Pusapom

Though not a democracy, the government of Pusapom has many of its features, such as political parties, electoral votes, a legislature, and a system for recalling executives.

Government

Electoral votes

Each of the 60+ states in Pusapom has a specific number of electoral votes, one for each of the legislators who live in the imperial capital of Blop. The people of each state do not choose the legislators; instead each state has its own method to choose them, but all in all they are chosen by the existing government of each state, which may or may not be subsequently responsible to the general public in that state. The name of the legislature is Pistientambum Pum Pupapi, translating roughly to "Legislature of Human Affairs", because even though Pusapom has many sapient animals, those animals do not generally respect the political boundaries humans have set up and cannot be assigned representation in a particular state of the Empire. Instead all interspecies affairs are handled locally. The name of the legislators is žavwub.

There are a few states that are not allowed to participate in this system and have 0 votes; generally this is because they are too politically divided to agree to have a unified opinion, or too small to merit even one representative.

Additionally, foreign nations are represented in the legislature, and their votes are actually more powerful than those of the Poswob legislators. The noko, an overseer representing the Khulls nations, can overrule any non-unanimous vote, but cannot himself change the vote. This is mathematically equivalent to being able to choose sides in a vote by refusing to pass any legislation until the minority opinion he prefers becomes a majority. Typically, after one round of voting where the nokō rejects the legislation, if the second round returns the same result to him, he will not re-use the veto unless he prefers no action at all.

Most Moonshine states also send voters to Blop, but they send less than one would expect proportionally based on their Moonshine population. These numbers are agreed upon by mutual trust since there is no active census of the Moonshine population.

Also, states outside the Empire which have significant Poswob populations are able to vote; this means that some states actually have two sets of votes, one for the Moonshines and one for the Poswobs of that state.

As there are many other sapient species living in Pusapom besides humans, the human population is not always represented well. For example, in the state of Ramma, almost all humans were eaten by wildcats and birds of prey around the year 7700. These animals also preyed on rabbits, but the rabbits were hardier and eventually built settlements strong enough to keep out the wildcats and added tunnels to make it easy to hide from eagles etc. Humans live in these settlements too, but are subjects to the rabbits and thereefore are not actually citizens of Pusapom since the rabbit nation (aslo called Ramma) is not in Pusapoms' control. The representatives of Ramma know these humans exist, but cannot count them in a census and therefore get no additional representation.

Structure

The legislature (known as Pistumbum) has several houses. The core house is Labaltam, made up representatives of most of the major Poswob states, with one for each electoral vote of each state. States with zero votes are represented by a nonvoting member called a žamwavža. By tradition, all Labaltam members are female, although in some cases a man may stand. Typically male Labaltantas are not allowed to speak until after all of the female members in his state are done speaking, and their vote may count as more than one female vote. This may seem an exception to the rule that women generally hold most of the power in Pusapom. However, the original reason for this was that men were chosen to represent a group of females who were sworn to agree with each other on all relevant issues in a session and chose to send only one. That is, the only reason for the presence of the man is to be visually distinct from the massive female majority. The man in fact has no opinion of his own, and serves only as a reminder to other members present that he represents more than just the one woman standing beside him telling him what to do. This man is called a kis. There are a few examples of male Labaltantas serving on their own, not representing a group of women, but this is rare, and is considered just a special example of a Kis, a man with only one female representative, where that female representative is not physically present in the room. THis may also happen in the case of a woman who is ill or otherwise unable to serve.

Labaltam typically has about 850 serving members at a time, making it the largest but not the most powerful of the many legislatures.

Political parties

The primary party of the Poswob Empire itself is the United Pacifist League. This party is over 6000 years old, massively older than the Empire itself. Its representation ranges from essentially 100% support in western cities such as Lypelpyp, to 70%-80% in the central rural areas, about 50% in Blop and the eastern third of the empire, and less than 50% around Paba. Note that most of the areas not supporting UPL instead vote for party ideologies that are even more pacifistic than UPL. The only exception to this is the far east, where the climate is too cold to make UPL-style pacifism (not killing land animals even in self defense) realistic.

Note that this does not apply to states outside Pusapom that still vote in the legislature, nor to states such as the Moonshine Crown Territory that are part of the Poswob Empire but do not allow Poswobs to live in them. Here, the UPL often gets no votes at all.

States

For a long time, Pusapom had had about 25 states. In the 7700's, many of the states split apart into other states, and as of the year 8743 there are exactly 101 states in Pusapom.

Papsosa

This is the territory of the capital, almost completely occupied by the one city, Blop. Everything is unique here, not just in the empire, buti in the world. Papsosa is also known as Džaptampa, after its original founders more than 6000 years ago, even though the civilization was not continuous.

Nama

A very old state unloike all others. Humans here are so weak that one person can swoop in and terrorize the entire city,. e.g. as if the Beltway Snipers were just living in plain sight at the edge of town but no one could stop them, and they didnt even need guns. BUt yet, even so, Nama survives.

Lušatšam

A very cold state in the northeast corner. It is mostly unvegetated icecap, but has cities such as Wabbubo and Tarpos that are crucial routes across the mouintains. THe mtns are actually warmer than the lowlajnds, and the coast warmer than inland even in summer. Heavy snow is persistent throughout the summer, such that people cannot build normal houses or they would be buried. Moreover, temperastures do peep above freezing from time to time, and though usually the snow is too cold to melt even then, it makes the surface slippery enough that icebergs detach from the main icecap and slipslide their way to the sea. Thus people often live on cliffs overlooking the areas where snow tends to pile ip.In winter, although it is much colder and is very windy, there is not much snow,m and conditions are actually a bit more conducive to outdoors expectivity.

Lapel

This is the state where most Pabaps live. Pabap society is traditionally divided into genities (lisa). For the most part, a person cannot marry outside their genity. The different genities of Pabap society are as follows:

White (paptupa) The ruling class. Like all others, they are expected to do manual labor to support themselves, but they are free from having to serve others as a job. They are the ones who make the laws of Paba and any territory associated with it. They are allowed to marry inside their caste, and are expexcted to. So this group has become largelyt inbred. Over thousands of years, they outbred the other groups and became almost the entire population of Paba. This made Paba very wealthy, but at the same time it was very dependent on surrounding areas for basic necessities such as food. Note that the word paba itself means "white" due to phonology collission so further specification is required.

Purple (laba) The military. The color comes from the grapes grown in the area around Pabap and the idea that they were hiding amongst the grape vines and protecting the vineyards from intruders, although becuase they are pacifist they are allowed to hide out in deserted areas if necessary. The soldiers are not allowed to own or produce weapons and now serve their purpose only by staying up at night looking for intruders.

Orange This is a rare example of a caste color name being used to describe the color of skin rather than clothing. Oranges were Nik, a tall dark-skinned people who survived 7000 years of wars and population transfers by simply not participating in any of them. They lived along the immediate coast, ate mostly fish, and sold what they could not eat to non-fishermen. They still survive, but over the long history of Paba have rarely brought in more of themselves from Laba and preferred to marry amongst themselvbes and Pabaps. Although from their earliest days they averaged about three times the size of Pabaps, unlike the similar Tarpabap people they did not have a cultural taboo against marrying someone so small. However, childbirth was very painful and often fatal for the Pabap mother, so these marriages tended to be very rare and usually with taller-than-average Pabap women. In later history, the Pabaps themselves became somewhat taller, and female tallness became more socially acceptable as genes from the Repilian aboriginals and the Poswobs slowly filtered in. This led to Pabap men marrying Nik women, rather than the previous situation. These women were extremely tall and found difficulty being socially accepted but those few who did marry gave birth to healthy children and created a bridge population. This bridge population essentially killed the taboo forever and today the Nik have become almost indstinguishable from the pink-skinned Pabaps around them.

Green Outsiders such as Poswobs who are part of the society but outside the other caste groups. Anyone who has married Green becaomes Green. This is the only genity with this porperty; thus Green is slowly gaining at the expense of all the other groups. Green is associated mostly with Poswobs, who broke off from the Pabaps around 2800 years ago (formally declaring independence in the year 5547), but the Green caste predates this split by thousands of years and there are a lot of Greens in the southern Empire who have no Poswob ancestry. However, over the years many communities of Greens in the Pabap Empire have switched en masse to being Poswobs.

Black Not an actual color term, this is used for foreigners who are completely outside the genity system. Not a synonym for green because anyone marrying a black becomes green, not black.

Tarwas

For a long time Tarwas was the only landlocked state. But in the 7700s the Poswobs divided up many existing states according to ethnicity, and this created a lot of new landlocked states. Tarwas had been founded in 2144 by an ethnic minority from Paba calling themselves the Tarpabap people.

Slavery

Pusapom is unique in that its government has made slaves of the majority of its people, benefiting a minority, for more than 4000 years. The survival and persistence of this seemingly impossible system is due to several factors.

The TTT War

During the Ta Tuipita Tamna war, the embryonic Pabap nation, known as Wamu, was almost completely destroyed as the animal-gods that they worshiped turned against them and literally ate up most of their soldiers and civilians. But the larger nation of Mili, run by the Kuroras people, marched in and saved them from defeat even though they had nothing to gain from so doing since the TTT gods were not enemies of them and had no plans to ever be. Many Kuroras people died because their nation was actually not very large either and their soldiers were weakened by the rushed journey into Paba.

In thanks for rescuing their very existence, the Pabaps allowed the Kuroras people to do whatever they wanted with their nation, including making slaves of them forever. At first, the Kuroras people did not enslave Pabaps, but merely took away their right to carry weapons, saying that they were in some ways their own worst enemies. (Up until then Paba had been one of the most violent places on the planet, and its sister city, Lunila, was just as bad.)

But slavery was a firmly entrenched economic system both in Mili, where the governing Kuroras tribes enslaved aboriginals, and in Wamu, where military leaders enslaved the others. Since the new leaders of Wamu were military, they were natural leaders for the Pabaps, and since the Pabaps were ethnically distinct from the Kuroras, they were natural slaves for the Kuroras. Thus Wamu was annexed to Mili and became part of the slave empire.

The First Slavery Era

The Pabaps' gratitude at having been saved by the Khulls tribes in c. 4100 became part of their religion and thus was carried down for hundreds of generations without the Pabaps becoming generally angry at being enslaved forever. Although some Pabap slaves did get angry, their lives would be even worse in the wilderness or in other nations where they would be free but not guaranteed safety because they would be a foreigner. Nevertheless, Pabaps began flowing north across the Popoppos mountains into cold uninhabited territory and set up new nations. Other tribes unrelated to the Pabap/Khulls system were moving north as well, and a "new world" was created. But the Pabap nations found that without the protection of the Khulls masters, they were in danger, and exploration of the north slowed down.

Pabaps in Wamu had traditionally had large families, and being slaves did not slow them down. They did not often marry up into the Khulls tribes because the great difference in body size — Khulls people were much taller and often more than triple the body weight of the Pabaps — made such relationships seem unnatural and cause the children to be rejected by the Khulls society. Thus the Pabap population grew much faster than the Kuroras and soon the day in which the Pabaps would be the majority came to pass.

Some of the local governments in Wamu feared that an ever-expanding Pabap population would make their continued enslavement impossible and set their slaves free. They formed the Wami Alliance, whose symbol was a flat stone with a Khulls soldier and a Pabap soldier holding hands, showing that they were equal in their new society. (They were distinguished by dress style, not by size, as the Khulls people did not want the Pabap male soldiers to fear being physically belittled even by their allies.) But other Wamu states stayed conservative and built walls around their territory to keep their slaves physically bound to their land, and keep free Pabaps out. The threat of civil war loomed, and the parent nation of Mili threatened to invade in order to help keep the slave system in place.

But the Wamians realized they were in poor shape to fight a war, since they were outnumbered and their states were not all physically contiguous. Moreover they had mixed feelings about actually giving weapons to the Pabaps, since they could put themselves in danger that way, and on the other hand didn't want to fight a war in which half of their population was completely defenseless and yet necessary since they did most of the work in their society despite not being slaves.

So there was no war, and the Wami Alliance agreed to never attack the slave societies among them. They did, however, insist on assigning a higher status to their Pabaps than the slavemasters did to theirs. They considered their areas as private property, just as the slaveowners did theirs. Over the years the non-slave societies' Khulls and Pabaps blended together and mostly came to identify as Pabaps since the children of mixed marriages almost always identified as Pabaps. This period of mingling meant that later Pabaps even in the heart of their territory had significant Khulls ancestry and were not, on average, quite as short as their relatives further east in nations such as Saklo and Qoqendoq.

The Revolution of 4767

In the year 4767, the Kuroras religion (known as Kâham) collapsed because the sacred treasure at the Temple of Alahon, the Gems of Tebbala, was stolen. Unless the Gems were recovered, Kuroras scripture stated, all people of all nations would go to Hell and remain there eternally. A manmade religion named Theyape became popular in the urban areas of the Kuroras empire, which by now extended far beyond Mili and even considered Mili an insignificant are not worth wasting soldiers in defense of. But most of the Kuroras people in Wamu did not change their religion even though the Pabap people they ruled over had been practicing a different religion right in front of them for thousands of years.

Instead, they became more focused on the task of regaining the Gems of Tebbala so they could go to Heaven. They became more irritable than before and decided to throw out all of their ideas about people being equal so that they could use the Pabaps as slaves in order to search for the Gems more efficiently. The famous sculpture of two soldiers holding hands was defaced and replaced with a sculpture of a crowd of waist-high Pabap slaves saluting their Khulls masters. Abuses against Pabaps reached unheard of levels as the leaders frantically tried to recover the Gems.

The Second Slavery Era

However, the period of desperation lasted only a few decades. Wamu underwent a revolution from within as a strong central government formed in Paba, and created a single army to replace the earlier system of decentralized armies under the control of single families of slavemasters. They were able to intimidate the local kings with new technology borrowed from neighboring empires with better economies.

The new government sharply limited the privileges given to Kuroras slaveowners, even though it also reaffirmed their families' privilege to remain slaveowners forever and stated that slavery was natural and would never come to an end. The Pabaps were permitted to have government entities and societies of their own, even though their laws could sometimes be overruled from "above". For example, the Pabap legislature would consist of 30 or 40 legislators, who would propose bills and vote on them, and a single Kuroras overseer, who could look at the result and say "yes" or "no". But in some types of votes, his vote could not overrule a unanimous decision, so he needed to have at least one person in the lower legislature agreeing with him to act. The only time the overseer could overrule a unanimous decision is if they were voting on something that would affect the nation itself, e.g. to get rid of slavery. Another way to describe this is that the Kuroras overseer can choose who's right, even if he chooses a position embraced by only 1 out of 40 Pabaps, but he cannot choose a position that none of them like at all.

The Birth of Pusapom

Meanwhile, Kuroras people calling themselves Crystals (after the Gems) were aggressively expanding into the areas immediately north of the Popoppos mountains. In some areas, they found Pabap people already living there, who called themselves Poswobs after a type of skirt that their women wore during the summer months. (Pwa, known as tòṭa in Khulls) But the Kuroras tribes considered the Poswobs to be aboriginals, and thus enslaved them. But this slavery was of the old, unreformed, cruel type that gave the Poswobs no rights at all, even the right to life. Thus Poswobs in the north who were aware that the southern areas had become gentler began fleeing back over the mountains, knowing that they would still be welcomed as "Pabaps" despite their new national identity. However, other Poswobs moved even further north to join the Moonshine people, who were of the same religion as the Crystals but much more liberal and all-welcoming, or fled into inaccessible mountain areas which were inhabited by nobody, even aboriginals. Also, Poswobs were not quite as easily intimidated as Pabaps traditionally had been, since they had been living alone for many years. Thus the progress of the Crystals was not always easy.

The invading Crystals enslaved both Poswobs and the Repilians, who were the true aboriginals of their territory. Previously, the Poswobs and the Repilians had been enemies, having fought many wars against each other after earlier attempts at peaceful coexistence had failed. But peace between the two tribes became the rule after all now that they were both being attacked and oppressed by the slavemaking Crystals. The Khul/Kuroras people soon came to consider them to be as one with each other, especially since religion was the real defining characteristic of ethnicity and as a general rule people lived only with those of the same religion.

Notes

• Pupompom ("kissed land") refers to the northern states, essentially all of the empire outside of Pabap territory. It includes Nama.
• Pablwempum refers to the southern states, although they are sometimes also referred to by their aboriginal name Ler. The word Pablwempum is a loanword from Pabappa padempim, which means "the team". It is in turn an abbreivation of Pabi Padempim.