered a small general supply store holding hands. Then Eartha saw an outfit she liked, so she grabbed Power's shopping basket (which he had filled with items from other stores) and placed it on the checkout counter. She told the shopkeeper she was interested in selling him everything Power had bought himself in all of the other stores so that she could buy herself more clothes in his store. When Power complained, she told him "Trust me!" and slapped him across the face, causing him to stumble and step backward. Power tried to hide his pain, but then she slammed him into the hard wall of the store, injuring his back on a sharp metal hook that was sticking out from the wall and bruising his chest with her own strong hands. Then, she pushed him downwards from above, onto the floor, and then grabbed his wallet and some of his clothes just in case the shopkeeper didn't pay her enough for all the goods she was selling him. The shopkeeper watched the couple fighting but did not object to what was happening and happily paid Eartha $75 for the goods she had taken from her boyfriend so that she could get herself the dress she wanted.

After Eartha had completed the transaction and had money left over, she grabbed her boyfriend and dragged him across the concrete floor, his head collecting injuries as it bounced across the irregular bumps and dips of the poured concrete. Nevertheless, once they were outside the store, Power was still able to stand up, and he began once again to complain that Eartha had betrayed him. She grabbed him and reminded him that the purpose of the shopping trip was for Eartha to buy things she liked, and that she would use her own money, but that if she ran out, Power was to buy them for her. Power complained that Eartha had ripped his clothes while beating him up and not even been so kind as to let him keep one of the new shirts he had bought at a different store. Eartha reminded Power that he was not important in their relationship, and that his wishes didn't matter. Power tried to break free, but her grip on his arm was much too strong. When she realized her boyfriend was trying to run away, she kicked and punched him until he was unconscious, and then dragged him across the cobblestone streets to her house.

Dire Docks

But their relationship was not always so one-sided. A woman who had seen Eartha dragging Power across the ground called the police and told them she had seen a young teenage couple fighting each other in public. The police arrived and arrested Power for hitting his girlfriend in the knee, since Eartha at that time had a bruise on her left leg from a rock climbing injury the previous weekend. Power figured he would be proven innocent in court, but Eartha blew up in rage as the policemen prepared to take Power away from her. She started yelling at Power for being always so calm, and reminded him that the woman who had called the cops had seemingly been interested in going after both of the teens, not just Power.

As the girl grew increasingly angry, the policemen cautiously let go of Power and told him to try to talk to his girlfriend. But Eartha couldn't react to what was going on, and she threatened to kill the policemen and the woman who had called them in order to save herself and her boyfriend from the possibility of being imprisoned. Power tried to tell her this was a bad idea, but before he had even said "umm", Eartha slapped him in the face. Then she hit him much harder, knocking him over onto the wooden dock they had been standing on. Then she crawled on top of him, her left knee pinching his stomach and causing him severe pain. But she was only trying to reassure him that she was going to stop the beating now so that she could listen to what he wanted to say. The boy could no longer speak because of his injuries, so she asked him if he wanted her to calm down and stop making threats against the police. He nodded his head to say "yes" and she looked down at him angrily but stood up and let him breathe freely again. Then the two teens walked away from the police and she brought him to a hospital so he could recover from his injuries.

Enemies of the superheros

The teens in FILTER fought fantastic enemies, just like the kids in TCT had. Most of these enemies were also female, since it was simply taken as fact that females were the stronger sex and only a female supervillain could stand a chance of taking them down. A gigantic fairy trapped Power in his ship and then splashed him with poisonous chemicals. He was helpless to fight back but eventually his girlfriend rescued him. Later on, the woman who had called the police turned out to be a villain as well, and she sent an army of girls after Power after realizing her initial attempt had failed. Then, after a massive fight in which the FILTER girls were victorious, she called in a teenage girl who was about 40 feet tall to sit on Power in an attempt to simply crush him to death. The woman finally stopped harassing Power when the gigantic fairy decided to join FILTER and they became much stronger.

Other characters

Although Power belonged to Eartha and Eartha alone, there were many other girls in the FILTER league that had set their sights on Power. Mana was a red-haired girl who was easily frightened and literally clung to people around her for protection. Although she knew she was stronger than Power, she saw him as a protector because she knew that he would never betray her no matter how strong of an enemy they faced. Her best friend, Werra, was much more aggressive. She often yelled at Power and in general took the lead whenever the girls as a whole had a problem with Power that kind words couldn't solve. Julia was the leader of the club, and tried to be kind to all of the other members, but she admitted that she hated all males and saw men and boys as the greatest problem facing their club. Thus, even though Power was a FILTER member, Julia realized she would soon have to eliminate Power. Julia was taller than the other girls and often fought her enemies by using her physical strength instead of her magical powers. Nevertheless, she did have very strong magical powers, such as the ability to cause a glacier to form, even in warm weather, and smear everything underneath it into rubble.

As FILTER grew, they joined and absorbed many other leagues. Though Power thought his life was difficult living with four girls who bossed him around, it became even more stressful when, early on, FILTER decided to join a sister league of superheros consisting of six girls who, like FILTER, fought with cold weather spells. Power soon clung to his girlfriend and followed her around everywhere she allowed him to, simply out of the fear that if she left him alone he would be finally succumb to the injuries inflicted on him by the other nine girls who beat him up when his girlfriend wasn't around to protect him.

Fortunately, one of Eartha's powers was to heal wounds, so when she returned home from a shopping trip to find her boyfriend sprawled out unconscious and bleeding on the floor because he had delivered an order intended for Coldwater by mistake to her twin sister, all it took was a few minutes of physical contact for him to be nursed back to full health.

SW Russia

A "warlord in SW Russia" was involved in one battle in which almost all of the males died, because somehow one side of the war had figured out how to focus a disease onto only the male population.

Relationship to Camia

Power and Eartha lived in a separate world from the TCT superheros and their enemies. They lived on Earth, originally around the year 2175. They originally lived on a small island in the Atlantic, spoke a language that somehow resembled Old English, and ate a lot of ice cream. I think these traits were from a dream I had once, but I can't be entirely sure. Essentially I imagined that there was an island off the coast of Massachusetts in which somehow pure OE had survived intact, and the people there, at least the ones I met, were mostly young teens and children who loved eating ice cream. It's possible that I was simply thinking of Iceland, and confusing Icelandic with OE because they actually have a lot in common. It seems petty to even point it out but "ice cream" and "Iceland" both begin with the same word, and while I doubt that Iceland literally has multicolored climbable lickable mounds of sugar-infused frozen cow's milk covering its landscape, in the context of a dream that kind of subconscious association can expose itself.

But I had a few "crossovers" between my two worlds, such as Julia's glacier move reappearing hundreds of years later in the hands of Teddy's girlfriend Nauri. This was the beginning of my "multiple worlds, one loooong timeline" scenario that led to Camia eventually becoming unworkable and me abandoning it entirely many years further on.

I think it is possible for all of the events FILTER took part in to exist without violating the continuity of TCT's timeline, but right now I prefer to think of them as separate worlds because of the many plot problems relating to superpowers, and to a lesser extent because the two stories don't have a lot in common. I made a sharp divide when I started writing FILTER stories. When I was 12 and younger, my character was pushed around a lot by adults, and he didn't like it very much, but he always not only won every battle but escaped entirely without injury. Female characters were scarce, with adults always being teachers or mothers of young children, and girls being almost interchangeable with boys.

But once I turned 13, adults were mostly gone, and my character spent his free time getting slapped and pushed around by the many girls around him, suffering painful injuries, and loving every minute of it. Girls were a clear majority of the characters and they treated boys strictly as inferiors. My self-insert character had joined his girlfriend in a club run by a feminist named Julia. Julia stated that she hated all men and boys, and that although boys were allowed to join her feminist club, girls were allowed to kill those boys and not pay a penalty. Thus even though my character was fully devoted to serving his girlfriend, and obeyed her every command, when she was off on a shopping trip he was forced to work even harder for the many other girls in the club and get in return only the assurance that they probably wouldn't murder him that day.

Crossover comics

I seem to have attempted a true crossover at one point, with the TCT kids and the FILTER teens actually being present in the same world at the same time. It may have been for a videogame that I was fantasizing about creating, and never got around to. Somehow, part of TCT merged with FILTER, and created a new superhero league called LTRC consisting of 9 girls, 4 boys, plus 2 adult women and 2 adult men who joined the kids but behaved as ordinary members rather than attempting to lead the kids around.

I must've been 14 years old by this time, so presumably the "kid" characters were as well, as I tended to drag the ages of my characters forward to match my own. (This is why events in my timeline strictly follow the order in which I wrote the stories: Teddy was 10 years old when I was 10, 13 when I was 13, and so on, and therefore each story I wrote by necessity occurred later in time than the previous one.) Only two TCT boys joined the league: Tree and Sučithasi. Perhaps the other boys found the aggressive and openly anti-male FILTER girls too intimidating even for their own overpowered selves to handle.

Having adults mingle with 14 year olds in a superhero league is a lot more believable than having adults hanging around a team of elementary schoolers with an 8pm bedtime and a portable heater full of ice cream and grape soda, but it still never occurred to me at the time that even the kindest and most open-minded adult superheros would probably want an adult authority, not an angsty teen named Julia, to be in charge of them.

Sugar and spice

As above, FILTER's leadership, and most of its membership, consisted of aggressive teenage girls and submissive teenage boys of northern European descent. They loved cold weather and saw ice cream as both a symbol of their power and a food to be enjoyed for its own sake. They completely lacked male leaders and they liked it that way. As they expanded over the Earth, they faced little resistance. Most of the enemies they faced were also female, and when defeated some of them joined FILTER and thus made their army even more feminine. However, one enemy who emerged early on was a man named Senguttuvan who lived in southern India.

Senguttuvan was opposed to FILTER's extremely feministic power structure even though he agreed with some of their political ideals. He promised to defend India against the teenage girls that were creaming all of the other nations around India in preparation for a massive squeeze march. But they eventually subdued him, and he agreed to join FILTER with his wife Tammy.

In many ways Senguttuvan was the polar opposite of all the other FILTER members. Whereas they had always had some male members, these had always been small, weak, and fully submissive to the girls. Senguttuvan was the only adult male in the entire army, and he was very strong. Whereas FILTER soldiers licked ice cream cones and sipped sugary sodas before each battle to increase their energy, Senguttuvan preferred hot Darjeeling and spicy rice curry. He thus symbolized heat whereas everyone around him symbolized cold.

The feminists in FILTER did not see Senguttuvan as a threat, however. Unlike the adult characters that the TCT kids had adopted, Senguttuvan was not a predator or a parasite. He was a very competent fighter, and did not expect the teens to bend to his wishes or place him into a position of power. In fact, one of his greatest abilities was the power to magnify energy and bounce an enemy's attack back at them, even if it was a "cold wave" which he could not himself produce. Thus, Senguttuvan could pair with any of the many fighters around him, whereas others fought best only when coupled with certain ones.

First adult male role model

The introduction of Senguttuvan nevertheless marked a turning point in my writing. Previously, I had lacked down-to-earth traditional adult male power figures entirely, except those that were evil and a few somewhat incompetent allies on the sidelines. All of the real heroes had always been boys and girls with just a few teenage girls such as Julia on the border of adulthood. But Senguttuvan was my writing's first true adult male superhero and role model. However, I stopped writing entirely soon after that. I did produce a few more stories with Teddy and his classmates in their late teens, as that was the age I was at the time, but they were in history book format, not narratives.

My earliest video game creations

Looking back, I dont think this setup was for a video game, because it wouldve been a fighting game, and I doubt I would have wanted to make a game in which two adult males were playable characters and could win trophies by beating up young girls and boys, even if the kids were around 14 years old.

Of course, my earlier writings were, on their face, far more ridiculously absurd than this. Adult male supervillains armed to the teeth attacked children of all ages whenever they felt like it, with the children getting no help and no sympathy whatsoever from the people around them. But those stories had very little realism. Maybe a small boy couldn't hold off an army of 300 soldiers in tanks by himself, but if he had the help of the girl who lived down the street, the battle was theirs.

Furthermore, I never identified with the adult characters in my early writings, even adults who joined the kids' ambitious save-the-world missions, whereas I was beginning to cross that barrier in my early teenage years by creating adult characters who were actually competent instead of just making messes for the kids who'd befriended them to clean up.

I think it also matters that in my childhood stories, the superheros literally always won, no matter whether they were fighting mutants or an army of men in tanks, and literally always left the battle without injury, whereas this hypothetical fighting game would have pitted adult superheros against kid superheros, and therefore there was no guarantee that the physically disadvantaged "boy" and "girl" fighters could stand up to their larger adult opponents.

I do remember that I created a similar video game around this time, but the only playable character was Power, and it was essentially a masochist game, because there was no way for me to win the fights. If my character did manage to survive a round with one of the aggressive girls on the opposite team, she would simply reappear in a later round with full health as if nothing had happened. This game had no name and it honestly didn't hold my interest for very long, because this was 1994, and the technology I was working with was such that the action scenes essentially consisted of dialog boxes telling me how many hit points I had lost to the latest punch, kick, or slap from my overly aggressive girlfriend on the other side of the ring and how comparatively few hit points I had taken away from her with my attempts to hit back. There were graphics in this game, but no animation.

It's possible it was for a racing game, as I did attempt to do something like that once, but I don't know why I would have chosen only a small subset of the superheros to be the contestants if it was just about racing.

Borrowing backwards

Alcohol

As I wrote my early conworld entirely without experience in drinking alcohol, it simply never occurred to me as a child, or evne a teenager, whether the Camians should have bars serving wine, beer, etc. or not. If I were to decide to borrow backwards from Teppala into Camia, since the Camians are technically the Swamp Kids, they would inherit the Swamp Kids' extreme prohibitionist viewpoints and therefore ban both the consumption and the production of all forms of alcohol, even if intended for export to one of Camia's many rivals. Since even the Swamp Kids' enemy party, the Raspara, passionately hated alcohol as well, this would mean that the Camians would not be exposed to much dissent on this issue even from their worst enemies. As for other drugs, these were also prohibited. I remember once saying that teens in Camia had a slogan "Get out of the pub and into the lab!" Though this could be interpreted as a very obvious reference to home manufacture of illegal drugs, I was essentially naive at the time and if this means anything I want it to be a reference to Camia's "impossibly good" students who even in their free time would go back to school and work together on chemistry experiments.

Having a Camia without alcohol is a bit disappointing to me, but I refuse to violate my own rules even if it would make remembering my old childhood fantasies more interesting. Wamia would not likely ban alcohol, and might even see Camia's insistence on total prohibition as an invitation to smuggle various forms of alcohol into Camia, but Wamia was always far weaker than Camia and would not likely have been very successful. At most they would thrive on letting Camians drive into Wamia (road transport was very cheap, even if space travel was not) and then helping them sneak back into Camia when they were done.

Having a Camia without alcohol could, however, lead to potentially interesting situations. Space travel was expensive but ubiquitous, and the potential for setting up illegal "space bars" just outside Camia's atmosphere would be extremely profitable because, although space travel was expensive, anyone wealthy enough to be able to afford it could afford to pay high prices for illegal alcoholic drinks as well, and these would never be found by the Camian police. Ive recast Nanuko, always somewhat of a misfit as the only adult among the TCT kids, as an alcoholic or at least someone who used to be an alcoholic before TCT tore him away from his impoverished but very comfortable life as a "tribesman and village guard" on planet Namma. I could certainly imagine Nanuko taking one of the kids' spaceships out for a ride, preferably late at night when they were all sleeping, and buying himself a few cases of moonshine using money the kids had donated to him out of their allowance.

Sobriety of Xema

Note that the supervillains who spent so much time kicking the Camians around are not identified with the Raspara but with Xema, which in the Teppala world is identified specifically as a colony settled by the Swamp Kids. This is in keeping with my original mindset that all of the supervillains living on planet Xema were in fact Camians who decided to betray their nation rather than Wamians or one of Camia's many other enemies on other planets. Thus Dr. Zāme got his kicks by bombing buildings, shooting up boats full of little kids, and breeding gigantic mutants to eat up the humans around them, but at least he did it all while stone-cold sober.

Candy and ice cream

The Swamp Kids also hated candy. However, they saw the consumption of candy as far less of a vice than the consumption of alcohol, because whereas alcohol is addictive and drinking alcohol is (in their eyes) worse than having nothing at all, candy is merely wasteful since the body consumes it quickly and soon becomes hungry again, and is not addictive.

Unlike candy, ice cream held symbolistic value for me because it is a cold food, and not many foods are meant to be eaten cold. I didn't really think about it much when I was in my 20s but I'm pretty sure that if ice cream had been available in the Swamp Kids' time they would have hated it at least as much as they hated candy. However, the technology was not available to them.

Content from dreams

Some dreams have given me material that makes sense only in my childhood conworld ("Camia") and not my newer one ("Teppala"), mostly because of technology. Thus even though I officially stopped working on the Camia conworld in my late teens or early 20s, there are bits and pieces of newer ideas here and there. For example, there is now a chain of restaurants in Camia called Burger Tyke, whose logo is a hamburger with a diapered baby girl standing on top of it, happy to provide free extra toppings for customers too cheap to buy a deluxe burger. And the diaper she wears is made by the Planetarium Diaper Company, whose motto is "put yourself on top of the world!" Camians seeking a brighter skin tone can make themselves up with Tintamint, invented by a man calling himself Chad Soapskin.

At a restaurant, perhaps Burger Tyke or perhaps not, one can buy dolphin-flavored coffee, but nobody has ever ordered it. Another specialty at Burger Tyke is a burger combining turkey, chicken, beef, and pork sausage patties all in one bun, and another is a menu of wraps with a crispy bacon shell replacing the traditional bread wrap. The Burger Tyke in #Lewiston offers unlimited free refills on coffee to all customers who arrive before 6 am. They open at 7 am.

Soapboy and the Bombs

A blue Bomb.

Soapboy.

In 2012, I started work on a video game that I never finished. The hero of the game is named Soapboy, and the gameplay largely revolves around hitting enemies with soap and water, but there is also a species of animate walking bomb. The Bombs generally don't mind getting shot and blown up, because "Bombs have been playing this game for a very long time now and they all have hundreds of extra lives." They may believe that Heaven is a video game in which the Bombs carve out new levels each day from solid blocks and no Bomb need ever worry about running out of lives.

Unlike the Bob-ombs of Super Mario Bros., Soapboy's Bombs are a species of animal that put on their Bomb suits and volunteered their services in order that they could help Soapboy complete his mission. Male Bombs are blue, and females are pink, but any Bomb can change its gender instantly and they generally do so in response to the environment. Thus, their gender does not matter.

Although this game does not really take place in either of my two conworlds, it could be a game that exists within the Camia conworld.

The Bombs

The Bombs are in some ways a lot like the Swamp Kids, in that despite being bombs, they're not very "bombastic", but rather seem to be perpetually depressed, lonely, and unable to trust anyone besides other Bombs. They have poor eyesight, no sense of hearing, and overall have a difficult time identifying dangers around them. Unlike stereotypical cartoon bombs, the Bombs in Soapboy are actually a native animal species wearing a bomb suit that covers all of their body except their arms and legs. However, in their suits, they have control of their body and the suit in such a way that they appear to be one single seamless creature, including the fuse.

Also unlike steroetypical cartoon bombs, the Bombs in Soapboy are very depressed and lonely. For some reason, the body type I chose lends itself well to showing the Bombs in depressed poses, seemingly always about to burst into tears, whereas when I tried to draw them in "happy" poses they merely look surprised, as if amazed that their suffering might be finally about to end. A third type of pose doesn't have good way to translate it but depicts the Bombs being frustrated at their inability to communicate, as if they were animals or toddlers who had discovered the solution to world peace but had not yet learned to speak. (Bombs can communicate with the player using hand signals, but cannot make loud noises in order to attract his attention. In the game, rather than having the player learn what the various hand signals mean, they are reinterpreted as human-like poses and are limited essentially to gestures of pleading for help and other emotions.)

The Bombs originally came to the mines in order to help Soapboy, but were disappointed and became depressed when they realized that Bombs were almost obsolete as a weapon and there were therefore far more Bombs in the mines than Soapboy would ever be able to use.

When the player character (Soapboy) picks up a Bomb, the Bomb is overwhelmed with joy at being chosen, and eager to serve Soapboy by blowing apart a wall blocking the player's progress or setting an enemy's spaceship on fire. However some Bombs are found in places in which there are no walls to be blown up, but there are buttons in the floor that need to be pressed on. And so these unfortunate Bombs are picked up by Soapboy only to be placed down on top of a switch that Soapboy needs to be held down in order to move on to the next area. Predictably when this happens, the Bomb will wave its arms increasingly frantically, trying to signal to Soapboy that he has forgotten to take the Bomb with him. The Bomb cannot understand why Soapboy would rescue him and then abandon him so soon thereafter. The game considers it ideal to get rid of unneeded Bombs by blowing them up, as that is what the Bombs came to do, and the game rewards players that eliminate all the Bombs.

I have one scene where a dozen or so Bombs are waving frantically to be rescued, and while they can't talk, I imagine them saying things like "why isn't he rescuing us?", "maybe he can't see us. Try waving higher ",,etc, never able to believe that soapboy would ever refuse to rescue one of them.

The Swamp Kids

Likewise, the Swamp Kids, particularly the (majority) Pioneer party, were overly trusting of outsiders and could not understand why their enemies, the Raspara, kept attacking them even as the Swamp Kids struggled to do more and more favors for the Raspara in an attempt to appease them and encourage them to ease up their abuse of the Swamp Kids. They were not quite as naive as the Bombs, as the human equivalent of the Bombs' behavior would go beyond even the most extreme definitions of masochism, but even though they knew who their enemies were they had a very difficult time bringing themselves to hit back when they were attacked by the people they had invited to live in their country. They even insulted their own men when they began to publish propaganda encouraging their women to marry foreigners because they claimed their own men were too small to satisfy their women. The intention of this was to encourage more foreigners to mix with them and therefore reduce ethnic tensions, but it never worked because people in the Swamp Kids' newly diverse nation simply aligned themselves with religions and political parties instead of ethnicities, and fought even more intense wars than before.

It helps as well that the Andanese word for "bomb" and for a subrace of humans that the Swamp Kids belonged to was the same: kula. I dont remember if this was deliberate or not, so it's either an interesting coincidence or nothing worth remarking about at all.

The future scenario

I seem to have coined the name Swamp Kids during a phase in which my writing focused on a future world in which sexual reproduction had been made entirely obsolete by the invention of the incubator. All babies were born from incubators and neither men nor women needed to couple with each other to make it happen. Children were raised communally by "nurses" rather than by parents. Thus, the need for an equal sex ratio was removed, and most people soon chose to have male babies, and the few females in the society took on the roles of nurses and other jobs related to child care.

When their nation felt it appropriate, the birthrate was accelerated so high that at times the civilian population consisted almost entirely of children, since these children vastly outnumbered adults and all adults were either in the military or in jobs taking care of those children. I seem to have also decided that, given the level of technological development their nation had reached, the government decided that men themselves were unnecessary, and simply cut off growth before puberty in order to keep their soldiers more obedient to their commanders.

Reflection on Teppala

I seem to have retained some aspects of this in my medieval conworld. The Swamp Kids were a nation that, like all others, had an even sex ratio and normal physical biology involving growth into adulthood and the proper development of facial hair and other characteristics. But, unlike all other nations, they referred to their adult men as boys and expected them to obey their leaders unquestioningly, and those leaders were the few adult males that had the right to call themselves men. Thus, the Swamp Kids were not literally kids, they were (largely) adults who had the personalities and responsibilities of adults but were treated by their leaders as children.

The Camians

I think that the Camian culture in general, and of the superhero leagues in particular, fits this stereotype well, and if the TCT kids were replaced with any non-human creature or creation I would choose it to be these Bombs. The Bombs are actually quite powerful by comparison to humans, as any hostile human that so much as touches a moving Bomb is simply crushed to death on contact by the Bomb's much greater weight. (Humans in this game are a very small species, comparable to mice, but have proportionately strong muscles. Yet, humans are weak in almost every other way. It is said amongst the other species in the game that humans are a species that can rip apart a hardcover textbook and then bleed to death from a paper cut from one of its pages.)

Thus it is fitting that TCT children setting off on a mission to save their planet from certain destruction will find themselves unable to board their spaceship because a hostile adult has decided to stand in front of the door and block their path. Sometimes the intruder wanted a free ride to an alien planet, and sometimes they were enemies of the kids intent on kidnapping and enslaving the kids. But the TCT kids could not understand why someone would want to do something bad to them, and they figured that if they talked things over with their kidnappers the kidnappers would realize they were doing the wrong thing and then agree to follow the kids along on their originally intended mission. Since this strategy never worked, the TCT'ers grew increasingly desperate to get their uninvited stowaways to listen to common sense and reason. All the while, however, the kids were secure in the knowledge that they had superpowers and the invaders did not, so they were never in any real danger, and even if they were severely injured during a fight with one of their enemies, they all had "hundreds of lives" due to their ability to heal their wounds with magical powers that defied the laws of medicine.

Likewise, Camian children, especially the TCT children, did not fit the general stereotype of children as being noisy, hyperactive, and full of energy. Instead they rarely talked to kids outside their close friends, and acted as if they were more mature than the adults that bossed them around. Instead of running around on playgrounds and entering video game competitions, mainstream Camian children studied biology and arithmetic in their free time whereas the TCT children flew around the universe deposing warlords and capturing criminal masterminds.

The Camian children show some emotional resemblances to the Bombs as well. In my entire time writing I've only depicted one of the adventurers actually crying, and it was a helpless sort of crying (he was being attacked unfairly) rather than sobbing from sadness. In this way, they differed from the Bombs. However, the kids very rarely were happy. When they returned home successful from a dangerous mission, Nancy reliably threw an even more dangerous one at them and sent them on their way. When Camian children were attacked by conventional armed forces consisting of adult males, they were afraid that if they lost the battle, they would be punished by Nancy for not fighting hard enough. Thus, they endured abuse from both their enemies (supervillains) and their supposed ally (their teacher Nancy). Thus the Camian children resembled the Bombs in one other way: the TCT kids relied on each other for emotional support, bypassing the adults who delivered them nothing but pain.

It is a common trope in fiction that if children are the main characters in an adventure story, they will prove to be smarter than the adults they interact with. e.g. Inspector Gadget relied on his 9 year old daughter(?) Penny to do the real detective work while he just bumbled around. I bit on this to some extent, in that the age of the children in my stories seemed to have no relation to how good they were at handling power, but I didn't go so far as to say children were actually smarter than adults. The same is true of the Bombs: they are not smarter than humans, they just "think clearly" and are more obedient to their leaders than humans are.

Lastly, although the TCT kids could not change from boys into girls in response to environmental stresses, they were so strongly defined by their superpowers that their gender did not seem to matter at all, and boys were often replaced by girls on missions and vice versa.

Conlangs

To a much lesser extent, i try to follow universal canonicity with my conlangs as well. For example, 22 years ago h was the Moonshine word for "human" (I dont remember the etymology), so I needed to make sure that Khulls hʷ "soldier" could evolve into that same h in the new Moonshine, which is now a daughter languages of Khulls whereas in 1994 it just floated on air.

The Jafa people

Names like Dr. Zāme are taken from a "Camian" language that has no counterpart in my Teppala conworld because it did not evolve from any other language. Ijust now realized that I for a short time called this language Jafa (/jafa/; even at age 10, I knew that j was /j/ in many languages) and stated that the Jafa were a culture that arose within Camia but were not specific to it. I wasn't clear whether Jafa had evolved from English or not and probably abandoned the entire idea soon after I came up with it. I vaguely remember Teddy having to reveal that he was "a fierce Jafa warrior" when he got kidnapped one day by giant spiders, to which one spider's reply was "EEEYIIKES! BRACE YOURSELF, MARGLOOB! IT'S A JAFA!" I don't believe that I intended the Jafa to have their own language, but I am calling what I had "Jafa" because I identify it with a particular stage in my childhood writing career, when I had not replaced Camia's language with something completely different.

I like the look of the "Jafa language" but there is no easy way to take any of my existing conlangs and force them to evolve into something like Camian/Jafa. Even if there were, it still wouldn't "work" because it would only be a valid language for a few hundred years before evolving into something unrecognizable.

Jafa as Khulls

For the most part I identify the spirit of the Jafa language with Khulls, even though Khulls looks nothing like Camian. The similarity is not in the phonology or grammar or even the spelling but in the feeling of intense power and strength that both languages exude to me. A name like Xapalês simply looks strong to me, without even knowing what it means. I never really seemed to pick up the concept of "magic spells", so all of the superheros just cast their magic silently, but if they were to want to use a magic language to help put their minds into their magic more deeply, a spell with a name like "Kʷoxʷudas Lŏnotas!" would probably sound more forceful than "Wupsibum pop nobellies!"^{Literally "citizens couple of your ice cream!"}

A small number of Khulls words, mostly names, are imports from the Camian language, generally presupposing that the Camian-like form was something that existed a few thousand years before Khulls, such as in the Gold language or even further back in Tapilula.

It helps that Camian was basically a stereotypical "bad conlang", the kind that most people create as their very first. My word for ice was "ice", but it was pronounced /ɪkɛ/ : ) The language changed from month to month: did it have long vowels or not? Was there a /q/ or was I just being fancy? Were æ and œ separate vowels or not? What about the œ̆ that appeared in just a single word?

I decided pretty early on that "Zāme" was definitely a Camian name, as it was important to the storyline that Dr. Zāme be Camian and not an intruder from a foreign country or even a foreign planet, but how does that mesh with the fact that Camian is supposed to be derived from English after 400 years of sound changes? I never had an answer for that.

I would say that the form of the language with the most emotional pull for me is the one with the long vowels, however, as it is the only form of the language that is completely unrelated to English; i.e., it is an a priori conlang. I never got beyond making it a namimg language when I was young, however, because within less than a year I was alryeady recasting Camian as a future fork of English/.

Jafa as Pabappa

In the Teppala conworld, the Swamp Kids arose from a subtribe of the Andanese people, who were at that stage of history largely assimilated as a family of tribes of Pabaps. They thus had historically spoken Andanese, but had given it up in favor of speaking Pabappa in day to day life long before they declared themselves Swamp Kids. Andanese was retained as a religious language but all Swamp Kids were fluent in Pabappa. The Pabappa of this era was actually Babakiam, which looks similar in many ways but has long vowels and many long sequences of vowels whereas Pabappa does not. Bābākiam nevertheless still has a very childlike, even babyish, appearance, with phrases like Paubabi Pumau Bapababe in everyday parlance. This is the very opposite of the strong, masculine, "intense" Khulls language. It could work in a somewhat ironic sense, in that the TCT superheros were constantly forced to deal with humiliating situations as they navigated through societies run by larger, more muscular adults, but at the same time never felt afraid of those adults because the TCT kids were much stronger in every way, even in physical strength, than the adults who attacked them. However, this does not work very well because I originally patterned Pabappa after the language which in my early writing was spoken on planet Namma (it never had a name). If Pabappa goes to the Jafa, there is no language left for Namma.

Jafa as Abaka

It is possible that Jafa could be Abaka, a fork of Pabappa that I created early on. Abaka was essentially Pabappa with all of its /p/ deleted, and a few other changes such as replacing /pp/ with /k/. I had a few versions of Abaka, one of which restored /p/ by devoicing the still fairly common /b/. Another versions kept /b/ as /b/, but derived /p/ from /f/, meaning that it was a fork of an older version of Pabappa and thus was more difficult to work with.

If I decide to make this substitution, the proper name of the language would be Label, as that is Abaka's (and Pabappa's) cognate of the word Jafa. However, using a language with a name that is also a common English word could be problematic so I will continue to call it Abaka.

For some reason, or perhaps no reason at all, I seemed to have never once used the phoneme /p/ in my early work with Jafa. By contrast, the language of Namma used /p/ and /b/ very commonly, and had no guttural consonants. This is similar to the difference between Pabappa and Abaka.

However, none of the forms of Abaka would make logical sense if they were placed in a storyline in which standard Pabappa was spoken on Nama. Even though I stated early on that the Nammans and the Tebbalans were related, if their languages differed by so trivial a manner as a sound shift of /p/ > /0/, it would be preposterous to assume that the visiting Tebbalans would be unable to speak the language.

Jafa as Andanese

For a while, I tried to identify Camian with "Anzanese", by which I mean Andanese but with a very messy way of re-reading the tiny phonology to turn it into something quite large. Essentially every syllable, and in some cases even a combination of two syllables, became a phoneme, and therefore words became a lot shorter. But the only way that this resembles the Camian language of my childhood is the prominence of the phoneme /z/, long a staple of science fiction.

Jafa as Asup

In my late teens, I created a language called Asup, originally from Moonshine. It would be a logical contradiction to use the language itself as the Jafa language, but I could derive from Khulls a language that looks like it. However, I don't think this would work well. Asup was not one of my better conlangs.

Jafa as Echo

From Asup, I created a deliberately "corrupt" form of the language intended to be easier to work with, more realistic, and more pleasant-sounding. This was the first time I found myself creating words like "balambam" and "yabebap" that would be right at home (except for the /j/) in Poswa and Pabappa. This is also the language that gave me the name Yuyabhoybakopa, one of my favorite names of all time in any language. The syllable bhoy in that name is pronounced /bhoi/; there were no aspirated consonants in Echo, but it did allow clusters of voiced stop + /h/ even in monomorphemic words like yabhoy "human".

At first, the sequence /oi/ was also very common: at one point I decided to give the TCT boys surnames in Echo to make them sound like a more authentic future culture, and created the surname Amaboy for Teddy and Metaevaboy for Zachary. Boy was the Echo word for outer space, so it appeared in a lot of surnames. However, I later changed the "suffix" form of boy to be, thus changing the names that used it. The name Yabebap (for George Kennedy) seems to have included this same yabhoy morpheme, apparently at a time when I had decided to get rid of both oi and bh.

One difference between Echo and my previous conlangs is that Echo sounded "tropical" to me. At the time I was working on Echo I had imagined that the Camians in power were of a type that were rebelling against their nation's stereotypical love of cold weather by deliberately triggering extreme global warming on their planet and trying to not only melt the glacier they lived on the edge of, but turn their habitat into a tropical rainforest.

While using Echo still technically creates a logical contradiction, the connection between Moonshine and Echo is so narrow that I could easily do it without sharing a single word in common. Since all of the names I used for those two boys were taken from real-life people, often cartoonists, "Amaboy" and "Metaevaboy" are the only valid last names I have for those two boys. However, I doubt I'll use them either in that form or in the "proper" -be form.

The role of Japanese

Because I played video games at the time, I took some names from Japanese for some of my characters. Thus Camia was a mix of whites and Japanese ... or at least, the one town that most of the action took place in was. The rest of Camia may have been entirely white, but I never gave it much thought. I just knew I really liked Japanese. This is a bit of a problem, because from the very earliest writings I did, I was well aware that even though I represented everyone's speech in my comics and stories as English, they were really speaking Jafa, and therefore encountered trouble when they wanted to communicate with people from Earth. I wobbled back and forth between 2408 AD and 4208 AD as the "present day" time period in which the stories were happening, with 4208 being (I think) the earlier choice. This would make the survival of Japanese intact after 2000 years very interesting. I could, of course, just handwave and say "well, Jafa is represented as English, so this other language is represented as Japanese," but I am pretty sure that even my much younger self would not have taken such a solution. Instead, I would have created a second conlang for the "Japanese" immigrants to speak and be named in.

A month or so ago, I decided to use bynames such as "the Mountain" and "the Little Philosopher" for the "Japanese" people, but I want to instead use a newer conlang, probably Thaoa, even though I only very rarely and hesitantly borrow "backwards" from my adult work into my childhood work. I choose Thaoa because Thaoa is identified with the nation of Sara in one story, and in another story Sara is identified with Japan. This causes problems, because Teppala's Thaoa was "Sara" in 2600 AD, and didn't even exist in 4200 AD since it had been smeared into a mess of broken-up mountain villages by the much larger nations around it, but if I borrow only the language and not the culture it isn't really a true contradiction.

If Japanese is Thaoa, Jafa can really only be Khulls, since the Thaoan people preyed on the Pabaps and to a lesser extent the Andanese, both of whom only looked upon the Thaoans with fear in their eyes, wholly unlike the mutual love and respect shared by the Jafa people and the "Japanese" whom they invited to move in them.

FILTER

Likewise, if I have time I want to make the "Islander language" a reality and not have it just be a dialect of English that diverged unusually rapidly over just a few generations in isolation. FILTER is an organization of Islanders that consists of aggressive women and submissive men and boys who they push and slap around. Thus their language needs to somehow be both very strong and very feminine sounding. This is largely in my head, since although a language can certainly sound aggressive, I dont know how a language could sound feminine. I admire Láadan very much — I even bought the book around 2000 or so — but to be frank it's not the kind of feminism I get excited about because it's based on the way women are in real life instead of the way I imagined they were in my early teenage fantasies when my main experience with females was a girl I was dating who was much taller than me and could easily have beaten me up without taking a hit.

Moonshine

To me the most logical choice is Moonshine, as the Moonshine culture consists of tall, strong women who completely dominate their men in every aspect of daily life, and then at home push them down and dominate them in bed as well. Using Moonshine automatically kills any potential for uniting the FILTER language with English, but it does offer the prospect of uniting it with the Jafa language, provided that Jafa is either Khulls or a descendant of it, since Moonshine is also a descendant of Khulls. If I ever do this, I may refer to the language as "Spācōin" instead of Moonshine as that was my early name for it.

Interestingly, both the Jafa language and the Islander language were modeled largely on Old English, but I had more knowledge of OE when I was working on the Islanders (age 14) than when I was doing the original Jafa language (age 9 and 10).

Notes to self

• "he only doesnt let me down the stairs" ... complaining someome isnt THAT abusive because he at least still allows access to the hallway
• The (Soap) Bubbles were identified as identical with the Andanese in a scrap story immedaitrely after the TDA story

• However, it was certainly not just an ethnic group; e.g. Pinuha and the Red Sun, the two most powerful people in the government of the Little Country, joined the Bubbles, fired all Swamp Kids from the government, and banished all Swamp Kids from the Little Country.

• One story that uses the word "bubble(s)" fifty times seems to identify them as Mampum, indicating they include Crystals. This would explain why the Crystals of the 4149-4268 era seem to have nothing in common with the Crystals of the 1500AD-3915 AD era. This same story also uses "crystal(s)" 169 times.

• Can "Larnac and Lucy" be here?
• "leaving just Ezra" <--- when did this happen?
• The Swamp Kids may be a fork of the Crystals. The "Vaamūans" that invaded Tarwas and later got invaded by Atlam were identified as Crystals in one source.
• there was a strong localistic sentiment in amade, and the region refused to force its children to learn standard camian, preferring instead the smooth, measured dialect that had come to them from clubia. <--- possibly explains "STW was imported from Clubia"

Not qualified h not ă pappo

:)