Cold Men

The Cold Men (Play Pupa) were a party formed as a faction of the Swamp Kids in spring 4172, becoming a separate party in the early 4190s.

Scioe

Scope

The Play-speaking Cold Men were not the first party to use this name; the Raspara's private name also meant Cold Men. The name of the party was not mere trivia, as the Play speakers choosing the name suffered from the problems of ambiguous party membership, as they were forced to allow Raspara to join their party, meaning that some people could be members of two political parties at the same time, even though the parties' interests were against each other. Thus Raspara were voting in the Cold Men's internal party elections and disrupting their leadership. The Cold Men could not do the same to the Raspara because while the Raspara were also forced to accept Cold Men in their party, their internal party leadership was not democratic.

The Raspara were few in number, however.

First Mallard War

Invasion of Ŋapata Fatu

The Cold Men invaded the Play region of Ŋapata Fatu in 4182. The Cold Men had been sure that they would succeed because they were fighting for a compact area of land. The Pioneers did not support this new war. The Cold Men considered Memnumu to be part of the original Tinks' homeland, and therefore their war was not an attempt at expansion but at recovering lost original territory.

The Play population had grown since their last contact, so the Players roused an army of more than 90,000 soldiers to defend their territory against the invasion. However, at this time, the Players were still struggling with internal conflicts, and worried that some rebellious states within the Play empire could defect to the Cold Men.

In 4182 the Cold Men declared victory.

NOTE: Assuming that Ŋapata Fatu is near Ŋapata Ŋūa, this war included battles along the coast, and thus was not a simple north-south front.

Outside contacts

This section is intended to be greatly expanded. See Lava Handlers for details.

Over the next four years, the Players surrendered to the Cold Men, then saw the Cold Men also surrender to outside powers, encouraging the Players to sign a peace treaty with the Cold Men. Then, the new Cold-Play alliance won their war, and the Players started planning out their next war against the Cold Men.

Appeal to Laba

After signing the treaty, the Players were wholly controlled by Xema, a naval power which had arrived from the icecapped regions of the far north. Despite the inconvenient location of their homeland, Xema wrested control of the entire Play coastline and maintained a self-sufficient occupation, such that they had no need to connect with Xema.

The Players knew of an even more distant naval power called Laba. This was actually a geographical region within Dreamland, but because Dreamland was a confederation, its constituent states were free to direct their own military affairs, and the area calling itself Laba had cycled back and forth through time between aligning with Dreamland and pursuing an independent military policy. Dreamland had recently lost several major wars on land, but the navy had remained strong. The Players hoped that they could pull Laba into the war so that the Dreamer-Play coalition could fend off the Xeman navy and restore control of Memnumu to the Players.

Laba agreed to send ships to Memnumu, and stated that because it was a humanitarian war, they expected nothing in return from the Players. Rather than sail eastward from Dreamland around the continent, they sailed westward from the oceanic islands. This meant that the Laban sailors spoke a language no Players knew; even those who had learned the Baywatch and Dolphin Rider languages were useless here. Nonetheless, the sailors understood their mission and promised to do their best to keep in contact with intermediates who could speak Play or Leaper, which some Play diplomats had learned.

Reconciliation of 4186

In late 4186, every Play army in Memnumu except that of Thaoa signed a treaty abolishing all interstate conflicts and ending all wars within Memnumu. Thaoa instead declared allegiance to the Cold Men. Thaoa had no land connection to the Cold territory, but the Cold Men had previously sent slave traders into Thaoa, so the Players knew that a unified Cold-Thaoa nation could easily be created through war. If this were to happen, the Play territory would be divided completely in half, with most of the population to the west of Thaoa, and those Players living east of Thaoa unable to communicate with the rest.

The treaty of 4186 did not start a war against Thaoa, but the Players encircled Thaoa by land and by sea so that Thaoa could not easily join the Cold Men to bring a new war to Memnumu.

The Players then planned a conventional war against Nama, even as they admitted Nama was innocent of all crimes against the Players, solely because the Players felt they needed upland territory from which to later invade the Cold Men and further isolate Thaoa.

By this time, the Players had fully lost contact with Tata, and the entire Play population in Tata was enslaved. Many Swamp Kids in Tata were slaveowners now, although the Players in Memnumu did not know this.

Players move north

This will be explained better soon. Note that this is why the Cold Men cannot have had control of Pūpepas in 4190.

Due to yet another outside war, the Players and Cold Men joined hands once more and fought a war that helped both sides repulse their invaders; Xema had invaded the Players, while the Raspara had invaded the Cold Men. After the war was over, the Cold Men invited the Players to move into Cold territory and establish the Play party as a new party competing democratically.

The Players agreed, and immediately sent tens of thousands of Players into Cold territory. A Play woman named Meŋumaa Paus ("the Happy Queen") set up a propaganda service in the new territory, trying to convince the Cold Men to defect to the Players. The Players realized that they could quickly become a majority in the areas they were settling and push out the Cold Men.

After the first general election, the Players won control of several high mountain towns in the areas that had once been part of Nama. Then, with their new homes secure, the Players drafted plans for a new war against the Cold Men to be fought in Nama.

Treaty of 4188

In 4188, the Players signed a treaty with the Cold Men, and in fact, with many other powers as well, committing their forces to lead a new land war against Dreamland. Dreamland by this time was so divided that their own navy joined the war against Dreamland, although they did so only because of their stated obligation to the Players, having rescued them from Xema just two years earlier. The Dreamer navy did not expect to actually see combat. For that matter, neither the Players nor the Cold Men expected to see combat either, but had signed the treaty because they had been so weakened by their previous war that neither wanted to risk provoking an invasion of their own territory if Dreamland were to fall quickly to the coalition. The Players therefore continued to assume that they would soon be at war with the Cold Men, and would be fighting in Cold territory, such that few Player civilians would be at risk, but many Cold Men would be captured and perhaps enslaved.

War in Dreamland

With most of the nations in the invading coalition deciding not to participate, the coalition mobilized only 15,000 soldiers. Most of them did even not make it to Dreamland, and Dreamland thus won their war against the world. This was in part due to the small size of the coalition army, but more importantly because those few soldiers who did fight in a combat role had misgivings with each other and refused to cooperate. Only the Matrix and the Swamp Kids had sent a sizable number of men into Dreamland, and those Swamp Kids were mostly of the Pioneer faction. Then, at the height of the war, the Matrix army betrayed the Pioneers and signed a treaty with the Dreamers.

Second Mallard War

The Matrix betrayal in the First Mallard War had put the Matrix in charge of both Dreamland and Tata, with the capital in Tata. Here, they held nearly 100,000 slaves, mostly from the Players but also largely from the Pioneer Swamp Kids who had thought that the Matrixes would be their allies in the war against Dreamland. The Matrix army had been much smaller than the others, and the Matrixes claimed that they had won the war because they were much smarter than both their enemies and their allies.

Most Swamp Kids, of both the Cold Men and Pioneer factions, admitted that they had lost their war against the Matrix and had few adult male soldiers left with which to fight a second war. The Cold Men had mostly dodged the war, knowing that conquering Dreamland would do little to help the Cold Men, but nonetheless they had been required by their treaty with the Pioneers to help out in the war.

The Swamp Kids knew that if they were to regain their lost territory and free the slaves, they would need to pull in help from outside allies. One such ally was STW.

STW invasion

In 4190, STW sent a troop of small boys towards Tata, enveloped by a traditional Swampy army identifying itself with the Cold Men, the faction that had best weathered the recent defeat against the Matrix.

As in the last war, the Cold Men were required to participate because they were still a faction of the Swamp Kids, not an independent party, and therefore shared a military with the more militant Pioneer faction. By this time, even the Cold Men were eager for revenge against Tata's Matrixes, but were nonetheless reluctant to send their men to war, knowing that their border with the Players to the south was already weak.

The Matrixes were fully in control of Tata now, but from STW's standpoint, nothing had changed: one enemy had conquered another enemy, but an enemy they remained. STW told the boys that they were humanitarian relief workers, and that their job was to help cure the diseases that STW had earlier spread into Tata. STW claimed that the adult Cold soldiers were merely there to protect the children and would not be allowed to act independently of STW.

Prisoners of war

The Matrix soldiers quickly captured both the Cold Men and the STW boys, and put them to work in slave camps. When STW learned of this, they demanded monetary compensation for the abductions, and sent a second troop of small boys to rescue the first. When the Players, in turn, learned of STW's reaction, they declared war against STW, and revived their war against the Cold Men. Thus began the Angel's Birth War, which the Players also referred to as the Second Mallard War. The Players had been wanting this new war all along, but could not motivate their leaders to start a new war because most Players had seen the Cold Men as fellow victims of larger outside powers, and as an ideal ally. But now, the Players had an excuse for their new war.

Reactions to abductions

The Play women declared that STW's leadership had become delusional; by insisting on monetary compensation, STW proved both that they saw the so-called humanitarian war as a financial investment, not a moral obligation, and that they were so detached from reality that they had forgotten what it was like to lose a war. Furthermore, the Players argued that the Cold Men had sent their soldiers only after realizing the boys in STW needed help, not beforehand, and that this proved that STW did not understand how to protect child soldiers during war. Lastly, they argued that the Cold Men's secondary role proved that they were not in charge of their army, but rather taking orders from STW.

The Cold Men responded that they were fully in control of their own affairs, and were fighting the war against Tata using the best soldiers they had left: children surrounded by adult protectors. The Cold Men stated that the child soldiers were not attempting to engage in combat, but rather to help cure the diseases that the Players, acting through STW, had earlier spread through Tata. Lastly the Cold Men stated that since both Dreamland and Tata had prosperous economies, it was within reason for the Cold-STW coalition army to demand financial compensation for each military loss, something they would not do when facing a traditional enemy such as the Players.

Play offensive

By this time, the Players had fortified the frontier they shared with the Cold Men, and knew that the Cold Men could not simply invade Play territory the way they had invaded Tata. Since their invasion of Tata had failed, the Players predicted that any future invasion of Play territory would fare even worse.

The Players also launched a civil war inside Cold territory, using the land that the Cold Men had invited them to move into four years earlier. The Cold Men had seen this coming, and had originally stationed more of their own soldiers in this region, but these soldiers had been mostly sent to Tata where they were kidnapped by the Matrix.

Raspara revolt

By this time, STW still had tens of thousands of children on its membership rolls, but few adults, and those adults who had remained had proven unreliable. Adult male soldiers quickly began deserting STW as they realized they were at war with powerful enemies, but most did not take time to educate the younger members, so STW's young children remained at war with the world around them. Furthermore, most Raspara in Anzan had remained in their party rather than joining the Cold Men, and therefore they were not obligated to help STW in this war; indeed, the Raspara soon declared war on STW, and disorganized Raspara troops massacred STW's defenseless child soldiers. STW had no reaction to this because their charter did not allow them to demand monetary compensation from a group within their host nation.

Thaoa secedes

Nonetheless, still in 4190, the Player state of Thaoa seceded and joined the war on the side of the Cold Men. The Players realized that there was no credible threat of invasion from the Cold Men to their north, so they immediately invaded Thaoa with the full force of their army, and blockaded the south coast to trap the Thaoans on shore. The Cold Men announced that Thaoa was strong enough to defend itself, and that the Cold Men did not need to send reinforcements. Thus, the Players quickly took control of Thaoa.

Changing attitudes

As STW realized it was about to lose its war, they signed a treaty with the Raspara, stating that they would surrender to the Raspara armies only, and would even sign themselves over to Raspara slavery after the war. Importantly, however, STW's treaty did not announce that STW was ending their war against the Players and Matrixes, nor that they were expecting the Raspara to help them in their war. They also continued to expect monetary compensation from the Matrixes in Tata, and now demanded an even higher total for the additional child soldiers that the Matrix had captured since STW's first demand.

The Players' reaction to this treaty was to again claim it proved that STW's leaders were insane, and that STW had somehow managed to take control of the Cold Men. The wording of the treaty showed that STW acknowledged they were badly losing their war, and that they would soon need to surrender, but yet they still continued to fight. The treaty also implied that STW expected the Raspara army to betray its allies at the end of the war, such that the Cold-STW coalition army would be able to surrender everything to the Raspara and nothing to the Players and the Matrix. Here, the Players urged caution, warning that even the seemingly deluded STWers might know something their enemies did not, as the Raspara had betrayed their allies in war before, and the Players had no way to connect with the Raspara leaders in the midst of the war.

New Cold treaties

As the Cold-STW alliance continued to lose battles, they announced they were dropping their demand for monetary compensation.

Immediately, the Raspara switched sides and endorsed STW's war against the Players and Matrixes. The emerging Raspara-Cold-STW coalition promised that, when the war was won, the winning side would enslave the losing side, and that the winning armies would divide their slaves proportionate to each army's share of participation in the war. Because the Players in Memnumu had joined the war, and vastly outnumbered the Matrixes, the signatory parties expected that nearly all of the slaves would be Players, and that they would be allotted mostly to the Cold Men, as the Cold Men were the ones fighting in Memnumu and Anzan, whereas the Raspara were focusing only on Tata and STW had so far contributed little to the war on either front.

Seeing the war suddenly turn around, Thaoa's soldiers pulled on their remaining strength to launch a civil war in Memnumu, taking the Players back out of Anzan.

STW's leaders assumed that they had effected these changes all on their own, and announced that they would conquer the Players once they were finished conquering the Matrixes in Tata.

Cold Men invade Memnumu

The Cold-STW coalition invaded Memnumu (Creamland) in 4190. They invaded through the region of Šafabapaa, named in honor of four pregnant angels. The Players were surprised, as they had judged the Cold army incompetent, but the Players had nonetheless prepared for the invasion and continued to fight with their full force.

The Impossible Treaty

The Cold Men declared that they had won. The Players signed a treaty surrendering their entire population to be slaves for the Cold Men. They also stated that this treaty applied to the Players in Tata who had only just recently been freed from their Matrix-owned slave camps.

The Play leaders' logic was much as the Cold Men's had been: although the winning side of this war was a coalition of the Cold Men, the Raspara, STW, and other small armies, the Players chose to surrender to the Cold Men only, figuring that the Cold Men would be the gentlest of all possible occupiers. The Players then stated that if the other members of the coalition wanted to share the spoils, they would need to send their own troops through the Cold territory and fight a new war, with the intent that in this new hypothetical war, the Cold Men would be siding with the Players in order to keep exclusive control of their new territory.

But by this time there was no way to enforce any treaty, and the Players ceded land to the Cold Men that the Play army was only pretending to have controlled, knowing it made no difference and might help tie up enemies in a fight against each other.

Subversion clause

Just before signing the treaty, however, the Players and Cold Men agreed to an amendment such that STW would also have a role in occupying Play territory. They stated that STW's traditional structure, in which members were organized into numbered bases, would fit well with the Play nation's geographical division into states and counties within those states. Each Play state, they promised, would come under the control of an individual STW base, and the chief of that STW base would be the ruler of their particular Play state. Both sides agreed to this amendment because both sides agreed STW had contributed little to the war, and that STW's leadership continued to vastly overestimate the power of the STW mercenary army, which by now consisted mostly of child soldiers since adult males had found it easier to desert the army when the war was turning against them.

The amendment to the treaty deliberately left unresolved the question of how both the Cold Men and STW would be able to maintain absolute power in Play territory, because the Players knew that neither side was likely to concede to the other, and that the Cold Men would be far better able to project their power. Thus the Players hoped that STW would waste itself trying to enforce the contradictory treaty, while the Cold Men hoped that they would be able to force STW into submission even if they had to afford STW's leaders formal control over the Play territory. Thus the treaty came to be called the Impossible Treaty by both the Players and the Cold Men.

Role of the Raspara

The Raspara also signed the Impossible Treaty, stating that because they had fought only in Tata, they would enslave the Players and Matrixes in Tata (even though the Players had not fought back), but would forfeit the rights to any slaves of the Play or Matrix parties who lived in Memnumu or Anzan.

Details of enforcement

One clause in the treaty that the Cold Men insisted the Players follow with absolute obedience was the demand that the Players take all of their troops out of the territory they had won in the recent invasion, including those areas of Cold territory into which they had earlier been invited by mutual agreement. The Cold Men allowed Players to escape this clause by formally converting to the Cold party, but knew that very few Players — not even men — would be willing to surrender their feminist lifestyle, and figured that the Cold victory in the recent war was decisive enough that the Players in Memnumu would not revive the war in order to amplify Play resistance in Cold territory. The Cold-Play border was thus reset to what it had been before the start of the Second Mallard War.

Continued fighting in the south

Because the Players still had sympathy for the Cold Men and STW's younger members, they continued to obey the letter of the law in their recent treaty, which stated that the Players had surrendered their entire population to be slaves for the Cold-STW coalition, and that the Play army would make no attempt to defend any intrusion into their territory. The Play army remained solely to defend Play territory against attacks by other outside powers. However, the Cold Men allowed the Player military leaders to retain their rights to command their army, meaning that the Cold Men could not force the Players to fight for Cold interests that would not help the Players. The Cold Men hoped to coax the Players into a formal alliance by conceding this privilege, and that in the future, a Cold-Play alliance would form a unified state with secure, defined borders, and focus on defense rather than starting new wars in distant lands.

The Players' surrender treaty took them out of the war and allowed the Players to also make separate peace treaties with the other invading powers such as Xema and the Raspara. This meant that the Cold-STW coalition had to fight Xema without the Players' help, and that the Raspara were free to abandon their coalition, as the Players had been suspecting they would.

Raspara revolt

Indeed, the Raspara quickly backed out of the Impossible Treaty as well as a private treaty they had earlier signed with the Cold Men and STW. STW's leaders were insisting that both treaties afforded STW the right to control both Memnumu and Tata, and some STW leaders had even revived their demand for financial compensation. Raspara soldiers responded to this by raiding STW's schools, capturing children to be used as slaves, claiming sarcastically that they were fulfilling the obligations of their treaty because sheltering and reeducating the STW children would take such work that it would feel as if the Raspara were working as slaves for STW after all.

Cold advocacy for STW

By this point, even the Cold Men had admitted that STW's leadership was not qualified to lead a war, though they softened their words by arguing that STW's leaders were not insane; it was merely that STW was a corporation and not an army. The Cold Men argued that STW's only goal in this war had been to make money, and that their leaders, though expert financial advisors, simply did not understand the concept of war as it applied to the soldiers and civilians caught in the fighting. Indeed, STW had continued to operate its traditional trade route stretching over 3,000 miles from the southeast corner of Play territory to Tata in the extreme northwest, even though this route crossed through territories that were at war with each other.

The Cold Men realized that, by continuing to shelter STW, they would suffer the consequences of STW's misleadership, and that since the Raspara had revived their war against STW, they might also revive the war against the Cold Men. The Cold Men reaffirmed their obligation to protect STW, but realized that it would be unwise to let STW's leaders lead the Cold army into battle as they had months earlier at the outset of the war.

Battle of Napaatusā

By late 4190, STW's few remaining adult soldiers had mostly fled, and the rest had become disobedient, leaving STW with an army consisting entirely of children, some of whom were very young. They were forced to travel within the Cold Men's army, as the Cold Men were their sole remaining protector, and even the Cold Men no longer considered themselves an ally.

STW realized they could no longer project their military influence in the region, but sent child soldiers out to fight adults in a desperate hope that they could still win by some unpredictable and nontraditional means.

In the town of Napaatusā, STW fought its last battle. Their child soldiers were trapped between two hostile armies: the Raspara advancing from the north, and Xema advancing from the south. Neither army had known that STW still had soldiers on the ground in the region; they had been expecting to fight a three-sided war between each other and the Cold Men. Instead, the two advancing armies signed a temporary truce and split the children between them. After this battle, STW disappeared from Play territory.

Xema admitted its plan to enslave its captured children, but also promised to spare their lives, and argued that the children would be vastly better off under Xema's control than they had been under STW's. The Raspara, on the other hand, made no promises of any kind, so Xema claimed the moral high ground, saying that the Raspara party had long ago abandoned its traditional honor code, and that the Raspara soldiers were going to abuse the captured children until they succumbed to their injuries.

Xema thus asked its enemies for mercy, saying that if the other armies stopped fighting Xema, Xema would continue fighting the Raspara and would rescue as many children as they could find. Knowing that the captured children likely had mere months left in their lives, if that, the Xemans pleaded for urgent action by the outside powers, most of which were still officially at war with Xema. Xema also criticized the Players, as the Players at this time had an army called Tee Vauva, consisting of children aged between five and ten years old, and though their duties were noncombative they were working unprotected and thus were vulnerable to ambush.

Formal party split

When the Swamp Kids' Pioneer faction ordered their military to invade Baeba Swamp, the Cold Men faction was forced to follow along even though they opposed the war. Some Cold Men escaped the mobilization by joining yet another decoy party, the Counters (Fivīs Mas), a party whose leaders pledged to vote in lockstep with the Cold Men on all issues so that they could pull in Cold Men who chose to stay in their homeland rather than move to Baeba. The Counters promised that they would never have a party platform.

Counter War

Many Cold Men nonetheless chose to join the war in Baeba after all, figuring that to remain in Anzan would be foolish, as there were other wars already raging in Anzan, and opposition to war in Baeba would not give them ground to plead with the other armies for mercy in Anzan.

By contrast the Counters believed that the other wars in Anzan were opportunistic, as the rival Pioneer faction of the Swamp Kids was vastly overspread relative to its size, and thus their army was weak everywhere. The Cold Men explained that the Pioneers' recent move to Baeba proved that they had finally realized what the Cold Men had been arguing for twenty years: that it was much easier to defend a small territory than a large one.

Persistence of democracy

Nonetheless, the bulk of the Cold Men's adult male population remained in the coalition army and thus moved to Baeba to fight for the Pioneers. Within months, the only adult men living in the Cold Men's former territory were Counters and a few elderly and physically disabled Cold Men who had been exempt from the draft. These few men soon realized that by remaining in the Cold party, they could wield disproportionate power, as they expected that the Pioneers (who had quickly renamed themselves to the Slime party) would soon re-establish contacts with their original homeland in Anzan, and would prefer to interface with the Cold Men who had helped them rather than with the Counters who had ignored them. The Pioneers had suspended democracy in the territories they were fighting for in Baeba, but maintained democracy in Anzan.

The Counters soon realized that they could not keep their initial promise to vote in lockstep with the Cold Men, because the Cold Men were able to support the war in Baeba without fighting the war in Baeba, and could pass new laws that made it very difficult for an able-bodied male to function in society, effectively reinstating the draft.

Attacks on the handicapped

However, as an independent party, the Counters were no longer bound by any rival party's charter, and the party's leaders voted to revoke their promise and develop their own party platform. They declared that the elderly and frail men in the rump Cold party were acting in bad faith and did not deserve the sympathy that would normally accord to people in such a state. The Counters seceded from Anzan and then declared that since the Counters were geographically dispersed, their new territory was coterminous with Anzan.

The resulting Counter War led the Counters to attack the defenseless Cold Men, even though they knew the wives and children of the Cold Men would be against the new war. Rather than fight a conventional war, however, they pushed the handicapped people into worksites where able-bodied Counters also worked, telling them that if they could not keep up with the Counters, they were not welcome in the Cold nation. They warned that anyone who refused to work would be killed.

Surrender

Soon the Cold Men surrendered to the Counters. The defeated Cold Men signed over the rights to their party name and the Counters then expelled the defeated people from the party.

Having regained control of the name Cold Men, the Counters declared that the Cold Men would be a one-faction party, meaning that the Counters and the Cold Men were the same entity, and that the Counters' internal party leadership elections would be the means by which their population would vote in their democracy. That is, the party became the government. This had happened before.

The Counters forced the handicapped victims into the disused Tadpole party (Ŋavaiva), and declared that the Tadpoles' votes only applied to internal party affairs. That is, they could appoint their own leaders, but not the Counters' leaders, and since the Counter party infrastructure was the government, the Tadpoles could not meaningfully vote in the new Counter government.

Leadership crisis

But the Cold Men had chosen to maintain the law that only adult males could vote, and their adult population was primarily female. Thus the female population was disenfranchised, and some Cold Men worried that they might defect to the Play party, which was run entirely by women.

Worries about democratic overload

Furthermore, since young children had not been sent to the war, and had had no reason to switch parties, the new generation of boys was approaching the age of thirteen, meaning that they would be legally adults and could vote in the Cold party's internal elections. This had also happened before but not in a nation in which the party internal elections were synonymous with the nation's democratic elections. The adults worried that the new generation of boys might also defect to the Players, or to the Tadpoles, or start their own party altogether.

Because there were far more boys than men in their nation, the Cold Men worried that they would be voted out of power once the boys turned thirteen even if the boys also disagreed with each other. They read worriedly about the history of the Play nation, which had been torn apart by revolts led by teenagers who understood little about the world around them and had massacred both adults and each other.

Historically, the Player government had mostly remained stable even when the adults were greatly outnumbered by children, but this was because the Players restricted voting rights to women, who died in much smaller numbers during wars. There were only about 5,500 enrolled Cold Men because they had been small to begin with and then had expelled the Tadpoles. But there were just as many children as that in each grade in school, so the Cold Men knew that within a year their votes would be equalled by those of the children, and that within two years, they would be outnumbered two to one.

Proposals for voting reform

Just as the Pioneers (by now known as the Slimes) had abolished democracy in their territory in Baeba Swamp, the Cold Men now considered abolishing democracy in their home territory. This would mean abolishing the internal party elections, as they were synonymous with the natioanl elections. They thus planned to rule as a hereditary class, each official individually appointing their replacements only when they were too old to rule. The people who supported this idea were typically those already high in the power structure in the Cold party.

Others wanted to reform democracy instead by extending voting rights to women, who greatly outnumbered men. They planned to expel any women who showed sympathy for the Tadpoles or who otherwise voted against the Cold Men's interests.

Unnamed War

Siege of Natamšīa

This may be part of the Third Mallard War, but if so, it means that HTN was also founded during the war.

Many Players still lived peaceably in Cold territory. In the city of Čumfunua, in the Cold Men's northern Needle region (Natamšīa), a group of Play civilians gathered up weapons and then attacked the city, taking it over by pure force and thus turning it into a Play stronghold outside the control of the Cold Men. Čumfunua was an important waypoint on STW's trade route that stretched across the continent and linked the Play capital city of Pūpepas with Tata and Baeba Swamp thousands miles down the road. By taking over Čumfunua, the Players realized that they could disrupt trade and travel along the road.

The Play army had been ruled out of Cold territory by the recent Impossible Treaty, and this was one of the few points of the treaty for which the Cold Men demanded strict compliance. But the Cold party constitution did not allow them to ban the Play party itself, and there was no support within Cold territory for a civil war against the legal Play civilians who had chosen to remain. These Players manufactured their own weapons, largely made from the wood of the pine trees that grew in and around the city of Funua Čisee.

The Players were not formally at war with the Cold Men, and so the Cold Men considered the attackers to be criminals rather than enemy soldiers. The Players' response, nonetheless, angered the Cold Men. The Players in Memnumu said that because the attack had taken place in Cold territory, it was the responsibility of the Cold military and police forces to prevent such attacks, and therefore the Players in Memnumu would not accept blame. The Cold Men knew that they could not easily launch such attacks in Play territory because the Play police force was much more strict and did not allow the Cold party, nor any other party with a male leadership structure.

Rise of the Scorpions

Some Cold Men opposed pacifism. Their kupukapukipa movement, glorifying war for the sake of war, told Cold Men that while the Players could still be their friends, they would need to bend to the Cold Men rather than meeting in the middle.

Rise of the Scorpions

Within months, the Kupukapukipa broke away from the Cold Men, and declared themselves an independent political party. By this time, an unrelated anti-pacifist movement calling itself the Leash (Tamaba nuu) had also declared itself a party, and the Kupukapukipa realized they needed to organize quickly to prevent the Leash supporters from taking root.

Because the name Kupukapukipa, shorn of its classifiers as by tradition, could be read in many ways, they did not ask for a standard trade name when meeting with foreign language diplomats; they identified themselves by their flag and by their native-language party name. They sometimes answered to the name Scorpions, as kipa was the Play word for scorpion, and they were fond of imagery depicting scorpions injuring humans' bare feet.

Scorpion philosophy

The Scorpions, also called Needles, described their philosophy as a middle position between the Cold and Play philosophies, taking what was right from each side and leaving what was wrong. Therefore, the Scorpions were not compromising between the Cold Men and Players, and would not change their philosophy simply because the Cold Men and Players changed theirs.

The Scorpions stated that because they supported war itself and not merely one particular war in a given time or place, their philosophy was eternal, and they could never be defeated except by similarly absolute pacifists. The Scorpions thus oriented themselves against the rising pacifist movement and prepared for an all-out war against their unarmed opponents.

The Scorpions published a political charter detailing their beliefs:

1. War is natural, and war is good in and of itself.
2. Adult leadership is not necessary in a war; boys and men can both find their way to sites of battle.
3. The weak and stupid deserve to be abused, even if their morals are perfectly clean. Unworthy people seeking to join the Scorpions will be assigned the position they deserve.
4. Pacifists and anyone showing compassion for the weak also deserve to be abused.
5. Individual humans have no rights; rights follow from loyal service to a community.
6. Authority must be earned, and anyone falsely acting as if they are in charge will be demoted to the bottom of the hierarchy.
7. Filth is natural, and will protect humans from disease while yet allowing soldiers to spread plagues far beyond their campsites.
8. Identification with elements of the natural world, such as cold weather, drives off potential supporters. The Scorpions shall have no geographical or tribal boundaries.
9. The Scorpions do not need allies, but should always fight wars strategically rather than relying on national pride to deliver improbable victories.
10. A strong nation needs a single head of state; it matters not whether the leader is male or female, but they must be very intelligent and not simply guided by a brash personality.

The Scorpions admired STW's longstanding practice of traumatizing young recruits to ensure they were hardy enough to benefit the organization, but argued that to truly serve its purpose, the pain should be inflicted on the enemies, not the supporters, of the Scorpions.

Comparison with the Matrixes

The Scorpions took power in an upland area of Nama well out of reach of Tata's Matrix army, which had recently captured over 100,000 slaves and now boasted of being the world's cruelest soldiers. The Scorpions announced the Matrixes were mere pretenders, and warned that if the Matrix and Scorpion forces ever clashed, the Scorpions would quickly turn the Matrix soldiers into meat. But the Scorpions also announced they felt no sympathy for the slaves of the Matrixes, and would not send a Scorpion force to rescue them.

Comparison with the Zenith

The Scorpions also rejected comparisons with the Zenith, an ancient alliance of criminals which had long been associated with amoral politics during those times when its members engaged in politics at all. The Zeniths had no central government, and were the only political party that allowed treason (meaning Zeniths could kill other Zeniths and face no penalty), whereas the Scorpions embraced authoritarianism and, unlike societies around them, demanded that power be concentrated in a single head of state.

Scorpion demographics

The Scorpion movement filled the power vacuum left by the departure of the adult male Pioneer army. Therefore, their membership consisted almost entirely of children, and they could not meaningfully participate in a war at the time of their founding, much less win one. Their dedication to warfare was thus based on emotion, not reason. Nonetheless, the leaders of the Scorpions were adults who had defected from the small remnant adult population as they grew opposed to both the mainstream Cold philosophy and the rising pacifist movement. These adult leaders focused on protecting their large child population while attracting recruits from the young children who belonged to other movements.

Plans for war

The Scorpions' president, Navuŋīyā, planned to launch a conventional war around the year 4206, fourteen years after their founding, expecting that by then all of their founding members would be adults and that a new generation of Scorpion children would by then have arisen to replace the founders, and if necessary, also help them win their war.

Likewise, the Scorpions opposed the philosophically similar Leash party in public, but privately planned to declare their support for the Leash within a few years in order to form a military alliance, and then betray them at the last moment so that the Leashes would be forced into a war in which they would gain nothing. Since the Leash was a traditional adult political party, the Scorpions hoped that they could stir up sympathy for their own members while they were still children and then give nothing back when the Scorpions reached adulthood.

Players' reaction

The Players banned the Scorpion party immediately, stating that nearly every point in its charter violated the Play constitution, and that any party with even one such violation would be unwelcome in Play territory. Many Play leaders wanted to beat the Scorpions at their own game, saying that since the Scorpions valued intelligent leaders so much, the new, well-educated Players could outsmart them all and win their praise. Other Players believed that the Scorpions would burn off all of their hatred within a generation, as the violent children turned into adults and raised children of their own.

By contrast, the Cold Men began to argue that both the Scorpion and Leash parties were simply factions of Cold Men, and would return to their parent party at the next outbreak of war regardless of who the enemy was. The Cold Men began to consider that strengthening their nation's control over minority parties might be more important for the foreseeable future than strengthening their small remaining conventional army.