Star Empire

The Gold Empire, not to be confused with the much later Ogili Gold Empire, also known as the Gold Union, was an alliance of nations positioned around the Gold Sea. It was formed from the union of the Star Empire and Subumpam, each of which were themselves unions of smaller nations who had agreed to a military alliance.

Subumpam

The treaty creating the Gold Empire was unpopular in Subumpam. Even though more than 80% of the population of the Empire was located on the western (Star) shore, the founders chose to build their imperial capital in the extreme southeast, near the eastern border of Subumpam. Even though Subumpam was not a democracy and its people were used to being exploited, the sudden appearance of a foreign power forcing the Subumpamese to build castles and fortresses from which they themselves could be even more strictly controlled led to a conflict. This was the Peep Riot (Peep was the name of the city they had chosen for their capital). The Gold rulers were forced to admit that they could not build their capital here, and Peep seceded from Subumpam soon afterwards, joining instead the nation immediately eastward for its own protection. Thus the Goldies realized they needed to put their capital someplace central. Even so, they chose another location within Subumpam, the city of Wabula Pipem. Since word of the revolt had spread among the peasants, they told the Pipemese people that they were not merely a "second choice", as they felt that would spoil their rule, but that they were chosen because they were already the capital of Wabula Pipem and that it made sense for the subimperial capital and the high imperial capital to be in the same place.

The Pipemese rulers realized immediately that they had essentially been removed from power, since they were under the control of foreigners even in their own imperial capital, and began to regret signing the treaty. Soon, the Gold legislature voted to disband the Subumpamese military, since they didn't want to worry about the threat of any more revolts, and threatened to invade and occupy Subumpam with the much larger Star military if they did not immediately comply. Subumpam thus became the only member of the Gold Union without a military.

They also occupied all of Subumpam's ports, placing them under direct control of the Gold military. They raised taxes on the Subumpamese people to pay for an armed police force that watched cities and inspected people to make sure that peasants were not able to buy or produce dangerous weapons. Many positions in the Subumpamese governtment were abolished or replaced with figureheads reporting to the Gold government.

Due to the lack of a military, the Gold governors worried about invasion, and so they blocked the major roads leading out of Subumpam. They did not actually do this, as was commonly perceived, to prevent Subumpamese from leaving; in fact, for a small fee, anyone in Subumpam could leave so long as they relocated to somewhere still within the Gold Empire. But the Gold governors ordered the roads blocked off because they realized they had just deliberately created an extremely weak open wound in their Empire, out of the fear of the native population rebelling, and did not want to put their new preferred home territory in a weak spot. They were afraid to allow the Subumpamese to create another military, even if it was more strictly controlled than before, because they felt that would mean admitting that disbanding the military had been a mistake. They also did not want to force the Star military to waste time and resources occupying Subumpam, but realized that they might in the end be forced to do just that. As a temporary solution, they allowed people from Nama to occupy various key areas within Subumpam.

The shock of seeing Naman soldiers occupying Subumpam, when Subumpam had been promised from the beginning that the whole purpose of the alliance was to protect Subumpam from being crushed by potential enemies such as Nama, was too much for the Subumpamese to bear. Some Subumpamese formed a secret society promising to get Subumpam back out of the Gold Union, even if it meant surrendering control to another union, or even to Nama itself. A throng of unarmed Subumpamese attacked a Naman security guard, who responded by killing them all. The new secret secessionist society was depressed when they heard the news, not only because of the many innocent (as they saw them) victims who had been killed but because it showed that the Subumpamese were far weaker at resisting occupiers than they had been just a few decades before, when the people of Peep successfully resisted the occupation altogether and pulled out of the Union.