Memnumu

At the time of their foundation in the year 4127, the Player party consisted primarily of small children, and their few adults were mostly young, single women. Moreover, Play ideology required all adult males to devote their lives to the military, and when Dreamland invaded the Players in 4132, the Players sent their entire adult male population, along with some boys, into Dreamland, and the Players became a nation entirely without men.

Background

Three different nations invaded the Player territory nearly at once, figuring the Play nation was defenseless even if their army was winning battles against Dreamland far to the north. Though the Players had an all-female police force, the roaming soldiers simply pushed these women aside as they sought to find needy young Play women in search of a husband.

Nonetheless, for multiple reasons, the men of these foreign nations had little success in marrying Player women, and the Player women continued to go without husbands even though they were forced to allow the men to remain in Play territory. Those who did marry often left the Play party and joined their husbands, which meant that the women were no longer considered Play citizens, and were warned that they were subject to removal from Play territory in the future.

Even as the Play women rejected the advances of the men who had invaded them, they soon forced their own soldiers to bring home men from distant territories, chiefly Baeba Swamp, believing that Baeban men would make better husbands. Some of them men who had invaded Play territory warned the women that they would attack or enslave these Baeban men on sight.

Although the Play men dutifully obeyed their orders to help foreign men reach the lonely Play women in Memnumu, this journey was difficult as well, and more unwanted men continued to arrive in their stead. The Play women were still unwilling to marry these men. Instead, they decided to wait for the next generation of Play boys to become old enough to marry. Thus, there was a crop of marriages in which the wives were typically older than the husbands, and the birthrate declined.

Most of the Play soldiers who had won victory in Dreamland never returned home, and the Play homeland in Memnumu continued to live in a situation in which all adult males were illegal invaders, except the very youngest ones, the teenagers who had just become mature enough to marry, but these boys were still required to join the military, and therefore they knew that they would be required to fight against the older adult men around them.

Domestic revolt

Soon, however, trouble came from an unanticipated source. Play territory had early in its history become so difficult to live in that most children ran away from their homes and joined the orphans whose parents had died or abandoned them. Many of these children grew up with no meaningful adult contact, and knew nothing of the world except what older children had told them.

When the runaway boys learned that they would be required to fight the adult male intruders as they became older, various groups of children formed independent nations of their own, mostly along the south coast of Play territory. As the children reached out to the men around them, the men attacked the children, seeing that they would make pliable slaves. This led to a wider civil war that eventually cost the Play party its entire territory by the year 4149.

The winners of the civil war were a party called the Tinks (Neuyubu), representing the adult male soldiers who had returned from Dreamland after the war. They, too, were officially required to fight all of the other men, but had avoided doing so by signing private agreements with the invaders while disguising their activities as border patrol in order maintain their Play membership.

Final Stages of the War (4151 — 4268 AD)

After the Tinks invaded Paba in 4151, Paba's Players formed the new nation of Memnumu. By this time, the population of Creamland had grown to about 1.2 million people, and again, about 75% of these were children under the age of 13.

Memnumu (4268 — 4767 AD)

After the declaration of world peace, the Player government remained effectively a one-party state, with other parties permitted to exist and hold elections but locked out of power by the vast Player majority, and only allowed to hold votes on issues affecting their own members.

Political platforms

As their territory was ignored by outside parties fighting over Baeba Swamp, the Player government based in Paba survived intact. The Players entered the new Memnumu Era with their party platform intact, and maintained the laws nationalizing the ownership of most types of property and the distribution of food, and tying food and housing distribution to family size only. Therefore the birthrate remained extremely high as couples married very young in order to acquire new homes, and raised many children in order to keep both themselves and their children well fed.

New factions of the Play party arose when the newer generations began attending school and reading literature written by outside entities such as Moonshine. Strictly speaking, these were not indepndent parties, and the conservative faction of the Players did not try to suppress them. They continued to use the inherited terms ŋaŋe and vap to refer to the various political parties of their nation and the world around them, but because only the Play party could hold power, diplomats began to identify these terms with nations rather than parties, and use new terms such as peim to refer to the Play factions that closely resembled the independent political parties of Baeba Swamp, Moonshine, and other distant empires.

Pro-Moonshine faction

The Crystals who entered Player territory came uninvited, but may have won the favor of the natives without a violent struggle. Many Players had become favorable towards the arctic empire of Moonshine, and although the Crystals were not of the Moonshine faction, their lifestyles were similar.

On the assumption that the pro-Moonshine faction of the Player party enrolls most of the all-female police force, it may simply be called the Police (SGN). This name could persist even if it becomes a formal political party. A native Play name such as Šeŋumu Ŋenavu, meaning "family protection (trail)", could thus be the name of the police force. The Police may even have referred to their nation as Mem Šeŋumu, an altered form of the Players' earlier name, Memnumu.

Conservative faction

The conservative Players were pushed out of power by the Moonshine-allied faction, even if they remained a majority. The new government structure was no longer a true democracy. The losing party's name may have remained as Play, or it may have taken on a new name to indicate its new status as the weaker of the two main entities. A possible new name would be the Magic Combs (Ŋani Taumnui), based on their refusal to comb their hair. That is, they did not comb their hair because they claimed their hair was already in the state it needed to be, and thus had combed itself.

Wami

A breakaway party from the Police formed early on. They were quickly demoted by the Police and thus effectively voteless on most issues, and some members of the party planned a military insurrection and the overthrow of the whole system. They considered themselves allies of the Players, but many Players saw the new party as a threat to the nation's stability, and with it the middle-class status that many Players had come to enjoy. One name for this new party was Wami or Wamu, but this was not their true name as it was from a different language.

Representation

Though the Police led what they called a democracy, votes were weighted unequally, with members of some parties having much more power than others; parties with amplified representation were closed to new members. For example, votes from the Police counted about five times as much as votes from the Players (Combs), meaning that even though the Players were the majority, the Police could outvote them easily unless an issue arose on which the Police were split nearly evenly. But the Players were denied the ability to join the Police and thus gain superior voting power, because the Police were a closed party.

The Police did not want absolute power in their nation because they believed that the weaker parties they ruled over deserved a voice in government. They merely believed that the share in power of these weaker voices need not be equal to their share of the empire's population. Many small parties were assigned even less weight per capita than the Players, and the Players considered themselves a middle class rather than an underclass.

The Police claimed that their system was vastly superior to the traditional Gold parliamentary system, where each tribe was assigned a single vote in Parliament, regardless of their population.

On any issue where the Players and Police agreed, their combined votes totalled nearly 100% of the population, and such policies were unstoppable. They also considered adopting a policy from the Thunder Empire stating that the greater the support for any law at the time it was passed, the greater a majority would be needed to later overturn it. Thus such laws would be effectively indelible.

On issues where the parties disagreed, the Police easily dominated during the first decades of Memnumu because of the massive extra weight assigned to their votes. But the Police knew that in the future, they might become so small a minority that they would be forced to decide whether to cede power to the Players or to further increase the amplitude of their own votes. And they knew that even some Police would be opposed to further increasing the imbalance of the system.

Population growth and fertility

The Police and Players cooperated on many important issues, and the opinions of both parties held firm for centuries. Both supported the right of children to attend school, and to be free from financial obligations to their parents; they also supported the right of children to run away from home and to stay in government-subsidized foster homes provided that they continue to attend school and obey the adults running the foster homes. Both asserted that children had the right to play, and could not be made to work alongside adults, though they also both agreed that children should be made to work farm labor and to help catch fish, which they no longer considered work. Thus, despite maintaining Play as the name of their party, they now endorsed some activities that the original Players had considered child labor. They did this upon learning that this had been the historical way of life in their territory and that child labor of this sort may have been responsible for the era of economic prosperity that preceded their invasion by AlphaLeap alongside other foreign powers.

Importantly, both the Police and Players supported maintaining the collectivization of agriculture and the distribution of food rations according to family size, meaning that families without children needed to either forage for food in the wild (which was not considered agriculture) or continuously sell property in order to feed themselves. This put strong pressure on teenagers to marry immediately, and to have children of their own as soon as possible. The Police also applied this new law to their own party members, meaning that although the Police tended to be wealthy, they would rapidly run out of wealth if they did not have large families just like the Players they ruled over. This concession set the Police apart from all of the nation's previous occupiers, such as the Raspara and the Leapers, who had always created difficult laws and then exempted themselves from them.

Territory

In theory, Creamland's territory could expand to take over the entire area that was reserved for Thaoa before Thaoa was defeated. However, it is possible that another power takes over here; remember "Gold people even settled Laba now" and that this territory would be considered as remote as Laba was.

Other information

The early Creamers (and possibly the founders) were racially exclusionary, allowing only Lenian people to join their movement. Thus, they were united by their tribe and not by their political ideology. This was also true of most enemy parties within their territory, and it could be said that Creamland never embraced true political debate and simply remained tribalistic as it had been for thousands of years. Even so, their relations with the outside world depended on all of the tribes working together in their common interests.

Indeed, Creamland's government was remarkably stable despite the violence raging within its borders, and Creamland was one of only three powers which could believably claim to have survived the great war that introduced the Cosmopolitan Age. The situation may have been similar in Tarwas, which had long been a centralized state led by a single tribe but with many smaller tribes living within and throughout it.

The Play party at its peak had tied food distribution to childbirth, such that all childless women and all men were entirely cut off from the food supply, and had to find their own food. The Play empire collapsed quickly, but they were merely building on a long-established cultural tradition in their area, in which children worked farm labor instead of attending school, and the most powerful women were those who had large families. As living standards declined, it became more difficult for women to have such large families as they had had during the Play era and the centuries leading up to it, but the government remained in place, and could have even continued to deny access to food to childless couples and to single men.

Politically, the Creamers were isolationists, refusing to help their ideological partner, Dreamland, against the more powerful armies in Baeba Swamp. Neither did Dreamland participate in the politics of Creamland.

Creamland remained a child-focused culture as the birthrate declined. Many cities were likely already built in the Creamer style, in which houses for families were built facing each other, and had a nursery in the center where small children could play. School was not important; children split their time between the playgrounds and the farms. Nevertheless, the people were well-fed because men were no longer required to serve in the military, and children were no longer forced into jobs they were physically incapable of.

The Andanese people did not survive as a cohesive social group anywhere inside Creamer territory. Thus, the Andanese languages died out, with Late Andanese surviving as a ceremonial language, and the Cream languages likely took in fewer Andanese loans than some other branches. Note, though, that the Andanese people living eastward of Paba fared better than those living within Paba, who had been directly in the line of attack many times over with no allies at their side. They would still have been mostly trapped inland, as the Andanese people were so small they had difficulty rowing boats, and their society suffered any time food production shifted to the sea.