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.

Language

Most Players spoke Bābākiam; some also spoke Late Andanese.

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

When the Play party declared independence, they enrolled over 343,000 citizens. However, there were only about 15,000 adult males among them; though women outnumbered men, the vast majority of the population consisted of children.

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

Decades of civil war and famine had made survival very difficult in Paba, and because Pabap culture favored protecting the lives of children even if it led to orphanhood, Paba's population had become very young, with children vastly outnumbering adults. AlphaLeap had shut down Paba's school system early on in order to impose forced labor, so children in Paba were used to working for a living and some could survive on their own. As the population of infants and toddlers grew, the Players generated more and more human waste. But the Players had abolished child labor, and adults kept busy with other tasks; nurses simply threw waste products into a pile in the middle of each city, figuring that local animals would take care of the problem over time. Soon the problem of waste disposal became a crisis.

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. The Leapers realized that burdening children with such a severe workload was cruel, but that it would be even more cruel to enlist children 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 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, with the adult male farmers gone, and most women occupied with childcare, civilian food production was assigned exclusively to young children. The Play party had prohibited farming, saying the only legal foods were those ready to eat when found in the wild. Though soldiers were still occupying some farms in the north, they were mostly in areas of poor soil, and the intensity of the famine increased even as the weather began to turn in their favor.

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.

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. Soon, there were almost as many runaways as there had once been orphans. However, women were in fact very busy with the duties of childcare; the illusion of a society powered by child labor appeared because children were the only Players allowed to earn money.

Early struggles at sea

Some children believed they could find food if they crossed the ocean to Amade, but none of them knew which way to sail. The Player women quickly prescribed strict rules for fishing so that the children would not harm each other. They divided the children into two groups: the keu paa šābā, who stayed within sight of the shore and caught only a few fish, and the bim pia, who went further out to sea, suffered many accidents, and caught many fish. Many of the children in the second group were recent runaways, but some families had older children in the bim pia group and younger children in the keu paa šābā group.

The keu paa šābā survived by feeding their families first and selling extra catches to private markets; on days when they caught no fish, their mothers would go to these markets and buy the fish caught by other children. Meanwhile, the bim pia lived dangerously, but became rich by forming an alliance with each other and charging high prices to the private fish markets.

Building of stores

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.

Some children lowered their prices in order to sell more fish, but as they used a currency that could only buy one product, the other children could simply lower their prices in tandem and defeat the strategy. Soon, children agreed to cooperate and avoid attempts to undercut other children.

A small number of Leaper adults sympathized with the Player children, and offered to fish the sea and supplement the catches of those children who had caught the least each day, but the children believed that each fish caught by the Leapers meant one less fish for the Player kids, and banned all adults from the seashore. They told the Leapers that the best way to help the Play party would be to convert to the Play party themselves and then join the land army.

The Four Quarters War

Background events

In early 4132, Dreamland's Baywatch party heard that Halasala's abusive Leaper government had been overthrown and replaced with an all-female party calling itself Play, and decided the time was ripe to invade. Halasala had claimed more than half of the habitable land on the planet, but their capital was the ancient city of Paba, whose native population consisted entirely of women and small children.

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. However, many Dreamers believed that their soldiers could provide a gentler solution to the conflict, as they knew that there were already many widows in Paba, and that by separating the army from the women at home, the Play women had ruined their chances of finding a husband among their own people. The Dreamer soldiers also expected to find many hungry, desperate orphans on the streets, as they had not yet learned of the Players' decision to send all children to the seashore.

When the Player women learned they were at war, they 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.

Although the Leapers still controlled much of the territory north of Paba, they could not overrule the women's surrender, and the imperial army's soldiers obeyed the women's orders to retreat. The Leapers had a private army of their own, but knew that they could not defend their land claims without the much larger imperial army on their side. When Dreamer generals began quickly coursing through the territory the Player women had given them, the Leapers retreated, and most of the population submitted peacefully to the Dreamers. Thus it was now Dreamland that had the world's largest empire, and by a very wide margin. However, the Dreamers enacted new laws that confiscated the property of the rich, and therefore the upper class of the conquered people came to have pro-Leaper sympathies.

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.

Dreamers plan for war

The Dreamer generals celebrated their easy conquest of the vast Leaper-held territory, but could not overcome the temptation to invade the Player women holding the capital city of Paba. The Players had been expecting this, however, and had learned of the continued invasion beforehand by communication from trade routes. For example, even though Baeba Swamp was within the territory that the Players had surrendered to Dreamer control, and Baeba Swamp had always tempted the Dreamers, the Dreamer army simply ignored Baeba as they rushed towards the women in Paba.

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 Players 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 Players 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.

The Players 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

The Player party renamed their empire 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 Play 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, Players did not think that Dreamland had enough soldiers to attempt an occupation of all of the territory that the imperial 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 Players would use their own resources to house and shelter the refugees. Since the Four Quarters Empire had been a single political entity all along, the Players opening their doors to immigrants from the rest of the Empire was not new; indeed, Paba was the most diverse of the four Quarters.

Dreamers move south

The Dreamer army felt they had a good chance of victory in Paba for several reasons:

1. As the Dreamers had swept through the countryside, they noticed many adult males welcoming them. The Dreamers knew that Play party policy required all able-bodied adult males to serve in the military, and to obey the orders of the Player generals. Since the Player generals had ordered a full retreat, by law these men were required to leave their families and move to Paba in preparation for a war, but had not done so. The Dreamers took this to mean that Paba would have relatively few soldiers and that the soldiers in the conquered territory would not rebel against the Dreamers.
2. A persistent famine in Halasala had stunted the growth of its lower classes, and therefore those soldiers who did resist the Dreamers would be weak and poorly nourished.
3. Paba's adult male population was war-weary already, having been involved in a civil war for the last 24 years against the Leapers who now nominally controlled them.
4. Paba had long been a pacifistic empire, and lacked many natural defenses such as walled cities. The Dreamers hoped that the Pabap soldiers would have poor strategy, and noted confidently the the traditionally violent tribes such as the Raspara were in the territory that had been ceded to them and had not rebelled.
5. All of the political decisions in the capital city of Paba were being made by women, since the Play party had the most popular support in Paba, and the Players did not allow men to remain in civilian occupations during a war. Many of these women had lost husbands to the Leapers, and struggled to find enough food to keep their children healthy. The Dreamers hoped that, if they could quickly cut their way through the Player army, they could surround the women in Paba and present them a peaceful way to surrender that would help improve their lives.
6. Many Player soldiers had been abused by the Leapers as children, and the Dreamers hoped that they could convince some soldiers, still fearful of the private Leaper army, to defect to Dreamland. Many Dreamers considered this an honorable strategy, and stated that by pursuing this goal the Dreamers could claim the moral high ground.
7. Although the Dreamers had never seen the Player children's fishing colonies along the south coast, they knew that adult males were not allowed to work outside the military and that most Pabap women worked in the cities, leaving children the job of finding food for themselves and their parents. Furthermore they knew that the ocean was the most reliable food source. The Dreamers hoped that they could stumble upon a group of weak, hungry children, ideally orphans, who would submit to them without a struggle and then lead the Dreamers to other children they could also adopt. However the Dreamers knew that reaching the coast was very difficult, and that they would need to approach the children very cautiously, as the primary means of fishing was with spears.

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 surviving a war against 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 could make easy work of 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.

The Leaper sailors informed the central government in AlphaLeap that the south coast of Paba was now populated by 130000 Player children, who had ruled out all adults, even their own relatives. The Leapers saw this vulnerability as a potential path back to power, and therefore planned a conventional naval attack in which the Leapers would pilot warships and crush the children's boats, forcing them into the sea, either to drown or to be kidnapped by the Leaper navy. They also brought range weapons such as arrows and slingshots so they could hit the children without being hit back. The combination of murder, kidnapping, and the loss of their main food supply would drive Paba into a panic, they hoped, and lead Paba's female government to surrender to AlphaLeap before the Dreamer army even reached their borders.

Thus, both the Dreamers and the Leapers sought to control Paba's vulnerable children: the Dreamers wanted to adopt and embrace them, while the Leapers wanted to abduct and enslave them. The Leapers sailed a single warship to southwestern Paba and they combined all three strategies: they shot children who were fishing for food, tore open their boats, and kidnapped any children who managed to stay afloat. Then, more ships followed, and in the battle of Satĭxa, the navy vanquished a team of several hundred young boys and girls without sustaining any injuries or damage to their warships. However, some children managed to escape and quickly alerted the government, who promised to revive Paba's navy in order to patrol the sea, even though this meant a further reduction in the size of Paba's land army. AlphaLeap's pirates responded with a full naval assault, in which they killed children, stole their food, and also killed the adult sailors who had been sent in to stop them. Therefore Paba prepared to fight both AlphaLeap and Dreamland simultaneously.

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.

Because AlphaLeap had committed a premeditated assault on the Player children fishing the south sea, the dominant Play party had fired the few remaining Leaper politicians from the government, and therefore Paba became a one-party state led by the Players. With their new power, the Play party rejected pacifism and stated that Paba was now a military champion and could seek its own interests rather than forever being subservient to other, more violent empires as they had throughout their history.

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, and most of the children were along the coast. 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 battalions 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.

When the Dreamers approached Paba, the Player 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 were required to procure their own food in order to spare the children and women at home.

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.

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 Players 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 excised through the six years of war.

The Players decided to launch a direct invasion of Dreamland, exactly mirroring Dreamland's failed invasion of Paba. 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. They renamed their new empire Vaamū, abolishing the use of the name Halasala.

As the Player 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 Play army that was heading towards Dreamland. They thus stated that they were not declaring war against Paba, but against the Play political party, and that Puap considered itself loyal to Paba.

Although the Play party was run by adult women, they taught their children about daily events to ensure the children stayed faithful to their people. As the children grew older, some formed opinions of their own. Now, some Play boys wanted to destroy not just Dreamland, but every other nation on the planet, and every other political party, including the Leapers who were still abducting children from the sea. But the wiser adult military generals still pressed on to invade Dreamland and Dreamland only, promising the eager young boys back home that they would have time to destroy the rest of the planet once Dreamland had been subdued.

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.

Counterinvasion of Dreamland

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 Players must have powerful military technology, since they were able to fight off so many powerful attacks. Meanwhile, a militant wing of the Play party, a group of small children calling themselves the Flower Bees, had begun plans to run away from their homes so they could form a second army and destroy all foreign nations, not just Dreamland.

At first the Player 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 (Puap and others that had earlier been independent) were all protected by the same types of natural barriers that had protected the Players. But the Players did not give up; they fought battle after bloody battle with courage and a perfect obedience to their commanders that frightened the others.

The Player 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 Players, 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 Players' naturally small stature and a persistent famine.

Against this, the Player 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 the Play party but for the possibility of returning home to their families and giving them the guarantee of safety. Even so, the Play 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 Play 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 15000 men, with the Dreamer army being physically more powerful and better armed, and having the advantage of occupying difficult terrain. But the Play 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 Play 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 Players only a few days to penetrate Dreamland and claim their first civilian casualties.

Further battles in Dreamland

The easy conquest of the northeastern headlands had given the Play 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 Players 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 Player 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 Players 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 Player 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 Players, intending to deny them as much territory as possible. The Player army was also traveling as a single unit, betting everything on the Battle of Gadanas, where they vowed to fight against 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 Players from penetrating too far inland. The Dreamer civilians started fires that spread only downstream, intending to weaken the Play soldiers without weakening the Dreamers. Fire soon encircled the Players, meaning they could not retreat if they were to lose. However, the fires began to spread to villages along the coast, which the Players 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 3,000, but in the end the Players 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 Play 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 Players 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 Play army was declared the winner of the war, de facto control of Dreamland was given to the Play party, and the Play party assumed control of the entirety of Vaamū.

Animal symbolism

The Dreamer generals compared the Players 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 Players 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 Play soldiers fed on the captured Dreamer people and sent them as slaves to their homeland.

Diplomacy

The Players were ideologically similar to the Dreamers they were attacking, although they had developed their ideology independently and felt no sympathy for their enemies. The Players were nationalists, and therefore refused to make transnational alliances based on ideology, but the Dreamers who fell under Player occupation hoped that they could assimilate and become accepted as Players themselves, even though the Players were forcing them to live in such poverty that more Dreamers were dying than being born.

Thus the Player army of 15,000 soldiers completely routed the Dreamer army of about the same size, and forced the Dreamers to surrender unconditionally. The Players reclaimed all of the land towards Dreamland's border, and announced that they would begin enslaving Dreamers in Paba. However, some Dreamers 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.

As the Play party had eliminated luxury industries such as restaurants, they were accustomed to living in extreme poverty. Still, Dreamers living under Player occupation hoped that the Play party's command economy would soon collapse due to the abuses it laid upon its people. 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.

Postwar reforms in Dreamland and Paba

Forced marriage

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.

Education

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 adult women to go around.

Farming reforms

The Player party platform outlawed child labor, but by delineating strict societal roles for men and women that took up most of their time, they had indirectly thrown the task of acquiring food to the children who had nothing else to do. But now, children were freed from their obligations so they could attend school. Farms run by the Dreamers were assigned to Player families, with the labor being shared between the Players and their Dreamer slaves.

New construction in Dreamland

The new Player-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 Player martial law. They offered the inhabitants of Fakarana a choice: they could move to Paba as slaves, or wait until the Player 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 Players 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.

Soldiers return home

Most Play soldiers chose to remain in Dreamland to run the new country, but some returned. Those who returned were mostly those with wives and children at home. When they returned, 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 human waste in city centers, much of which had lain there for more than ten years, was solved when the Player governors had their captured slaves shovel up the messes into wheelbarrows and push them for 4000 miles over the mountains and down the newly built road to Dreamland.

Spread of plagues

The Play party told its people that hygiene was a waste of time and resources, and therefore many Play soldiers had not bathed for years. When the Players set up slave operations in Dreamland, they maintained the same policy and told their slaves that hardy people could endure natural contaminants that would sicken and kill the weak. Thus, the occupying Players held to the traditional principle of găya: a life of extreme poverty, close to nature, in order to produce an environment where only the hardiest people could prosper. The Players believed that despite their small physical size, they were much hardier than the Dreamers, and could survive in an environment where the Dreamers could not.

However, the Players exposed their slaves to more diseases than the Players themselves faced. For example, the Five-Year Flower Disease, which killed children slowly over the first five years of their lives, spread through Dreamland as the Dreamer slaves carried contaminated diapers and other waste products that the Player children had produced but quickly disposed of. Thus, even as the Five-Year plague spread through Vaamū, Dreamland experienced a much more severe version of the same plague.

Cut off from the sea, the combination of famine and pestilence drove the defeated Dreamer republic to the brink of extinction: now, even the animals were living better than the remaining Dreamer humans. Dreamland surrendered to the Dolphin Rider empire to the west, thus reviving the name Dreamland for the full extent of both empires. They had hoped that the Riders would respond by pushing the Play army back out of Dreamland, but the Riders announced they would not defend that territory.

Treatment of disease

One of the few differences between Players and Dreamers was their attitude towards disease. The Dreamers were individualists, meaning that they cared for sick people even if curing their diseases was expensive or impossible. By contrast, the Players would only treat diseases they felt could be overcome, and ignored those they attributed to the sufferers' frailty. When the Players heard that their waste products were spreading plagues throughout the Dreamer population, they increased the workload of the Dreamer slaves assigned to dumping waste products and began to pour contaminants into the Dreamers' water wells. The Players reminded themselves that they did not need slaves to live; only weak, pampered peoples lived like that. Thus, driving the Dreamers to extinction through disease took priority over using the Dreamers for slave labor.

The death toll of the war and its associated plague soon surpassed 20000, more than any other war in recent history, and the plague began to spread into the Dolphin Riders' region of Dreamland. The Riders were better equipped to handle a plague because they had control of their government, but because the Five-Year plague could hop from one adult to another without any visible signs of infection, the child population of the Rider state soon began to suffer the plague as well.

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.

War in Tarwas

While the Player army was conquering Dreamland, they had also fighting a war against their traditional ally, Tarwas, and managed to conquer it as well. However, the citizens of Tarwas put up tougher resistance than those of Dreamland, and the Players were never able to secure a lasting peace.

Similarly, they had also invaded and conquered Amade. Both of these wars were with Raspara direction, as the Rasparas wanted to see more Players die in order to strengthen Raspara control over the survivors.

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.

Rise of the Bees

Four years after Vaamū's Play army had defeated and enslaved Dreamland, a new political party arose in Vaamū: the Flower Bees (Sui si). The Bees were only the third political party in Vaamū's entire history, the other two being the militant Players and the defeated, unloved Leapers.

The Bees launched a civil war against all other nations and political parties, saying that the Bees had the sole right to rule on their planet. Most Bees 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. They remembered the promise of the early Play generals that once Dreamland was subdued, the rest of the planet would soon follow.

A split in the Bee 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 Rasparia, a province of Vaamū which had recently declared independence.

The Bee invasion failed, however, and the Raspara enslaved the Bees who surrendered. Then the Raspara 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 Raspara took over the Laaatalalatataaa the way they had taken over the Bees just months easlier.

In 4145, a small tropical nation called Amade 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 Raspara declared war on all of the other political parties in Vaamū, claiming no alliance to Tarwas, Amade, 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 Raspara victory. The Raspara set the calendar back to the year 0 and enslaved all surviving Vaamūans who were not part of the Raspara army or a family member of a veteran.

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

Play/Swamp relations

In 4138, the victorious Play army had added their newly conquered Dreamer land to the preexisting border state of Tata, and set up an all-female government replicating the original government in Paba.

Union with Anzan

In 4149, after having changed hands several times, the Tink army took control of Paba and claimed the right to rule the entire empire of Vaamū, which they renamed Anzan. The Players signed an agreement with the Tinks affirming that they recognized each other as part of the same party.

Both parties rejected child labor and stated that adults should serve children rather than the converse. Though the Players had early on forced young children to fish the sea to feed their parents, they abolished this practice once they began enslaving Dreamers.

Feminism

The Players considered themselves feminists, and restricted all political power to adult women. The Tinks did the precise opposite, as they blamed female power for their series of embarrassing military and political defeats. Since the Tinks ruled the capital city of Săla, their platform overruled the Players', and the Players were forced to fire all their female politicians and replace them with uneducated males who were accustomed to a life of outdoors activities such as fishing and hunting.

The Tinks had written a clause in their constitution stating that although they were building a democratic empire with voting rights for all adult males, the central government in Săla had the right to suspend democracy in troublesome areas of the empire and appoint a king to rule autocratically. Some Players wanted to claim that they were having trouble controlling the Dreamers so they could get a king who would agree to devolve most of his powers to the women who had been running Tata for the preceding eleven years, but other Players warned that this king would be free to make the situation far worse than it already was. A majority of Player women agreed to recognize the decisions made by their newly empowered men, and a majority of Player men voted to set up a new opinions council composed of women who had no power, and then to do whatever those women told them to do. Dissenting males were stripped of power entirely, and the Players announced they had rescued their all-female government system from the Tinks in Săla. However, the new system restricted government power to a small cadre of women rather than the entire adult female population, as before. This reform had been proposed before, but had always failed.

By sending women home from their government jobs, the Players answered the long-standing complaint that their nation was run by child labor, with sedentary women avoiding manual labor while men stalked the wilderness looking for Dreamer resistance that had died down eleven years earlier.

Later political evolution

However, the Tinks began attending schools run by the well-educated Raspara minority, and their ideology rapidly changed while the Play party in Dreamland refused to make even slight changes.

In 4151, the Tinks launched a civil war against their supporters in Paba, forcing the Pabaps to declare themselves a new party, the Creamers (Žayu). This name translates a native-language pun, not the name itself; they chose their new name to show that even allying with their age-old enemy, Dreamland, was preferable to mending relations with the Tinks who had attacked them. Since they stated that they preferred Dreamland to the Tinks, they also declared opposition to the Player occupation of Dreamland, but most Creamers believed that the Players could be brought back into the fold since they were not being exposed to Raspara propaganda.

In 4152, the Tinks changed their name to the Swamp Kids and declared that they would soon conquer Baeba Swamp. Thus, the Players in Dreamland realized that they would be forced to occupy Dreamland with no help.

Generational divide

By 4175, many elder Players were looking to join new parties, but the younger generation was much more conservative. The Play party stayed true to its roots in representing the interests of children and parents of large households, whereas the dissenters were often people who had no children or had children who were hostile to their interests.