Gold Empire

The new Star Empire was sharply divided into two groups of people: native Stars and everyone else. The conquering Namans introduced the Stars to the imapa (also imepo, imapala, i mappa, imupu, imaqpag, etc.) system of government, a political philosophy that had been created by the World Utopians, who had shaped their philosophy to make it appealing to the frightened Stars so that they would let the Namans abuse and control them. The World Utopians had found success with imapa in other nations, too, and had come to dominate the Gold Union well before the induction of Lobexon. Once Loexon was opened up, imapa became a reality, as it was to the Stars a welcome alternative from the many violent factions that had fought for control of Lobexon for all of their lives. Besides imapa, the conquering Namans also forced the Stars to register themselves in the universal census, in order that the government know exactly how many Stars there still were. The Stars were allowed to have some representation in the government, though slavery continued.

Even though the Stars were no longer in power, Lobexon was still relatively wealthy because much of the Stars' technology had survived the war so far. This was imapa's version of utopia: instant gratification and avoidance of pain, even at greater future loss of pleasure. Imapa often upset Star-stytle gov'ts, which were now protected by the Star army and thus prevalent even in Lobexon.

Some Laban nations came looking for a truce with Nama, hoping the two ruthless military powers could learn to make amends. But the problem of Lobexon was so great that no solution could be reached. In 2057, the coast was opened, and Nama sent legions of Lenians down to Lobexon to take over the government. The Lenians introduced the Stars to a form of government known as Lapiwa, which was a special version of imapa that applied only to Lobexon.

However, life in Lobexon after its induction into the Gold Union was nothing like what had existed before2057 because of the exclusive dominance of Lapiwa. Lapiwa had through Lobexon's advanced technology become a symbol of affluence, satisfaction, and hedonism. Lobexon's laws grew more liberal every year.

Slavery in Lobexon

Slavery had been largely introduced by the conquering Macro-Repilians from Nama, who had imported it from their homeland. Some of the conquerors were slaves themselves in their homelands, and wanted a way out. THe slavery was of a type that only operated in a particular geographical area. Everyone had to sign a census form, and each town had a list of slaves and whom the slaves belonged to. It was even possible, though uncommon, for two people to both own the same slave.

Note however that some areas of Lobexon, such as Katō, had been enslaving Pabaps for several hundred years. These Pabaps were called Pōsa and generally lived in areas where the powerful Pabaps with trading ships did not go. The Treaty of 2057 had essentially flipped the tables in that it enslaved all of the Stars and freed the people that the Stars had been enslaving, but Nama's rule was very weak in the tropics, and most Naman warlords enslaved both groups unashamedly. Still, they did not want Pabap trading ships finding out that they were so grossly violating the terms of the treaty, so the areas that held enslaved Pabaps generally did not trade directly with Paba and thus were much poorer than areas further north with harsher climates.

Vegetablization of farmland

The Naman slavelords ripped apart Lobexon's agriculture system to make it less self-sufficient. Nama had lots of wild animals, but was a very difficult place, despite its immense geographical extent, to grow vegetables. Naman slavelords decided that Lobexon would therefore become a giant vegetable garden for Nama so that Namans could learn to eat a little bit healthier. But also, they figured that they would likely eventually be thrown out of power, and figured that if a new independent Lobexon found that its farms were only good for producing vegetables, they would be dependent on Nama for food aid even while independent. This is why they killed off all of the livestock and produced fake pro-vegetarian arguments saying that those farm animals had been the cause of all previous famines.

However, an even higher priority for Nama was to end Lobexon's alcohol production, given that the tropics were great places to produce "banana beer" (kōxi) and "palm wine" (tákʷ). Then Nama banned alcohol entirely for the slaves except with permission of their masters. The only alcohol available now was grape wine, mostly imported from Paba and Subumpam, and a few quickly-consumed gallons of apple cider imported from Nama. The slavelords considered alcohol to be sinful even for themselves, but considered that the life of a slavelord was so stressful that sometimes they needed an escape. With its alcohol production shut down, the new enslaved Lobexon actually was more self-sufficient than before.

Political parties

Lobexon was now a very diverse area. As in Subumpam and Nama, political parties and religions were one and the same, so to change ones politics meant to change one's religion. Many religions were essentially confined to specific ethnicities, so these parties were monoethnic as well. And yet, one ethnic group could have several religious divisions, some of which would combine with the divisions of other religions in an alliance without actually merging.

Major groups in Lobexon in the 2100s were:

Gold

The Gold party was the ruling party and the only legal party after the Treaty of 2057 ending the war. The Gold party made it clear that it considered itself to be already multicultureal and openminded and that all other parties represented just a single point of view and were thus inferior. Some non-Gold parties were tolerated, and even welcomed openly, but they were still denied any government power. Other non-Gold parties were not even tolerated; anyone admitting belonging to them could be enslaved or killed. The Gold party was multiethnic and even multireligious in the sense that it did not ask its members to abandon any traditional religious beliefs they had had previously. Nomimally, Gold was itself a religion, but this was just a product of the government system in which people associated with others of the same religion and worshipped in the same buildings. The Gold religion did not ask its members to abandon their old traditional religions, be they Yiibam, Emon, Sisnasi, Kâ, Calacila, Macro-Repilian traditionalism, or anything else; they just demanded that their members pledge allegiance to the Gold government and not the minority parties being set up by those other religious groups.

Note that any minority group confined to Nama, such as the soon to be infamous Litila, associated with the Gold party rather than forming their own. These included some groups that were very hostile to slavery and went on missions to rescue slaves from Lobexon, something no one else could do because only the Gold people had full access to the coastline and the right of way throughout all of Lobexon's roads. However, they could not simply steal the slaves from their masters. So they had to either buy them in the fair market, which was expensive, or focus on freeing escaped slaves who had already been abandoned, which was difficult because they tended to be found in the most remote parts of the Empire. Nevertheless, the Gold government tolerated this because it was their own governmental philosophy that allowed it, and for the Lobexonian slavemasters to revoke the right of Gold people to disrupt slavery would mean that they themselves were no longer Gold.

Crystals

The Crystals were the strongest-fighting group in the Star War, and considered their defeat to be due to the other groups' betrayinbg them. However, they had always been a small minority, even before the end of the war, so if they had been fighting Nama alone the war would have collaped even quicker. The Crystals were almost all slaves, but they had a few allies in the upper class. THey were explicitly transnational, meaning that they were sending diplomats to other nations in the hopes of finding allies there. They also admitted that their situation in Lobexon was so dire that they might well find their first success in another nation such as Subumpam or Kuhilani rather than in Lobexon. They also said that although they wanted to free all the slaves in Lobexon, they would fight only for themselves, and would not feel guilty about letting the Gold slaves remain enslaved, since by staying Gold those people had explicitly rejected teh Crystals' help.

The Treaty of 2057 had made it illegal for any Crystals or Gilgosi to leave Lobexon. However, the Gold gov't only enforced this on the coastline, figuring the rugged interior was impossible to blockade without occupying more Gold soldiers than there were people in all of Lobexon. Unlike the Gilgosi, the Crystals considered themselves transnational, which meant that they often used this open border to move to other nations, hoping to raise armies among the foreigners that would help them get back in and dominate Lobexon. They also swore that their only allegiance was to other Crystals, and would not bother trying to rescue Gold slaves, or even Gilgosi slaves, though they would expect at least some of these people to convert to Crystalism if the Crystals began winning military battles near their homelands.

A few Crystals hid out in the highlands, in land that was within Lobexon's territory but had not been claimed by any slaveowners, and essentially became free. They invited people from Kuhilani to move in with them, though they were careful to avoid overpopulation, as the highlands were not good farming land even though their climate was surprisingly wet for being smack in the middle of the desert belt at 17N latitude. They ensured that they were able to use weapons so that they could not easily be abducted and dragged down the mountains into slave plantations. And they were even worried about being attacked by slaves, as they had already alienated themselves from most of the other slaves by promising not to rescue them if they did not first convert to Crystalism.

Gilgosi

The Gilgosi (a code name) were a fork of the Crystals who rejected transnationalism and wanted to fight purely for supremacy of Lobexon over all other nations. They wanted to free all the slaves, not just the ones who voted like them. And although they looked for help in other nations, they expected that any help from other nations would lead to yet another exploitative treaty with the people of Lobexon at the bottom. Like the Crystals, the Gilgosi were mostly slaves, and even the ones who were free were legally barred from exiting the country, while also being barred from any positions of power, which meant that they were in an uncomfortable state of having to work much harder than most other people, even harder than slaves, just to get by. (Slaves were provided food, water, shelter, clothing, and even medicine for free; their only fear was that if they did not work hard enough, they could be rejected by their owner and even killed. Free people had to find all of these things on their own, and although most were far better off than slaves, unlucky freemen often had to work very long hours merely to buy themselves the things a slave could get for free.) They considered themselves a majoity party in Lobexon, saying that if the slaveowners were thrown out, essentially none of the former slaves would vote to have them come back in and start up slavery again, which is what the Gold party and thus the many pro-Gold slaves seemed to support. Neither would these people vote Crystal, as the Crystals had specifically promised not to rescue any non-Crystal slaves if they were to achieve power, and seemed to many to be liable to become just yet another slaveowning minority that enslaved all of its enemies with no regrets. Furthermore, Gold slavemasters typically required all their slaves to be Gold, or else face punishment including death. Meanwhile, any non-Gold slavemasters were persecuted by the Lobexonian government itself, so they were afraid to publicly convert. Thus the Gilgosi figured any slavemaster who did not force all his slaves to be Gold was a likely Crystal or Gilgosi sympathizer, and of these two groups, most slaves would likely favor the Gilgosi because the Crystals were not promising them freedom whereas the Gilgosi were.

Strengthening the Gilgosi's claim to be a silent majority was that the Crystals did not make a similar argument to claim that they too were a majority; they actually agreed that the Gilgosi were a majority, and were the true descendants of the original Star party, even though the GIlgosi had originated as a fork of the Crystals. This was because before 1989, there had been no need for a Star "party" for people to belong to; the entire population was Stars and needed no organization to identify itself with. The Crystals had merely created their political organization earlier than others, and the Gilgosi consisted of people who preferred the old Star way of life but had joined the Crystals at first because the Crystals had the only functional anti-Gold organization at the time.

The Gilgosi party was seen by the Gold party as the most dangerous of the major parties, and was thus banned, although for the time being the individual Gilgosi people were not punished by slavery (if currently free) or death, which meant that most Gilgosi were open about it in public and they could thus be easily spotted. The few free Gilgosi people tended to be economically powerful, and in many ways similar to the Pabap minority, except that the Gilgosi were not allowed to get on a boat. The Pabaps thus admired the Gilgosi, and wanted to make friends, but it just so happened that the Gilgosi were vehemently racist against Pabaps, seeing them as even worse than the Naman slavelords because the Pabaps seemed to dominate the economies of every nation they went to, pushing even the slavelords into middle-class status and intoxicating the governors with their potent raspberry wine. Thus the Pabaps' love for the Gilgosi was a difficult one.

Pōsa

The Pōsa were slaves of Pabap and Subumpamese origin mostly living in the equatorial regions of the empire. Pirates from Lobexon had begun abducting them in the 1700s. Paba's government openly admitted that it wanted to export its people as slaves to foreign nations and didnt care that they would be abused for centuries. They merely wanted money in exchange for the people they owned. The Lobexonian pirates refused even that, and simply landed on Paba's beaches and grabbed everyone they could onto their boats and headed back to Lobexon. Subumpam was also a target, but its government was strongly anti-slavery. The Subumpamese, so famous for losing every war they participated in, were nontheless surprisignly resilient to being adbucted, and even though Subumpam was closere than Paba relatively few attempts at abducting Subumpamese slaves to lObexon were successful. Thus most of the slaves taken were from Paba.

Whereas Pabaps and SUbumpamese did not blend much in their homelands, the slavelords here had forced the mto do so, generally with a Subumpamese wife and a Pabap husband because doing it the other way around would result in painful births and maternal deaths since the Subumpamese were typically much taller, and a subumpamese baby inside a Pabap mother would be a risk to the both of them. Thus tiny men married tall women and births were generally safe. The problem soon was ended anyway as the new mixed-race people came to be entirely homogeneous.

The Pōsa had been freed by the Treaty of 2057, which also made their former owners into slaves. But Nama's rule was very weak here, and the new incoming Macro-Repilian slavemasters often chose to simply enslave both groups indiscriminately. The Pōsa were of mixed religious beliefs, as their native Yiibam religion believed in gods that were physically present in the Pabap homeland, and these slave families had been forcibly abducted from that homeland over 400 years ago, so they had lost most of their religious concepts. Many of them had converted to the native religions around them. However, they never subdivided further; they remained a single group with a single religion calling themselves the Pōsa.

Mixed marriages were banned, as the slavemasters wanted the Pōsa slaves and the Star slaves (who had been renamed Kampa) to hate each other, not love each other.

The Kampa were told that they should hate the Pōsa because the Pōsa people were clearly related to the Pabap people who were dominating the economies of the Lobexonian nations lucky enough to be further north, and that although the Pōsa were at present better known for pillow fights than massacres and cannibalism, they were only a few hundred years away from an all-out genocide against the dark-skinned Kampa-like people who had settled Paba before them, and that slavery was what the Pōsa really deserved.

The Pōsa were told that they should hate the Kampa because the Kampa people had been abusing them for 400 years, even launching ships into Paba to abduct more slaves, and had never even considered repentance even when it was clear that they were about to be defeated by Nama. They said that only Nama had been both kind enough and strong enough to take the Kampa's tentacles out of the Pōsa homelands, and that slavery was what the Kampa really deserved.

The tropical rainforests were very poor now, even poorer than the desrts of Taryte, because it was difficult to farm the land and there were few other national resouirces. They also did not benefit much from trade with Paba because they did not want Pabap trading ships to dock on their shores and see Pabap people being horribly abused. They traded with Paba, but only indirectly through areas of Lobexon that were further north and did not enslave Pabaps. Arguably the slaveowners in the tropical rainforests were worse off than some of the slaves in the far north, which had been enriched by commerce, and where slavemasters prevented slave revolts by making their slaves' lives more comfortable even if they still refused to free them. Occasionally a slaveowner living in the Equatorial zone would simply abandon his slaves and plantation to move with his family to the north, becoming simply a free citizen with no slaves. Thus these slaves would be freed. At other times, slaves simply escaped, since even though the rainforest was very poor, it was one area that was easy to survive off the land in, and the life of an escaped slave was not much different than the life of a slaveowner in terms of meeting basic needs.

The Pōsa party was not banned, although as its people by definition lived only in areas where the imperial government was too weak to reach them and thus rescue them out of slavery, they had no political meaning and any Pōsa people who escaped into the safer parts of the empire usually chose one of the other parties to belong to. Those who escaped but could not get out of the rainforest tended to sympathize with the Crystals, since their adherence to the Yiibam religion after 400 years of slavery was very weak, although very few of them actually converted since the Crystal party was illegal whereas Pōsa was legal and just happened to consist mostly of slaves.

Nevertheless, the Pōsa party did have political positions of its own besides just their support for ending slavery. Unlike the Crystals, the Pōsa people supported freeing all of the slaves, not just the ones who joined their party. They admired the stable government of Nama and believed that problems including slavery could be solved by nonviolent means. Thus unlike the Crystals and Gilgosi the free Pōsa living in Lobexon did not try to arm themselves or participate in sniping against members of the other groups; they wanted to rise to power fully in line with the Gold party. Indeed, their opinions on almost all issues other than slavery were perfect matches for those of the Gold party, which put them at odds with the other three Pabap groups.

Kampa

As above, this is a term for the Star aboriginal slaves living in the equatorial zone, who were mostly kept apart and worked in non-agricultural slavery, and thus led lives different from the other Star slaves further north. Kampa slaves who escaped often joined nearby nations since they could blend in with the aboriginals whereas the Pōsa could not (though Pabap people, the cousins of the Pōsa, were setting up nations nearby, they were small and not easy to find. Moreover these nations often had dark-skinned majorities anyway, so the Kampa could still also move here.)

The Kampa party was not banned, although its situation was different than Pōsa. Pōsa people were by definition descended from Pabaps and occasionally Subumpamese, both of which were free peoples according to the Treay of 2057. THe Kampa, being aboriginals, were enslaved throughout the entire empire, and had no reason to want to escape into the north where conditions could even get worse for them since the slaveowners had much tighter control over their slaves there. Thus escaping Kampa slaves usually preferred to hide out in the highlands or move into Kuhilani. Those who stayed in Lobexon considered "Kampa" to be an artificial creation with no political meaning, as it was essentially a racial group rather than a religion or even a political philosophy, and instead chose to identify as one of the other groups, often the Crystals. (Though as they were in hiding, this still had no political meaning in the eyes of the imperial government; they would not answer a census from a 7000 ft mountain pass.)

Other Kampa converted to the Pōsa party, seeing slavery as evil but admiring the Gold government and preferring nonviolent means of coming to power. These people generally wanted to leave Lobexon, however, as they could not simply follow the blonde Pōsas northwards because they would be arrested and put back into slavery.

However, they were careful not to let the Gold party win after all by dividing them up politically instead of racially. They saw the blonde Pōsa people as allies, not enemies, but also wanted to be the allies of every other group that was at the bottom of society, even if those people were extrmeely anti-Pōsa.

Emon/Kafūfa

Emon (also known as Kaxʷūxʷa or Kafūfa) was a religion that worshipped the sun. Most of its members were aboriginals enslaved by the Treaty of 2057 and made to convert to the Gold religion, but a few stayed out. Emon was not a very political religion, so its people tended to be entirely ignored by the Gold government, as they were considered not even dangerous enough to oppress. Kafūfa happened to be most popular in the state of Katō, however, and Katō killed all of its slaves in the year 2140, which meant the near-total destruction of Kafūfa.

Nevertheless, Kafūfa survived. It was not a primitive religion worshipping the sun for fear that if they didnt, it would go away; it was actually a lot like its neighbor religions except that it had stopped worshipping animals and other life forms and instead come to worship the things that gave those earlier gods their power.

Kafūfa was the only major party other than the Gold party that actually supported slavery. Thus, they were frequently attacked by escaped slaves and even bound slaves whenever the opportunity came about. They agreed with the Gold party on all the other major issues as well, and were effectively Gold members who merely had a different religion. Those who believed in the theology of Kafūfa but not the politics tended to convert to the Gilgosi party.

Kafūfa's support of slavery and the Gold party did not lead to the Gold government freeing those Kafūfists who were still enslaved. They nevertheless were more likely to be freed than other slaves, even the Gold slaves, for various reasons. They were commonest in areas of the Gold Empire where slavery was weak, and slaveowners often left their plantations seeking a better life in the richer north and gave full control to the slaves. Although formally banned from becoming slaveowners themselves, a small upper class of Kafūḟists managed to for all practical purposes recreate slavery on plantations that they had inherited or bought from other slaveowners. The loophole was that a landowner could forbid other people from entering or leaving their property, thus allowing them to force other people to work for them in order to be fed and housed. They were thus restricted to agricultural slavery only, unlike the new types that had begun appaearing in larger cities where slaves performed manual labor of other types with their master not always physically present .

Sisnasi

Sisnasi was the primary religion in Subumpam, and even though most Subumpamese people officially converted to Goldism when the Gold government took over Subumpam, a sizable minority chose to publicly remain Sisnasi believers. They were legally reocgnized, but had no government power. They mostly kept to themselves and did not object to being oppressed. They considered themselves allies of the Gold party but tried to avoid endorsing the Gold party's positions on issues related to slavery, since they saw slavery as an import from Lobexon which at best could only hurt Subumpam.

The Sisnasi leaders had refused several offers from their Naman overseers to introduce slavery into Subumpam, even when promised that it would be only ethnic minorities who were enslaved. They considered themselves morally superior to slaveholders and their supporters and did not want even to share in the benefits of the slavery taking place across the sea in Lobexon. The Naman response to this was to enslave Subumpamese people for speaking out against slavery. Howeever, only a small number of Subumpamese people were enslaved; Nama realized that Subumpam might have been correct all along that slavery was bad since Subumpam had been economically successful for over a thousand years without any slavery.

Very few Subumpamese ever left Subumpam for Lobexon, except those who were ethnic Pabaps. They knew that they would be a target for violence in Lobexon, even if they pretended to be Pabaps, and that htere was no possible advantage in trying to blend in.

Pasulup

The Pasulup (a code name) were Pabaps who had previously been trading between Paba and the Star Empire, but were trapped on land by the Trety of 2057 as their ships were taken over by the Naman navy. The Tretay was friendly to them, and allowed them the choice of moving back to Paba if they wanted. The Pasulup are the descendants of those who had chosen to stay and make a life as normal people not working in the shipping industry. They were of the Yiibam religion, but considered their interests distinct from the other Yīa-worshipping Pabaps and did not want to unite with them. They did not call themselves Pasulup; that is merely a codename created by Nama so that all of the Pabap groups would begin with the letter P, and thus came to be called "P people" (Pʷ, where p happens to be the Naman word for "teacher" and is thus their world's most flattering exonym). In fact the Pasulup were almost entirely Khulls-speaking, learning Pabappa only to conduct business with other Pabap-descended groups. This helped them gain access to the ruling class in Lobexon, and even the ruling classes of Nama.

They were open to intermarriage with other tribes, even those who were much taller than Pasulup people and would be taboo in their original homeland of Paba, but not all that many people actually married out.

Some Pasulups tried to marry into the Macro-Repilian slaveholder families, thus becoming slaveholders themselves. Lobexon's government had no reaction to this unexpected phenomenon; they let individual families handle it. Thus the marriages were generally allowed, and Pabaps for the first time became a slaveholding people, albeit only through their half-Repilian descendants. These people, however, were no longer legally seen as Pasulup by Lobexon's government, and in a few ways marrying into a slaveowning family actually took their families a step down in society because they had married into the class seen by almost all outside nations as the ultimate oppressors, and thus were not treated kindly when traveling overseas or even to many of the more liberal areas within Lobexon. This classification system ensured that the Pasulup would continue to be entirely pure-blooded Pabaps throughout their entire existence.

Note that marrying slaves was illegal, although on occasion a free person would buy out a slave's freedom and then marry them.

The Pasulup people understood the purpose of Nama's government system better than many others because they had had some experience with it in their homeland of Paba, and had also been living in the best-educated part of Lobexon for a while. They were aggressive in promoting their interests in the imperial Gold government, despite being essentially a monolithic single-ethnicity group only represented in a small part of the empire. They understood how to turn Nama's hugeness into a weakness: wherever Nama opposed them, they could likely find some other part of Nama that would support them.

They had managed to convince Nama to allow them to build a second nation in northern Nama, called Paesapam, and Paesapam served as a second Paba since it almost always agreed with Paba in Nama's Mirror government. And thus they could on occasion even defeat the Gold party in Nama's legislature if there was an issue in which most other parties were neutral. Put another way, Lobexon had two votes in Nama's legislature: one for the huge Gold majority, and one for the tiny Pasulup minority. This was possible because Lobexon was not geographically connected to Paba, and Lobexon no longer allowed Pasulup access to boats, so the Pasulups could not simply sail over to Paba if they wanted to return to their homeland. Thus, they were for all practical purposes a new nation of people who lived only in Lobexon, which meant that Nama was obligated to grant them a separate seat and an entire second nation of their own carved out of Nama's own territory.

Lobexon realized now that the Pabaps had outsmarted them and essentially had three nations to themselves now: Paba, Pubapi, and Paesapam (because even the Lobexonian slavemasters agreed the Pasulup in Lobexon were being oppressed). And thus, through their two votes in the Naman parliament, the Pasulup Pabaps could void and even invert any of Lobexon's Gold Party's votes. They used this power even on issues entirely unrelated to the wellbeing of the Pasulup people to try to win concessions for the Pasulups elsewhere. To Nama, it didnt matter at all that there were only about 10000 Pasulup people in Lobexon versus several hundred thousands of Gold; all that mattered was that there were two "nations" living there.

Pastip

The Pastip were a new group of Pabaps who had been created shortly after the 2057 Treaty. They were neither the Pōsa who were enslaved in the tropics nor the Pasulup who were trapped in Lobexon by the sudden naval blockade. Instead they were people whom the Gold government had chosen to invite into Lobexon to help improve the economy and perhaps even the government. The Gold people saw Paba as a miracle nation that had been violently assaulted from literally every one of its neighbors for over a thousand years, but which had never fought back and yet somehow survived to become the strongest and richest nation in the world for most of its history. They saw that Pabaps had established themselves as a minority in many other nations throughout history and never made threats to overthrow the governments of those states, and therefore the Gold people did not fear that the Pabaps they were inviting it would overthrow the Gold government.

The Pabaps were humiliated by the Gold governments' praise of them, as they did not consider being badly abused and taking it quietly to be a trait to be proud of, but nevertheless many agreed to move in, since Paba was perpetually overcrowded and the Pabaps had always stereotypically preferred tropical climates anyway. The Gold government made a small exception to their full naval control of Lobexon's ports to allow Pabap ships in and out, as these Pabaps were mostly working in trade and other naval occupations for the time being, and Paba still refused to allow any non-Pabap ships to enter its own ports. However, there were only a very few places in Lobexon where these Pabap ships were allowed in, and they were overseen very strictly to make sure Pabaps were not smuggling people in or out of Lobexon along with their much-needed cargo. Further, the Gold government made it clear that they wanted to get the Pabaps off of the ports and onto the mainland to work in more traditional occupations as Lobexon had plenty of international trade already.

The Pastip felt bad for the aboriginal groups, and offered to rescue them and settle them in Paba or in any of the many colonies Pabaps were building in the equatorial zone. Although they wanted to rescue slaves, for the most part this was impossible and would get the Pastip killed so they focused their efforts on rescuing the free Gilgosi people and inviting them aboard their boats. The Gilgosi actually were strongly anti-Paba, claiming the Pabaps were owed revenge for the Pabaps' massacre of dark skinned Sukuna people several hundred years ago, and the GIlgosi considered themselves to be one with the Sukuna. Many had become openly racist against Pabaps (and other blonde people such as the Subumpamese), but the Gilgosi who accepted the offer to move to Paba were those who were friendly. However it should be noted that they were not anti-Pabap because of the ancien t massacres, but because Pabaps always seemed to become the upper class wherever they moved, and refused to share their fruits with other groups; the arguemnts about the Sukuna aboriginals were merely inherited from the Star government's politics of the previous two centuries.

Paba's own military questioned the perverse decision of the Pabaps to rescue only the one people living in Lobexon that had become famous for its violent massacres of Pabaps, and hoped that this new mission would be another Pabap "miracle" that seemed at first to be a dangerously masochistic idea but would in the end somehow benefit both Paba and the Gilgosis. Although these rescue missions were illegal, for the most part, the Gold navy did not capture or harass the Pastip people because they were only rescuing freemen, which actually helped the Gold party as these were the people most likely to be violent in the future. The Gold gov't had been wanting to simply enslave them all but could not get its people to vote to do that because they were not quite that openly malicious. Indeed, Lobexon had been worried about letting any more Pabaps into Lobexon for fear that they would immediately start doing good deeds such as rescuing Lobexonians, but they were pleased when they realized they had found a solution that both groups enjoyed: the Pabaps enjoyed rescuing people and settling them all over Paba, whereas Lobexon enjoyed dumping their most dangerous and unwanted people all over Paba.

As it turned out, most Gilgosi moving to Paba simply converted and blended in with Pabaps, forgetting altogether that they were originally foreigners. Those who did not assimilate were still welcomed, but were confined to the lower class because they could not fit in even with other minorities and therefore ended up mostly being sold as slaves to the still unrepentant Thaoa. Thus ironically Paba had rescued freemen and delivered them to slavery.

A third group of Gilgosi were not taken to Paba but to new colonies in the rainforests of the far southwest, where Paba hoped to establish fully independent nations that would give Pabaps the power to dominate the tropics. For the most part these societies did not work out well, as the numbers of people they were sending were too low, even with enormous birthrates, to survive wars against the aboriginals here, and Repilian slave lords were also exploring this area, which meant that often these people also ended up becoming enslaved. This was also the only area where the Gilgosi often attacked Pabaps, because they had been expecting to be allowed to move to Paba, but were unaware that the government of Paba often required its people to settle new lands and the incoming Gilgosi were disproportionately affected as they were the lowest class. But even here, many Gilgosi decided to stay, realizing they would end up as slaves if they tried to get back to Lobexon. In their new habitats they married Pabaps and started new families and forgot all about Lobexon and its problems.

These new countries called themselves Fambwem, and became very prosperous, although it was a short lived prosperity. The Empire of Kuhilani in 2131 declared all of the new Pabap-Gilgosi nations to be Kuhilani territory, as they saw the new civilizations were very young and yet already doing very well, and Kuhilani wanted more wealth and power for itself. The Fambwemiams surrendered immediately, as they were trading colonies with no militaries of their own living in a very military part of the world. However, Kuhilani soon realized that its dream was not to be, as when Kuhilani annexed Fambwem, Lobexon immediately shut off the trade routes with Fambwem, and Fambwem became even poorer than Kuhilani had been. Paba did not give up on its plans to settle the equatorial zone, but they soon lost touch with what had been their colonies and all that remained when the next Pabap ship arrived in the area were a few curious-looking aborigines with blonde hair and stone tablets written in a language they could no longer understand.

Pabaps

Yet a fourth group of Pabaps began moving into Lobexon in the early 2100s, the difference this time being that they did not seek citizenship and preferred to think of themselves as Pabaps. This was a change in behavioral habits for them, as Pabaps of all types had previously been passive and expected to be treated as inferiors. These Pabaps came to Lobexon claiming that living in Lobexon was their reward for their ancestors' having occupied parts of Subumpam for 70 years during the Star War. They were not much different than the Pastip group, which had been painstakingly invited to move to Lobexon; the difference is that these new Pabaps were not invited, and they expected the Gold navy to let them come and go as they pleased, whereas the Pastip people had to stay on land except when specifically told to go to sea.

When these new Pabap immigrants found that they could indeed come and go as they pleased, all of the other groups in Lobexon realized that perhaps the Gold slavemasters were not as all-powerful as they claimed. The three other Pabap-descended groups still claimed loyalty to Lobexon now, but were relieved that they could now visit Paba instead of being forever trapped on the mainland. Even now, however, Nama still considered Pasulup to be a nation of its own, deserving of a separate seat in Nama's parliament, which meant that they continued to frustrate Lobexon's Gold party.

As each year went by, the power of the Gold government in Lobexon seemed weaker and weaker. Lobexon's Gold government began to consider that perhaps the importation of so many Pabaps had been a mistake. They had been expecting to soften the rough spots of their vast nation with the world's most peaceful people, who would work hard to clean up the messes Lobexonian slavelords made and as a reward expect only the permission to find new ways to scrub even harder. Although many of the Pabaps really were a vast improvement over the people they settled amongst, as their numbers grew, their power grew even faster, and this growth was at the expense of the Gold party rather than the Gold party's enemies.

The Gold party had divided the Pabaps into four major ethnic groups, and hoped that these four groups would at least occasionally fight each other and thus weaken their power, but they were embarrassed when they realized that the four Pabap groups were reliable allies, and that those who had the most power happily shared it with those who had none. Furthermore, the Goldies attempts' to provoke their other minority groups into attacking the various Pabap groups had mostly failed as well. Their Xàsa program, advocating a complete removal of all non-aboriginals from Lobexon, had essentially won no allies; the only people calling themselves Xàsa were Gold slaveowners in disguise.

The Gilgosi were the only group that were prone to violent attacks against Pabaps, but they had been so for a long time, and held no allegiance to the Gold government. And even their numbers had been greatly reduced in recent years as the Pabaps had reacted to their attacks against Pabaps by adopting them and resettling them in Paba in the hopes that they could get along better in a nation with no slavery and no wars.

Pabaps isolate themselves

The various Pabap groups had been trying to stay out of this emerging conflict, having become more selfish and cynical the longer they stayed in Lobexon, and now figuring that a Gilgosi vs Crystal war might be just what Pabaps needed if they wanted to secure a lock on power in Lobexon. Fifty years earlier, Pabaps had been waltzing into battlefields with greeting their enemies' swords and spears with hugs and kisses, but generations of being surrounded by war and slavery had forced the "soft" Pabaps to be either killed or married into the families of the most violent of their enemies. THus left behind were a group of Pabaps who were almost as hard as the people they lived amongst, and claimed allegiance not to Lobexon, but to the mystical and seemingly inviolable foreign nation from which they had come.

They figured that the Gilgosi and the Crystals could wipe each other out, thus depriving the Gold slavemasters of most of their slaves, and leaving the four Pabap groups entirely unharmed. In their hearts, many Pabaps strongly admired the Gilgosi, or the Crystals, or in many cases both, but they did not want to officially sign up as allies of either of the two groups because they knew that every Pabap who signed up to either of those parties would be at best consigning himself to slavery for the rest of his life, and at worst being drafted into one of their armies and sent off to kill his own family members.

At the same time, however, the Pabaps generally also refused to join the Gold Party, because even though that would give them direct access to the power structure of Lobexon's government, it would endanger their safety, as the Goldies were the one group that made both Crystals and Gilgosi unite in an insatiable hunger for blood. Nama's government, which was still nominally in control of Lobexon and all its many slave plantations, made it difficult for new political parties to be created, but even harder for them to be abolished. Gold slaveowners in Lobexon now were telling Pabaps that their four political parties were all phony, and that they were winning political concessions on a technicality that made them appear to be a coalition that formed a majority, but because they were four groups instead of one, the Goldies were denied the use of the laws they had created to overrule majorities.

The Gold people could not understand what had gone wrong. Their political system had worked well on Nama for thousands of years, but in Lobexon the Pabaps seemed to have found a fatal weakness that enabled them to push around even the upper class of slavemasters into handing over ever more power to the Pabaps. The only potential conflict where the Goldies still had a clear advantage over all of the Pabaps was an all-out war in which the Goldies would be forced to overthrow their own government, and secede from Nama, thus using their still all-Gold army to force the Pabaps to hand power back to the Gold party. This, they knew, would cost them the support of Nama, because even though Nama was also led by the Gold party, the Gold party considered it unforgivable to overthrow a Gold government, even if the party claiming power was also Gold and was doing it to preserve what they felt was the best government in the eyes of Nama. Thus even Nama was turning against the Gold slavemasters now.

The Goldies decided to focus their efforts on dividng the slaves amongst each other.

Conflicts among the slaves

The Gold Party had been unsuccessful at promoting divisions amongst the slaves they ruled over, but soon realized they might not need to try. By the early 2100s, the Gilgosi were beginning to win allies even amongst their traditional enemies. As the Gilgosi regained power, the Crystals hiding in Sulasali felt increasingly threatened. Most Crystals now moved away from Sulasali, and those who remained were physically abused by visiting groups of Gilgosi, who were not punished by the Gold government.

Thus, even though the Gold slavelords considered the Gilgosi the most dangerous of all of their enemies, they tolerated and occassionally even promoted Gilgosi people into power in the hopes that it would lead to a civil war of slave vs slave that would leave the mutual enemy of all slaves relatively unharmed.

Crystal-Gilgosi relations

Soon, a secret army commanded by the Comet (an ex-Crystal turned Gilgosi) became powerful and focused on attacking Crystals at every opportunity. This army was frequently attacked by the Gold government or, occasionally, by the Crystals themselves, but it survived these frequent attacks and when it declined, it was due largely to a shift in military power towards another secret army, commanded by Old Faithful, another anti-Crystal.

Another major change was the fact that the Gilgosi, too, had become the target of an army. Here, however, it was the regular Gold army that did the lion's share of battling the Gilgosi. The Gold party had decided to agree that the Gilgosi were the true majority in Lobexon, if only because it made Nama grant them extra power to oppose the Gilgosi (that was one of the main tenets of the Gold philosophy).

A third change was the fact that Crystals from FILTER (a feminist group) now openly helped the Crystals on the islands of Sulasali, despite increasing violence from other groups. As FILTER helped the Crystals, Lobexonians' sentiment shifted even more against the Crystals. Feminism in this context refers to a biological adaptation of some tribes of humans in which women are much taller than men, and cultures with this trait tend to have their women rule over their men and dominate them in every way. This was seen as dangerous by even the females of the traditional tall-maled groups because it upset their power structure. Thus, even though the Crystals were very weak, the fact that they had allowed themselves to live with and enroll Feminists into their party made them the most alien group of all, and therefore the most hated. Feminist cultural traits had begun to filter into even the mainstream Crystal population now, meaning that they often elected female leaders and considered their men to be less important than women in some ways. It also meant that they were less prone to seeking to gain power through violence than they had been until even very recently, as they saw violence now as a masculine, and thus Gilgosi, trait.

Also, because the upper crust of the upper class was itself Feminist, the tiny Feminist Crystal men were seen as collaborators in the abuse of all of the other groups, making their position the very bottommost of all. Gilgosi people became more aggressively masculine now, seeing feminism as a trap to castrate them and force them to submit not to their own wives, but rather the women of the slavemasters who were intent on abusing them for the next 10000 years.

Thus, even though the Gilgosi wanted freedom from their Gold slavemasters, they devleoped a secret army which attacked the Crystals whenever the Gold army couldn't stop them. Thus, a "triangle war" had emerged -- the Crystals, the Gilgosi, and the Gold slavelords were all against each other.

Some Crystals asked the Gilgosi for an alliance, but the Gilgosi refused, despite the fact that they were now being as badly abused by the imepists as were the Crystals. The Gilgosi refused to humiliate themselves by giving in to the much more submissive, feministic Crystals. The Crystals were still biologically masculist, and knew that they would be for a long time, but they were electing female leaders as they created a "slave democracy" that idolized the bottommmost poeple into power and said that women were purer than men and should be in control of all men.

Thus, although some Gilgosi were now secretly defecting to the Crystals, the two groups remained separate, and both groups remained victims of the oppressive Gold government which they all had earlier fought to put in place! This was one reason the Gilgosi didn't trust the Crystals. Another was the fact that the Crystals were openly corrupt; for example, they stole money and offered it to anyone who would vote Crystal. They justified this by saying that it is still better than gaining power by force, and therefore was more ethical than what the Gilgosi supported. Finally, the Gilgosi didn't trust the Crystals simply because Crystalism was a very "worldly" movement, which meant it would not be valid in the future. Since Crystalism would not work in the future, they said, any Crystal who would try to stay in power would really be obstructing progress, which is what the Crystals were accusing pro-sko people of.

On the other hand, the Crystals didn't trust the Gilgosi for other reasons. They said that the Gilgosi were nationalists, whose allegiance was to an authority no greater than Lobexon. The Crystals, on the other hand, belonged to no particular country; they were everywhere. Also, the Crystals accused the Gilgosi of ethnocentrism and ruthless bursts of violence (such as their centuries long history of hatred and violence against Pabaps and Subumpamese). Coming from a group who for years had unsuccessfully tried to gain political power through violence, this signaled a surprising shift in policy — it seemed the Crystals had given up trying to be violent and had adopted a more covert method of gaining power.

However, this was a time of terrible vexation for the Crystals. The Crystals blamed themselves for their failure to take over the SS Union, saying they should have foreseen the war and built up a military before the other groups did. But it really was not their fault; there simply weren't enough Crystals in the world to have made much difference in the outcome of the war.

In Sulasali the Crystals taught that their task was to peacefully spread Crystalism to the rest of the world, and at the same time ensure its noncorruption (although this stance was taken only because they were so weak militarily that it was their only hope). The Sulasalians by now had split away from the outworld Crystal parties completely as part of their anti-corruption effort. They wanted to attract people to their party who were looking for God's army, so they worked hard to clean up their image.

In fact this cleansing rebirth did attract the attention of the outworld, but it was in a fashion the Crystals had hoped to prevent - their new image now shone in the world as a stark contrast to imapa, and Nama, the leader of the imepist council, vowed to destroy the Crystals. As a result, the Crystals were forced to shield their islands from the outworld as virtually all other parties, even fellow oppressed parties in Lobexon, began to boycott their philosophy.

The Crystals' worst enemy was perhaps Loporomo Leap, which was also deeply involved with the Lobexonians' unique imapa doctrine, called Lapiwa. Lapiwa allowed the Lobexonians to cling to the freedom won by imapa without renouncing national sovereignty, as mainstream imapa demanded. Loporomo Leap had no ethical reason for their habitual abuse of the Crystals; they did it because it was fun. Yet some could not help observing that it seemed the Crystals had stumbled upon the path to real world peace that the rest of the world had blindly been trying to find for all of history.

Gilgosi-Pabap relations

The Gilgosi who had not moved to Paba had, for the most part, been unaware that the Gilgosis who had moved to Paba were doing well and were far more prosperous than the ones who had stayed behind. Thus they didn't realize that they had missed the opportunity of a lifetime, and that Pabaps had really truly wanted to be the best friends of the Gilgosi. Thus, these ignorant GIlgosi people had continued hating Pabaps all along, and even attacking Pabaps, and by 2140 the two groups had little contact with each other as the Pabaps had become a lot more fearful now and also a lot more assertive of their interests. They had much more contact with Crystals, and thus hated the Crystals even more than they hated the Pabaps. Nevertheless, they began to see the Crystals and Pabaps as having a lot of traits in common, and said that if the Gilgosi ever had a nation of their own, they would consider Crystals and Pabaps to be the same people.

The Pabaps had little interest in befriending Gilgosi people anymore, but the Pasulup Party Policy committee reacted to this new declaration by declaring that the Pabaps, if forced to choose a side in a G vs C war, would choose the Crystals, as only the Crystals considered them even potentially to be allies. The Pasulups were just one of four Pabap party organizations in Lobexon, and were actually the smallest of the four, but they had the most power because of the technicality they had relied on fifty years earlier in order to get a seat in the parliament of Nama.

Crystal-Pabap relations

The Crystals considered themselves the weakest and most oppressed of all the groups now, even below the slaves. Their own hideout on the islands of Sulasali was now controlled by "two ugly dogs", they said, and they couldnt survive even there, so they needed to move to an entirely foreign nation to escape persecution.

The Crystlas believed that Pabaps were at heart a helpful people, and wanted to ally with them in the future, but knew that due to Lobexon's legal system, essentially no Pabaps would even consider converting to Crystalism, since it would make them automatically slaves, and that Crystals could not simply convert to one of the Pabap parties because they would be an obvious ethnic mismatch amongst the blonde blue eyed Pabaps and even if the Pabaps appreciated their help they would be rejected by the government of Lobexon as an obvious escaped slave. (Even though Crystals had expanded more rapidly overseas than any other group, and became quickly the most ethnically diverse party in Lobexon, all of the people they had drawn from as of yet were geographic neighbors of Lobexon and thus all generally were very dark skinned people.)

The Crystals wanted to move to Paba to strengthen themselves in preparation for a future attack against Lobexon in which the Crystals would use the Pabaps living in Lobexon as allies to make the war easier. But preparing for this would take serveral generations, and would at first need to be done entirely with Pabap ships and Pabap money, as the Crystals, even the ones still living on the islands of Sulasali, had no ships and lallmost no money of their own to draw from. And at present Paba was too overcrowded to accomodate yet another group of immigrants and was not interested in consigning itself to being involved in what seemed likely to be the most dangerous nation in the world for the indefinite future. But even so, a small number of Crystals did manage to move to Paba. These generally were ones who were living on Sulasali rather than the mainland, as even though Nama's navy had thickly encircled Sulasali they were less suspicious than Lobexon about allowing Pabap ships to visit. The Crystals hiding out in the western highlands generally moved even further west rather than trying to get to Paba.

In previous decades, the very thought of a Crystal-Pabap alliance would have been disgusting to the Crystals, because they considered Paba's religion to be a superstitious and violent religion not worthy even of animals. But so many other problems had surrounded the Crystals now that, although they still did not waver from their faith in their religion, they considered only atheists to be worthy of being excluded from their religious umbrella, as they figured all other religions would still choose the Crystals as allies if the only alternative was atheism. Even many of the Crystals who moved to Paba managed to alienate themselves very quickly by proclaiming that the Pabaps were a stupid and primitive people while the Crystalks themselves refused to send their children to school.

Nevertheless, the Crystals tried to hold their tongues in the hopes of making a Crystal-Pabap alliance a reality. THey said that their primar enemy was not Paba, but Loporomo Leap. Loporomo Leap in fact was an atheist state in Nama, and their real quarrel with Sulasali was the obvious fundamentalism of the Crystals. What troubled the Loporomans most was the fact that the Crystals now had a "clean" fundamentalism; that is, it was somehow aligned with all religions at once, excluding none. This was because the Crystals had carefully purged their religion of all tenets that alienated them from the outside world; they believed only in God. They thus had a very simple religion, explaining little, but their only enemies now were atheists. Unfortunately, atheists ruled the universe.

Although the Crystals taught that anyone who was faithful to their "heart religion" — meaning what they honestly believed, rather than what they preached — would be saved, they encouraged people to join their group and convert to their religion as they felt in their hearts that it was the only right thing to do. Meanwhile, they began to transform their own people into an army.

The Crystals soon began to teach that the Crystal party had suffered assault after assault in their history not only because they were fundamentalist, but even more because they were virtuous, and now they predicted even tougher times ahead as they now would have to turn against the atheist, unethical universe. Thus they encouraged their people now to think nothing of risking their lives for the sake of their country. Still, as they were to others essentially harmless, they encouraged peace whenever possible, but began rapid development of a secret military.

The Crystals thus presented to the world a peaceful face, intended to win over the outworld by compassion, but in reality were preparing for what they felt was a necessary evil - a cataclysmic war against the atheist monsters that filled up the rest of the world and were to blame for the Stars' defection from the Crystals during the Six-Boat War.

Attempts to settle Baeba

The population of Lobexon in 2095 was approximately 50 schools (plus 50x). In 2095, a group of about 6000 (5949) Stars attempted to establish a settlement of Baeba Swamp. The sailors hoped that the swampland creatures would provide them a source of food and shelter so that they could live there, and hopefully eventually spread out.

The Pabap ship that they used had immediately crashed. The sailors had landed near their destination, which they now called Baeba Swamp, but they soon discovered that the animals living in this swamp were very dangerous to humans, as the first person to step out onto the land was attacked and killed by a snakelike animal within the first minute.

As huge as Lobexon's population was, Nama's population of about 5 schools was much stronger, and their powers made them too strong for the Stars to ignore. Even the small percentage of MacroRepilians that traveled to Lobexon was enough to hold down the now-united Stars' desperate attempts at rebellion. The Stars never surrendered but they were soon subdued by the much more powerful Macro-Repilians. Although this action caused almost all of the Repilians' allies to declare war on them, for the meantime these other Naman countries, whose populations totalled around 320 schools, were to weak to save the Stars from their coming doom.

However, the protective shield around Lobexon was not nearly as strong as it had used to be. Humanitarian missions took people from Nama, people who were hoping to absorb the Stars into their own societies, to Lobexon to adopt the otherwise doomed Stars and bring them back to their own countries. The Namans could not attack these ships because they couldn't see them.

Although many of these missions failed, enough succeeded that Nama had adopted a sizable minority of Stars (including the Polotta) within a few months.

The role of Subumpam

Northern ("Uphill") Subumpam at this time was dominated by fundamentalists of the religion called Sisnasi. Nobody in the Susubmpamese government took seriously nyone who did not back up all their political opinions with Sisnasi scripture and philosophy. In southern SUbumpam (Bipabum), a scandal involving the Sisnasi priesthood, combined with the liberality that came with its greater affluence, had caused the population to question Sisnasi and move toward a very secular government, with atheists competing for power at the highest level. They also practiced Emon, a sun-worshipping religion that had been imported from Lobexon.

The Subumpamese, though they had been at peace for more than a hundred years now, were still frightened of the seemingly ever-changing war in Lobexon, and responded by uniting under the banner of Sisnasi and declaring all of Subumpam to have just a single religion and a single political party. They were not attempting to suppress dissent; they just didnt want to become a player in a war that would likely hurt Subumpam even more than it would hurt the other armies. They realized that Lobexon was where all the violence was found, and therefore Lobexon made things happen and Subumpam merely reacted. They figured that if they purged their territory of all of the parties which were causing problems in the western half of the empire, they would not soon need to clean up those problems in the eastern half.

THey were afraid that Subumpam was liable to be swamped and essentially consumed by any party in the war they happened to alienate, and that for the meantime the only thing protecting them from this was Nama's continued naval blockade. THus, even though Sisnasi was not particularly friendly to the Gold Party, they considered themselves strong allies of the Gold Party, as it was what was protecting them from all the other groups. Every break in the GOld Party's power, such as the Pabaps' discovery that they could penetrate the naval blockade, was a loss for the Subumpamese. Meanwhile, Pabaps living in eastern Subumpam were becoming interested in forming political organizations of their own patterned after the ones they had in Lobexon. Subumpam looked for a way to reassure themselves that their empire was not set to become the stage for yet another major war fought by two foreign armies that were hostile to each other but cared not at all for the welfare of the Subumpamese whose homelands had become their battlefield.

As a concession to the Subumpamese complaints of being yoked to and run over by larger powers in the Star Empire in previous centuries, the Namans had enrolled Subumpam as ten states in the new Gold Empire, rather than just one. In essence, the preexisting government structures of the individual Subumpamese states had been restored, and were now treated as being on the same level as Lobexon's eight states rather than treating the whole of Subumpam as just a ninth state. Nominally, thus, 55% of the voting power in the Gold Union was in the hands of the Subumpamese. In practice, however, votes were determined by political parties, not by population counts or the number of nations participating in a vote. The Subumpamese, being entirely Gold, were thus still the strongest party, but the problems and thus the attn of the GOld party was definitely not in Subumpam. Note also that Subumpam had not regained the port territory of Pipaippis in the Treaty of 2057; this was still securely Pabap territory. Thus sea trade in the eastern half of Subumpam was still mostly controlled by Paba, rather than Subumpam or Nama. This had the effect of making eastern Subumpam much poorer than western Subumpam.

Decreasing living standards throughout the decades actually solidifed the Gold Party's dominance in Subumpam, and by 2140 Subumpam was effectively a one party state with no tolerance for dissent. Note that the Gold party had been the only legal party for Subumpamese people since 2057 anyway, because the Pabap parties only admitted Pabaps. But dissent movements had been much more widely tolerated here than in Lobexon. But by 2140 any evidence of membership in a party other than the Gold party for a Subumpamese person was a crime. All of the non-Gold parties were restricted to ethnic minorities (mostly Pabaps) and had no government representation, not even the power they had in northern Lobexon. Religion had submitted to politics now; the Sisnasi religion was allowed to be practiced openly, as it had seen the Goldies as the lesser evil all along, but atheism was the public face of the Gold movement now. Even though many people claiming to be atheists were not actually atheists, they did not consider it blasphemous or sinful to hide their religious beliefs in these circumstances, because they felt that they could at least use atheism as a means to unite people who would otherwise fight. Still, atheism was not the primary motivating factor behind the GOld party; politics was. They merely found atheists easier to deal with since they did not generally have to weigh their allegiance to their god against their allegiance to their political party. Thus a religious conflict between the Sisnasian Subumpamese and the Yiibamic Pabaps was prevented.

Conflict in Katō

Around 2127 the Macro-Repilian slave lords created yet another new political party, which they called Xàsa. This was a return to the old type of political party that represented only an ethnic group and a religion, rather than a political philosophy. They said that they did believe in a philosophy, and that it was the rejection of the belief that Labans are racially superior to other humans. They defined Labans as all non-aboriginals. Thus Xàsa told Stars living in Lobexon that the Pabaps, Subumpamese, Andanese, and other peoples living in their territory were unwelcome guests and should be expelled or killed. The Macro-Repilian slavemasters promoted this new party in the hopes that it would direct the anger of the slaves towards outsider groups such as these, rather than towards the Macro-Repiiian slavemasters, since Repilians were also aboriginals.

Repilians and Stars had fought many wars in the past, and the Xàsa believers hoped that they could put an end to the wars and make a new alliance of all the aboriginal tribes of the continent against all of the "new" races that had been moving in over the last 2000 years.

Massacre of 2140

In 2140, all slaves living in Katō were killed. Thus slavery was abolished. Those who escaped (î) fled northwards into the desert, mostly Taryte. Katō claimed it was morally superior to the other nations because it had eliminated its slaves and relinquished the yoke the slaves had imposed on their economy. However, they were much poorer now, and needed to rely on help from other nations in order to produce enough food to feed themselves. In a state of panic, Katō purchased some slaves at high prices from surrounding nations, saying they would return them when they were self sufficient again. This pushed the government of Katō into debt. Meanwhile, slaves living in other nations were horrified and became much more loyal to their masters than they had been before.

Slaves achieve freedom

In 2155, a new law was passed that freed all slaves in the entire Empire, but for those who belonged to illegal political groups such as the Gilgosi and the Crystals. Vowing never to respect a conversion that would buy one out of slavery, the government declared that all people not known for certain to not belong to any of the illegal groups would remain a slave. They said that anyone who had been so determined to bring down the government as to join a group such as Gilgosi could never repent and be freed. Their children would be feeed, but due to inheriting nothing from their parents would live a life of extreme poverty unless they moved away from their parents at an early age and publicly converted to Goldism.

Treaty of 2172

The Gold party was itself undergoind a civil war. From early on, a breakaway section of the Macro-Repilian army calling itself the Polotta had carved out a bubble of territory within Lobexon where they were in power and the other Gold people were not. Both groups considered themselves Gold, and therefore both groups considered themselves the legitimate rulers of Lobexon that had been sent down by Nama in 1989 to stop the oppression of the Subumpamese people by the Star Empire.

At first, the Polotta had lost most of their battles, but slowly the tide had turned, and in 2172 the Polotta achieved complete victory and a treaty was signed in which all of Lobexon and Subumpam was turned over to the Polotta army, which renamed itself simply the Gold army, and the losing side of the battle was allowed to remain if they chose but they would neither be enslaved nor armed. Most in fact chose to flee to Nama, figuring it would be safer there.

The Polotta were largely descended from immigrants from Laba, and some Tarpabap people who had moved to the area in recent years. However, even among the Polotta, there was a thin upper class consisting of Macro-Repilians just like the ones who made up the other side of the army.

The Treaty of 2172 voided the law in 2155 that had freed all of the Gold slaves in Lobexon. Thus, they were back to slavery again as if nothing had happened. Nama's naval blockade reacted to the change in power by simply remaining in place ,as they nominally belonged to Nama rather than Lobexon, and thus had not been thrown out of power at all. (Even though Lobexon's coastline was more than 20 times longer than Nama's, the navy had long been allowed to remain under the control of Nama as the Macro-Repilian slavemasters had essentially all come from high mountain regions and were not interested in learning how to live at sea.)

2175 Yuenan government raid

In 2175, a political refugee group from Taryte calling themselves the Dabondians moved into the state of Yuenan along the south coast of Subumpam and built a series of forts, hoping to damage mainstream Subum society as much as they could before they were discovered. They were in fact planning to kill all the Subumpamese and rejoin the Union as the new state of Dabondi, but they knew that there were too few Dabondians at this time to be able to do that. When the Gold government discovered what the Dabondians had been planning to do, they arrested them and put them in slavery in northeastern Subumpam. Most were moved to Tacarapi, Miepabem, and Fimpameinu. All of these were places dominated by Pabaps. Thus Subumpam now had slavery, although the slavemasters were not Subumpamese but Repilians with a few Pabaps cooperating. Subumpam now realized that Nama was increasingly no longer able to protect them from outsiders, even outsiders from other parts of the Gold Union. They had refused to adopt slavery several times and had now had it forced upon them.

The Gold government of Subumpam told the anti-slavery protestors that they were wrong to think of slavery as immoral, and that it was simply natural that some people were born to serve others, and that the Subumpamese themselves were in effect servants of the Gold government, even if not enslaved. In 2176 a new law was passed which made it illegal to disrupt a slavery operation or protest against it, and the punishment for this action was to be indefinite slavery for the guilty people and all of the children. Thus many Subumpamese were enslaved on the same plantations taht teh Dabondians had been, and the slaves started to fight amongst each other.

This was the closest that Paba had come to owning slaves of their own. Previously, Paba had been essentially always the victim of a slave drive, happily selling its own people off to overcome their persistent problem of overpopulation. Paba thus had no moral misgivings about slavery; they just didn't feel the need to participate in it as a winner. But now some Pabaps were tempted to take in the Subumpamese and Dabondian slaves from the Pabap-dominated lands of eastern Subumpam into Paba itself.

In 2183, ownership of the Wolf in Wool campground, where many slaves had been housed, was transferred from Nama to Paba. Although the slaves were still within Subumpam, they were owned by the nation of Paba itself now and not merely Pabaps who lived in Subumpam. Thus Subumpam realized that they had now become the world's ultimatce victim, an epithet that had been placed on Paba before bt had never been true in such a way as it was of Subumpan now. The Cranberry Army was born, an apolitical organization seeking to stop all abuses against the Subumpamese people and release all slaves in all nations. The government responded by adding the Cranberries to the list of organizations whose members would be enslaved on discovery. The Dabondians still had not given up, even while enslaved: a Dabondian soldier set on fire a building in which many Subumpamese had been sleeping, and most of them died. The slavemasters asked the slaves who had survived for help at locating the soldier, but were unsuccessful. When a funeral for the victims was held several weeks later, the soldier turned up and started massacring the mourners before he himself was killed.

Fore the most part, though, the slaves were kept apart so that they would not fight each other. Paba did not want its first experiment with slavery to fail so soon. They created a micronation called "Burlia" which was surrounded by Miepabem on all sides, not bordering Paba, and put their slaves in it.

New states in the Star Empire

The increase in wealth in Lobexon seemed to bring an increase in political liberality with it. Lobexon's laws grew more liberal every year. This was especially true in Amade, the wealthiest state in Lobexon and also the wealthiest state on all of Teppala. The two poorest states, a rainforest state and Taryte, were also the two most politically conservative. Some of the other poorer parts of the union, such as Maheal and Vasabadas, were also fairly conservative, but they were conservative in a way that served to advance the agenda of the liberals in Amade because their conservatism was opposed to the old conservatism that Amade had previously embraced. In 2141, a liberal party calling itself the Sejape Party took control in Amade for the first time and launched a very ambitious program designed to make their dream empire a reality. Sejape (Sĕyepa) was a version of imepo that allowed its believers to refuse to integrate themselves politically into Nama and also allowed them to refuse to allow slaves and certain other minorities to be represented in the government.

The Sejapeans declared that all of the conquered territories that Amade had won in the last war were part of their empire, and could be best served by cooperating with Amade's government. Amade finalized the name Lobexonfor its new empire, which now included 19 states stretching from Bipabum to Maheal.

The Sejapeans planned to build the largest nation in history, and said that they would be able to do it only because it would be a diversitarian empire, doing its best to please everyone. The type of government that Amade was spreading over its empire was largely derived from the Subumpamese system of government, and the Sejapeans told the Subumpamese that it was as true that Subumpam had conquered Amade as vice versa. The Sejapeans believed that Nama/Subumpam's dissenter system was superior to Amade's old democracy, but they didn't actually abolish the democracy because they felt that if they did so, Amadeans and others would complain and revolt because they would feel that their power had been taken from them and given to an unaccountable elite. In Subumpam, a fake democracy was installed to mollify these same people, but all the real decisions were still made by unappointed officials whom the Subumpamese believed to be better able to govern than the people themselves.

In 2148, Amade outlawed tribal alliances and passed a law giving most minorities (but not Andanese or certain groups of Namans) nearly equal rights with Amadeans. In 2155, all Subumpamese and "tropical" slaves were freed and the forced importation of people from Subumpam or any other region was also outlawed. Close relatives of captured Subumpamese slaves were allowed to settle in Amade. However, g&c was still illegal.

In 2161, Lobexon abolished the promotion of the Emon religion and officially became agnostic. Although most governing officials remained Emon believers, they were no longer allowed to publicly promote their religion or to discriminate against non-Emonians. (Few people outside Lobexon practiced Emon.)

To stop ethnic conflicts, Lobexon in 2161 also introduced a massive resettlement program designed to smooth out the distribution of minorities across the Star Empire. Many states, such as Taryte and certain Subumpamese states, nullified the proposal, but those that didn't nullify it were rewarded by Amade with large amounts of money and the importation of some of Amade's wealthiest citizens into their territories.

In 2162, Lobexon revoked the sole official language status of Amadean and allowed minorities to speak their own native languages, although they had to also be fluent in Amadean. Lellapians were not allowed to speak their own dialects of Lellapian, though. (Amadean was just one dialect of a larger language called Lellapian.) Upset at being neglected by the Amadean government in favor of minorities, Tarises threatened to secede. The government of Tarise offered money for prominent conservative Lellapian/Gold politicians who wished to settle in Taryte , but the Gold government threatened to disenfranchise Taryte if they did not agree to cooperate with the more liberal states. The next month, a secessionist party became the majority party in Taryte, and these Tarises encouraged secessionist movements in Subumpam to seize power away from the Subumpamese liberals that were helping Amade. The Subumpamese, who overwhelmingly adored the Amadean government, refused to cooperate, but the tropics elected a secessionist government in the next month even without Taryte's support.

Both of these new governments were afraid to act against Lobexon, because both were geographically isolated and extremely poor compared to much of the rest of the empire, and they were also militarily helpless, so they knew that they couldn't really secede. Also, the tropical government changed hands again the next month, putting a very pro-Sejape government in power. (Sejape was Amade's liberal party.) When in the following month the Tarise government also turned liberal, a group of Tarise conservatives declared that they would form a paragovernmental organization within Taryte and try to live on their own without actually seceding.

This allowed money from Amade to flow into the Tarise, which was now by far the poorest state in Lobexon, and it allowed the conservatives to feel that they had succeeded at least in part. Thus, nearly all conservatism in SE2 had now been destroyed by the Sejapean liberals.

But they still had the problem that they couldn't completely get along even amongst themselves. Sejape appealed to minorities of all types, and these minorities had been drawn from a diverse stock, and their interests conflicted with each other. Some of the Sejapeans were really poor, underprivileged minorities who were far more conservative even than the Saharans, but whose conservatism was allowed to pass for liberalism because it was opposed to the Saharan conservatism. For example, "Wipep" had passed a law stating that only the Wipepians could serve in its local governments, and that Wipepese was the only language allowed to be spoken in public in Wipep. They also allowed discrimination against non-Wipepians and discouraged non-Eipeians to settle in Wipep. This was far more radical a policy than what the Tarise conservatives were asking for, but the Amadean liberals embraced it because it served their best interests. Similarly, they refused to do anything to stop the "oppression" of married women in Babbam, Subumpam, and the teropics, or the oppression of non-treopical people (including even Amadeans) in the tropics. Much of the tropicswas in fact controlled by local tribal governments, with the official tropical government being too afraid to enforce its laws. Some of these tribes fought against each other, and others teamed up to fight against Amade.

Lobexon had a strongly capitalist economy, and the government of Lobexon refused to improve its global welfare system to provide its poorest citizens a standard of living comparable to that which Kxesh's poorest citizens enjoyed, but some states introduced their own welfare systems, taking the money needed to run them from taxes. Often, recent immigrants from Amade paid a disproportionate amount of these taxes. This was partly because the states blamed Amade for lack of support, and partly because local sentiment was anti-Amade anyway, and the people were glad for anything that helped their own states gain at the expense of Amade. Amade's government, the most liberal in the empire, assumed that these acts of hostility were being caused by the imbalance of wealth between Amade and all the other states, and they did not try to retaliate. Many liberals began to believe that a less capitalist economy was necessary to equalize the wealth imbalance, but the liberals that were in power in Amade held to their inherited belief that capitalism was always the best path to future prosperity. They poured money into local economies to help alleviate their problems, but they never aided the poor directly, as this was contrary to their philosophy.

Meanwhile (April 2166), the southern end of Lobexon (called Shuppa) was beginning to deteriorate. Although in the northern part of the tropics, businesses were developing and people were getting richer, Amade's economic aid was not able to reach the southern tropics or Babbam. The conservative population distrusted the Lobexon government and didn't believe it could solve their problems. Thus, even though it looked as though formal secession would never happen, the southern part of the Star Empire was becoming more and more effectively not even a separate country, but a loosely organized group of tribal communes reminiscent of the ancient tropics that had not yet been conquered by Amade. Even Tarises began to move to the tropics now, hoping to get out from under the thumb of their new Sejapist state government. Others remained in Taryte and set up a pseudo-tribal government that was much better organized than all of the ones in the tropicsand was also even more fiercely opposed to the government.

To the alarm of Amade, these people renamed themselves Dabondians and set up the nation of Dabondi (Taryte) within Sahara's borders, without the consent of any government. Amade voted to let Dabondi secede, since they had chosen land with very few non-Dabondians on it, and they had chosen to cooperate with Lobexon and not plan a war. But Taryte would not agree, and they threatened to enslave the Dabondian leaders if they continued to cause trouble. Babbam, which had a very libertarian government, invited the Dabondians to settle in Babbam, and promised to let them have almost as much freedom as they would have if they were an independent nation. The Dabondians felt uncomfortable amongst the Babbas, and few agreed to their offer. Those that did move mostly did so because they were members of a group of Dabondians that believed that their lives were worthless unless they were dedicated to overthrowing the entire Star empire. A few Dabondians moved to the rebellious states in southwestern Subumpam (Vasabadian strongholds, not Moonshine ones), hoping to damage mainstream Subum society as much as they could before they were discovered. They were in fact planning to kill all the Subumpamese and claim their land for Dabondi, but they knew that there were too few Dabondians at this time to be able to do that.

When the Star government discovered what the Dabondians had been planning to do, they arrested them and put them in slavery in northern Subumpam. They then forced all 19 states to sign an agreement endorsing Sejape and forbidding the construction of any internal empire within SE2. Even the most conservative of the anti-Sejape parties agreed to this, because they wanted to be sure to be seen as friendly to Amade so that Amade would send them more money.

Amade had spared themselves from being attacked by Dabondi, but they knew that they still had the chaos of the far south to deal with. Babbam's government had officially signed a petition condemning the takeover of Subumpam by Amade in the 2140's, and Babbam began to trade directly with Subumpam, ignoring the many states in between them. They had also become openly hostile to the nearby Empire of Kxesh, even though they had until recently been a part of Kxesh. Kxesh blamed Amade for the problems, and Amade considered destroying all of Babbam.

The Islanders

In 2175, the Battle of Wapeblo Pisuba was fought, in which the FILTER army was reduced from 151 soldiers to only 14. FILTER was an organization of feminists who had seceded from their homelands and settled a small tropical island later called Wapeblo Pisuba, or Wapeblo Island. (Khulls speakers called it Ƥāli.) Most people on Wapeblo Island were of the races that had women taller than men, but a few tall-maled people had moved in to be with them. Their language was a conservative dialect related to Subumpamese that had already gone extinct on the mainland. They had also set up a colony in the cooler upland forests of Nama, but wanted their main nation to be in the tropics.

FILTER wanted to create a society without any violence by putting women in control of men in all aspects of life and stopping any attempt by the males to pursue equality. They felt that violence was so severe of a problem that preventing it even overruled other virtues such as treating all people equal. The people on Wapeblo were not Repilians but rather a collection of Subumpamese immigrants who by genetic drift had acquired some of the Repilians' tall-female genes. These people called themselves Feminists and said that Feminism was nothing more than the state of having women be taller than men and therefore physically capable of controlling men. They said that if necessary they could create parallel Feminist forks of all of the other major parties, e.g. Feminist Gold, Feminist Crystal, Feminist Bubble, etc, but for the mean time they were a very small population and just called themselves Feminists. They realized that if they did split up, they could potentially convince Nama to give them a new nation for each of the many forks of their philosophies, but did not want to rely on this, as those other nations could simply forgo Feminism and join with their outworld parties.

Although FILTER was friendly to the Repilians, they were for now living on a tropical island and had no direct connection to any Repilian nation, nor did they expect to have room to allow immigration from Repilia.

They also figured that Repilians would not want to move there anyway, as to them all of Repilia was a fantasy land with no problems whatsoever simply becxause in Repilia women made the rules and men obeyed them, and to them, that was all that mattered. Indeed Repilia really was remarkably peaceful for a land so poor, but they had many other provblems to dewal with. Unloike Repilia, though, FILTER still had some "masculist" traits in their society. Even though men were supposed to be deliberately put down, there was always an "alpha male" who had thirteen women all to himself and ruled over the other males and was in most respects better off in society than all of the females. The other males were of low status compared to everyone else. In Repilia, generally speaking, there was no such thing as an alpha male because women had the power in their society to keep their men at home away from other females.

The problem occurred when they were btought on the mainland. They refused to integrate themselves back into the society of Lobexon, and swore that even with an army of 14 people they could defeat all of the millions of people in all of the other nations on the planet. Lobexon brought the Islanders into court and tried them as criminals. One of the four male survivors was accused of wifebeating, because they had seen him hit his girlfriend, even though she was much taller and stronger than him. In fact, she broke through the jail her boyfriend was put in and got him free.

In 2176, a man named Tepe Bemalamja was elected president of Amade.

Info

Soon a small number of goldies began to respond to the Crystals' preaching. Lapiwa was religious, but its religion was so liberal that it was a favorite target of criticism for atheists from non-imapa nations. Disillusioned with the profanity of everyday life in "LobexonLoop", as they called it now, they renounced their faith in the government's Lapiwa system to become Crystals, members in the new fundamentalism that they knew would cost many believers their lives. These people called their new philosophy Popasopa, and their leaders were the descendants of priestswho had been defeated in an unrelated war from 450 yeaRS AGO. they had had a plan for world government 450 years earlier by the universal debate center.

It wasn't just that the Popasopists wanted a fundamentalist government because it was their own preferred way of life; Lapiwa was actually dividing society and through its lax mores weakening the friendly fiber which had for so long bound LobexonLoopians together, and the Popasopists saw that it was indeed an evil plague that they needed to get rid of for the benefit of the world as a whole. The Popasopists, a minority in the Kwipipupûan government composed of a nearly equal percentage each of SLobexonians and LobexnonLoopians, spoke out against imapa/Lapiwa, calling it simply a "demon preying on people". However, their message was distorted by the majority of Kwipipupûans, and these Kwipipupûans thus became even more convinced that Lapiwa, not Popasopa, was the path of truth.

The Popasopists became known in Kwipipupû as the "people of the night" (Pispíspéa). In reality the Popasopists both enjoyed and despised their new name, as in reality they often carried lights with them as a symbol of the one spirit of god that was simultaneously light, love, faith, and all that was good.

The Popasopists were a tiny minority in Kwipipupû, and as they looked to cataleptics and xenophobes for advice, they were considered brainwashed by the majority of Kwipipupûans, and thus Kwipipupû as whole became even more convinced that Lapiwa, not Popasopa, was the path of truth.

One project that the Popasopists engaged in, however, drew frightened reactions from imepists on its discovery: the construction of a fort out in the wilderness - a safe haven for Crystals, and a place where the hard-working believers had spent the last few decades dedicated to the construction of a superior army, one that could conceivably, if not destroyed immediately, grow strong enough to defeat the entire rest of the planet. They called this Lobexonleap.