Meromo

In 3348, the nation of Meromo was born. It was a nation founded by Mammans (originally from Kava and FILTER) who had settled in an area they at first called Putu Lake. The governing party called itself the Plumes.

Language

See edit history for Sapeepa-specific details.

Because the founders of Meromo were exiles from Kava, they had the same language as Kava. In their civilization, every nation was considered to have its own language, even if it may be nearly identical to some other closely related language. Thus people began to speak of "the Meromo language", not merely the Meromo dialect of the Kavan language.

Kava's linguistic histoiry was cpmplex. They spoke either a Paleo-Pabappa language, a FILTER language, or both.

Since Kâlika is not Dreamland, it is possible that there were no significant populations of Dreamlandic speakers in Meromo.

There was also an alliance between "Teupí" and "Cila" against Tarwas in the mid-3300s. (See Book_H.doc .) Dreamland did not exist yet, so the Teupí referred to here is entirely of Kava stock. Tarwas wins and enslaves the Teupi, but it is not clear whether they conquered their enemies or merely drove off the invasions.

THis also proves that Kâlika is NOT Dreamland.

Early history

Kakpoko

A nation called Kakpoko existed in northern Nama. These people were Lenians who had both Dreamer and Meromo ancestry. Unusually, their Dreamer ancestry had come to them long before the Dreamers reached their area; it had actually happened more than 800 years earlier.

Tarwas sent its army into their territory in the 3300s, intending to establish a foothold in Lenian territory even though they had previously refused to expand anywhere beyond their borders. Tarwas won, and took over the government of Kakpoko. Soon they bred with the locals and the people of Kakpoko became racially distinct from the Lenians. Then, Kakpoko declared war on the Lenians, and invaded the area they called Teupi, which was already at war with Tarwas. Kakpoko became a pocket of dark-skinned people and formed an alliance with Baeba, but Baeba refused to join any alliance that included Tarwas.

Tribal wars in Repilia

There were three tribal confederations in western Repilia: the native Repilians, the Lenians, and the Merar. These were easily identified by their physical appearance: the Lenians were blonde and blue-eyed, the Merar were darker-skinned, and the Repilians of moderate coloration with distinct facial features. Within these tribal confederations were many distinct tribes who did not always side with each other. The Merar were not as dark-skinned as their founding population had been in 2414 because the cold climate of Tarwas had slowly selected in favor of settlers with lighter skin coloration. They nevertheless stood out from the other tribes.

By their mere presence, the Lenians and Merar were invading Repilia, but few Repilians expected they would ever get their territory back.

Birch War

In 3125, the Birch War started, as the Lenians claimed a plot of land in the far north and began exterminating Repilians. This was a slow-moving background conflict, as both the Lenians and the Repilians here were nomads who moved from place to place rather than building compact cities. The aboriginals did not launch a counterattack until 3137, and by this time they had lost many strongholds and could only attack from vulnerable outposts.

The Birch nation soon expanded backwards as well, and came to border on the circular lake later called Putu. Female immigrants from Paba (and Aboa) came to settle here, and the nation's growth outpaced its rivals. However, Paba's government restricted the number of women allowed to leave because they did not want their own population growth to slow down.

The Birches also took in immigrants from Repilia, because even though they were at war with Repilia, they were trying to skim off potential defectors in order to weaken Repilia while strengthening their own empire. As immigration from Repilia increased, immigration from Aboa slowed down, as the people of Aboa began focusing on other areas.

Towards the late 3100s, the Birches abandoned their Lenian ancestry entirely and began to identify as aboriginals. Even though their ancestors had acquired their land by slaughtering aboriginals, there were enough aboriginal immigrants in the Birch nation by this time that they considered the debt to have been paid. The Repilian confederation signed a treaty opening its remaining territory to the Birches, but warning them that they would be required to live under Repilian law, and that Repilia would refuse to protect the Birches in a wider war. The Birches realized this meant that they could gain protection by ceding their land back to Repilia, and although they did not give up all of their land, the areas where most people lived were indeed ceded back to Repilia, making Repilia once again the largest landholder in the far north. The new "Repilians" were racially mixed because of the many blonde Birch people who now lived there, but they had all fully come to identify as Repilians.

Birch language

The Birch people spoke Yeisu Kasu, but may have switched to speaking a neo-Repilian language (see Macro-Pabap languages).

Repilia invaded again

In 3302, the Lenian tribes in Kava declared war on Repilia, including the descendants of the Birch tribes who had come to live there. However, Repilia launched no counterattack, as they were too disorganized. In 3315, the Merar tribes also declared war on Repilia, and joined the Lenian invasion. The Lenians knew that the Merar had been hostile to them in the past, and expected that they would be hostile again if they were to meet up with the Lenians inside Repilia. Thus, a three-sided war had begun, with the Lenians, the Merar, and the Repilians all against each other, though for the meantime the Repilians were too weak to even fight back.

The Merar soon defeated the Repilians, but they stopped their invasion at the borders they had defined in a previous treaty with the Lenians, and promised that they would not intrude into Lenian-held areas of Repilia. Thus, many Repilians fled into Lenian-held territory even as the Lenians were massacring the Repilians already there.

Squirrel War

In 3332, the Repilians finally began to attack the Lenians who had invaded them. This thirty-year delay helped them prepare, and when they finally attacked, their army quickly encircled the Lenians and forced them to surrender. However, the land they had trapped the Lenians in had been part of Repilia before the war, and thus they were only regaining their own territory, and were unable to invade Kava.

Even as they were losing their war in Repilia, the Lenians attempted to build colonies in northern Tarwas. They never formally declared war against the Merar tribal confederation that ruled Tarwas, but simply sent their people to live there.

Lenians invade Baeba

Within months of their defeat in Repilia, the Lenians declared war on the dark-skinned aboriginals of Baeba Swamp. These dark-skinned people were distinct from the Merar and did not consider themselves mutual allies. This war was a stalemate, however, and the Lenians gained no significant territory despite a high body count on both sides. However, not all of the battles were symmetrical: early on, Lenians massacred a troop of Baebans who had been poorly equipped, and later on, the Lenians fought a major battle in the Baeban neighborhood of Adom but the Baebans massacred them.

The Lenian tribes living in Sessia, located west of Baeba, had elected a pacifist government and focused on stopping the war in Aboa, but few people in this area were interested in Aboa. Meanwhile, another group of dark-skinned tribes calling themselves the Crystals was now approaching Baeba and threatening to subjugate the aboriginals.

When the Lenians in Sessia heard that the Lenians of the north had declared war on Baeba's aboriginals, most Sessians sided with Baeba. However, within this group of dissenters, a further dissent soon arose; some tribes within the group which had signed allegiance to Baeba defected and instead fought for the Lenians in the north. (Meanwhile, FILTER was still at war with Aboa.)

Founding of Meromo

In 3348, the Repilian aboriginals had regained most of their lost territory and pushed the Lenians into unfavorable areas. Here, the Lenians founded the nation of Meromo. Their governing political party was the Plumes. Meromo's founding tribe was called Mamma, but they soon dropped the name in favor of identifying as a political party.

Meromo signed a treaty with an older Lenian nation named Kàlika and created the binational empire of Teupí. In the mid-3300s, the Lenians of Teupí declared war on the Merar and invaded Tarwas. At first they won, but Tarwas pushed them back out and then conquered not only Teupí but a third Lenian nation called Čappini (Kakpoko).

Cappini submitted quickly and therefore the Merar maintained control there even when the war turned back in favor of Teupí. However, Cappini cut ties with Merar and declared itself a fully independent tribe. They signed a treaty with the aboriginals of Baeba Swamp but did not pursue unification.

Soon, the Merar regained the upper hand yet again, and enslaved all of the Lenians who had reached Tarwas. They announced a new alliance open to all of the tribes except the Lenians, and hoped to unite all of the Baebans and Repilians on their side. But Baeba's aboriginals refused to unite with Tarwas, and the Repilians also refused because they still claimed that Tarwas had been stolen from them. Ironically the only people who joined the Merari's expanded confederation were the exiles from the Birch society who were mostly of Lenian ancestry. They ceded their land to Tarwas because they considered the Repilians (and the mainline Birch people) to be a greater threat.

Crystals conquer Baeba

The Crystals conquered Baeba and abolished Baeba's slavery-based economy. The aboriginals fled into Dreamland now; they knew the Crystals fought only for their own kind and would place the aboriginals at the bottom of their society even if they did not enslave them. However, the aboriginals only moved to the pacifist nations of Sessia.

Soon, the dark-skinned aboriginals who had moved to Sessia began to dominate the governments of the nations they had fled into. They declared a permanent war against the Crystals and turned Sessia into a military outpost for any tribes who were hostile to the Crystals. Thus, refugees from the tropical empire of Kxesh began moving to Sessia as well.

The native tribes of Sessia supported a pacifist party calling itself Foam (PDP), which had kept Sessia out of major wars in the past. The pacifists were terrified when they realized that the Baeban refugees were turning Sessia into a military stronghold and that Sessian pacifists might soon die in large numbers in a war that would gain them nothing.

Baywatch settlement

In 3373, Dreamland's Baywatch party gained control of the border state of Popa, located immediately north of Baeba, and signed a treaty with Baeba's aboriginals which granted them the right to settle in Popa so long as they helped the Baywatchers overthrow the Crystals in Baeba. The Baywatchers wanted to conquer Baeba themselves and make it the capital of all of Dreamland. They promised to abolish tribalism and win their war by uniting an army drawn from all the tribes of the world against the Crystals and anyone who chose to side with them. The Baywatchers promised that racism would be impossible in Popa because all of the tribes would live in harmony and blend together as they married each other and had large families.

However, the Baywatchers abruptly reversed course when they realized that many Crystals were claiming to be aboriginals and thus moving to Popa as well, and that the Baywatchers could not tell the difference between the two dark-skinned groups because they did not understand either of their languages. They thus enacted a racially restrictive immigration law and told the aboriginals that they would have to move to Sessia instead of Popa.

When the other Dreamer states learned of the war, they all aligned with the Baywatchers, and although they did not prohibit immigration, they were pleased that the pacifists in Sessia were being overwhelmed with militaristic immigrants because they knew that Sessia was the only area of Dreamland that had not committed itself to the war.

Birth of Sapeepa

Meromo was the parent empire of Sapeepa.

The people who were in charge of Sapeepa and felt more love for their subjects than for the rulers of their parent nation, Meromo. The governors of Sapeepa raised their children as Sapeepans, not Meriras. Since Sapeepa was both distant and an economic liability to Meromo, Meromo treated them as an independent state without formally relinquishing their land claim.

Meromo's governing Plume party sent food and even laborers to Sapeepa because Sapeepa was so much poorer than the rest of Meromo. The Sapeepans disliked this, and tried to become economically self-sufficient in order to acquire a sense of pride while also helping Meromo. Yet, the Plume party also supported the killing of poor people, in order that they might not be able to suffer or cause other people to suffer. Thus their ideology caused problems for its supporters.

The Sapeepans developed a new, secret party based on "angry" egalitarianism, and stated that people who were unsuccessful were simply not trying hard enough. Thus their philosophy was often not much kinder to fellow Sapeepans than that of the Plumes. They gave speeches to their supporters saying "You have no rights." The Sapeepans forged close relations with the Kâlika people^{*NOT* Dreamers} living in slightly better conditions to their west. They sometimes called their alliance Têupí, and people moved in both directions.

Sapeepa grew slowly, and they could not conquer Baeba Swamp. Throughout the generations, Sapeepans often led invasions on weaker villages outside the Swamp, and stole food and other basic supplies which were scarce in their own territory. Their weapons were made of stone, and much weaker than the Baebans', but Baeba was not ready for a war, and treated the intruders as mere criminals. Sapeepa was also hostile to Repilia, but Repilians avoided attacking Sapeepa in the vicinity of the Swamp because they believed the Sapeepans and others would cast magic spells that harmed only Repilians.

Independence

In 3431, Sapeepa revolted and became an independent nation. They said that they were going to reproduce faster than all other peoples and eventually take over the world. But many of their leaders were very perverse, and many of the people revolted and became savages disliked by all others on the planet except the Dreamers, who had rejected racism and come to embrace every race except the dark-skinned ones as fully deserving of love.

The savages lived like animals, in almost total ferality. Children were ill-treated by their parents, and often not protected well enough to survive in the swamps. Thus, even though the savages were reproducing very quickly, their kids kept dying. Warfare broke out among the many Sapeepans living in the swamp (not Baeba), and they began to eliminate their weaker members through warfare.

Foundation of Thunder philosophy

Shortly after the breakup in 3431, another new political party, the Thunder party, began to take over Sapeepa. The Thunderers believed that the rights of the majority were the only rights that mattered at all - and there was no such thing as fairness, because everyone was ultimately part of the same universal being. Thus they were communitarians.

Thunder philosophy was very much the opposite of the Plume government that had preceded it, but the Thunder leaders had taken no steps to burn off the frustration they had accumulated while living under the Plume government, and they were as perverse as the people they replaced. (The Plume government was still in control of Meromo.) They believed that all crimes should be legal, so long as they benefit the perpetrator more than they benefit the victim.

The new government was run entirely by Thunderers who had great and terrible plans for their new nation, which they immediately transformed into an army. They claimed that true Thunderers could never let a disease confine them to a life of suffering, and refused medical treatment for many common diseases.

Over the next sixty years, the birth rate increased, the death rate fell, and the material wealth of the population rose. However, the birthrate was still among the lowest in the world because Sapeepan children did not typically gather berries or other food items and thus each new child reduced a family's food supply. Neighboring nations began ruling out the Sapeepans, so they could not easily leave.

The Thunderers excused sin after sin, saying the misdeeds of their people were not sins after all but expressions of the power and beauty of their God. They exonerated their entire population, essentially declaring all Sapeepans, even those who had not joined the Thunder party, innocent of all sins. With this mentality, Sapeepa became strongly united and ready to begin attacking outside nations. Even though its military was very weak, the Thunderers began preparations for war against Têupí almost immediately after they declared independence.

In 3434, the Thunderers attacked Punu Lake, but they were driven back by the Têupíans. Early in 3435 they attacked again, and took over the Lake. Then they quickly began attacking more and more of the nations around them, winning most of their battles. Those battles that they lost were not terribly upsetting to the Thunderers, because their own nation was not hurt at all by the defeats.

The Thunderers stressed the great importance of maintaining a high birth rate in their society, and praised good mothers who raised large families for the nation. The Thunderers abolished marriage and replaced it with a system designed to maximize the amount of children each woman could bear, where each man who was allowed to would live with as many as ten women, and the rest of the men would be in the army, ready to fight (some women were in the army as well, but not many).

The Thunderers began to settle more and more lands around them, mostly mountainous areas to their west that lay between the Swamp and Punu Lake. They captured the highest peaks of the Black Mountains, a poor environment for humans but one that was very difficult to attack. Thus, they promised they would never be conquered even if they were to lose a major war.

The Thunderers despised the Crystals. Crystals sent their people into Thunder territory, trying to make converts, but the Thunderers thought little of killing the Crystal immigrants.

Lantern Empire history

Sapeepa conquered most of Meromo, but a few strongholds of the Plume party remained in outer areas. These areas did not join the Lantern Empire, and therefore the Plume Empire continued to exist. Most Plumes aligned themselves with Dreamland as Dreamland was the only competent enemy of the Thunder party, but the Plumes knew they were of little value to Dreamland, and feared than in a war they would be left unprotected as the Dreamers focused on defending their own people. Therefore, they never signed a formal pact with Dreamland.

War of 3564

Nama surrendered in 3564 and focused on squishing weaker territories like Kava instead of trying to kill all of Sapeepa.

Sapeepa-Taryte relations

In 3696, Taryte invaded Sapeepa and conquered most of Sapeepa's territory in the lower latitudes. This war cost them the support of the Crystals, however, and therefore the war also became Taryte's war of independence from the Crystal Empire.

In 3958, Taryte and Sapeepa met up again, this time as allies against the even greater power of Adabawa. At this point, the Plume party rebuilt its army and joined the war on Adabawa's side. Adabawa won, but his rule was so weak that the conquered territories began to split up into many small armies. Soon, Sapeepa ceased to exist as a cohesive territory, and Taryte was split up by many immigrants who ruled tiny stretches of coast in the tropics, while the interior became poor once its contact with the coast was cut. The Plumes were simply one of many small empires now, and they again began to look towards Dreamland for a potential alliance. However, just as before, Dreamland was not interested.