Dolphin Riders

The MFZ Empires were three unrelated political empires that arose at the dawn of the Cosmopolitan Age. The original Empire, Mayuvas, was Dreamland, which acquired the byname after it came to be dominated by the Gold party, as the word for gold in Play was mayu. The other two empires, Fayuvas and Žayuvas, were then named as puns based on Dreamland's model.

There was no common trade union between the three empires, and they did not see themselves as an alliance. Their diplomats only met through a fourth party, Baeba Swamp, which at the time was run primarily by the Iron party, an offshoot of the much older Zenith party. Baeba Swamp was a single city, and not an empire, but it had a strong economy and was the center of world diplomacy. The common bond among the MFZ powers was that they were strong enough to achieve economic independence rather than depending on trade with Baeba; nevertheless, Mayūas and Fayūas traded with Baeba and with each other.

Note that the best transliteration of the names in the original Play language would be with the long vowel ū, giving Mayūas ~ Fayūas ~ Žayūas, but that from the earliest stages of Play exploration, their language was already resyllabifying sequences like these into having sequences like uv (pronounced as IPA [uw]).

Mayuvas (Dreamland)

Structure of Parliament

Dreamland entered the Cosmopolitan Age under the control of the Dolphin Riders, who had declared themselves to be the seventh iteration of the ancient Gold party. As such, they governed Dreamland according to Gold ideals, meaning that in their Parliament, every tribe was given equal representation regardless of their size. In the Gold Empire and Nama, this had led over time to many tribes with very small populations governing their empires much as royalty would, since they had vastly disproportionate power over the larger tribes making up the common population. But in Dreamland, this process had not had ample time to take place, even though some tribes were much larger than others.

Recognition of new tribes

Historically, the Gold party had held the sole authority to determine what was and was not a proper tribe; this is why earlier Gold empires such as Nama had not simply disintegrated into thousands of single-family "tribes" each claiming full representation in Parliament. However, once the Gold party recognized a tribe, no future action by the Gold party could take this status away.

Because the Dolphin Riders were creating a new Gold government in a fresh territory, they drew all of the tribal boundaries themselves, and chose boundaries that they felt would help ensure a strong pro-Gold majority well into the future. This meant recognizing many different tribes among peoples who they believed would support the Gold agenda, while lumping historic enemies into the same tribe whenever possible. The Riders recognized that any group of people with its own language was an independent tribe, as previous Gold governments had done, and therefore had to concede the existence of hostile tribes such as the Tippers who had arrived from overseas, but areas of traditionally anti-Gold politics among the native Dreamer population were lumped into the Gold tribe, defying the traditional Gold practice of treating political parties with hereditary membership as equivalent to tribes. Therefore, the only way for any anti-Gold citizens of Dreamer descent to have a voice in the new Gold government was to learn a new language and attempt to join the tribe that spoke that language.

Yet, even as they denied the creation of tribes along political lines, they created dozens of new Dreamer tribes defined by geographical boundaries, claiming the minor dialectal differences between adjacent Dreamer territories represented separate languages, and that these were therefore separate tribes entitled to equal representation in Parliament. The Gold party realized that they could not count on these discrete geographical regions to all support pro-Gold policies indefinitely, but hoped that they could always maintain a pro-Gold parliament by rewarding pro-Gold tribes with extra representation as they created further divisions within those tribes while refusing to recognize any divisions within hostile tribes.

Many purist Dreamers opposed this procedure, saying that the Gold party's long history of stability derived from its practice of respecting the rights of minority tribes and parties.

Family planning

The Dreamers planned to lower the global birthrate across their empire, saying that they had already achieved the ideal population for their territory, and that continued growth would be detrimental in a peaceful world. They also shut off immigration, even though they knew that immigrants had been strong supporters of Gold politics in the past.

To encourage lower birth rates, the Dreamers championed homosexuality for both men and women, and disincentivized large families, doing precisely the opposite of what the Players were doing in Žayūas. The Dreamers also promoted a traditional male-led society, in contrast to the feminist societies to their east.

Language

The Dreamers continued to speak their inherited Dolphin Rider language in daily life, but unlike Dreamers of the past, they promoted bilingualism for common people and scholars alike, and those near Baeba Swamp came to speak Ogili, the descendant of the Leaper language that had taken root there.

Growth of the Kapa corporation

An STW-like corporation arose and soon controlled much of Dreamland's economy. Unlike STW, it did not have a child-focused growth model, as Dreamland did not have a large population of orphans or children seeking to run away from home. Kapa was "cephalist", and thus anti-"sarabist". In the long term, these things also characterized the growing Bottom party (UPL) to the east.

Fayuvas

Note that there is no convenient way to represent the Play-language pun in English, as no English word rhymes with dream and yet also relates to the meaning of the empire's name in Play, roughly "thornland" or "sharpland". The founders were pacifists, originally from the Bottom party, who denied their members the ability to own weapons or armor, making them "soft" (nuufa), even as the rival parties around them remained heavily armed, and thus "sharp". The Play language distinguished between two words for softness: fubap describing something soft and thus flexible, and nuufa describing something easily cut or torn apart. As humans, the Bottoms realized that they were well described by both terms, but that the latter term was more relevant.

Dedication to pacifism

The founding Bottoms declared that pacifism could stand alone, and that they would win over the rival parties without violence; they promised even if they were slaughtered in their own homes by their enemies, the Bottoms would never carry weapons to defend themselves. They soon drafted a party platform denying their members the right to hunt animals or even uproot plants, saying that as humans they were meant to submit to nature rather than seeing themselves as part of nature.

Indeed, many Bottoms and other defenseless pacifists were abused and killed during the early decades of Fayuvas, though the violence was mostly disorganized, because the ruling Hailstorm army policed both their own members and those of any other groups that retained the right to carry weapons. The Bottoms had tried to survive without police, but on their own they had been unable to push out the other groups within their territories, and were forced to admit that their ideal of pacifism had a dangerous flaw.

Nonetheless, as the Bottoms ceded more and more control of their nations to the Hailstorm police force, the incidence of violent crime declined; the police ordered all citizens, not just the Dolls, to disarm and live in submission to nature; the police were exempt because they were not citizens of the Doll nations.

Žayuvas (Creamland)

Žayuvas got its name when the rebel Tink army invaded their ally, the Play party, and the Players responded that they would sooner ally with their historical enemy, Dreamland, than to make peace with the Tinkers. The Players' own party name had been a pun when first coined, and they were fond of puns even in wartime, so the name of their new empire came to be used in diplomacy and regarded as a legitimate name of the Play territory; nevertheless, they also called their territory Memnumu.

Like the Dreamers in Mayūas and the Hailstorms in Fayūas, the ruling Police faction took control of Žayūas and laid out long-term plans for their empire's stability. The Police were the ruling class of the Play party. Their empire's longstanding problems with poverty and education turned into an advantage: their people spoke many languages rather than one, and thus had access to much local knowledge, handed down for many generations, that was out of reach of all foreign empires. Although the Leapers had burned many books, others had survived. Furthermore, the Players had spread their own language far beyond their borders, and thus had access to knowledge of the happenings of the foreign empires as well.

The Player peasantry surrendered physical control of their empire to the Police, and like the Bottoms in Fayūas, disarmed their entire population. Unlike the Bottoms, however, the Players (dominated by a group calling themselves the Magic Combs) never wrote pacifism into their constitution, and still had the power to overrule the Police on some political issues provided that the Police respected their democratic process instead of ruling by brute force.

Rather than relying on preexisting legal loopholes to overrule the majority as in Mayūas and Fayūas, the Police drafted a new constitution stating that while their empire would remain a democracy, the Police were entitled to five times as many representatives in Parliament, per capita, than the Magic Combs, and that therefore the Police would be stronger than the Combs for the foreseeable future. (Note that both the Police and the Combs apportioned representatives according to the size of the adult female population only.)

Party membership

The Police party restricted membership to adult females, and therefore maintained their membership only by relying on mixed marriages. This served as a check on their power, but also helped them keep control of other parties, since there would always be Police in the homes of the men of other parties such as the Combs. Because the first generations of Police were typically much taller than the people they ruled over, they preferred husbands who were taller than average for their tribe, and the resulting marriages led to the Combs becoming even shorter than they had been before; however, since only women could be police, the male children of these mixed marriages remained in the Comb party and therefore the height gap between the Police and their subjects gradually decreased.

Tribal conflicts

Background

Tribal conflicts returned suddenly to the Play nation around the year 4144. Though Memnumu had long been home to a diverse population, the strongly unitary Play ideology had taught the nation's young population to identify with their nation and not with their ancestry. However, the vehemently abusive Raspara party also opposed tribalism, and had used this to excuse their forced marriages to Play women during an invasion. Furthermore, a second invasion from the rebellious Tink army, who again opposed tribalism, underscored the association between claims of intertribal unity and unprovoked invasions.

The tribalists strongly opposed the Raspara, and stated that it was unnatural for a tribe like the Raspara, with such a strong and muscular body type, to live among the small, slender Players.

The tribalists also united in opposing the very tall Repilian tribes, even though Repilians had never been known for invading or abusing the ancestors of the Players. At this time, Repilians lived mostly in the far north but also had some territory in the mountains along the northern fringe of the Play-controlled territory, which obstructed the Players' paths to the northern reaches of the Anchor Empire.

Furthermore, the tribalists all agreed that they were part of the Play party, and therefore agreed to all of the core tenets of the Play party philosophy. Thus, even as the tribal divisions within the Players opposed each other, they remained more closely bound than breakaway factions led by teenage runaways such as the Flower Bees and the Rusted Pearls. They also served alongside each other, even as they opposed each other, in the Play army and navy.

Thus these new tribalists were fighting not only other tribes, but members of their own tribe who refused to organize along tribal lines.