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.

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 to join the illegal Tadpole party (Ŋavaiva). They stated that the victims' previously existing internal party structure now belonged to the Tadpoles, and only applied to internal Tadpole 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.

Furthermore, because the Tadpoles were illegal, the Counter police force warned that they had the right to arrest and imprison individual Tadpoles at any time, without requiring evidence of a further crime. The Counters soon passed a law stating that it was a much graver crime for Tadpoles to promote their beliefs to non-Tadpoles, and that the punishment for this would be immediate execution, arguing that it was important to ensure that Tadpole ideology did not spread.

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.

Arguments about graduation

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 43,600 children in the eighth grade in school, and even though only the boys among them would gain voting rights, the Cold Men realized that their adult male voting population would soon be outnumbered four to one by just a single year's graduating class.

Some Cold Men became alarmed when they realized that they were soon to be outnumbered, and that many of the boys due to graduate school soon were the children of handicapped soldiers whom the Cold Men had attacked. The Cold Men realized that if the children became a majority, they could vote their parents back into the Cold party and then vote the reigning Cold Men into the Tadpole party. Then the nation would be ruled by the children and their handicapped parents, although the Cold Men expected that these children would probably assign voting rights to their mothers and sisters as well.

As the Cold Men worried about reprisals for their attacks on the handicapped, they decided to abolish the Counter faction of their party, which had led the attacks, and join a new faction called the Cherries (Pamaši, also known as GYS). The Cherries passed a law stating that one faction could not be punished for the crimes of another, and therefore the Cherries were immune from all legal reprisals. They published propaganda criticizing the Counters for attacking the handicapped Tadpoles, and then transferred the Tadpoles' party membership to the Counters so that they would only be able to pursue legal action against each other.

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.

Some Cold Men proposed withholding diplomas from students who did not pass an ideology test, and then planned to make this test extremely difficult, such that even loyal Cold Men would be denied graduation and thus voting rights, simply because the Cold Men did not want to have children pushing them around when the children gained the majority.

Defeat of the Raspara

When the Cold Men split from the Pioneers, they had immediately taken a much harsher attitude towards the Raspara minority. Typically, the Raspara had been the upper class, and despite being greatly outnumbered they had managed to win many battles against the Cold-Pioneer coalition. Early on, the Cold Men had been strongly anti-Raspara even as they conceded that some of their own members were converting to the Raspara.

Discrimination against the Raspara

When the Cold Men formally broke free of their treaty with the Pioneers around 4191, they put their anti-Raspara program into action. The Raspara were excluded from jobs requiring education and a new tax was enacted that applied only to the Raspara. The Cold Men had no military with which to enforce these new laws, but the Raspara had become a tiny minority by this time.

Discrimination against other groups

Then, the Cold Men passed a law allowing the Cold police force to enroll ethnic minorities into the Play party, and to deport such people to the Play district of Ninanama if the police deemed them a threat to the Cold nation. The Cold Men stated that these threatened expulsions were simply following the terms of their recent treaty, which demanded that all Play soldiers move to the Play homeland.

Importantly, the new law treated groups as tribes, and therefore if a violent incident occurred, the Cold Men could declare any arbitrary group that included the criminal to be a separate tribe, and therefore claim the right to deport not just Players, but people who would have until that time considered themselves loyal Cold Men. The language of the law strongly suggested that the Cold Men were targeting ethnic minorities with visibly different body types, but some Cold liberals worried that this was only a cover to reassure the Cold party base, and that in fact the Cold Men were primarily interested in targeting dissenters from within their own tribe.

The Cold Men's new discrimination laws strongly resembled those of the Players' Purse faction, which had hit the peak of its power some decades earlier. Racial discrimination was no longer common in Play territory, but it had never been outlawed either, and therefore the Players did not attack the Cold Men's racial discrimination laws.

Rise of the Cooks

The adult Cold Men conceded defeat when they realized that they would soon be facing a war against their own children, and hoped that the children would simply fight each other to a draw as the first group of graduates realized that they would soon face a similar war against their classmates from one year below them.

New government structure

Census-based voting

The incoming Cold boys solved this problem by abolishing voting rights. They declared that they and their younger classmates were part of the same group and had no goals other than to stop civil wars within their nation so that it would be a safe place for all to live. They did not specifically say that they were abolishing democracy, but that they were reducing the powers afforded to individual citizens in their democracy.

The Cold boys created the new Cook party (Uvās), saying that they were going to mix different things together and create a new whole that was greater than the sum of its parts. This was an independent party, not bound to the Cold Men, but they promised that they supported the Cold nation and would not seek independence. They signed a power-sharing agreement with the adults, whom they now forced to re-adopt the name Counters. (Note that the name "Counter" here refers to the act of counting money, and not to furniture; thus, even though the Cooks depicted themselves as working together in a kitchen, there was no Play-language pun to be made.)

The Cooks said that henceforth, all voting would be done through the census, and that the census would ask for the party identification of all citizens, including men, women, and children, in order to determine how to apportion votes in Parliament. This was a common and well-worn system, used for example by the Crystals, but it had not been used in the Cold nation or any of the states that had preceded it in recent history.

The people would not be allowed to vote for individual representatives; rather, the party leaders would appoint representatives for each district in the Cold nation.

Power-sharing arrangement

The Cooks declared themselves to be legally adults because they had graduated school and because their age (most were 13 years old) had been the legal age of adulthood all along; they however said that they would share power, both with the adults they had displaced and with the younger children who had not yet graduated school.

The Cooks agreed with the adults that the greatest threat to the new Cook power structure was not the adults but the even younger children who had yet to graduate school. The Cooks decided to over-count the votes of the adult Counters, saying that they could be useful allies and the Cook-Counter alliance could help stave off any insurgencies that had yet to arise. They did this by awarding the Counters a section of Parliament all to themselves, from which they could never be removed, no matter how small their minority became, even as more and more children graduated school and (assuming they became Cooks) outnumbered the adults by an ever greater margin.

The magnification of the Counters' votes was done based on party identification and not age. The Cooks stated that the Counter party was free to determine their own membership requirements, and could, if they chose to do so, set a minimum age for party membership so that the young Cooks could not simply swarm into the Counter party and outvote the adults from within. Likewise, the Cooks warned that they were considering a ban on conversions from the Counter party, but would not set an age requirement for membership, either as a minimum or a maximum.

On top of the Parliament, the Cooks placed an executive bureau consisting only of Cooks, which had the ability to overrule Parliament in any way, though in some cases, their vote could only override Parliament if it was unanimous. Thus, the Cooks did not fear being outvoted by the adults in Parliament, but they did not have so much power as to make the Parliament feel redundant.

The Cooks planned to lean on the Counters and convince them to form a stable alliance such that the two least democratic organs of government — the executive bureau and the Counter-only Parliament wing — would be allies, and therefore any attempt to vote out the Cook-Counter establishment would fail.

Purposeful design

Because of the undemocratic Cook-only executive bureau, the Cooks had no great need to expand their party base. But they still competed democratically in Parliament, and had done this on purpose so that their party leaders would not grow too powerful. They felt that the best form of government was a mixed system in which parties competed for power while different forms of government also competed for power within the system. Here, they had democracy competing with a top-down system comparable to Moonshine, where the party itself appointed the officials in government. This came as no surprise to the Counters, as the Counters (and their wives) had been the Cooks' teachers, and had taught this very same idea in their schools.

Outreach attempts

The Cooks, confident of their hold on power, spent only small efforts on party outreach attempts. However, because such a large portion of the population — all women, all children, and many men — had been disenfranchised under the previous government, the Cooks hoped that even these small efforts would result in a growth in party membership, and that the new members joining the Cooks would be just the sort of people they needed to help maintain their hold on power as they grew. Thus they cast the Cook party as the party of wide appeal, in contrast to the Counters and the various small parties who had persisted from the previous era, all of which the Cooks described as representing only narrow special interests.

Appeal to Tadpoles

The Cooks upheld their forebearers' ban on the Tadpole party, consisting of adult men who had violated Cold laws, and who were largely handicapped or people who had feigned disability to escape the Cold nation's two recent foreign wars. Thus, many Tadpoles were pacifists, and many had been forced into labor camps by the Counters, including those who were unable to perform the required labor. The Cooks depicted themselves as being more pacifistic than their parents, and felt therefore that the draft-dodging Tadpoles would make ideal Cooks, as there were no other parties that seemed a good fit for them. Even though the Counters had also avoided the two recent wars, the Cooks felt that very few Tadpoles would willingly join a party run by people who had abused them by assigning them impossible tasks in the labor camps.

Pacifism was a difficult subject in Cold culture, as the common belief was that not just men, but humans in general, needed to be constantly aggressive in order to fight off their predators, and that any people who dropped their weapons would quickly become toys for those who had not. Thus, the Cooks did not specifically identify themselves as pacifists, but stated that there was such a thing as being too militaristic, and that they were correcting this flaw in their parents' ideology.

Appeal to women

Vastly more numerous than the Tadpoles were the unenrolled adult females in the Cold nation, largely the wives of Counters and Tadpoles, but also including some, especially younger women, who were unmarried or who had lost husbands in the recent wars. Polygamy was legal but financially difficult as the husband was responsible for the welfare of his wives and children, and Cold women often gave birth to many children.

Expecting these women to span the entire range of ideologies, the Cooks avoided political arguments and promoted the young boys in the Cook party leadership as being the only group in the Cold nation who truly respected women's rights, and in particular the right of women to express their opinions. The Cooks opposed the Play party because the Players discriminated against males, and the Cooks stated that women were strong enough on their own not to need the government and police to enforce Play-style laws confining men to a position at the bottom of society.

Appeal to aboriginals

When the Counters had earlier passed racial discrimination laws, they applied those laws only to minorities whose population lived partly outside Cold territory; that is, to transnational parties such as the Raspara, Matrixes, and, controversially, the Players. The Counters claimed that the aboriginals of Nama and Repilia were entirely within Cold territory because the Counters (then known as Cold Men) claimed jurisdiction over all of that territory. They stated that the aboriginals were irrevocably wedded to the Cold nation and that, therefore, they should be on the winning side of the Counters' discrimination laws.

This coalition strategy was very similar to the Players' earlier efforts to build a coalition from the disparate groups in their nation, who were divided by race as well as by ideology, while excluding groups who lacked strong ties to the Play nation. The Players at the time were so overcome by unrelated conflicts that their strategy mostly worked; but now, in the Cold nation, the aboriginals were unmoved by the Counters' promise of solidarity. Traditionally, the aboriginal tribes had voted through a census, meaning that the entire tribe always voted the same way in all elections; now, they began to break from their tribes to join political parties, both new and established ones.

The Cooks claimed that, by abolishing racism, they had solved the only reasonable objections that the aboriginal tribes could have to the incoming Cook dynasty. But they also sharply criticized the aboriginals who chose to remain in their traditional tribal voting system, saying that any party which forces all the members of a tribe to vote in exactly the same way is no party at all. The Cooks warned the aboriginals that they might soon make such parties illegal, just as they had already banned the Raspara party which even the Counters had chosen to tolerate.

Appeal to other ethnic minorities

The Cooks inherited their parents' cultural stereotypes. They thus grew up believing that people with blond hair were delicate, cowardly, and the first to submit to a hostile power during war. (A better English translation would be "requiring a luxurious lifestyle".) By contrast, black hair was associated with courage, hardiness, and loyalty towards nation and family. These stereotypes were associated with the Empire's period of occupation by Dreamland; the Cold Men claimed that Dreamland had only been able to win its war because at the time, the Empire had been disarmed by a previous occupying power, the Crystals, and that the Dreamers were in fact very poor soldiers by nature. The Dreamers were also well-known for their dislike of nature, and particularly of forests, as the Dreamers had a very large nation for their population size but yet lived mostly in large, compact cities where there were few animals or plants nearby. The Cooks and their ancestors both attributed this practice to the Dreamers' supposed physically delicate build, such that they simply could not live in an outdoor environment without constantly injuring themselves and acquiring various illnesses which would not affect hardier peoples.

There was no significant Dreamer population in the Cold nation; rather, blond hair was a trait that was scattered throughout the population, and in no discernible geographic pattern. The Counters had discriminated against these people, and, towards the end of their short time in power, had also passed a law that enabled them to deport groups deemed to be minorities into the Play nation, even if knowing the Players would also mistreat them. The Counters (then called Cold Men) had even allowed the Players to invade Thaoa, at the time a strong ally of the Counters, and the Counters refused to help Thaoa because they claimed Thaoa should have been strong enough to repulse the Players on their own. Despite its southerly location, Thaoa's people were among the blondest in the world and had supported the Counters while resenting their belief in the stereotypes.

The Cooks abolished racial discrimination, saying that a strong nation would not make enemies of its own supporters. This included the prohibition of discrimination against groups with no legal definition, such as people with blonde hair. Nonetheless, the stereotypes remained, and the Cooks believed that these people would be more physically vulnerable in nature than the dark-haired majority, and unable to hold the rugged žaya lifestyle the Cooks were planning to lead their nation into. Some Cooks believed that it would be enough to pass laws intended to enforce the žaya way of life, while others believed that people with blonde hair, even those who supported the Cooks, would demand a luxurious lifestyle and drag down the Cooks' reform projects by their mere existence.

The Cooks were largely unaware of the Soap Bubbles, who shared the Cooks' cultural stereotypes against the Dreamers but who themselves mostly had blond hair and thus did not apply those stereotypes based on physical appearance.

At the southern fringes of Cold territory, there were two groups of people with dark skin: one was the Eggs, a member of the Play party coalition, and the other was a group of long-time residents of the tropics who had recently joined the Moonshines. The Cold Men had never included either of these groups as minorities because they were both already members of separate parties, and therefore the Counters' discrimination laws could not punish these people in any way that they had not already brought upon themselves by joining a minority party.

Appeal to young children

Pridefully, the Cooks agreed with their enemies that the greatest threat to the nation's stability was not any of the above groups, but rather the newly enfranchised young children who had yet to choose their preferred party or even form an ideology. The Cooks believed that their party would have greater appeal to young people than would the Counters because the Cooks themselves were very young, but they also knew that the young children could create a party of their own, and perhaps several, that could threaten to bring down the government; even with the executive bureau and the Counter's reserved seats in Parliament, the stability of the government rested largely on cooperation between those two unelected groups.

Eastern Capital Treaty

With the help of the STW corporation, the newly empowered Cooks soon established contact with the emerging Little Country more than a thousand miles to the west, which was now run by the Clovers, a group of STW graduates and students who were about the same age as the founding members of the Cooks. The Clovers' government was an absolute monarchy, in which the young king, the Golden Sun, shared power with his classmates since he knew that he could not run the country singlehandedly. Since the Clovers had absolute power, they saw no need to broaden their appeal, and because the king did not trust adults, there were no positions of power for adults in the Clover government.

The STW corporation had financed the war which placed the Clovers in power. Now, having heard that the Cold nation had also come under the control of very young rulers, STW felt that the Clovers and the Cooks would make ideal diplomatic partners, and arranged a meeting in the Cooks' capital city of Napaatusā, which the Clovers were now referring to as the eastern capital (pāanaā paata) of the Little Country. This was a tribute to the rising Cook party; the Clovers were not seeking to wrest control of Napaatusā, but merely to acknowledge that the Cook government was on par with their own.

Journey to Napaatusā

The king sent two of his classmates, a boy and a girl, eastward to Napaatusā to meet with the Cooks. The Counters were also invited to send a team of diplomats to the meeting, but the king told the Clover diplomats to speak with the Cooks first and to make their decisions based on the assumption that the Cooks and the Clovers would be the two parties in control of their respective nations.

The route from the Clovers' nation of Pavaitaapu to Napaatusā crossed two mountain ranges, but yet the two cities lay on the same road, because the STW corporation had financed the construction of such a road to enable them to trade along this route. Indeed, STW was responsible for all contact between the two groups, and was also financing the Clover kids' mission. This trade route normally took months even so, but with such a light load, STW's caravans delivered the two kids to Napaatusā within a few weeks. They traveled entirely by land, avoiding the eastern downhill river routes, so that a Sunspot bodyguard named Slider (Play Nīmtua Ŋapuši) would be able to steer their caravan for the entire journey.

The young girl Lifeline (Play Ŋamatapai Mamnuaatata, also known as Mamnuaa for short) took the leading role in the mission to meet the Cooks in Napaatusā. The king had chosen to send both a boy and a girl because he had heard that the Cooks, though brought up to embrace a male power structure, were now inviting girls into their party and therefore might be impressed to learn that the Clovers, despite being brought up in the same male-led society, had also made the same reform.

The boy's birth name was Naašayu, from the phrase naas žayu "loyal to the capital". At the time of his birth, the unquestioned capital of the Empire had been Napaatusā, but now the Clovers were referring to Mutanapana as their own capital. To avoid a fruitless debate over the meaning of his name, the boy introduced himself as Anthem (Play Pīseuyavavu).

Although the Counters were invited to the meeting, the children told the Counter diplomats to wait outside so that the two groups of kids could first meet with each other. Yet, the bodyguard named Slider, who worked for STW, then followed the Clovers into the meeting room without explanation, and the kids did not object to this.

Sun's advice

The Golden Sun's Clover diplomats warned the young Cooks against enrolling adults into their party, saying that all adults had outside motives that by definition conflicted with the Cooks' plans for government, and that this included adults whose ideology aligned with the Cooks'.

The Clovers explained that because STW was not seeking a direct role in governing either the Clovers' nation or the Cooks', Slider would not object to this plan.

The diplomats said that they had experienced strong resistance from their own adult population, even though these people were members of the same political party. Indeed, the very name "Clover" was not a party, but a term of abuse, a Play-language pun implying that the young Clover leaders were so uneducated and unfit for government that they did not know the name of their own country. Thus, the Clovers were sure their troubles were simply due to their age, and that the public was protesting against being left out of power, not against the Clover agenda.

The Cooks countered that because they did not have slaves, they could not run the nation on their own, and needed to enroll adults into the government in order to have a competent police force, and for other basic functions such as education which they preferred to run through their government (STW was a private school system, and the Cooks supported STW, but did not want to rely on it). However the Cooks promised the Clovers that these adults would not be required to join the Cook party to receive their positions, and therefore that the Cook power structure would not be compromised.

Counters enter the room

After a long wait, the young Cook diplomats opened the door to allow the Counters into the room. They were assigned empty seats across the table, meaning that the Cooks and Clovers were on one side of the table and the adult Counters were on the other, even though the Counters were part of the Cooks' government and the Clovers were not. Slider, the STW bodyguard, was now standing in the corner of the room behind the young Cook and Clover diplomats.

Signing of the treaty

Thus the Cooks and Clovers signed the Eastern Capital Treaty (Puptapupa Pāanaā Paatas), establishing a social connection between their two parties independent of the national government, and stating that decisions made by one party would have effects on the other. This was legal because the Cook party hierarchy was separate from the government of Anzan, even though the Clover party hierarchy had been merged with the government of the Little Country.

Counter reaction

Nonetheless, the Counters protested that the new treaty was illegal, claiming it had created a government within a government, and could only harm the wider state of Anzan. The Little Country was a kingdom within Anzan, and the Counters claimed that although the Clovers had absolute power within their kingdom, they were still part of Anzan and could not sign a legally binding treaty with an entity that represented only part of Anzan.

STW's representative, Slider, had done much of the writing of the treaty despite not participating in the debate. The Counters complained that he had worded the beginning of the treaty to imply that the Counters had surrendered all of their power to the Cooks, and then made little mention of the Counters until recording their signatures at the end. The Counters figured that when Slider arrived back in Clover territory, he could easily twist the meaning of the words even further. Yet, in every case, the wording was such that a literal reading of the treaty would suggest that the Counters were still in power, and so when the Counters explained their reluctance to the young diplomats across the table, they sounded like they were trying to steal power away from them. This, in turn, made the Clovers' claims that all adults were power-hungry seem ever more true.

Just as they were being herded out of the room, one Counter diplomat loudly accused STW of maliciously shunning the Counters in order to create a sham state run entirely by young children, who would think they were getting power but would in fact be wholly dependent on STW, just as the adults in the Little Country's Slime party, which enrolled the vast majority of TLC's population, had become. The Counters noted that the treaty nowhere assigned any power to STW, or even a role in managing the Cook-Clover government, but that because STW controlled the only road leading between the Cook and Clover capitals, they controlled not only all trade but all communication between the two reigning groups.

Contact with the Players

The Players were pleased to see that both the Cold and the Clover nations were now run by children, and hoped that the Play party's traditionally child-focused politics would appeal to these children during the few years they had before they matured into adults. The Players had maintained contacts with the Slimes through trade, despite the great distance and the need to send these contacts through what was now Cold territory.

The Play party had recently invaded Nama, which the Cold Men traditionally considered an ally. The Cooks reaffirmed this, and stated that they would be continuing the ongoing Cold occupation of Nama to protect the Naman villagers from the Players. But the Players and the Cold Men were not formally at war with each other.

The Cooks had originally planned to keep their adult diplomats in place, figuring that the Cooks' and Counters' foreign policies were identical, but the Cooks had grown suspicious of the Counters as they realized that their mothers, whom they had expected to split allegiances or even lean towards the Cooks, were siding resolutely with their husbands and making the generation gap between the Cooks and the Counters even stronger than before. Thus the new Cook diplomats being sent to meetings with the Players were as young and wide-eyed as all of the other Cooks, and almost entirely untrained in the strategy of war.

First Cook reforms

The Cooks abolished the Counters' racial discrimination programs, but also banned the Raspara party. The Cooks stated that it would always be illegal in their nation to discriminate against any citizen for something they had not chosen, such as their ethnic background, but that party membership was a choice, and therefore the Raspara could not simply claim to be another ethnic minority and escape the Cooks' laws. They further declared that the Raspara were not citizens, and thus could not simply join the Cook party or any other party in the Cold nation, even if that party declared itself open to outside membership. Thus, the Cooks promised that the Raspara would not be able to join the Counters.

Change in enrollment

Police and land army

The Cooks realized that they would need to raise an army and a police force consisting of adults. Though the Cooks conceded that they were legally adults by their culture's traditions, very few Cooks had married, and their leaders did not know of any who had yet given birth to children of their own. The Cooks were unwilling to put themselves in a dangerous situation when there were older adults who could do the same. The Cooks thus again stated that their nation was a multiparty democracy, and that it was the Cold nation, not the Cook nation, and that therefore the Cooks would remain in power while also using the other parties to help strengthen their rule.

The Cooks promised that they would police themselves very strictly, and that their nation would not have a problem with teenage crime. They promised that they would also police their younger members and any orphans who were not under control of their parents or other adults. Thus, there would be a Cook police force, but they would only police the behavior of other Cooks. The Cooks said that this would ensure that the only violent crime in the Cold nation would be committed by adults, and the Cooks believed that this would shame the adults into policing their own behavior just as strictly and therefore eliminate the need for a unified police force in the Cold nation.

Enrollment of adults

Breaking the promise they had made to the Clovers, the Cooks soon enrolled adults into their party, including many who were past the prime of their life. They figured that elderly people, of whom there were few, might differ from younger adults and be more willing to cooperate with leaders who were very young. The Cooks preferred to enroll women, since their nation had many more women than men, and because women had been locked out of power by the previous government's masculine power structure, but for this very same reason, the women who joined the Cooks were inexperienced in government and many had less education than even the youngest Cook boys.

Unlike the Clovers, most Cooks came from parented families; many had lost their fathers to war, but the adult female population in their nation had been largely spared because, despite losing their war, they had not been invaded by the winning side. The adult males who had remained were largely also part of intact families. Therefore, the Cooks' new plan put young Cook children in charge of their own parents.

Election of 4191

Because the Cooks and Counters were essentially two generations of the same population, they lived in the same places, and it was impossible for one party to gain a geographical stronghold without the other. Therefore the Counters announced the establishment of road voting (mupā ŋaupumi), a policy borrowed from the Players. Since the Counters could not win a majority in any district in Anzan where they lived, they wanted to pool their votes into a few districts along STW's trade road and gain control of that. They also said that they would be using the votes from the Slime party to the west, since the children in the Little Country were preventing the Slimes from voting there.

The Counters urged the Cooks to call off the election, which was intended to be a simple census count of party enrollment, saying that the Counters were not interested in competing in any district not bordering STW's trade road and would concede 100% Cook representation in all of those districts. They merely wanted to divide the trade road with the Cooks so that both parties would share power there, with Cooks having some districts and Counters having the rest. The Counters stated that the population was irrelevant for this and that the division should be based on an agreement between the leaders of the Cook and Counter parties.

Interactions in Parliament

The Cooks won their election as planned, and sent a slate of representatives including many adults into Parliament.

The young Cook leaders soon found the adult Cook members uncooperative, with both men and women acting as though they were in charge of the Cook party despite their low formal position, and the Cooks soon pondered whether the Clovers had been right all along. Particularly embarrassing was the realization that the fights breaking out in Parliament and debate committees were not between the adults and the young Cook leaders, but between different factions of adults fighting for the right to order the Cooks around.

Though sympathetic to their mothers, and supportive of education for both women and for men, the Cooks now asked by what rationale these uneducated women should be placed in charge of their recently graduated children, who had done all of the work in creating the new government and even established diplomatic relations with the Clover kingdom to the west. Likewise, to the ex-Tadpoles, who were mostly men, the Cooks explained that they had done a great favor by erasing their crimes, and that the Cooks had had no obligation to do this. The Cooks had expected the ex-Tadpoles to recognize this and to repay the favor by dutifully obeying the Cooks, but the Tadpoles largely acted as though they were the ones who had been cheated, and that the Cooks' rehabilitation of their fathers was just the first step in a long path towards righting what had been wrong.

Second diplomatic meeting

The young Cook leaders therefore arranged another meeting with the Clovers, and specifically requested to meet with the same two kids that they had met months earlier. When they arrived, the Clovers admitted that they had earlier only been repeating the words of their king and had not committed to the advice themselves, but that now they understood that the king had been right and that both the Clovers and the Cooks would be facing adults who were obstinate at best and hostile at worst. The Clovers advised the Cooks to drop all pretense of democracy and simply rule by force, saying that despite being young they vastly outnumbered the adult males in their nation, and thus had a key advantage that the Clovers did not; the Clovers acknowledged that there were many other problems that could not all have simple solutions, but again underlined that both the Cooks and the Clovers were facing opposition that was not due to ideology, and therefore that it was foolish for the Cooks to expect to make alliances with older people along ideological lines.

Weather War

The Players formally invaded Nama in 4192, claiming territory that the Cold Men had also claimed. The Cooks and Counters had both traditionally favored a small nation, and had refused to defend land claims in areas where few Cold Men lived, but the Cold Men had always considered Nama to be part of their heartland, explaining their low population as being simply due to the difficult climate and terrain.

The Counters urged the Cooks to declare war against the Players, and stated that they would be willing to fight for the Cold nation even if the Cooks refused to send their own soldiers to battle. The Counters stated that they wished to heal their nation's partisan divide, and that if the Cook and Counter parties reunited, it would be adults who would have to fight this war, not children. Therefore the Counters did not think they were doing anything extraordinary; however, they also warned the Cooks that they would be ruling any territory won from the Players directly, with no input from the Cooks.

A young Cook boy named Mint also urged the Cooks to declare war on the Play nation, but avoided mentioning the Counters, knowing that his party's leaders had no respect for adults even when they were promising to selflessly defend the nation.

Conference in Nama

The Players also called for a meeting with the various parties. Departing from their long tradition, the Players set up the meeting in an area of Nama that was still under Cold party control.

As they traveled, two of the Cook boys were abducted and never made it to the meeting. The other Cooks did not know what had happened until they arrived at the meeting site and saw that they were missing two diplomats. The Players hosting the meeting claimed that because the kidnapping had taken place in Cold territory, Players could not have been responsible, and that it was likely that villagers from a Naman aboriginal tribe had carried out the deed. The Players offered to take control of the entirety of Nama in order to search for the perpetrators, saying that the Cooks and Counters clearly had lost control of that territory already as evidenced by the fact that they had been abducted just while traveling through.

Counter response

The Counters responded to this by declaring war on the Players, and stating that they would fight the war on their own. Previously, they had held back from this, stating that the Cooks and Counters needed to have a common foreign policy, and that they respected the Cooks' outreach to nontraditional nations such as the Little Country.

The Counters believed that the Players were responsible for the kidnapping, and had specifically demanded that the meeting take place in Cold territory so that they could deflect the blame onto the innocent Naman villagers, whom the Counters claimed were mostly pro-Counter in any case.

The Counters thus promised to raise an army of at least 10,000 men to fight their war, saying that the Naman villagers would willingly join the Counter army, as they expected the Namans would greatly prefer Counter rule to Play rule. They knew the Players' army was much larger than this, but stated if they could push the Players out of Nama, they would stir up support among the Naman villagers and hold the territory through civilian cooperation without the need to push into Play territory and defeat the surviving Play soldiers.

The Cooks had recently created an army of their own, mostly consisting of young boys but with some adult men who had promised to take positions on the front lines should they ever come to battle. But the Counters urged the Cooks not to get involved, saying that Play soldiers could do things to them that they could not turn back on the Players. The Counters repeated that all territory won from the Players would be part of a strictly one-party Counter state, but promised that life in this territory would be better for the Cooks than life in the Cooks' own territories.

Declaration of war

Nonetheless, the Cook Parliament, listening to the words of Mint and the other diplomats who had attended the meeting, formally declared war on the Players and promised to send their army, headed by the adult volunteers who were mostly ex-Tadpoles. The Cooks insisted on keeping their army separate because they knew that the Counters would refuse to obey their commands, and because they figured that the ex-Tadpole soldiers would still have hard feelings towards the Counters who had earlier abused them.

Appearance of militants

But now some militants within the Counters formed a movement of their own, the Leash (Tamaba nuu). The Leashes stated that they represented the true nationalist wing of the Cold party, that they would never compromise with outside powers, and that children should obey adults; therefore they would not serve the interests of the rebellious young Cook children. Yet they bluntly stated that they did not care what had happened to the two kidnapped Cook boys and would not search Play territory solely to rescue the boys; their priority was to invade the Players and take more land, even if the Players responded by abducting and killing more Cold citizens.

Player escalation

Needle attack

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. These Players manufactured their own weapons, largely made from the wood of the pine trees that grew in and around the city of Čumfunua.

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.

Disruption

By this time, the Cooks and Clovers had formed close bonds and were considering a treaty identifying themselves as a single nation with two autonomous provinces; this would be little more than a diplomatic formality since they would not be bound by any treaties, even to a common military policy, but it would underscore the claim that the Cook-Clover alliance was in control of its territory and not merely a front for the traditional adult powers sharing their land.

But now the Play insurgents had broken the young nation in half. Despite its large claimed territory, communication between the Cook and Clover capitals relied on a single, vulnerable trade route controlled mostly by the STW corporation, which had built and continually maintained the road because it profited from the trade. This road also continued further south, into Play territory, and therefore by taking control the Players could conceivably charge higher prices for their products and pay lower prices for what was given to them.

Cold reaction

The Cold nation had no unified police force because the Cooks had expected that an adult police force would not obey them. Thus, the adult police force was run by the Counter party.

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. This was the same argument that the Players had used just weeks earlier to blame the kidnapping of the Cook boys on the villagers of Nama; this led the Counters to grow increasingly suspicious of the Players, wondering if this excuse would be repeated every time the Players launched an unprovoked attack against the Counters or the Cooks.

The Counter soldiers knew that they could not easily launch revenge 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.

The Cooks knew that the STW corporation would most likely order its traders to fight the Players and reestablish control of the route for STW, since STW relied on that trade route more than the Cooks did. All adults in STW were soldiers, and therefore could be called on at any time by STW to fight a battle, but the Cooks also knew that STW had recently become notorious for forcing child soldiers into battles adults would not fight, and worried that STW's traders, who were now stuck in Cold territory south of the insurgents, would use some sort of clever trick to force the Cooks into battle against the insurgents and that STW would only show up once many Cooks had been killed. The Cooks figured that STW's scheme, if it existed, might rely on antagonizing the entire Play population and not just the insurgents along the trade route.

Cooks attempt to regain control

With their own army, the Cooks attempted to regain control of the lost city of Čumfunua.

Battle of Čumfunua

However, the adults in their army refused to fight, telling the children to lead the battle themselves since they were the ones with the most to gain from a victory. Repeating well-worn arguments, the adults argued that there was no cultural precedent to force older adults to take the front lines of the battle while sparing younger adults, and that even the youngest Cooks had become legally adults by taking power in the government. These men argued that the Cooks could not be adults in Parliament and children on the battlefield, and that because the Cooks had the leading positions in the government, they should also be the ones to fight on the front lines.

Therefore the Cooks declared themselves at peace with the Play party to the south, even though the Players were still invading Nama.

Meeting in Pūpepas

The Cooks sent a team of diplomats to the Play capital of Pūpepas. They asked the Players to protect them on their journey so that they would not be abducted again, and so that if harm did come to them, the Players would not be able to deflect the blame.

In Pūpepas they asked the Players to intervene by telling the insurgents to back down, admitting that the Cook boys and girls were unwilling to combat the adult insurgents and therefore could not retake the city of Čumfunua. The Cooks stated that, because they still shared a nation with the Counters, STW, and other unaffiliated groups, these other groups would most likely take over Čumfunua on their own, and might then punish the Players in ways that the Cooks would not. Therefore the Cooks again asked the Players to intervene, saying that it would mean the best for both the Players and the Cooks if they were to call off the insurgency before the traditional adult powers got involved.

Expulsion

In the wake of the Play insurgency, the Cooks banned all adults from their party. They claimed that the adult male Tadpoles who had joined the Cooks had used legal loopholes to avoid being forced to quell the rebellion, with some merely repeating their earlier claims of being physically disabled, despite having admitted otherwise in the meantime to appeal to the Cooks' pacifist ideals. The Cooks extended the ban to women because they argued that women, too, should be police officers and that they should patrol the streets for young children, and because the men who were being expelled were married to some of these women, who to the Cooks were behaving as one.

Not all of the adults in the Cook party were battle-shy ex-Tadpoles. But the Cooks claimed that the remaining adults were merely taking advantage of the difficult situation, and that, rather than uniting with the young Cooks against an obvious greater enemy, the adults had demanded the Cooks put the traditional adult power structure back in place, having claimed that the much older citizens knew from their long experience at war better how to handle an insurgency than did the young Cook leaders. But the Cooks argued that they had more experience with the situation at hand because the veterans had only fought wars as adults.

Moreover, the Cooks explained that in their short time in power, it had already become plain that the adults who had joined their party were not interested in cooperation, did not respect that they had been invited to a position they had not earned, and were unlikely to change their ways. From the beginning the young leaders had complained that the adults did not take them seriously. Adult Cooks had at times forced their ideas through even when they were clearly outnumbered, claiming they spoke for a much wider population, and that even when they lost an argument they would refuse to back down. Because so many of these people were the Cooks' own parents, they would continue the fights at home, and had forced many young Cook children out of their homes.

The Cooks revived the Tadpole party and expelled the adult Cook population into it. They then declared that the Tadpoles were a criminal organization whose members could be arrested at any time. This did not apply to adults in the Counter party, which the Cooks promised to respect and consider outside their purview.

The Cooks abolished their own adult status with this declaration, stating they were not adults and that their culture was wrong to force children as young as 13 into adult duties when they were still growing and most had not yet found homes of their own. (Most Cooks, having run away from their parents, now lived in vacated STW orphanages without adult caretakers.)

The Cooks promised to pass new laws discriminating against Tadpoles, saying that this did not violate their earlier proclamation because they were merely discriminating against a rival political party, just as they had for the Raspara. This again did not apply to the Counters, even though the Cooks also admitted they were growing weary of the Counters' own drive for power.

The Cooks stated that childhood was a life stage, not a party identity, and that the Cook party would grow with its members and become a traditional adult party in time. Thus, the Cooks promised their new laws could not be turned back against them if an even younger group were to arise in the future and threaten the Cooks' power structure.

Counter response

The Counters by this time were growing wary of STW, claiming that STW had dismantled the adult power structure of both the Cold and Clover nations, replacing them with children unfit to rule, presumably because STW knew that young children would be both very loyal to STW for having hoisted them up, and also very easily pushed around.

The Counters took pity on the Cook children, admitting that it was difficult for the Counters to relate to their situation. The Counters understood why the Cooks wanted peace with the Players even as the Players were escalating their invasion of Cook territory: the Cooks had trusted the adults in their party would fight the adult soldiers in the Play army, only to be betrayed before their first battle.

Four-party system

Some young children opposed the Cooks' movements towards pacifism. Their kupukapukipa movement, glorifying war for the sake of war, told Cooks that while the Players could still be their friends, the Players would need to bend to the Cooks rather than meeting in the middle.

By this time, an adult-oriented militarist group calling itself the Leash (Tamaba nuu) had declared itself a separate party.

Within months, the Kupukapukipa broke from the Cooks, and declared themselves an independent political party, the Scorpions. The Kupukapukipa had realized they needed to organize quickly to prevent the Leash supporters from taking root and gaining cross-generational appeal.

Thus, there were four major parties competing for power in Cold territory:

1. The Counters, the people who had broken away from the Pioneers and founded the new Cold nation. They were mostly adults and had traditionally supported a male power structure. Now, they were enrolling women who had no place else to go, but they still insisted that men retain control.
2. The Cooks, largely the children of the Counters. The Cooks barred adults from party membership, and now had an even balance of boys and girls, and were the most pacifist of the four parties, even seeking to form an alliance with the Players who had occupied the city of Čumfunua.
3. The Leash, strong nationalists who supported aggressive expansion of the Cold nation into Play territory and opposed minority rights. They were a traditional adult male party but were warming to the idea of admitting women.
4. The Scorpions, nationalists with violent rhetoric who considered themselves more hardy than all other parties and promised to reduce everyone's living standards until the other parties gave up. They were mostly young boys but were too few in number to greatly affect the Cooks' ratio of boys to girls.

Thus, although the Cold nation had four major parties, for practical purposes, there were two parties for children and two parties for adults. The Cooks, the largest party, had expected new parties to arise, and had hoped to ally with the adults in the Counter party against their new opponents. However, to their dismay, the Counters showed little interest in this, despite their close ideological match with the Cook party.

Rise of the Scorpions

Naming

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. They sometimes also used the name Needles, honoring the insurgents who had attacked the Cold Men precisely when they were too weak to respond.

Scorpion philosophy

The Scorpions 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 Leash

The Leashes promoted racism and stated that it was simply natural for a nation's ruling party to better the interests of its dominant ethnic group at the expense of the smaller, weaker groups trapped within its borders. This type of racism was more severe than the Counters' support of racial discrimination laws because the Leashes planned to discriminate even against longstanding aboriginal tribes that the Counter had seen as natural allies. The Leash also promoted militarism, stating that only men who risked their lives in war were true Leashes, and that by doing so, they would earn the right to overthrow any non-Leash governments, even if the victims of the coup were soldiers who had fought alongside the Leash in recent wars.

By contrast, the Scorpions opposed racism. They never stated that racism was morally wrong, but rather that it was a sign of weakness, and that any group that attained majority status and still faced opposition from minorities was very weak indeed. The Scorpions promised that they would seize control of their nation while still being a minority, and would dominate their enemies, including the Leashes, by pure physical force.

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.

Counter secession

At this point, the Counters seceded from Anzan, wishing the young Cooks the best of luck in running a nation with no adults. They promised that they would not launch an all-out war against the Cooks, but by declaring independence, they deprived the Cooks of almost all of their tax revenue and forced them to depend on foreign trade to meet even their basic necessities. Since STW was still strong, the Counters gave the Cooks a choice: either obey their parents, or admit that the STW corporation had replaced their family and that they were just pawns for STW by this point.

The Counters warned that they planned for their new nation, which they called Counterland, to have a strong military and that they would not feel obligated to defend the Cooks' nation, which had retained the name Anzan, even though most Cooks were the children of the Counters. The Counters again promised to hold off the invading Play army on their own, but stated that they could not do this while simultaneously helping the young Cooks who were trying to make peace with the Players.

The Counters also revealed plans for a war in which the Counter army would invade the Cooks and push them into a single city, with Counters surrounding them on all sides. Here, again, they promised that they would take all possible measures to avoid killing their children, and that by winning the war they would be protecting the Cooks from the Players, but that such a war may be needed to convince the Cooks to give up their struggle for a nation of their own.

Family migration law

The Counters abolished cities, stating that they were now a nomadic people whose Parliament would only meet when they were able to secure a stable territory in Counterland or else regain control of Napaatusā from the Cooks nonviolently. They nonetheless passed a law stating that the migrating families needed to take their children with them, apart from those who pledged allegiance to the Cooks, and that if the parents judged it morally sound, they could also bring young Cook children with them in the belief that they were too young to know what was best for them. Thus, the Counters were forbidden from abandoning young children to fend for themselves in the wilderness. Yet, some families chose to abandon their children even so, claiming that the Cooks were able to take care of them, and that their parental responsibilities had been cleared. These people took advantage of earlier claims from the Cooks that even very young children could make independent decisions, and then claimed that the children they were abandoning had voluntarily chosen to join the Cooks.

Cooks regroup

Fifty years earlier, the Flower Bees had seceded from the Play Empire, forming a nation of their own that was also entirely without adults. However, the Bees, despite their self-designation as children, were mostly teenagers of military age with ready access to weapons, and with a compact territory to rule over. The Cooks were much younger, with nearly all being fourteen years of age or younger, and few Cooks had access to weapons and armor. Only adults had physical access to military storehouses, even though the Cooks were nominally in control of the entire nation now. Moreover, in this case, it was the adults who had chosen to secede and concentrate into a compact territory, leaving the young Cooks scattered throughout the vast territory of Anzan.

The Cooks realized that they would have a much easier time defending their territory if they concentrated themselves along STW's trade road, since three outside powers — the Players, the Clovers, and STW — all benefited from trade along that road and would have a strong incentive to keep the road open and safe for travel and for habitation. Also, moving to the road would free the Cooks from the danger of living so close to the Players, in the event that the Players were to defeat the Counters and then push onward into Cook territory despite the Cooks' attempts at making peace with the Players.

But the Cooks realized their plan to physically consolidate their nation would be difficult. Their parents had run away from their homes, in many cases leaving the children without viable means of transport to get to the western trade road. Even those who did arrive would have to solve new problems, such as where to live and how to feed themselves without weapons to hunt animals with, or easy access to the sea.

Consolidation of troops

The Counters soon realized that the Cooks were serious about their plan to rule Anzan without adults, and that the Cooks were about to raise an independent army, economy, and so on, rather than admitting they could not do it on their own and pleading for the Counters to compromise with them. Because the Cook territory was insulated from outside powers, the Counters figured that the Cooks would not need to fight conventional battles against their enemies, but the Counters expected that, one way or another, Anzan would fall into ruin and that the Counters would need to sweep in to rescue the Cooks either from outside invasions (even if indirect), from famine (as they were unsure of the Cooks' ability to gather food supplies), or from a civil war in which they had broken up and attacked each other.

By this time there was already a second political party, the Scorpions, which had broken from the Cooks and which also had very few adult members. Since the Scorpions were children, the Counters knew that they had little moral restraint against attacking other children, and that a Scorpion-Cook civil war could lead to tens of thousands of deaths as the two young armies would not be able to stop the war once it began.

A new party for adults, the Leash, had arisen in recent months, and they had shocked the world by admitting that they did not care if the kidnapped Cook children were being abused in Play territory, and implying that the Leashes themselves would attack children if the opportunity arose, expecting no sympathy from the other three parties competing for power in Anzan. Since the Leashes had not followed the Counters' plan to fight the Players in Nama, they were roaming freely through the Cook territory that was otherwise off-limits for adults, and the Counters worried that the Cooks would be easy prey. However, the Leashes reminded the others that most of them were the parents of young Cook leaders, just like the Counters were, and the the Leashes' plans involved slaughtering their enemies, not their sons and daughters.

Eight-party conference

The Counters and Players agreed to yet another new meeting in Counterland, the fifth major conference to take place in the space of a year. The Counters had begun to contemplate surrendering all of Nama to the Players in the hopes that they would be satisfied with that and then allow the Counters to retake control of their child population.

The organizers also invited the Cooks, the Clovers, the Scorpions, the Pacifists, the Leashes, and STW to the meeting. STW was responsible for transportation of the Scorpions and Clovers, and had earned their place at the debate table by promising to deliver the young representatives safely to the meeting. The Cooks chose to again rely on the Players for transportation, even though the Players were invading their nation.

Player position

The Players went to the meeting knowing that they had the strongest position of all the participants. The Cooks' trade route connected with the Play homeland, not with the Counters' new nation in Nama (although there were poorly maintained accessory roads connecting Nama). Therefore, the Cooks were economically dependent on the Players, not on their parents, and despite the Counters' earlier threats to ruin the Cooks' economy, only the Players had that power.

The Play diplomats were female, as in previous meetings. The Cooks seemed to grow more distrustful of adults with each new meeting, but the Players hoped they could reshape this feeling into a distrust of adult men specifically, and therefore come to be seen as ideal leaders for the desperate young Cooks. Yet the Players knew that the Cooks had expelled women from their party as well, and for the same reason that they had expelled the men.

Meeting begins

However, at the meeting, the Clover and Scorpion diplomats never arrived, leaving the Cooks surrounded by adults. In the earlier meetings, the Cooks had been reassured by the presence of the Clovers even though they seemed to make little difference in the outcome of the meetings. Now, the Cooks were frightened and wondered if the STW diplomat they had been told to trust had in fact kidnapped both the Clovers and the Scorpions, for some reason yet to be revealed. But the Cook diplomats were afraid to criticize STW.

STW's explanation

STW answered that the Clover kids could not attend the meeting because they were now at war with their own adult population. STW promised that they were fighting on the Clovers' side in this war, that the Clovers were still interested in maintaining friendly contacts with the Cooks and the Players along STW's trade route, and that STW could easily guarantee safety for anyone traveling in both directions. But the Clovers were so short on personnel, he continued, that they simply could not afford to send any of their representatives to the new meeting in Counterland. He produced a document that had earlier been signed by the Clover king, the Golden Sun, stating that his people were too busy to participate in foreign affairs, although the document did not specifically mention the new meeting and thus could not be used as proof for STW's claims.

The STW diplomat then went on to explain that the Scorpions were geographically dispersed, that STW had been unable to locate a leader to talk to, and that they felt the Scorpions could not be accurately represented in a debate if STW were to simply pick Scorpion kids at random to speak for the wider population.

Nonetheless the Cooks realized that this meeting did not really involve the Clovers, and they were not familiar with the Scorpions, so they listened quietly to the Counter men and the Play women who refused to back down on their plans to move further north. The Cooks were worried that the Counters would respond by escalating the war, and that the Cooks would be drawn into it because they could not simultaneously be at peace with the Players and with the Counters if the Counters and Players were at war.

Cook diplomats' reaction

The Play word vapap "war" was never used metaphorically; Play had other words which could signify either a literal combat war or a conflict of emotions, but STW's diplomat had been clear what he meant. Though the Clovers were indeed fighting a war of combat, nearly all of the soldiers fighting in this war were adults, including the small but powerful Matrix army, along with STW's mercenaries. A third participant was the Soap Bubbles. The Cooks were unfamiliar with these other powers, and wrongly assumed that the orphaned children in the Clover kingdom were fighting against their adult population directly. Thus, while the STW diplomat had intended to reassure the Cook children that their friends in the Clover kingdom were safe, the Cooks became visibly distressed upon hearing STW's explanation for the Clovers' absence and did not feel relieved by the diplomat's more detailed explanation.

Invasion of Anzan

Celebrating their diplomatic victory at the meeting in Napaatusā, the Players appointed a new general, Mibas, to lead the assault against the Cook children who had signed the peace treaty with the Play diplomats. The Players realized that STW had lost its standing with the Cooks by failing to deliver the representatives from the other children's parties to the meeting, and that the Cooks had misunderstood the STW diplomat's explanation for their absence, believing that the Clovers in Pavaitaapu were fighting hand-to-hand combat against their adult population, with the adults in that war seemingly giving the children no sympathy. Therefore, the Players assumed that they could invade the Cooks and the Cooks would see the Players as protectors so long as the Play soldiers did not simply slaughter the children upon first sight.

The Players knew that their betrayal would only underscore the Cooks' belief that all adults were suspect and liable to betray them with or without a reason. But the invasion plan called for the Play army to invade the kids from the woods to the east, not along the trade road, which would cut them off from their parents in Counterland, and force the kids to negotiate with the Players alone even if the Cooks switched sides in desperation and tried to rejoin their parents. Meanwhile, any Counters attempting to rescue the Cooks would need to fight through the new Play battalions first, and any Counters who transferred from Vavatabūa's front (that is, Counterland) to Mibas' front would only accelerate the Players' takeover of Nama and the remainder of Counterland.

Further battles

By this point, population shifts and slightly lower fertility rates among the Players had reversed the longstanding demographic situation: while Play children still outnumbered adults, the balance was not so extreme as it had been during the Players' first few decades, while the Cold Men had recently lost most of their adult male population. Traditionally, the Players had considered their young population to be a strength, as their population had kept growing despite plagues, wars, and defections. Now the Players seemed likely to win the war from the opposite side, as they had an adult male army much larger than their enemies, eager for war, and yet the Players retained their transnational appeal to youth, as young Cooks seemed to grow ever warmer to a formal alliance with the Players even though they knew that the Players could easily invade and occupy the Cook territories without fear of an insurgency.

The Players had just invaded Nama, and the Cold Men had joined the war to protect Nama from the Players. Thus the Weather War began; it was also known as the Third Mallard War by the Players.

The Cold Men had just committed themselves to a new war against the Players, partly as revenge for the Players' invasion of Nama, and partly to more easily take control of Nama for the Cold party. But without a sizable army to fight their war, the Cold Men realized that they would either need to send child soldiers, as the Players had often done, or admit that they could not help Nama in this new war. This in turn relied on the assumption that the Play army preferred to attack Nama rather than the Cold Men.

The Players had always considered the Cold Men the strongest army in the region, while Nama had no standing army at all, having been reduced to ungovernable wilderness hundreds of years earlier. The Players had admitted publicly that the only reason that the Players had ever invaded Nama was because the Play population had outgrown its seaside habitat and needed more land to live on. A recent Play census showed that the total population was similar to what it had been fifty years earlier — slightly over one million — but the Players were now confined to a much smaller area of land, as they had lost territory in wars against the Cold Men, the Eggs, and Xema, and had only recently reconquered the rebels in Thaoa.

The Players had always apologized for attacking Nama, which had never attacked the Players, but now the Players had an opportunity to fight the Cold Men, which they hoped would draw third parties into the war on the side of the Players. Nonetheless, because the Play army admitted that they had begun the war by attacking a defenseless third party, they realized that they might still be fighting alone.

The Players thus escalated their conventional war against the Cold Men, saying that their adult army would defeat the Cook children without the need for great bloodshed, and would then isolate the much more violent Scorpions by physically trapping them between the strongholds set up by the Scorpion adult guardians, such that the guardians would appear to have taken the children prisoner. Against the Leash army and the villagers of Nama, the only adult armies in the region, the Players expected to face a more even battle, but the Play military strategists doubted that even in the whole of Nama there could be 90,000 adult male soldiers left, and that the Leash army was small as well. Lastly, the Players expected that the Pacifists would submit to the Players once they realized the inevitability of defeat.

Occupation of Thaoa

The Cold Men's declaration of war ended the Players' willingness to incorporate Thaoa back into the Play Empire with full citizenship rights. Thaoa was small, having been originally home to just a tiny fraction of the Play population, but the Players had lost so much land and sea that they realized the need to assert full control over Thaoa.

Challenges to minor parties

As the war spread, both the Pacifist party and the two new militarist parties realized they would be inevitably drawn into the conflict and had already alienated both sides. The Players realized that this could help them in their war, as despite their recent territorial losses, they had succeeded in maintaining the Play party's monopoly on power in their territory, and the new schools had only reached children living in the conflict zones of Nama.

The Players hoped that they could push the Pacifists into Cold territory, weakening the Cold defense, while sparing the lives of Pacifists so that they would not give up pacifism and fight the Play invasion.

Battle of Ŋasupuniūa

The Cold Men invaded the territory of the Eggs, Subumpam, which by this time was ethnically mixed because the Eggs and their slaves had mostly both remained in the area, while the Eggs had lost control of the western territories from which they had earlier come. One territory they invaded was called Ŋasupuniūa or Ŋasupunikuu.

The Players also invaded, but claimed that their invasion was friendly whereas the Cold Men would exploit them. Nonetheless, some Eggs had converted to the Swamp Kids a few generations earlier, and many among these had then moved on to join the Cold Men, as that was the locally dominant faction of the Swamp Kids. This is why the Cold Men in this immediate region were racially mixed and no longer thought of themselves as a tribe. Other Eggs had joined the Players, while still others had remained Eggs. There were also the descendants of child slaves who had joined none of the above parties, though most had eventually chosen one of the above three.

Pacifist approach

The Cold Men had the support of some locals, but sought to push the locals into the front lines of battle and thus had to compete with the local pacifists who provided shelter for people who saw no reason to join the war. The Stargazer movement took root here, bringing pacifism to the Cold Men just when they needed to rally their troops to war; however, the Stargazers also pulled soldiers away from the Players. Previously, support for pacifism had been mostly confined to Nama, where the war had been two-sided and conventional, but now pacifists in Subumpam appealed to members of parties who endorsed neither the Cold Men nor the Players, as well as deserters from the two larger armies who felt that the Cold and Play parties had too much in common to fight a war.

The Players thus regained control of the Egg territories in this battle, and did not seek to push out the Eggs, because they believed that the Eggs would voluntarily convert to the Play party. Nonetheless, those who refused were given no power in the government. The Eggs also did not get control of their original territory back, as it was lost to both the Players and the Eggs by this time (still being ruled by the Firestones with the support of Wax).

Cold party government reforms

The Cherry party (Pamaši) had by this time rejoined the Cold Men.

Contact with Moonshine

Moonshine joined the Cold Men's side in the war, but warned that they remained committed to pacifism, and would do nothing to help the Cold Men on the battlefield; their only commitment was that the Cold Men could flee into Moonshine territory if they lost their war. Furthermore, as true pacifists, the Moonshines also allowed the Players to flee into their territory, provided they move to the state of Hōki, open to refugees and war criminals alike.

The Cold Men were frustrated by this development, as they knew that Moonshine's help would be useless, and yet that allying with Moonshine would alienate potential outside allies in the war who had come to oppose Moonshine for other reasons. Furthermore, as a feminist society with a power structure similar to the Players, any Moonshines who left their tribe would almost certainly become Players, since the Cold Men offered few positions of power to their women, and this could not easily be changed.

Hamatap rebellion

Proving the Cold Men correct, the Hamatap tribe of eastern Nama rebelled from Moonshine and joined the Play army. They did not speak the Play language, but most spoke Moonshine. Though they were few in number, the Hamatap soldiers rejected pacifism, and seemed likely to offer more help to the Players than the vastly more numerous Moonshines gave to the Cold Men.

Events in Baeba

Yet another insult to the Cold Men came in 4194, when the pacifist nation of Moonshine invaded the Little Country, a kingdom based in Baeba Swamp which had been founded by the Pioneer wing of the Swamp Kids. Moonshine was not the strongest army in this war, but when the Cold Men realized that Moonshine had fought a war in Baeba Swamp while refusing to fight a war in Nama, the Cold Men considered declaring that Moonshine did not deserve peace, and that they could be justifiable targets in a war. Moonshine's diplomats had no reaction to this, as they quickly realized their allies in the Little Country war had betrayed them and were now themselves threatening to invade Moonshine even as they admitted that Moonshine had done nothing to deserve such treatment.

New head of state

The Cold party had up until now been using the Swamp Kids' form of government, which had been inherited from the Players, and was essentially a masculinized Play system with no single head of state. Since the Cold Men noticed that most governments lacking a single head of state were feminists, they decided to invest power in a president (Play kiaa, Late Andanese gihakunua), just as the Scorpions had done.

First presidential election

The Cold nation remained a multiparty democracy, with the Pacifists, Scorpions, and Leashes all theoretically able to outvote the Cold Men, but the Cold Men promised that they would discard the votes of any party whose members seemed dedicated to sabotaging the Cold Men's war effort. Voting rights among the Cold Men were still restricted to men, but the other parties allowed both men and women; for this reason, the Cold Men counted their own votes twice.

The Cold Men elected a president named Nauvaatuā. (Both presidents' names began with the same /naū/, but this was not unusual in personal names and they did not see it a sign of friendship.)

War against the Scorpions

The Players decided to take on the Scorpion military force after all, figuring that they could impress upon the small children in the Scorpion army that their fantasies were not real, and that true power belonged to the Play conventional army. They planned to be as nonviolent as possible, hoping that the Scorpion children would grow into Play adults as they realized that the Players had rescued them from their doom.

Players push north

The Players sent tens of thousands of adult male soldiers into Nama now, beginning their largest-ever conventional military invasion. Led by generals like Vavatabūa, the Players rapidly pushed the Cold Men entirely out of Nama (though the Players did not conquer all of Nama, the areas they left behind were out of reach of the Cold army). Thus, the Players controlled their own lowlands, the mountains of Nama, and the lowlands on the far side of Nama. This had been their main goal in the previous wars, but they had only just now achieved it.

Weather symbolism

The young, uneducated Cold population had recently heard a rumor that the Play people were able to draw energy from the sun. This rumor had originated in Dreamland. Now some Cold Men came to believe that the Players were going to launch an attack of Cold territory in the summer, and that they would be able to bring hot weather with them, such that the Cold Men would not be able to bear the temperatures and would collapse due to the heat. The Cold Men figured that if the Players drew their strength from the sun, they must therefore be weak during winter, and the Cold generals drew up plans for an attack on Play territory during the onset of winter.

The Players proudly conceded that they were strengthened by the sun, but also reminded the Cold Men that this was due to the Players' hardiness overall, and that they were also hardy in cold weather. Therefore, the Players invited the Cold Men to launch their planned winter invasion and see which of the two armies was better able to handle the weather.

Aftermath

By 4195, diplomats were claiming that STW was the source of all the problems with the Cold nation, and that STW had dismantled the adult power structure of four nations — Amade, Anzan (that is, the Cold Men), TLC, and Šanaampu (a province in Player territory) — by forcing adults into war and then forcing unfit children into power where they could be easily pushed around. The Cooks, still considering themselves quite young, were unwilling to hear this, as they could not accept an argument based on the premise that they were unfit for power.

Notes

List of characters

1. Lamb and Mint: Two boys who controlled a wing of the army and planned to invade Play territory during the onset of winter.
2. Stargazer: A girl of Play ancestry whom Lamb admired. She was about 13 years old when they met, meaning that Lamb and Mint were probably also about 13 years old at the time. (In the original writeup, the boys were older, but this was a continuation of an earlier storyline.) A troop named the Seeds had tried to kidnap her earlier. The same girl also survived another kidnapping attempt (outside a bathroom); by this time she had become anti-Play, and it is possible she had been so all along but only became vocally opposed to the Play government once she became politically active. Nonetheless, it is possible here that the Play party she opposed was just one faction.

Notes on weather and timing

Canonically, Lamb and Mint ("the Šaŋašīs boys") won their war, but in doing so simultaneously destroyed their own homeland and that of the Raspara. Then, they fled to Nama and said "Did we do the right thing?" But the Players survived by also fleeing into Nama.

Šaŋašīs is the Play word for an allergic reaction to an insect sting.

Even though the Cold Men won their war, in the original writeup their enemy was the Warm Men and not the Players. The original writeup is lost to time and may in fact have never been written down (though the aftermath, involving the boys fleeing to Nama, was described in precise detail). It may be that the boys were not involved in the attack after all and merely had the power to flee whereas most others did not. Nonetheless, they surely had some sort of military power.

Note also that in the original timeline, the Weather War was a very brief event, and took place before the outflow of Pioneers to Baeba. Indeed, the Weather War so destroyed the Cold homeland that the Pioneers had little choice but to flee. This also explains the sudden fall of the Raspara. In this original reckoning, the Cold Men's drive to push out the Players (that is, the Warm Men) was so important that they were willing to destroy most of their own homeland to achieve it. Thus the move to Baeba took place for entirely different reasons than is written here. Also, the means by which the Cold-Pioneer coalition army came to be dominated by the young children is poorly explained, because if the Weather War predated the move to Baeba, the army would have still been comprised of traditional adult soldiers.