Dreamland

Dreamland was a nation founded in the northwestern corner of the continent of Rilola by Lenian tribes, cooperating with immigrants from the islands of Laba.

Language

The language was closely related to that of its enemy Kava. The proper name for their shared proto-language is Meromo. It has many loanwords from Pejo, and Pejo itself was spoken by some of the early settlers.

Phonology and diachronics

NOTE, try to evolve a "Nomisitamīlina" type phonology here (that is, mostly or entirely CV, with vowel length, and with an /l/ and a mostly polynesian-type setup otherwise). Unless it's Kava that has that.

Since dreamland was a mix of fun and labans,it can be that the phonology was the intersection of kava & laban .

Thus e.g. all sibs>s,labs>b/p,etc

Consonants of proto-Dreamlandic

Labials:       /p b m f β w/
Alveolars:     /t d n s z/
Postalveolars: /č ǯ ñ š j ž/
Velars:        /k ŋ/

Note that /ŋ/ was realized as nasalization of the preceding vowel except before a stop consonant, in which case it assimilated to that consonant. Thus, the sound [ŋ] is actually very rare.

Unlike the closely related Kava, the voiced stops /b d ǯ/ were preserved. However, there was no corresponding voiced velar stop /ġ/.

Vowels of proto-Dreamlandic

/a e i o u/

There is a four-way contrast of à/ă/ā/á for tones, although á is rare.

Early depalataization

The palatals /č ǯ ñ š ž/ changed to /k d ŋ f v/ before the back vowel [u], and to the coronals /t d n s z/ elsewhere. This new /ŋ/ was a true sound, unlike the old ŋ which merely nasalized the preceding vowel, even between two vowels. However, this new sound proved more stable, and the only ŋ also became a true velar nasal. Note that the /f/ above can be considered a variant of |h| but that this language simply did not have an /h/.

Further changes

/f/ > /h/ in most positions, possibly sometimes to /p/.

Then, /β/ > /v/ unconditionally. (Possibly a spelling change for convenience, not a true sound change.) Due to Laban influence, possibly sometimes to /b/.

Any remaining tones or tone residues are smothered here, leaving only vowel length. Long vowels may be spelled double (think of "Peepa" etc) rather than with macrons as in other languages, but this is a stylistic choice rather than a feature of the language itself.

Further growth

There will be little further growth here, as the formation of Dreamlandic may have been as late as 3700 AD, which is only a few hundred years from their participation in wars against their larger neighbors such as Anzan. The language used for names in the stories can therefore be assumed to be equivalent to the proto-language rather than a daughter of it.

NOTE: It's possible that this language will fill a void left by the removal of Ogili and Ogili II from the storyline. If so, it is because, although Anzan conquered ~80% of Dreamland, the original Dreamlandic language survived in the other 20% and then spread back outward, probably dividing into various daughter languages as it did so.

Geography and climate

Climate

Dreamland is oriented primarily east-to-west, but with a slight tilt that puts the eastmost cities at higher latitudes than the west. As a whole, Dreamland stretches from 17°N to 35°N and from 32°W to 3°W.

Temperature

Latitude has little influence on temperature in Dreamland; the climate of any given city is determined primarily by its location with respect to the seas and mountain ranges that define the terrain of Dreamland.

Cities south of the peaks of the mountains experiences southerly winds year-round, with no significant wet season. The air is very humid because of the influence of the wide but shallow Sea of Baeba to the south, but rain is uncommon. Irregular tropical storms provide much of the rainfall to coastal areas. Temperatures are warm in winter and very hot in summer.

Inland summer temperatures are even hotter: as hot as those of deep-inland locations such as Lypelpyp, and considerably more humid, thus giving Dreamland a claim to the world's hottest summers, about level with those of inland areas in AlphaLeap, Taryte, and the desert of Dahàwu. The capital of Dreamland, Fakadàne, is founded on an inland lake surrounded by small mountains. Here, the summer temperatures are the same as Lypelpyp's, but the humidity is much higher; during winter, the temperatures are much warmer than Lypelpyp's and never fall below freezing.

Along the north coast, the wind can blow from any direction in any season, and the wind direction determines the type of weather experienced. Yet, frost is entirely unknown in winter even at the highest latitudes along the north coast. This is in sharp contrast to locations further east at the same latitude, where frost occurs on more than half of the winter nights and snow is common for several months of the year. During the summer, the temperatures equal or exceed those of deep-inland forested locations such as Blop, with maritime cooling being limited to offshore islands and a few scattered headlands with long west-facing shorelines. The temperatures along the north coast are not as hot as those in the desert locations mentioned above, but they are still fairly humid, so even the north coast of Dreamland is known for its oppressively hot summers.

Even in the highest mountains, winter temperatures are still mild, since there is no source of cold air nearby. However, summer temperatures are considerably cooler in the highlands than along the coasts due to the thick cloud cover and very frequent rainfall. Thus the coolest areas of Dreamland have the most vegetation and, often, the healthiest wildlife populations.

Rainfall

As above, the coastal areas of Dreamland never experience frost, even in the extreme north at 35° latitude. The far north experiences a short rainy season during the late winter, but for most of the year remains dry. There is no summer monsoon, so the rest of Dreamland is relatively arid all year long, despite a high relative humidity. However, rainfall is common along the south slopes of the mountains, and in winter, also some of the north slopes. Thus, lakes and rivers provide Dreamers plenty of water to build cities to live in, and tropical agriculture is possible.

Demographics

Dreamland was founded by a confederation of Lenian tribes of diverse origins but similar body types. Some were recent immigrants from Laba, while others came from the local Meromo tribes. Both groups were typically blonde and blue-eyed, but among the Lenian Labans there were also some dark-skinned people who had formed an alliance in an earlier unrelated war.

The Lenians announced they were creating a new nationality, Gãm, in which people of all races and religions would live in harmony and cease all internal conflicts and wars. Thus Gãm and Dreamland were synonyms. However, the dark-skinned Crystal tribe immediately invaded Dreamland, and despite their promise of racial hospitality the Dreamers were forced to ban all dark-skinned people from their main settlements, even those who had come from the allied nations on Laba and did not closely resemble Crystals.

The Crystals eventually conquered Dreamland, but only in an alliance in which they were a minor player. Therefore, modern Dreamers still exhibit the blonde, light-skinned body type of the Lenian settlers. They are a blend of two distinct Lenian types, one adapted for cold weather and the other for warm. As Dreamland's climate is warm, the modern Dreamers resemble this phenotype more than the other, but many cold-adapted traits remain.

Wildlife and natural threats to humans

Dreamland's climate is ideal for human habitation. However, it is among the least densely populated areas of the planet for humans because it is also the ideal climate for many species that prey on humans.

Firebirds

Chief among these is the firebird, a close relative of the seagull which in recent evolutionary history evolved from a fish-based diet to a diet consisting almost entirely of land animals, including humans.

Firebirds cannot digest hair, so their choice of land prey is limited to humans, preferably those wearing loose,skimpy clothes. Pigs have sharp teeth here and thus do not make easy prey. Humans have ounterattcked the firebirds by building large cities, in whi b the humans can fight the firebirds by swarming, but the success rAte is still very low. These cities are most on the coast where easy prey in the form of fish is also available for both humAns and firebirds.

Firebirds are ambush predators, preferring to remain out of sight, hidden by shelter or other natural formations, and then swoop on a human from behind. They prefer to dive on a human from above at maximum speed, push the human to the ground, and then incapacitate the human by biting off a hand or other vulnerable body part. By this time, in most cases, the human has already suffered rapid blood loss from the impact of the bird's beak cutting into their body at high speed, and further resistance from the human tends to be weak.

Because their first attack is almost invariably to bite off the human's right hand, humans' defense is limited to small, one-handed weapons that are little threat to firebirds. In most cases, the human will bleed to death from their rapidly accumulated wounds without effectively fighting back against the firebird, but if the human is able to counterattack, or strong enough to stand up and flee, the firebird can quickly retreat to safety and attempt a second attack when its human prey is further weakened by blood loss and other injuries.

Other land predators

Firebirds mostly stay close to the seacoast despite their diet, as the high temperatures of the interior in summer will quickly exhaust them. But humans are not safe inland either because the interior of Dreamland is home to several other predators who hunt humans, such as pigs, desert wolves, and wildcats. There are also eagles, who hunt humans in a very similar manner to the firebirds near the coast, but humans are not their preferred prey.

Animal attacks at sea

Off the north coast of Dreamland, humans are even more vulnerable, because they are preyed upon by sharks and other fish, as well as, to a lesser extent, by seals and other aquatic mammals. Firebirds are also known to travel miles out to sea, using their keen eyesight to spot humans on their watercraft from the distant shore. However, the ocean is also the primary food source for humans in Dreamland, even those living far inland, and therefore humans on boats are keenly aware of their predators and will put up a ferocious struggle to survive an attack by any of the aforementioned animals. Dreamers generally build themselves large boats with sheltered areas into which they can retreat should they be attacked by a firebird. Seals generally hunt by ramming their bodies through the lower deck of the humans' boats, to which the human response is to use their fishing spears to fight back against the seal.

Humans as prey of pack animals

Most of the predators of humans are solitary hunters, and will attack humans at their most vulnerable: when they are alone, and generally when they are unarmed. However, firebirds have been known to attack in flocks as well, in which dozens or even hundreds of firebirds will simultaneously descend on a human city and carry out the same types of attacks they use when they attack one-on-one. Generally, each bird will alternate between stages of actively attacking and resting on top of buildings, out of humans' reach. A mass firebird attack can last for an entire day. The birds on the buildings keep watch for the others, and will attack any humans attempting to flee. Because a human attempting to flee has a reduced ability to defend themselves, these people are the most vulnerable and the most likely to die in a mass attack. Humans who stick together have a better survival rate in these battles, even though they are likely to face multiple firebirds attacking them from all directions. Humans always cluster together in circles where each individual faces outward, meaning that firebirds can only attack them from the front, where they are stronger and better able to protect themselves. Here, sometimes two birds will attack the same human, usually with one biting off the arms or hands and the other attempting to break or otherwise disable their legs and feet. When this happens, the humans who are free for the moment will attempt to grab onto the wings of each bird and pull them off of the other human. Since this requires the use of both hands, this leaves the humans open to attack from behind from another bird, and in some cases chains of birds and humans biting and grasping each other will form long lines or even loops as each animal tries to get the better of the other.

Politics and government

Founding and early history

Dreamland was founded in 3373 by settlers from the islands of Laba who spoke various Lenian languages and had been completely isolated from the wars and politics of the mainland for thousands of years. Dreamland was an explicitly political nation: rather than being founded on the basis of membership in a particular tribe or belief in a particular religion, people living in Dreamland were made to agree to certain political beliefs.

The various tribes of typically blonde, blue-eyed Lenians merged to form a new nationality, Gãm, and invited people of all races and religions would live in harmony and cease all internal conflicts and wars. The Gãm leaders announced a new constitution prohibiting the use of the army except for defensive wars. The new society was named Dreamland and consisted of preexisting settlements along the north shore of the peninsula around Baeba Swamp.

After a few months in Dreamland, the Gãm leaders launched an all-out war against the Crystal tribes, whom they said were frustrating the Gãms' attempt to build a society of racial harmony. They declared that in order to achieve perfect racial unity in Dreamland, nobody of the dark-skinned Crystal race would be allowed to enter, and conversion would be forbidden. Since the Crystals' capital city, Baeba, lay only a few hundred miles away from Dreamland, the Dreamer military generals declared that Dreamland's proactive invasion was in fact a defensive war, and said that if the Dreamers did not invade and conquer Baeba Swamp, the Crystals might one day in the future be able to mount a counterattack against Dreamland.

Early subdivisions

Shortly after its founding, the Dreamers divided their nation into six states. These corresponded loosely to six preexisting Crystal nations which they had taken over. Dreamland considered itself a single nation, but its constituent states had more independence than did the states of the nations of the other empires.

Latiki War

In 4132, Dreamland declared war against the famine-struck empire of AlphaLeap. AlphaLeap had recently moved its capital to the ancient city of Paba, whose population consisted largely of young children whose parents had starved to death or been killed in recent wars and natural disasters. When these children learned they were being invaded, they surrendered 90% of their empire to the Dreamers, and stated that they would only fight back if the Dreamers decided to also invade the remaining 10%, which contained Paba and some other important cities.

The Dreamer generals celebrated their hard-fought victory over the starving children of AlphaLeap, but considered it dishonorable to invade a country and not finish the job. Therefore, they decided that they would indeed invade Paba and fight it out in the streets against the local peasants. The Pabaps had been expecting this, however, and learned of the continued invasion beforehand by communication from trade routes. They evacuated most of the Pabap countryside, leaving the farms barren throughout the harvest season. Instead, farmers retreated to the southern coast, which still had a plentiful supply of fish so long as the people were willing to sail great distances out to sea. Paba itself remained settled, however, and the Pabaps expected that a great battle would soon take place there.

First combat

Paba had long been a strong proponent of pacifism. However, when AlphaLEAP had taken over their empire and relocated its capital there, they integrated the Pabaps into the wider Leaper military and developed a more conventional military policy. But the reputation for Paba's poor performance in past military conflicts had spread, and the Dreamer generals told their soldiers that Paba would fall easily to an invasion unless the Pabaps were able to call in soldiers from those areas of the empire that had been ceded to Dreamland upon the original declaration of war. Since Dreamland had already occupied much of this territory, and seen that the cities were mostly still populated, they concluded that Paba likely had not been able to draw in many soldiers from these areas, and that their original prediction of an easy war would be correct. Furthermore, as they realized that Paba had a very young population, they realized the city of Paba itself would be likely overrun by orphaned children who would surrender to any soldier willing to adopt them.

Although it was true that Paba had relatively few adult males, and that they had not been able to call in many of the adults from the ceded areas of their Empire to fight, the Pabap generals were nevertheless able to field a conventional army consisting of adult male soldiers to wait for the invading Dreamers at a safe distance from Paba's city center. They also constructed a second front near the coast, figuring that the Dreamers, who were also a seagoing people, knew that Paba's food supply relied on the ocean and that, if the Dreamers pushed the Pabaps off the coastline, both civilians and soldiers would starve. However, they also knew that Dreamland's navy would need to sail through many hostile harbors in order to reach Paba, as the distance from Dreamland to Paba by sea was nearly ten times the distance over land. Thus the Dreamers' primary attack was over land.

The Pabap army put up stiff resistance, such that the Dreamers were unable to break through and reach Paba itself. More Pabaps than Dreamers were dying in this war, but most Pabap casualties were due to disease and continuing struggles with finding food, since the soldiers' supply of food from the sea was unreliable.

Latiki counter-invasion

After six years of war, the Dreamers still had not yet sieged Paba. Without formally admitting defeat, the Dreamer generals began to pull back their soldiers and focus on building new Dreamer settlements in the countryside that the Pabaps had surrendered to them at the beginning of the war. But they also suspected a counterattack was coming, and that the target would be Dreamland itself rather than its colonies, since the Dreamer military had been largely excused through the six years of war.

The counterattack was led by a group of Pabaps calling itself the Latiki party. Throughout its long history, Paba had always been a monarchy, and political parties had never existed until they were conquered by AlphaLeap, which allowed only the Leaper party to hold power and considered political parties to be synonymous with nations. But now for the first time, dissent had arisen within a nation, and Paba had two political parties.

The Latiki party rejected pacifism and stated that Paba was now a military champion and could seek its own interests rather than forever being subservient other, more violent empires as they had throughout their history. They decided to launch a direct invasion of Dreamland, exactly mirroring Dreamland's invasion of Paba six years earlier. They restored Paba's claim to all of the land that they had earlier ceded, and claimed that they would reconquer it back for Paba after they had first defeated the home nation of Dreamland.

As the Latiki army roved towards the north, they faced some resistance, both from the Dreamers and a few citizens who had decided to side with the Dreamers. The strongest of these was the small nation of Puap (Pwâet), located in the region of Subumpam. However, the Puap army decided to spare Paba and instead attack the tail of the Latiki army that was heading towards Dreamland. They thus stated that they were not declaring war against Paba, but against the Latiki political party, and that Puap considered itself loyal to Paba.

Latiki-Leaper relations

The Dreamers soon learned that Paba's young population had become even younger, with the median age of many Pabap cities in the single digits. This was due to many factors: the war, the famine, and the tradition among Pabaps to put the lives of children ahead of their parents', even if it meant orphanhood for the survivors. With children left to fend for themselves, Paba collapsed into pestilential conditions and the intensity of the famine increased even as the weather began to turn in their favor. Plagues and diseases coursed through the population, killing many of the orphans who no longer had doctors to care for them. Though fish in the ocean remained abundant, young sea captains had difficulty steering the ships and they became increasingly fearful of attempting to fish away from the immediate shore.

To compensate for the drastically reduced population of able-bodied adults, Paba's ruling Leaper party instituted child labor, with a focus on personal hygiene in order to reduce disease and dispose of waste. Earlier, hygiene had been abandoned, with Pabap nurses simply throwing dirty diapers into a pile in the middle of each city, figuring that local animals would take care of the problem over time. The Leapers realized that it would be cruel to force children to work, but that it was far more cruel to enlist them into the army, and that both the army and the civilian labor force were necessary to keep a nation's population alive and healthy.

But the local government of Paba, which consisted entirely of women and children, disobeyed the command to introduce child labor, and became increasingly loyal to the militant Latiki party, claiming that the Leapers had merely made Paba the latest in a long series of societies which the Leapers had victimized. Since the Latiki party had launched an invasion of Dreamland, the army was now also loyal to the Latiki party, which meant that the Leaper government was no longer able to enforce its rule in Paba, and was in danger of losing its hold on the remainder of the Empire, which had been renamed Vaamū by the Latiki governors.

Among the boys running the Latiki party in Paba, an even more militant sort had arisen: they wanted to destroy not just Dreamland, but every other nation on the planet, and every other political party, including the Leapers. But the generals still pressed on to invade Dreamland and Dreamland only, promising the boys back home that they would have time to destroy the rest of the planet once Dreamland had been subdued.

Counterinvasion of Dreamland

The Latiki army entered Dreamland and began its conventional war much more quickly than the Dreamers had earlier; they were there within months, whereas the Dreamers had taken three years to reach Paba and another three years to give up. The Dreamers were weak, but had regrouped, and had several advantages: they were fighting a defensive war in mountainous terrain, which they were well accustomed to; there was no significant dissent in Dreamland, whereas Vaamū was on the brink of civil war; and the Dreamer soldiers were physically superior to the Latiki, both because they were taller and because they were better armed. This last difference was not due to Vaamū's young population, as even now the army still only allowed adult males, but because of a combination of the Vaamū people's naturally small stature and a persistent famine.

Against this, the Latiki soldiers had only intangibles: they were more obedient than the Dreamers, because they knew that the Dreamers would refuse to accept defectors; and they were mostly people who had left family back home and were fighting not just for Vaamū but for the possibility of returning home to their families and giving them the guarantee of safety. Even so, the Latiki generals motivated their soldiers by promising them control of Dreamland after the war, so that people who wanted to stay in Dreamland could gain power by doing so, and if they wanted, also bring their families.

The Latiki generals were well-educated, but had never fought an offensive war. They knew that Dreamland's strategy for invading Paba had failed, however, and sought to ensure they did not copy Dreamland's strategy. Rather than trying to force Dreamland into surrender by encircling the coast and causing a famine, they decided to attack the army head-on.

Despite the Dreamers' earlier humiliating defeat and their foreknowledge of their coming invasion, the Dreamers were ill-prepared for the next phase of the war. Both nations had a standing army of about 1 million adults, with the Dreamer army being physically more powerful and better armed, and having the advantage of occupying difficult terrain. But the Latiki army invaded from the north, and they quickly cornered the Dreamer battalion holding that stretch of land into a peninsula, where they were forced to surrender. This early victory was due to a quirk of Dreamland's geography: its northern border was easy to invade and difficult to defend.

The Latiki army conquered no major Dreamer cities during this battle, but the victory surprised the Dreamer generals, and the Dreamer civilians were horrified when they realized what was about to happen to them. They realized that during the Dreamers' six-year campaign to invade and conquer Paba, they had never reached any civilian territory at all, since the countryside had been evacuated and the people remaining in the cities were protected by a sturdy wall of soldiers who were ready to die to save their families living close behind them. Yet it had taken the Latiki army only a few days to penetrate Dreamland and claim their first civilian casualties.

Animal symbolism

The Dreamer generals compared the Latiki people to insects attacking a human: though its core, Paba, was small, their nation was protected by a sturdy outer wall of soldiers, and attacks against the Latiki did not affect the inner civilian population . By contrast, even though the Dreamers were larger and more prosperous, their civilians had settled the entire nation, and therefore even a minor invasion led quickly to high body counts for civilians. Furthermore, like blood-sucking parasites, the Latiki soldiers fed on the captured Dreamer people and sent them as slaves to their homeland.

Further battles in Dreamland

The easy conquest of the northeastern headlands had given the Latiki army 1/3 of the coastline of the Dreamer state of Tēyexīl, which contained the vast majority of Dreamland's population. From the enslaved Dreamer civilians, the Latikis learned that most of Dreamland's population was concentrated in two cities, Gadanas near the coast and Xʷakaràna, the imperial capital, further upstream. By conquering these two cities, the Latiki army realized they could conquer Dreamland. They realized that the Dreamers had been fools to invade Paba several years earlier, when they had been given control of the vast majority of AlphaLeap's territory with no struggle at all. Though the Latiki knew that they would be fighting an uphill battle in difficult terrain, they believed that they would easily defeat the two Dreamer cities and force a total surrender.

When the Dreamers realized that the Latiki army was advancing on Gadanas, they relocated their entire military to the river just downstream from the city, leaving the rest of their territory, including Fakarana, undefended. Here they advanced towards the Latiki, intending to deny them as much territory as possible. The Latiki army was also traveling as a single unit, betting everything on the Battle of Gadanas, where they vowed to fight agaisnt the disadvantages of terrain, physical inferiority, and the civilian resistance. They realized that, though it had not been their intent, they were about to cut off both Dreamer cities from the sea, and knew that the Dreamers would starve if the battle ended in a stalemate.

The two armies met up several miles from the sea, where the Dreamers balanced their desire to fight on superior terrain with their need to prevent the Latiki from penetrating too far inland. The Dreamer civilians started fires that spread only downstream, intending to weaken the Latiki soldiers without weakening the Dreamers. Fire soon encircled the Latiki, meaning they could not retreat if they were to lose. However, the fires began to spread to villages along the coast, which the Latiki then claimed as theirs since they knew that neither army could easily reach them. THen they pressed up the river towards Gadanas to launch another conventional battle, figuring that their surprising early victory had gained them a numerical advantage that would counteract their other disadvantages.

In Gadanas the two armies fought the bloodiest battle yet, and both suffered body counts above 200,000, but in the end the Latiki pressed onward and upward over the corpses of the defeated Dreamer soldiers while those Dreamers who had survived the battle made a hasty retreat into the wilderness, realizing that if they surrendered they would become slaves. The Latiki army sieged the city of Gadanas and made the inhabitants their slaves, but here they stopped their invasion, and offered a peace treaty in which the Dreamers would be allowed to hold the upland capital city of Fakarana while the Latiki would take control of Gadanas and the entire northern coast. The Dreamers knew that without access to the sea, they would be helpless, but agreed to the treaty to save the lives of their soldiers. Thus the Latiki army was declared the winner of the war, de facto control of Dreamland was given to the Latiki party, and the Latiki party assumed control of the entirety of Vaamū.

Postwar reforms in Dreamland and Paba

The new Latiki-led government of Dreamland allowed the Dreamer party to persist and dominate power in Fakarana, but they moved the capital of Dreamland to Gadanas, which remained under Latiki martial law. They offered the inhabitants of Fakarana a choice: they could move to Paba as slaves, or wait until the Latiki army cut off the food supply and made slaves of them there. The enslaved Dreamers built a 400 mile road connecting Fakarana and the western edge of Vaamū, from which they could be transported to Paba to work as slaves. The Latiki divided the Dreamers being shipped into Paba into two groups: those who would be owned by the government, and those who would be owned by individual families.

With the return of the surviving Latiki soldiers to their homes, the economy of Paba rapidly improved. Farming was restored, and fishing yields increased, ending the famine in a single season. The leaders promised to enact a nationwide system of education for children. Hygiene standards improved with the restoration of clean water supplies, and the problem of dirty diapers in city centers, some which had lain there for more than ten years, was solved when the Latiki governors had the enslaved Dreamers gather up the diapers and carry them for 4000 miles over the mountains and down the newly built road to Dreamland, where they dumped them into the river to enter the local water supply.

Dreamland-Anzan relations

While Vaamū had been fighting Dreamland, they had also fighting a war against their ally, Tarwas, and managed to conquer it. However, the citizens of Tarwas put up tougher resistance than those of Dreamland, and the Vaamūans were never able to secure a lasting peace.

Rise of the Horses

Four years after Vaamū's Latiki army had defeated and enslaved Dreamland, a new political party arose in Vaamū: the Horses. The Horses were only the third political party in Vaamū's entire history, the other two being the militant Latiki and the defeated, unloved Leapers.

The Horses launched a civil war against all other nations and political parties, saying that the Horses had the sole right to rule on their planet. Most Horses were teenagers who had grown up during the late years of AlphaLeap's rule and had never been allowed an education of any kind, but had been too young to participate in the wars that had preceded their rise. A split in the Horse party led to a massacre of many of their leaders early on, but the group survived and soon launched an invasion of the nation of Zakap, a province of Vaamū which had recently declared independence.

The Horse invasion failed, however, and the Zakaps enslaved the Horses who surrendered. Then the Zakap declared war on another new political party, the Laaatalalatataaa, an Andanese party which had no translated form of their name. However, a split within the Laaatalalatataaa resulted in the assassination of many of their leaders, and the Zakap took over the Laaatalalatataaa the way they had taken over the Horses just months easlier.

In 4145, a small tropical nation called Atlam invaded Vaamū, having just signed a pact with Tarwas promising to meet in the middle and squeeze the huge but hazardously unstable Vaamūan Empire between them. They won this war, but realized that occupying the whole of Vaamū would be suicidal, and instead focused on getting the Vaamūans who were still living in Tarwas to accept a submissive lifestyle or move back to Vaamū.

At this point, the Zakap declared war on all of the other political parties in Vaamū, claiming no alliance to Tarwas, Atlam, Dreamland, or any other outside power. They promised that they would eliminate all of the dissenting armies in Vaamū by themselves and therefore gain uncontested rule of all of Vaamū.

This war was over in a mere four days with a clear Zakap victory. The Zakap set the calendar back to the year 0 and enslaved all surviving Vaamūans who were not part of the Zakap army or a family member of a veteran.

Zakap rule of Vaamū lasted about two years. In 4149, a group of slaves calling themselves the Tinks declared war on their Zakap masters. The Tinks were mostly elderly men who had control of the slave laborers in the weapons industries, despite being officially still slaves themselves. They were among the very few people in Vaamū who had ever been to a school of any kind.

The Tinks locked their masters out of the weapons supply and therefore had both the advantage of numbers and the advantage of better offensive power, and quickly defeated the Zakap in a single bloody battle. They renamaed the country Anzan and enacted sweeping reforms: they abolished slavery and child labor, they created a nationwide school system (a promise of the earlier Latiki party which had gone unfulfilled due to unrelenting civil war), and they created a new system of government based on democracy, unique in the world at the time. However, they also affirmed the right of their new empire, Anzan, to be an empire, and therefore to revoke democracy in areas of the empire they felt unfit for self-government. The name Anzan was chosen to honor the Andanese people, who had never had a nation of their own. Furthermore, the Dreamers were aghast when they learned that the Tinks had enforced the abolition of slavery by killing all of the slaves they had earlier taken from Dreamland.

Within a few months, the Tinks declared war on their female population, alleging that they were largely disloyal to the imperial goals and needed to be forced out of power into a submissive position. Many females at this time had used their newfound democratic rights to join the Crystal party, and to declare that the Crystals were the enemies of the Tinks. The men fought the women for several months, and then turned against their children. Soon the Tinks had killed off so many of their own friends and family members that they were no longer the majority in their empire, and the empire came to fall under the control of six mutually hostile armies, each based in a different geographic region of the empire. These were the Crystals, the Tinks, the Repilians, the Zenith, the Raspara, and an allegiance of tribes living in Subumpam who protested the new form of government and preferred to identify as an alliance of ethnic groups rather than a political party.

Of the six groups, only the Raspara had received any significant formal education, and they were the smallest of the six armies. Although the Tinks had been founded by learned elderly men, these had been quickly eliminated in war and had handed control to an alliance of young boys and young girls who had promised not to declare war on each other. Thus the vast empire of Anzan was engulfed in a civil war directed by generals who could not read any language or count beyond 10. The Dreamers realized their attempt to conquer AlphaLeap had been a horrible mistake: had they merely waited another fifteen years, AlphaLeap would have destroyed itself. Some Dreamers now wanted to revive the war and invade Anzan as a seventh power, but the majority in Dreamland wanted to wait long enough to see whether it might be more prudent to ally with the likeliest among the six armies to be the ultimate victor.

Further contact with Anzan

The Tinks soon renamed themselves to the Swamp Kids and pledged to one day conquer and settle their people in Baeba Swamp, a tropical paradise protected from invasion by water and tall mountains. Baeba Swamp was near Dreamland, but Dreamland had given up trying to conquer Baeba Swamp hundreds of years earlier. They predicted that the Swamp Kids would fail miserably given the pathetic state of their empire at the current time, but were aware that, in the future, the Swamp Kids might be able to unify their empire again and become as strong as they had been when they had invaded and conquered Dreamland less than twenty years earlier.

In February 4156, an unauthorized army claiming allegiance to the Swamp Kids invaded Dreamland and quickly lost, showing the Dreamers that the Swamp Kids had hit yet another new low, as the invading Swampy soldiers had failed to even injure the Dreamers, let alone kill or make captives of them. As prisoners of war, the Swampy soldiers lived better under the Dreamers than they had in their own country.

When news of the catastrophic defeat reached the civilian Swamp Kids, many Swamp Kids considered defecting to the Dreamers. The Swamp Kids still believed in democracy, and allowed a Dreamer party to exist in Anzan, but the other side of the Swamp Kids had reacted to the defeat by vowing to invade and enslave Dreamland, taking a million Dreamers captive to avenge the thousand that the Dreamers had taken of them. Thus the Dreamer party remained underground and did not advertise its existence to the mainline Swamp Kids. This caused the mainline Swamp Kids to gravitate towards the more militant wing of the party that wanted to add a war against Dreamland to the many civil wars the Swamp Kids were already dealing with in their own territory.

In 4162, the Dreamer party in Anzan sought refuge in the tropical nation of Atlam, which at the time was run by the Crystals. Dreamland had denied these Dreamers the right to move to Dreamland, saying that they were too militant and would cause more problems for Dreamland than they would solve. After about eighteen months in Atlam, the Dreamer refugees declared war on their rescuers and slaughtered many Crystal civilians. In response, the Swamp Kids added the Atlaman Dreamers to the list of nations they were at war with, and the Swampy generals promised to do their best to restore power to the Crystals in Atlam even as they fought battles against the Crystals in Anzan. In response, the tropical nation of Wax, formerly a part of AlphaLeap, joined the invasion on the side of the Dreamers and promised to keep the Swamp Kids out.

Contact with the Baywatchers

In August 4167, a second pro-Dreamer wing of the Swamp Kids emerged and by early 4168 became concentrated in northwestern Anzan, near the border with Dreamland itself. They named themsleves the Baywatch party, the same name as one of the political parties in Dreamland. The Baywatchers signed a pact of peaceful coexistence with the mainline Swamp Kids, and promised that, unlike the earlier Dreamers, they would seek no war and would prefer to live in Anzan than in Dreamland. They strengthened their claim by pointing out that, regretting the tragic mistake that had happened in Atlam, Dreamland had invited the Baywatchers to move to Dreamland, and that many had chosen to remain in Anzan.

Baywatch War I

In early 4168, Dreamland invaded the Baywatch region of Anzan, claiming that there should be only one pro-Dreamer nation in the world, and that pro-Dreamer colonies in other nations belonged under Dreamland's control. The Swamp Kids joined the war, seeing the Dreamer invasion as proof that the Baywatchers had been lying about preferring to live in Anzan. When the Swampy army approached the Dreamer army, the Dreamers retreated in terror, as they had until then still believed the Swamp Kids incapable of patrolling their own territory, let alone fighting a war against a foreign power. The Swamp Kids finished defeating the Baywatchers by the summer of 4170.

Baywatch War II

After the war, however, the Swampies were unable to control the citizenry of Baywatch, and Baywatch decided to declare independence in January 4172. They named their new nation Tata. Tata promised it would avoid seeking unification with Dreamland, and also would not reunite with Anzan. Tata allowed democracy, and permitted multiple parties. The ruling party retained the name Baywatch despite their disillusionment with Dreamland.

In the summer of 4172, the Swamp Kids invaded Tata in an attempt to finish what they had failed to do two years earlier. They defeated Tata by early 4173. However, by this time, the citizens of Tata were growing annoyed at the constant harassment by the Swamp Kids, and many chose to settle in the Swamp Kids' territory in order to escape the Swamp Kids. This perverse logic worked in their favor because, in Anzan, there were so many insurrections that the Swamp Kids were forced to side with one enemy against another, and had to be careful in battle to avoid accidentally killing an ally. By contrast, in Tata, nearly the entire population supported the Baywatchers and there was no incentive for the Swamp Kids to seek defectors among their enemies, nor to be cautious about whom they killed.

Dreamland-Raspara relations

In the autumn of 4175, the Swamp Kids surrounded the parasitic colony of Sikel, which had been founded by Raspara several years earlier and survived by capturing and enslaving Swamp Kids who wandered within their range. Dreamland immediately invaded the Swamp Kids, having signed a secret pact with the Raspara just months earlier. Within just a few months, the Raspara-Dreamer alliance conquered the Swamp Kids and forced them to surrender.

Faced with an unexpected defeat, the Swamp Kids declared war on Repilia, a weak power in the far north that had been neutral in the war. They blamed Repilia for not helping the Swamp Kids, saying that because the Swamp Kids had conquered Repilia, Repilia owed the Swamp Kids a promise of complete military allegiance. But the other nations joined the war to protect Repilia, and the Swamp Kids were defeated even more quickly and profoundly than before. Dreamland invaded Tata now in order to gain easier access to Anzan, since Tata was now the only lowland connection between Dreamland and Anzan. By this time, although the Baywatch party was still the dominant power in Tata's democratic government, power was rapidly shifting to the insurgent Raspara party. Both parties were united in their support of Dreamland's recent invasion, but the Dreamers were uncomfortable allying with a nation in which power might change hands from one year to the next, and made it known that they preferred the Baywatchers to the Raspara.

Raspara regroup

As the invasion of Anzan progressed, the Dreamers began to take over the government of Tata. Tata's two political parties had both endorsed the invasion, because both stood to benefit from it: the Baywatch party was aligned with Dreamland, and the Raspara party was aligned with the Raspara party of Anzan. But Dreamland was suspicious of the Raspara, who had been blood enemies of Dreamland for hundreds of years, and the Dreamers suspected that the Raspara were planning to suddenly switch sides near the end of the invasion in order to steal territory gained by the Baywatchers and transfer it to the Raspara.

Dreamland knew that occupying Anzanan territory without the cooperation of Tata was impossible, since the only road between Dreamland and Anzan that did not pass through Tata was the one that had been laid by slaves and passed through cold, rugged terrain that was easily occupied by rebellious Raspara, but made difficult travel for the Dreamers. Although Tata was a democracy, and supporters of both parties were scattered throughout its territory, the Raspara had made military preparations only in the cold, rugged interior, and felt at home there. Likewise, although many supporters of the Baywatch party lived in the interior, the Baywatchers had stationed their military mostly along the coast, which was easily invaded but far more valuable to civilians than the interior. Thus the distribution of the two armies' powers reflected their traditional association with climate: the Baywatchers were strong along the warm west coast, while the Raspara, who had earlier called themselves Cold Men, controlled the cold, dry interior.

Dreamland realized that this bipartisan division could lead to a civil war in Tata, and ordered the two parties to merge their battalions and for both to submit to Dreamer supervision. The Dreamers promised that any territory won by the combined army would go to Tata's control, and not Dreamland's. The Raspara agreed to this plan, promising their soldiers that they would ensure that any land occupied by a Raspara army would be controlled by Raspara only regardless of its formal political definition. The Baywatchers also agreed, but many Baywatchers were suspicious of the Dreamers, who had earlier claimed that all Baywatch territory (not yet called Tata at the time) belonged to Dreamland. This earlier botched invasion also motivated the Raspara, who saw it as proof that even a pro-Dreamer party would be seen as an enemy by the Dreamers, and that allying with Dreamland was futile.

As the war progressed, other armies within Anzan joined the fight on the side of the invaders: the Crystal colony of Ekinakia seceded and fought battles against the Swamp Kids living within Ekinakia; and some Repilians joined the fight without issuing a formal declaration of war or secession.

Eaten up from all sides, the Swamp Kids rapidly began to lose ground. But they took note of the fact that, of their five invaders, Dreamland was having the most difficulty in occupying territory, and seemed to be entirely reliant on cooperation from Tata, which was unreliable because its two political parties had both recently fought wars against Dreamland.

Reaction in Anzan

As the Raspara army pushed deeper into Anzan and tortured more captured Swamp Kids every day, some Swamp Kids began defecting to the Raspara. Their reasons for this were complex, and the Raspara voted narrowly to allow the defectors to remain neutral in the war, even though the Raspara generals predicted that they would be worse off with the converts on their side than they would have been had the converts remained enemies, as they tended to make easy prey for the invading Raspara. The difficult situation caused Anzan's Raspara party to split into two hostile wings; however, news of the split did not reach Tata, and the Raspara in Tata continued to see themselves as a single entity, meaning that decisions made by the party leaders were obeyed by all. The Raspara leaders in Anzan declared that this meant there were actually three Raspara parties: the Blonde and Blue parties, based in Anzan; and the Green party, confined to Tata and largely ignorant of the internal struggles of the much larger Raspara parties in Anzan. The Raspara leadership believed that Tata's Raspara would likely choose to remain united, and if forced, would vote to side with the Blonde wing rather than the Blue, as the Blondes were more militant against Dreamland and less interested in controlling Anzan.

Reaction in Tata

Tata's Raspara party was much younger and less organized than the parent party in Anzan, and its leaders pled to the Anzanan Raspara for help in maintaining order, even at the risk of alienating their own members. By tradition, the Raspara never expelled members for any reason, even treason: Raspara had to leave of their own will. But now the Raspara party had split into two factions who supported opposite sides of the war between Dreamland and the Swamp Kids.

The Raspara parent party came to decide that the Tataan Raspara were struggling because they were much poorer than the Raspara in Anzan. Rasparas living in Anzan had major ideological differences as well, but they diapered up their problems by sharing their gains, particularly their still-growing pool of slaves, and pursuing their common goal of self-sufficiency. Thus the Raspara voted to help the Raspara in Tata gain control of slaves as well, and the Blondes and Blues agreed to let the Tataans pick which wing to ally with, and to allow them to remain as a third "Green" wing if they chose to ally with neither.

By this time, the Swamp Kids had definitively lost their war against their many invaders, but had refused to sign a surrender treaty; instead, they persisted in their fight, taking the battle to Repilia, which had been mostly neutral in the war but had proven very weak in the past. As the Swamp Kids focused on Repilia, the Raspara army penetrated even deeper into Anzan, and the Raspara were able to lock the other invaders out of the newly gained Raspara territory. On this land, the Raspara enslaved all of the Swamp Kids they could capture and distributed the slaves among the Raspara colonies. The Raspara figured that they had gained enough land in this most recent advance that they could afford to send slaves into Tata to help satisfy the desires of the Raspara living there for a large pool of helpless and easily abused slaves.

After being visited by a delegation of Raspara from Anzan, the Tataan Raspara party announced yet another new war, this time against both Dreamland and the Swamp Kids. Their long-term plan was to conquer and enslave the Swamp Kids, and then use them to conquer and enslave Dreamland. In this, they united the goals of the Blonde and Blue Raspara, with the Blues' war taking first priority and the Blondes feeding on their successes. The Dreamer army was aware of the new war but, despite having just won a clear victory over the Swamp Kids, was unwilling to invade the upland areas of Tata where most Raspara now lived. Instead they fortified their strongholds along Tata's coast and promised the civilians there that their cities would be safe from both the Raspara and any potential attempt at reconquest by the Swamp Kids.

The Honeypot War

In 4177, the Raspara party announced the Honeypot War (Gapeyes), an invasion of Anzan to be launched from Tata. The Tataan Raspara sent a very small battalion of soldiers into Anzan, hoping to provoke the Swamp Kids into reviving their war yet again. The Raspara announced that they were fighting in the name of Tata, not the Raspara party, and that they had put aside their differences with the Baywatch party of Tata. The Raspara battalion deliberately attacked a much larger Swampy army, and then quickly retreated, taking with them as many prisoners of war as they could hold. The Raspara were happy when they realized that they had indeed triggered the Swamp Kids to counterattack, and that the Swamp Kids had launched an invasion of Tata.

The Swamp Kids were unaware that they had been tricked, and as they entered Tata they focused their attacks on the Baywatch strongholds along the coast rather than the mountainous terrain of the Raspara. To do this, they invaded through the Anzanan border state of Puba, which had been conquered by the Dreamer-Raspara coalition and assigned to Tata, but whose civilian population consisted mostly of pro-Swamp resistance and pro-Raspara rebels. The Raspara here ordered their supporters to hold back and let the Swamp Kids invade their territory, promising the Raspara that all territory involved in the fighting would be under Raspara control when the war was over. Some Raspara, however, pulled yet another trick: they disguised themselves as Baywatchers (who mostly had the same language), and claimed to be rebelling against Baywatch control. Many of these rebels had covert sympathy for the Swampies, and wanted to see the Swamp Kids win their war against Tata even if it produced no benefits for the Raspara watching from the sidelines. They thus effectively became Swamp Kids, but for the fact that without formal secession from the Raspara party, the mainline Raspara were not allowed to attack or enslave them.

The Swamp Kids soon pushed through Puba and advanced towards Tata's capital city, Pĭdu. The Swamp Kids were still unaware that they had been tricked, as were the Baywatchers whom they were now attacking. The Swamp Kids thus had the advantage of surprise, as the Baywatchers had considered an attack from the Raspara more likely than an attack from the Swamp Kids.

As the Baywatchers fought the Swamp Kids, the Raspara army prepared to mobilize from their campsites in upper Tata. They waited patiently as the battles raged along the coast, with the Swamp Kids making slow progress as they took control of one city at a time. When the Swamp Kids had control of 1/3 of northern Tata, the Raspara army cut through the forests and pulsed downwards to the capital city of Pĭdu. The Raspara were much more efficient soldiers than the Swamp Kids, and had the advantage of facing a mostly-civilian population, as the soldiers were mostly preoccupied fighting the Swamp Kids. Thus the Raspara soldiers obtained a body count ratio of more than 20:1 as they fought their way towards the coast, and they conquered the capital city within less than a month. The Raspara abolished democracy and forced the Baywatchers into slavery, where they built fortifications around Pĭdu to prevent any other army from seizing control.

Thus, when the Swamp Kids reached Pĭdu, they found Raspara guards stationed outside the city who refused to let the Swampy soldiers in. Faced with the prospect of defeat after an extremely deadly war, the Swamp Kids signed a power-sharing agreement with the Raspara establishing joint control of Tata's government: the Raspara would rule without democracy from the capital city of Pĭdu, and the Swamp Kids would hold monthly referendums where their people would vote on how best they could serve their Raspara masters in their new labor camps.

To-do

1. Explanation for why Tata quickly fell to Matrix control, despite the Matrixes failing to gain any significant ground in Anzan.
2. Cut down paragraphs that are mostly about Tata, and copy the longer versions to Tata.