Players

The Play party was a political organization founded in Paba in the year 4127 by women rebelling against the ruling Leaper party. They immediately abolished child labor and declared that any economic consequences they suffered would be preferable to sending their children back to work.

Background

In 4107, the Dolphin Rider party, which ruled from western Dreamland, announced they had conquered the planet. However, outside powers knew that the Riders would be very weak outside their home territory of Dreamland. The Riders had overthrown Adabawa, the leader of a different Dreamlandic army which had, at one point, indeed controlled much of the planet, but the Rider army was much weaker and could not enforce the treaties the other nations had signed with Adabawa. AlphaLeap had itself signed this treaty, and considered itself formally an ally of the Dolphin Riders, but decided in 4108 to claim an empire of its own. They invaded the ancient city of Paba and planned to grow from there to encircle all land east of Baeba Swamp.

First years under the Leapers

In 4108, AlphaLeap saw that Paba's people had become the world leaders in education for over a thousand years and had lots of knowledge to share with the world. AlphaLeap promised to erase that record, and immediately converted all of Paba's schools into detention centers. They said that under the Leaper government, Pabap children would be given no education at all. Anyone, child or adult, caught reading a book not written or approved by the Leapers would be killed immediately.

The Leapers had conquered a very large empire, but they moved the capital to Paba in the extreme south in order to keep it close to their homeland, AlphaLeap. Paba had been a capital city before, but of a much smaller empire.

The Leapers handled their slaves badly. Despite the high birth rate, so many people died each day that the population actually fell during some months. Most of the time the slaves who saw the Leapers executing rebellious slaves succumbed to fear and obeyed their masters, but when they saw even the most obedient slaves tortured and killed for mistakes that weren't their fault, more and more slaves risked their lives to oppose the Leapers' sadistic misleadership.

Creation of the Tadpoles

AlphaLeap created a new political party called the Tadpoles to gather the opinions of the dissenters into a single group. However, the Tadpoles' opinions were chosen by the Leapers, and one of those opinions was that individual Tadpoles were not permitted to dissent from the Tadpole party platform. Furthermore, any Tadpole who lost a debate over political policy against a Leaper was given the death penalty. Since all of the Tadpoles had the same opinions, the Leapers held frequent organized debates and executed the Tadpoles after the debate was over.

In the late 4110's, some loyal subjects who were given positions of authority by the Leapers began to make independent decisions on behalf of the enslaved Tadpoles. The Leapers considered these people to also be Tadpoles, and kidnapped and tortured them whenever they heard of a new incident. The Tadpoles and other nonpolitical slaves took this as a sign that the Leapers did not respect them, pointing out that many Leapers seemed to actually enjoy watching the unexplainable accidents that seemed so frequently to take the lives of Tadpole children.

For example, a young Tadpole girl named Yulutika rescued many younger girls trapped in a room, and then went to rescue a woman, but then the younger girls turned against Yulutika and strangled her in the belief that the woman was intending to torture them.

Revolt of 4123

In 4123, some Tadpoles set fire to the plantations in the far western area of Halasala. Thousands of Leapers died trying to stop the fire from spreading, even though thousands of Tadpoles also died. One third of the Leaper governors moved to the center of the fire to stop it from spreading, and one female slave decided to close the gap and entrap them entirely in fire. The Tadpoles were amused to see the Leapers struggling to carry water from area lakes and rivers to try to pour it on the fire, knowing that they could not ask the slaves to help because any slave would simply dump the water on the ground. The Leapers were so tied down that they could not even control their slaves, and many slaves simply fled, even knowing that they no longer had a home or any possessions.

When AlphaLeap found out what had happened, they disowned the Leaper government of Halasala and let Halasala become independent. Thus almost the entire Leaper population was dead and the Tadpoles were free from oppression after fifteen years of torture.

However, AlphaLeap also declared that "an unfinished Leaper government could mean disaster in the future", and decided to kill all of the surviving Tadpoles, surviving Leaper occupiers, and anyone else who they suspected of disloyalty. They thus declared war on the entire empire of Halasala. AlphaLeap sent about 40,000 soldiers into Halasala to murder the civilian population.

Even though Halasala's population was much larger than AlphaLeap's, AlphaLeap expected an easy victory because their soldiers had dangerous weapons and thick metal armor and their intended victims were underclothed and mostly weaponless. However, the Leaper occupiers stopped firefighting so they could fight instead the invading AlphaLeap army. Thus Leapers fought Leapers, and some of the Leaper governors of AlphaLeap fled into a new breakaway nation called Puap, which had broken away from Halasala early on when it was revealed that AlphaLeap believed it needed to torture Tadpole children in order to wield its power.

Puap actually also enslaved Tadpoles, but in Puap, the ruling Leapers adored and exalted the Tadpoles as fulfilling the ideal role that the ruling Leapers could only wish they could achieve. Leapers who did work, they said, were lazy and inefficient, whereas the Tadpoles held in place by whips and chains worked five times harder and never complained. Another important difference was t hat there was no ethnic division between master and slave in Puap; Puapian natives could be masters, and Leapers could be slaves (though this occurred only for criminals). Thus the Leapers fled into Puap, figuring the Puapians would welcome them in.

War against AlphaLeap

Although AlphaLeap had denounced the Leaper government's abuses of its slaves in Halasala, it was common in this era to believe that the best way to end slavery was to kill all of the slaves. Thus the Tadpole slaves and their abusive Leaper masters fought on the same side — against AlphaLeap — and together they eliminated AlphaLeap's soldiers one by one.

In 4127, the chaos of the war reached such a level that animals began preying on humans for the first time in 1400 years. The Tadpoles sided with the animals, and guided them to kill AlphaLeap's soldiers because AlphaLeap was invading them. The simple minded animals mostly obeyed, and many AlphaLeap soldiers were bitten and bled to death through their body armor. AlphaLeap admitted defeat, and the conflict returned to its original two-party state, in which the Tadpoles fought against the remaining Leaper governors.

The Tadpoles threw off their manufactured ideology and formed a new political party, the Play party (Late Andanese Latiki), for the first time in their emipre's history. A few Halasalans who were loyal to the Leaper governors moved into forts with them, expecting to face the 15,000 soldiers of the Player army soon. But the Players had sworn off direct violence, and preferred to use forest fires and animals with sharp teeth for proteection instead of spears and swords.

AlphaLeap responded by making an alliance with the firebirds, specifically a species of firebirds that was much larger than average. These were called "20-ton rocs".

Independence

Play party platform

The new Play party was run entirely by women. Player ideology demanded that all able-bodied adult males serve in the military and be battle-ready at all times. These soldiers were also required to procure their own food, so much of the farmland in the lowland plains was turned over to the military. Meanwhile, the women at home found themselves vastly outnumbered by needy children. Thus, much of Play party policy revolved around children and children's needs. Since AlphaLeap had shut down Halasala's school system when they conquered the empire in 4108, neither the children nor most of the Player adults had had any education, and they governed largely based on their emotions.

For example, AlphaLeap had shut down the schools and forced all children to work in dangerous manual labor occupations in order to improve Halasala's economic output. The Play governors declared that child labor was cruel and therefore freed all children from their work, but there were no adults to replace them. Thus, crucial occupations such as farming and clothes manufacturing that had previously been performed entirely by children were now entirely abandoned, and the Players simply stopped producing clothes. The Player party immediately closed all restaurants and luxury goods stores, saying that people were going to have to start eating poverty foods until the war was over and perhaps even afterwards.

Hygiene

As the population of infants and toddlers grew, the problem of waste disposal quickly became alarming. A committee of Leaper civilians, still nominally in control of the empire outside Paba, recommended that the Play party reinstitute child labor and assign children the jobs of cleaning up human waste. The advisors said that the Players could not assign waste disposal jobs to adults because that would cost them valuable man-hours in every other industry. Only children, they said, should clean up waste products, because that was the only job they were capable of that adults could not do better.

But the Player women ignored the advice, as they realized that by obeying the Leapers they would become their own children's worst enemies. They especially did not like the idea of giving the most undesirable jobs to the youngest children. Since neither children nor adults were willing to clean up their messes, Player-held territory soon became a pestilential mess of swarming insects and flames the Players refused to put out. Long-dormant diseases reappeared and spread to both the Players and the Leapers. Some desperate Leapers humiliated themselves by volunteering to clean up the Players' messes themselves, but there were so many Player children that the Leapers could not keep up, and most soon fled to their homelands by boat.

Food production

Meanwhile, even as lands around Paba began to recover from their famine, the famine became more severe in Paba because the Player party had prohibited farming, saying the only legal foods were those which could be obtained in an instant. Some children believed they could find food if they crossed the ocean to Amade, but none of them knew which way to sail.

The Players were all former slaves, and in the egalitarian society they set up, famine affected all people about equally, and they had no outside enemy to blame their hunger problems on. Therefore, they made no changes to their way of life, and the famine continued to deepen.

But as hunger turned to starvation, the Player children began to violate the prohibition on child labor. With most adults tied down, children quickly assumed the role of procuring food for themselves and their parents, and most of this food was taken from the sea rather than the farms located in the region south of Paba that had remained under civilian control. The small, clumsy children were prone to accidents and injuries in their boats, but when a group of experienced adult male sailors of the Leaper tribe offered to help them, the children accused the men of catching fish that would otherwise have been caught by the kids, and reported the incident to their parents. The Player government then declared the entire coastline off-limits for all adults and all non-Players.

To control the rationing of food, private markets called uyunāā were set up just inland from the shore where the children would sell their fish and receive large sums of money to hold in the event they became sick or otherwise unable to catch fish for a period of time. All of the employees in these stores were also children, mostly girls. Women who had been childless began adopting orphans because this was their only legal way to access food. Soon, nearly every orphan had a home, and the Players saw that it had taken them only a few weeks to entirely solve the problem of homeless orphans.

A small number of orphans, mostly boys, chose to remain independent rather than seeking an adoptive parent; this was in part because the Player economy was such that parents were an economic drain on their young children, unlike all other societies. Some children realized that, despite their mothers promising to eliminate child labor, they had quickly devolved to a state in which children worked even harder than before while their mothers did seemingly no work at all. However, women were in fact very busy with the duties of childcare.

Dreamland-Halasala relations

In early 4132, Dreamland's Baywatch party heard that AlphaLeap's abusive government had been overthrown and replaced with an all-female party calling itself Play, and decided the time was ripe to invade.

The general of the Dreamer army threatened the women with invasion in the hopes that fear might motivate them to surrender and therefore prevent the war. The Players immediately surrendered the vast majority of their empire to the Dreamer army, maintaining only their claim to the capital city of Paba and many cities connected to Paba by roads and rivers; these were the areas where Play party support was strongest. They promised their people that they would hold strong, and would not obey a foreign army that had yet to begin its war. Meanwhile, they offered people in the surrendered territories the right to move to Paba in order to stay safe, even though they knew this would put pressure on their food supply.

Leaper reaction

The Players also offered to return control of the empire to the Leapers, if only because they wanted to see a war between Dreamland and AlphaLeap rather than a war between Dreamland and the small, poorly equipped Play army. They knew that AlphaLeap had been maintaining a small private army, independent from the official imperial army of Halasala. But AlphaLeap quickly withdrew its soldiers from the territories that the Players had granted to Dreamland, and told the Players that AlphaLeap's soldiers would only fight in areas where the Play army was on the front lines and took most of the casualties. Since the imperial army was now loyal to the Play party, the Leapers refused to fight. Indeed, most Leaper soldiers were now moving back to their original home states, AlphaLeap and Wax, since they knew that the Dreamers were unlikely to push into that territory.

Other nations also rejected any alliance with Paba unless Paba agreed to allow a complete takeover of the government with no rights for Pabaps. Realizing that this would be even worse than what the Dreamers wanted to do to them, the Pabaps rejected all of these potential alliances as well. (They were willing to let AlphaLeap abuse them, but not the other groups, because they figured only AlphaLeap would have an interest in fighting a total war against Dreamland to hold onto its conquest, since AlphaLeap's home territory was a desert, whereas the other major powers had little interest in protecting Paba.)

Some people did move from the other parts of the Four Quarters Empire into Paba, but they were not there to help the Pabaps. Instead, they were fleeing the invading Dreamer army, figuring that they were safer in Paba than anywhere else because Paba was at the extreme opposite end of the empire from where Dreamland had entered. The Players had no soldiers at all in the northwestern part of Halasala; they had been expecting the locals to do the fighting for them.

The Four Quarters War

Since the Dreamers had invaded the northern part of the Empire first, it was mostly northern tribes such as the Raspara that had fled into Paba. The Player women welcomed these people, even though some members of the northern tribes felt that the Pabaps had betrayed them. They nevertheless signed a treaty of mutual assistance, in which the Play army promised to fight the war in Paba only, allowing Dreamland to consume as much as 85% of the land area of Halasala before even beginning to fight back. These were the approximate borders of Pabap settlement, meaning that they were willing to surrender all of the ethnic minorities' cities to the Dreamers. They were not abandoning these people, but merely felt that with the government and most of the land army concentrated in Paba, staging a defense of the wider territory was unrealistic. To compensate the other tribes for their loss of territory, the immigrants were given more power in the government than their population would normally have deserved. On the other hand, they had to work harder than most Pabaps since they brought no possessions with them.

However, there were some settlements outside Pabap territory that the Players considered worthy of sending the army to defend. The largest was Blop, a Raspara-majority city at the mouth of a very important river. Moreover, the Players expected that the local people would at least try to slow down the invading Dreamers, as both the Crystals and the Thunderers had been blood enemies of the Dreamers for hundreds of years.

Pabaps living in Halasala realized that they were being invaded by Dreamland because they were the seat of power of an empire that also included the homelands of the Thunderers and the Crystals. Thus, they felt, if they simply threw away all of the Thunder and Crystal lands, they could perhaps prevent the war. But the Players' military planners were no longer publicly promoting pacifism, and felt that it was their duty to protect their supporters even if they lost the claim to the much larger empire they had inherited.

Treaty of Vaamū

Halasala renamed itself Vaamū now; the new name came from a language spoken in the north. The Treaty of Vaamū was signed, stating that the four powers had all agreed that the imperial army would defend only Paba, leaving the northern tribes the choice of whether to remain in their homelands and face invasion or better their chances by moving to Paba. The treaty helped Paba because it greatly reduced the amount of territory the Vaamūan army was responsible for; their army was very small for their land area, and they felt it would be easier to defend Paba than to defend Paba, Subumpam, the Thunder Empire, and the Crystal Empire, whose combined land area was more than half of the habitable land on the planet. The treaty also helped the other three allies because it guaranteed that any battles fought in the war would be fought in or near Paba, thus sparing the other three empires from having to fight the worst of the battles in the war. Although Dreamland was a large nation, Vaamūans did not think that Dreamland had enough soldiers to attempt an occupation of all of the territory that the Pabap army had retreated from. They were worried, however, that Dreamers would start attacking and enslaving civilians living in the other three Quarters.

This treaty also thus stated that anyone living anywhere in the Four Quarters Empire could move to Paba as refugees and that the government of Paba would take money from its own people in order to house and shelter the refugees. Since the Four Quarters Empire had been a single political entity all along, Paba opening its doors to immigrants from the rest of the Empire was not new; indeed, Paba was the most diverse of the four Quarters. But now that they were Vaamū, they disclaimed the other three empires, and almost all of the Pabaps living in those other Empires (except for cities like Blop and their environs) moved back to Paba as refugees as well.

First Dreamer invasion

The Pabap generals were surprised when they saw the maps of the early conquests of the Dreamer army in northern and western Vaamū. It seemed that Paba really was their main target after all, even though they were making a journey several thousand miles long to get there. They considered that the Dreamer armies were probably expecting to be able to live off the land as they roamed, since a supply line coming from their home country would be an easy target for attack. Townspeople living in what had been the Thunder Empire (it was now known, in Pabappa, as Pupompom) were sending reports of Dreamer armies roaming through their countryside, but not committing violence against the locals. However, the Dreamers did force the Thunderers to supply them with food and clothing taken from the upper class of the Thunderers. The soldiers in the Dreamer army were thus happy and healthy, but their progress was extremely slow.

Paba was curious why the Dreamers didn't seem to be interested in conquering the territories held by their traditional enemies, the Crystals and the Thunderers, but had decided instead to attack the Pabaps who had never hurt them at all. One reason was that Dreamland had acquired an exaggerated picture of the differences in physical form between their people and Paba's: some Dreamers believed that Pabaps were very small people, about knee high, and could fly. Thus they planned to enter Paba and convince the Pabaps to surrender based on sheer physical intimidation.

However, the newer generations of Pabaps were more battle-ready than they had been for several thousand years, and no longer felt they needed to rely on ethnic minorities to fill their armies. In part this was because Paba had been invaded so many times that its people were in many ways no longer Pabaps; they were still very small people on average, but had a lot more variety amongst them. In this way they resembled the Dreamers, who were descended from Labans who had married Thunderers and then invaded the Crystals.

Even though the Thunderers were happy to see that they were free of violence, many of them still figured they would be better off in Paba, even if they had no possessions to take with them. Others moved to Paba simply to help out the war effort, as they felt they could defeat Dreamland by getting to Paba ahead of them and then starting an offensive. An unintended side effect of the treaty was that the many people fleeing into Paba to escape the invasion were disproportionately likely to agree to sign up for the Pabap military, as they were coming to Paba with few possessions and, even though Paba was offering them welfare payments to offset their loss of property, still had less to lose than most other Pabaps. Thus Paba had partly recreated the old Pabap system where Paba paid ethnic minorities to move to Paba but required them to sign up for the military whereas native Pabaps were free.

Some of the Thunderers moving to Paba poisoned the earth as they retreated, even though they knew that this would make life impossible for those Thunderers who had chosen to remain in their towns. When it became clear that Dreamland was apparently not interested in a large-scale occupation of Thunder territory, the Thunderers were urged to stop polluting their environment, although it was difficult for the Pabaps to communicate their message to an area in which they no longer had soldiers. However, Dreamland's invasion was moving very slowly, and even the Dreamer generals seemed to expect that it would take them a full two years (autumn 4134) to reach Paba. Paba's generals realized that this slowness was Dreamland's main weakness in the war, and that the Pabap Army could surprise the Dreamers with an aggressive push northward and fight them in the towns they were occupying. But they still obeyed their treaty, and agreed to let the Dreamers move through Thunder territory and fight the war in Paba, not Pupompom.

Raspara settlement

Non-Player tribes were allowed to disobey the law drafting all adult males into the military, and the Play women had passed a law compensating non-Player tribes for the loss of their territory by providing them free property and a monthly stipend to make living in Paba easier. Furthermore, these minority tribes were given extra power in the government to overrule the Player majority on certain issues. They hoped this law would entice the tall, virile men of northern and western tribes to move into Paba and marry women who had no husbands because so many men were dying on the battlefield. However, this new law excluded the Raspara tribe of Blop, because the Raspara's land had not been surrendered to the Dreamers. The Raspara men were angry at this, and many Raspara men pushed their way through the Play army and asked the women in Paba why men from faraway places such as Baeba Swamp were treated as superiors whereas the Raspara were expected to live in the same conditions as the Players who had invited them in.

The Players responded that other tribes were being compensated for their loss of land, whereas the Raspara ruled from the city of Blop, which had not been surrendered. However, the Raspara had built settlements far to the west of Blop, tending farms that they had been forced to hand over to the advancing Dreamer army. Even though the Dreamer army had passed through the rural Raspara settlements and done very little damage, the Raspara still protested that the Player women's invitation to the tribesmen of Baeba Swamp, where the Dreamer army had never approached, proved that their law had no relation to property damage and that the women were simply choosing tribes with handsome men to absorb and settle down with.

Raspara-Zenith relations

As the Raspara moved into the Players' civilian territory, they encountered members of the Zenith tribe. Like the Raspara, the Zeniths had a tall, muscular body type and were eager to marry the petite Player women whose husbands were fighting in the war against Dreamland. And like the Raspara, the Zeniths had been denied monthly stipends by the Play government because their territory had not been surrendered to Dreamland in the treaty. Since the Raspara and the Zeniths were both ethnic minorities, they were not required to join the military and thus roamed freely throughout civilian territory whose adult population was otherwise entirely female. Some Raspara proposed an alliance with the Zeniths whereby the two tribes would divide the women between them; the Zeniths would control most of the deep inland areas, while the Raspara, despite having come from the north, would control the southern areas and the coast. This was because the Zeniths had occupied the same areas of land for over 2000 years whereas the Raspara were recent immigrants.

Since all Player males were required to spend their entire adult life in the army, both tribes knew that any adult male they met on the street was an ethnic minority. They thus promised that all adult males would be considered friends, and that the Raspara-Zenith alliance would only make enemies of women who resisted their impulses. However, they knew that men from western areas such as Baeba Swamp were also moving to Paba, and that these men would be accorded a superior legal status because they would neither have to work nor serve in the army. However, the Raspara and the Zeniths believed that they could distinguish Baebans on sight due to their distinct body types.

The Raspara promised that they would never intrude into Zenith territory so long as the Zeniths never intruded into theirs. Though the Play government was run by women, the Raspara stated that within Raspara territory, the real power would be in the hands of Raspara men. The Raspara leaders believed the Zeniths were planning to commit mass rape of the Player women whose territory they would control, as the Zeniths had long been known for running illegal prostitution operations using non-Zenith women, and were physically strong enough to overpower even a crowd of Player women trying to escape. The Raspara hoped that the women under Zenith control would be in such pain that they would willingly flee into Raspara territory in order to submit to the firm but protective Raspara men. They did not reveal this part of their plan to the Zenith because they wanted to remain allies long enough to enforce the treaty and build walls in Paba to trap the Player women inside their territories.

Some Zeniths agreed to the Raspara plan, but they were unable to get the entire Zenith population to agree. However, the Raspara promised they would stay out of Zenith territory altogether and would treat those few Zeniths who lived in the Raspara's desired territory as equals, and not try to shut down their prostitution operations. The Raspara would portray themselves as superior by abstaining from prostitution. However, as they expected more minorities would soon arrive, the Raspara allowed an exception: any Raspara who abstained from intimate contact with an unwilling Player woman would be allowed to have full control over the throngs of newly arrived Baeban men.

AlphaLeap enters the war

AlphaLeap had remained neutral in this war, as they saw little hope of conquering both Dreamland and the Players. But when returning sailors informed the Leaper government that the south coast of Paba was now inhabited entirely by children, AlphaLeap declared war and sent its navy to assault the children at sea. They figured that with the Dreamers fighting the conventional Play army in the northern borderlands, and the Raspara and Zeniths abusing the women in the city centers, the Leaper navy would have an easy time conquering the children. Since these children were required to spend their time fishing all day in order to feed their parents, the Leapers knew they could not retreat to shore, and the Leapers could shoot arrows from the safety of their warships while the children struggled to duck out of the way.

In the battle of Satixa, AlphaLeap's navy vanquished a team of several hundred young boys and girls without sustaining any injuries or damage to their warships. However, some of the kids had escaped even so, and when the Player women learned about the deaths of their sons they revived the Pabap navy and ordered the land army to send soldiers south to protect the kids at sea.

The Leapers wanted total control of Paba, and were unwilling to split the territory with Dreamland. Thus, despite the Play party's restoration of Paba's naval force, the Leaper navy decided to continue with their strategy of attacking small children at sea while they now also fought a more even battle against the adults in the Player navy. The Leapers knew that if they could stop the kids from harvesting fish, Paba would starve and surrender whether they had a navy or not.

However, when the Leaper pirates learned of the new battle plan, many objected and considered switching sides. They had entered the war after being told they would only have to fight against young children, and that these children would not try to flee or hit back. But now the Player navy was harassing the Leaper pirates, making it harder for them to reach the children's boats and thus forcing the Leapers to risk taking damage as they killed the children in the smaller boats beneath them. Seeing no easy path to victory, AlphaLeap withdrew most of its navy, keeping only a small force in Paba's harbors in order to keep the Pabaps distracted.

Paba builds its Bubble

After two years, there had been no attacks on the Pabaps. Communications from Pabap townspeople in northern Nama had mostly stopped, and the Pabaps figured that the Dreamers might have given up on their war either because they realized it was unwinnable or because they had split apart and attacked each other.

The Players decided to build a semi-circular front of soldiers about 250 miles out from Paba, facing north and west and touching the sea. Each soldier would camp out by himself, within earshot of the soldiers on either side of him, and with a good view of the slopes below in the assumption that Dreamland's army would be arriving in the daytime. Although the first few soldiers to face the Dreamers would be greatly outnumbered, the others would rush in to help them within minutes, and each soldier further along the chain on each side would hear the cries of the others and rush towards the center. Thus, the Players promised that no location was safe for the Dreamer army.

These camps were well outside of Player territory; in fact, the Play army was almost entirely in Nama now, but Nama did not mind this, as they had no army of their own to protect themselves. The Play soldiers had to spread themselves very thinly here because they were so far from home, and they knew that when the first Dreamers arrived, the Dreamers would punch right through the Play army because they would vastly outnumber the Players. But the Players maintained their widely spaced camps so they could hunt for food and because their camps were just north of the slopes of the Mountains of Wisdom, and therefore the Players would have the advantage of altitude, while the Dreamers would have to struggle uphill and would meet up with the Players at precisely the time where the hills turned into mountains.

Furthermore, the Players hoped to be able to receive communication from loyal villagers who had chosen to ride out the war by staying in Nama as the Dreamers passed through their territory without fighting the villagers. Then, they could move soldiers nearer to where they predicted the Dreamers would attempt to enter the core of Play territory. Some Play generals proposed to later explain this as telepathy in order to fool the Dreamers into believing that the Players had strong magic powers.

Domestic life

The Players had relocated their entire adult male population to a distance of 250 miles from the city center, meaning that nearly 40,000 square miles of Player-held territory was reserved for women and children. The only adult males in the cities of this zone were those of the historically violent Raspara and Zenith tribes, who were exempt from the requirement of military service. In rural areas, there were Namans and others who simply chose to ignore the war in the belief that Dreamland would have no interest in fighting to conquer their homes.

Some Raspara planners saw an opportunity to seize power in the young Player state by overpowering the women in the cities and forcing them to build the walls of a new Raspara state. The Raspara would then use the women to raise a new generation of pro-Raspara children, but only a few of these children would be offered membership in the Raspara party.

The Raspara were unsure of the Players' chances at defeating the invading Dreamers, but figured that it meant little. If the Dreamers pushed the Play army back towards Paba, the Raspara would meet them at the newly fortified border and force them to submit to Raspara rule; but if the Players were successful, the Raspara would have more time alone with the women to build their new state.

Dreamers arrive at Paba

First battles

By the time the first Dreamer battallions met up with the Play army in autumn 4135, their strength had collapsed so much that the Players easily crushed them while taking few casualties of their own. Many towns near Paba's capital had been preemptively evacuated, as the Pabaps had a long south coast they could retreat to and therefore were not in great danger of starvation if they left their vegetable farms in the interior. Where those towns had been, Paba now had a bubble of soldiers ready to defend their capital city from a distance well outside it. The Dreamer armies had planned to trickle in along different paths and then surround Paba on at least two fronts (north and west). They achieved this, but they did not all meet the Players' bubble of soldiers at the same time, so when the bubble army defeated each Dreamer battalion, they prevented those Dreamers from alerting the others that they were vastly outmanned.

Thus, Paba survived in a state of war until mid-4138 without any Dreamer soldiers ever actually reaching Paba. Furthermore, the number of invasions was slowing down, as it seemed that the Dreamers either were running out of men or were rethinking their war efforts. After six years of war, no soldiers had made it to Paba and then back to Dreamland in order to communicate with their homeland, so the Dreamers realized that they were probably losing the war. When Dreamer soldiers stopped trying to pop Paba's bubble, in late 4138, the Players decided it was time to go on the offensive.

Paba invades Dreamland

When Paba launched an invasion of Dreamland, they coursed back northward through Thunder territory and found little resistance. The Dreamer soldiers were completely gone. However, they did have a few uprisings in Subumpam, which they had not expected. In particular, the nation of Puap had decided to side with the Dreamers, and launched an invasion of Paba. This invasion soon turned north into Nama, however, in order to attack the Players from behind. They were hoping to crush the Players between their own army and that of Dreamland, even though they knew Dreamland's army had been massively weakened by this point. The Players had told their soldiers that they were fighting for the Play party and not for Paba, and that they would be willing to kill Pabaps who opposed the war, but the Player commanders pushed northwards at their maximum speed in order to apply their full force on Dreamland.

The Pabaps had always been known for strong population growth. During the six years of war, the population of Paba's core territories had more than doubled, partly in response to ethnic minorities moving in but largely also because Pabap women had given birth to so many babies. The very name Paba meant "maternity ward", as they thought of their homeland as a place where babies were the most important natural resource.

Government reform in Paba

The Players realized they were likely to win their war. They decided to take advantage of the situation and cement their hold on power. They decided to eliminate future racial conflict in their nation by blending all races together. Since ethnic minorities were exempt from the requirement of military service, the Player women had invited many men to come from distant corners of the empire to replace the men who were busy fighting the war in Dreamland. These men tended to be taller and stronger than the Players' own men, and therefore the Play women were eager to meet them and start new families. Meanwhile, they expected that most of the younger Player soldiers would decide to stay in Dreamland and start new families there.

Paba now also encouraged all their children to become as educated as possible, because their birthrate was now so high that, given that many adult males were away from their homes due to the war, there were more children below 10 in their cities than there were people aged 10 and over. By necessity they knew that they would soon be putting real government power in the hands of teenagers, as there were not enough adults to go around.

The war winds down

By 4138 the Dreamer population was in full-blown panic. Six years of their strongest men being sent out to attack Paba had, for all they knew, done no good at all, for they had never yet heard back from any one of them. They knew that the Vaamūans must have powerful military technology, since they were able to fight off so many powerful attacks. Meanwhile, a militant wing of the Play party, led by a group of teenagers calling themselves the Flower Bees, had just ordered their army to leave the area around Paba and completely eliminate all of the surrounding nations, not just Dreamland.

At first the Vaamūan soldiers being sent into Dreamland and the other countries encountered great difficulty, because now they were fighting an offensive war, instead of a defensive one, and the pro-Dreamer nations (Pwêt and others that had previously been part of another nation) were all protected by the same types of natural barriers that had protected the Vaamūans. But the Vaamūans did not give up; they fought battle after bloody battle with courage and a perfect obedience to their commanders that frightened the others. The Vaamūans showed no sign of sympathy for their enemies, and seemed not to react to the deaths of their own soldiers. And the Dreamers' worst fears about Vaamūan population growth were confirmed when they realized that the Vaamūan population had grown radically, and that the Vaamūans saw the war partly as a means to dispose of their excess population, and to steal back some land from the Sâpepans and Dreamers to make room for even more. They figured that the Vaamūans had started the war because they had run out or were soon to run out of natural resources in their own land, and were desperately trying to hold on for a few more years before they exhausted the full supply in Dreamland as well. And the Dreamers saw that the Vaamūans' physical weakness meant virtually nothing in the war so long as they had enough armor and weapons.

Thus Vaamū's army of 1 million completely routed the Dreamer army of about 1 million (they killed 400,000) and forced them to surrender unconditionally. The Vaamūans reclaimed all of the land towards Dreamland's border, and immediately began herding the conquered peoples into Paba so they could be forced to work for Vaamū. However, some were welcomed as citizens because they wanted to divide the prisoners of war against each other and also because they still held to their philosophy of the elimination of racial divisions through marriage, even if it was forced marriage.

The Play party promised to allow Dreamland to remain a country, but it was governed partly by the Players, who planned to steal natural resources and then hold up the resulting poverty to other nations as proof that the Dreamer economic philosophy was a failure.

Indeed, now that the war was over, Dreamers saw that they had been wrong about the Vaamūans being desperate for natural resources. The Vaamūans were not in economic trouble at all; thankful for their technology and their elimination of luxury industries such as cosmetics, Vaamūans had plenty of food and plenty of spare labor left over to build weapons. Still, Dreamers hoped that Vaamū's command economy would eventually collapse due to the abuses it laid upon its people. They also realized that the birthrate in Vaamū was so high that their women were devoted entirely to childcare and thus could not do anything else helpful to the nation or to the army. Moreover, the Dreamers were surprised when they realized that the Players had walled off the entire seacoast to their own adult population, restricting access solely to children in order that they be able to fish the sea safely. Some sympathetic Dreamers warned the children that Dreamland's coastline might not be as bountiful as Paba's had been, but the children refused to listen.

The Dreamers surrendered, and were thankful that the Vaamūans did not choose to consume the entire nation.

Rule of the Raspara

When the Players had gone westward and northward during the war, they had failed to conquer the nation of Rasparia, which was now located in northern Vaamū, although before the war it had been northwest of Vaamū. Rasparia was a breakaway nation from Vaamū, whose people had set up their own government after escaping the Leapers in 4108. There was a single capital city, Blop, and some countryside to the west.

The Raspara leaders knew that the Dreamers' method of attack (physical combat) was doomed to failure, and that the only way to overcome the Players was to outsmart them. The Raspara (also known as Raspara) wanted to make their nation much like Vaamū, and did not want to destroy Vaamū, but only to overthrow the Loporomo government and rule the nation themselves, rather as the Leapers had, a small parasitic minority ruling over a large submissive majority. Players outnumbered Rasparas by a ratio of about 70 to 1. Rasparia itself was about 90% Players, because refugees had continued to flee into Rasparia, irregularly, even after the overthrow of the Leaper government.

The Rasparas managed to convince the nearby Players that it would be wise to have Rasparas in control of the government, because they were better educated and otherwise more fit for leadership. They merged their nation with Vaamū, and mostly took over the forts that the Players had built in their former territory. They began to influence Players even outside their base, and even though Players outnumbered them by a huge ratio, both the Rasparas and the Players began to feel that it was inevitable that the Rasparas would soon take over the government of all of Vaamū. Many Players began to feel extremely frustrated at this fact, saying they had just eliminated their only major enemy in the world and had thus effectively conquered the world. Now the Rasparas were asking them to give it all up and become slaves again simply because the Raspara were better educated.

The Player women held a conference in Paba and then called for the killing of all Rasparas. Since their government was communitarian, they spoke for the entire female Play population and also had the allegiance of their men. But their plans were constantly thwarted by Rasparas and pro-Raspara Players, and the Rasparas only continued expanding their disproportionate influence over Vaamū. Within a year, Rasparas were making most of the important decisions in Vaamū, and whenever Play governors tried to do something to upset them, the Rasparas would threaten to destroy Vaamū, and the Players often backed down in order to appease the Rasparas.

When AlphaLeap had taken over Vaamū, many Crystals had fled to ancient homelands such as Xeniholom. Thus, there were many Crystals living outside Vaamū, and though all of the various Crystal groups were known for their radical political ideas, they all frequently disagreed with each other even on core issues. There were even underground movements of Crystal dissent within Vaamū.

The Rasparas realized that they could not continue fighting wars forever, and that Vaamū in its current state was not self-sufficient. They needed to improve Vaamū's economic system, they realized, because the cost of raising so many children each year was putting a strain on the economy. They began to plan a way to trick the Players into killing each other to the point where the Players would only outnumber the Raspara by a ratio of about 5:1, which to the Rasparas was low enough to allay their fears of a revolt. In 4141, they began to admit Players into the Raspara party, and then launched a war against the remnant Players. They mostly attacked nurseries and elementary schools because they knew that those were the places where the population growth was concentrated and because they realized that most babies wouldn't be able to cause much harm to the Raspara soldiers. In this war, they killed most of the Player population, but remained a minority.

Restoration of child labor

Because of the high birthrate, the Play population soon again consisted mostly of children. The population was now growing so fast that Players living in some parts of the empire were not getting enough food, because they were eating it faster than it could be sent to them. There were no more slaves to capture, and the native Players now vastly outnumbered them anyway. The Rasparas decided to introduce child labor yet again. Soon, those Players who were old enough to work led a much harder life than non-Vaamūans just to break even with their own need for survival. As soon as they could tell yes from no, Player children left the nursery and went to work on plantations and in labor camps where all of their food and clothing were made.

But the Raspara still felt some sympathy for the Player workers, as they saw themselves as on the same side in a fight against their common enemy, the Dreamers. The Players believed that only God could make someone completely happy, and that God could break through any emotions caused by the physical world. But they knew that God had never promised to make the Play workers completely happy all the time, so they had to rely partly on other sources of good emotions.

Although the overseers allowed the workers to play whenever they wished, there was still a lot of work that needed to be done. The workers were told that they were allowed to do anything they wished that would help themselves, but they were told that bad habits would cause them to be hurt and, if necessary, killed. By no means was the work given to the workers impossible to complete, except for workers who were disabled, but Players who could not or would not do the work they were assigned lived in fear of the many frightening punishments for Players who worked too little.

The Player economy was still low on resources and hungry for land. They began sending explorers to Tarwas to settle the southern third of the nation. But after this flurry of activity in the early 4140s, the Play party seemed to quiet down somewhat and go back to focusing on their own country. Their population growth had been greatly slowed down now, which allowed their economic growth to speed up. Since their whole economy was directed toward the military, this meant that their military was rapidly becoming more powerful.

Where other nations weren't helping to cut down Vaamū's flowerlike growth, it was the Players' own misplaced leadership that ruined their ancestors' plans. It came to seem that AlphaLeap's parting words of hatred were correct after all. The Rasparas relied on a complicated political machine to keep their workers in line. Political battles over problems such as the increasing abuse of Players by their Raspara leaders gradually eroded the ability of the Rasparas to control their subjects, and at times they again lost control over small areas of Vaamū (which included Tata at this time). The Rasparas were aware of these signs of decay in their nation, but they were already doing their best to prevent a total rupture of their government. Adding to the problem was the fact that they were still overwhelmingly outnumbered by Players, and the fact that most of these Players were very angry and yet very gullible people, who would listen to and obey orders from people who promised to solve their many problems. Even some Rasparas began to defect from their party and form independent political organizations within Vaamū intending to overthrow the mainstream Raspara government. But most of the new rebels were ex-Players, who were better at gaining trust from other Players than were Rasparas.

In 4149, the Raspara were overthrown by a wing of the Play party known as the Swamp Kids.