Dreamland

Dreamland was a nation founded in the northwestern corner of the continent of Rilola by Lenian tribes, cooperating with immigrants from the islands of Laba.

Languages

See Lenian languages for widespread languages and Dreamlandic languages for those that were mpstly or enturely confined to Dreamland.

Geography and climate

Climate

Dreamland is oriented primarily east-to-west, but with a slight tilt that puts the eastmost cities at higher latitudes than the west. As a whole, Dreamland stretches from 17°N to 35°N and from 32°W to 3°W.

Temperature

Latitude has little influence on temperature in Dreamland; the climate of any given city is determined primarily by its location with respect to the seas and mountain ranges that define the terrain of Dreamland.

Cities south of the peaks of the mountains experiences southerly winds year-round, with no significant wet season. The air is very humid because of the influence of the wide but shallow Sea of Baeba to the south, but rain is uncommon. Irregular tropical storms provide much of the rainfall to coastal areas. Temperatures are warm in winter and very hot in summer.

Inland summer temperatures are even hotter: as hot as those of deep-inland locations such as Lypelpyp, and considerably more humid, thus giving Dreamland a claim to the world's hottest summers, about level with those of inland areas in AlphaLeap, Taryte, and the desert of Dahàwu. The capital of Dreamland, Fakadàne, is founded on an inland lake surrounded by small mountains. Here, the summer temperatures are the same as Lypelpyp's, but the humidity is much higher; during winter, the temperatures are much warmer than Lypelpyp's and never fall below freezing.

Along the north coast, the wind can blow from any direction in any season, and the wind direction determines the type of weather experienced. Yet, frost is entirely unknown in winter even at the highest latitudes along the north coast. This is in sharp contrast to locations further east at the same latitude, where frost occurs on more than half of the winter nights and snow is common for several months of the year. During the summer, the temperatures equal or exceed those of deep-inland forested locations such as Blop, with maritime cooling being limited to offshore islands and a few scattered headlands with long west-facing shorelines. The temperatures along the north coast are not as hot as those in the desert locations mentioned above, but they are still fairly humid, so even the north coast of Dreamland is known for its oppressively hot summers.

Even in the highest mountains, winter temperatures are still mild, since there is no source of cold air nearby. However, summer temperatures are considerably cooler in the highlands than along the coasts due to the thick cloud cover and very frequent rainfall. Thus the coolest areas of Dreamland have the most vegetation and, often, the healthiest wildlife populations.

Rainfall

As above, the coastal areas of Dreamland never experience frost, even in the extreme north at 35° latitude. The far north experiences a short rainy season during the late winter, but for most of the year remains dry. There is no summer monsoon, so the rest of Dreamland is relatively arid all year long, despite a high relative humidity. However, rainfall is common along the south slopes of the mountains, and in winter, also some of the north slopes. Thus, lakes and rivers provide Dreamers plenty of water to build cities to live in, and tropical agriculture is possible.

Nimesisi Era (c. 1300 AD - 3370 AD)

Before the Dreamers arrived, there were many aboriginal tribes inhabiting the peninsula. The Dreamers called these people ńimiaśići, of which the name Nimesisi is a later reflex. These people lived a lifestyle very similar to the much later Players, but with important differences:

1. For the aboriginals, males were the taller sex, and men took leading roles in society.
2. The aboriginals had no common language and no unified state.
3. The aboriginals did not have written language.
4. The aboriginals had a low fertility rate, as they were mostly free from disease and rarely fought large wars. Therefore their culture was not youth-dominated like the Players', and their men did not spend their lives in military service despite being taller and stronger than their women.
5. With such a small population, the aboriginals did not sail far out to sea to get fish, and therefore did not sail far out to sea for any other reason, either. Thus they did not colonize other areas of the planet or migrate westward across the islands.

When the Dreamer tribes arrived from the islands, they built compact cities along rivers, and considered themselves allies of the aboriginals. This was because, even though the Dreamers claimed jurisdiction over the aboriginals and would not yield to a compromise, their lifestyles overlapped so little that the Dreamers felt they could grow their new nation and become a majority without crowding out the aboriginals. The Dreamers' superior naval technology allowed them to stay further out to sea, catching fish that the aboriginals could not, and the Dreamer sailors promised that they would always give the aboriginals priority for sea access close to shore, even though it made life more difficult for the Dreamers and the Dreamers had no self-interest in doing so since they outnumbered the aboriginals.

For this reason, among others, the Dreamers took more than 2,000 years to actually settle Dreamland, and never fought an organized war against the aboriginals. Their settlement did cause the aboriginals to unite as a single tribe, but most of these aboriginals voluntarily married into Dreamer families and came to think of themselves as Dreamers. Therefore the aboriginal population declined. The Dreamers had promised to respect their way of life, which involved living on the seashore and relying on fish for food, and therefore the Dreamers ceded much of their nation's best land to the aboriginal population. Over time, though, and without any conscious effort on the Dreamers' part, the aboriginals were slowly pushed inland and forced to share sea access with the Dreamer tribes.

The Dreamer confederation was so loosely organized that they did not even have a common military, and so they had no means of enforcing their promises, such as that they would give priority sea access to the aboriginals. The aboriginals formed a common military late in this era, but it was by then far too late to resist the Dreamer settlers, and the aboriginals were too consumed with their work fishing the sea to send their men to battle in any case; their only battles were defensive.

Contact with Baeba

The aboriginals of Dreamland never considered themselves to be kin of the aboriginals of Baeba Swamp, who were much richer and had an organized state relying on primitive agriculture instead of fishing. There were more people in Baeba Swamp than in all of Dreamland. Baeba's aboriginals did not invade the others because they knew the prospects for building cities on the peninsula were poor; instead Baeba looked eastward, towards the rest of the continent, for its foreign policy. Nonetheless, some Baebans did marry into the peninsular aboriginal families.

The peninsular aboriginals had no feasible means of creating a common military as they lived amidst the Dreamers, and therefore knew that they could neither help nor harm Baeba. Thus when Baeba came to war against a third group of aboriginals, the Repilians, they did not bother to ask the aboriginals of Dreamland for help in fighting that war.

Despite its diversity, Baeba's aboriginals considered themselves to be a single tribe because of their strong unitary state. This became important later on when they were invaded. Before the invasion, they had not thought of themselves as aboriginals, but simply as Baebans.

Also, Baeba's aboriginals actually held many captive Dreamer slaves, and Dreamland tolerated this for reasons explained above and below.

Western Dreamers assimilate

The climate of the western states of Dreamland was so pleasant that a simple lifestyle was feasible, meaning that Dreamers did not need clothes or even to put roofs on their homes. Thus they came to live somewhat like the aboriginals. The Dreamers who lived this way had a high birthrate and grew faster than the Dreamers living in cities; nonetheless, they lived poorer lives than even the aboriginals because the Dreamer states agreed that these settlers should not be allowed to push aboriginals off the seacoast, and therefore they were forced inland. Only later, due to overwhelming demographic pressure, did this situation reverse itself.

Despite their superior boat designs, these western Dreamers still spent most of their time gathering food, and therefore had little time for their military, and made poor soldiers. That, along with the fact that there was no common Dreamer military, explained the Dreamers' consistently poor performance at war, especially land wars, and why the Dreamers took so long to conquer their peninsula even against an enemy that also had very poor soldiers.

The aboriginals even won battles against the Dreamers who outnumbered them, but this was with support from Baeba, a late change in the situation due to outside pressure from the east.

Language

The dominant language of Dreamland at this time was Baywatch, not the Dolphin Rider language that later surged to power from the west.

Later reflections

The Nimesisi Era seemed exotic to later residents of what had been Dreamland, because the aboriginals had completely disappeared, and because the whole of Dreamland was overrun by feminist tribes. The descendants of the original Dreamer colonists thereby assimilated into the feminist populations, mostly Play-speaking tribes, as the genes for male tallness were bred out of their populations. Thus male tallness seemed alien to them and the long-past Nimesisi Era was seen as a masculine power fantasy.

Embarrassment

This section belongs below but is placed here for convenience.

As the Dreamer confderation grew, they devoted ever more effort to population growth, and ever less attention to their militaries. These decisions were made in tandem, since the Dreamer confederate supranational government could not dictate individual states' military policies. But slowly, one by one, the Dreamer states whittled down their militaries as men devoted their physical strength and stamina towards peaceful tasks. Some abolished their army entirely.

The result of this was that, despite a poor natural environment, eastern Dreamland became almost as rich as Baeba Swamp, and while western Dreamland remained poor, this was due to their lifestyle, pushing for population growth at the expense of everything else, and that even these very poor Dreamers did not have the same problems that accompanied poverty in other nations such as the exposure to the dangers of nature.

Dreamland was never invaded by sea because despite many states also abolishing their navy, their fishermen were armed with spears that were effective against humans too, and because their boats were spread out such that they could patrol the coast even against an enemy who sought an unpredictable landing place to begin their invasion. Nonetheless, the Dreamers realized that they were defenseless on land.

The aboriginals of Baeba Swamp had willingly signed an unfair treaty with the eastern Dreamer states, promising that Baeba would rescue these Dreamers if invaded, and that the Dreamers did not have to similarly help out if Baeba was invaded. This was because Baeba recognized that the Dreamers were extremely vulnerable and that any such help would be useless for Baeba. Baeba gained nothing significant from their promises to protect the Dreamers; they merely felt it was their duty to protect their weaker western neighbors. However, Baeba's farmers purchased and maintained an underclass of Dreamer slaves, knowing that Dreamland would be forced to legalize this or else Baeba would simply abduct the slaves instead.

Entry into a wider war

But around the year 3350 (possibly not until 3370), Baeba invaded the Dreamer state of Sessi, resettling a large number of Baeban citizens, a group called the Hooks, into Sessi over the objections of the local Dreamers. These people were true pacifists, not just Dreamers without a military, and therefore some Sessians actually supported the resettlement, but Baeba knew that Sessi's land and seacoast could not supply both populations with food and therefore demanded the best land for the Hooks and pushed the pacifist Sessians into the desert. They said that if the Dreamers could not survive in the desert, they needed to move further west into the rest of Dreamland and then prepare Sessi to take on more colonists from Baeba.

The reason for this was that Baeba itself was being invaded by an outside power, the Lantern Empire, and Baeba had never attacked the Lanterns or done anything else to warrant this. The Lanterns opposed slavery and therefore won the support of most of Baeba's slave population, which included many who were descended from Dreamers. Baeba's government did not bother with pro-slavery arguments, and merely stated that since their slaves were joining the war on the side of the invaders, the Dreamers who had been the source of those slaves were now enemy combatants.

Nonetheless, Baeba respected the Dreamers' frailty by saying that they were merely colonizing Dreamland, and not actually fighting a war. They promised that if the Dreamers meekly moved aside to make room for the Baeban settlers, there would be no new war in Dreamland.

Crystal victory

The Lanterns soon won their war in Baeba, freeing the Dreamer slaves (alongside aboriginals who were also enslaved) and forcing the remaining resistance to flee into Dreamland. These aboriginal refugees, the Hooks, were heavily armed because they included most of the Baeban soldiers who had not been killed by the invaders. Therefore they demanded that the Dreamers move out or else submit to the Hooks, who planned to continue the war from the Dreamer state of Sessia, even if it meant overthrowing the Dreamers' democracy in Sessia.

The Lantern army was a coalition of the Crystals and the Thunderers. The Crystals took over all of Baeba, giving nothing to the Thunderers, and this was in accordance with a previous internal treaty. Meanwhile, the Thunderers attacked Dreamer colonies further north along the seacoast, which were defenseless even though these Dreamers had not disbanded their armies.

Dreamland's military leaders blushed and told their people to give their cities and homes to the Hook settlers, knowing that they had no way of pushing the Hooks back into Baeba so long as the Crystals continued to occupy it. The Dreamers realized that because they had almost no army, they had no means of resisting the Hooks' colonization, and that if they did try to resist, the Hooks might defeat them in a war despite being outnumbered (earlier, Baeba had been more populous than Dreamland, but the Dreamers had grown much more over the centuries).

Thus, Dreamland claimed that the Hooks were their allies even though they had nothing to gain from allowing the Hooks to move in. Baeba's Crystals stated that they were not interested in invading Dreamland, although they did not hold their allies, the Thunderers, to this promise. The Dreamer military actually cheered the Thunder invasion of the Dreamer colonies along their far eastern coast because it allowed them to claim that they were in fact at war, and therefore needed to sign the unfair treaty with the Hooks, and that this was their only excuse for why the Dreamers needed to be pushed out of their own homes.

Moves further west

But the Crystals soon invaded Sessia as well, fighting battles against the Hooks in Dreamer territory. In this war, neither side cared much about the Dreamers, and so many Dreamers decamped and moved even further west, hoping that the war would not escalate further and force them to move yet again. Soon, the Crystals won and a wave of Hook refugees scattered throughout all of Dreamland, saying that they would continue to resist the Crystals, even if it meant that the Crystals would be forced to invade the whole of Dreamland just to find the Hooks. The Dreamers realized that they were liable to lose their entire nation, and therefore they signed an unfair treaty with the Crystals, giving the Crystals clear superiority in every point of the treaty just so long as they held to their promise to not invade even more Dreamer territory. This treaty included a provision stating that the Dreamer military would mobilize to its maximum extent, and merge with the Dreamer police force, and then devote itself to arresting the Hooks who had fled into Dreamland, and then to disarm them. The Crystals then offered the Dreamers the choice of whether to deliver the Hooks to the state of Sessia, which was now Crystal territory, or to maintain them as citizens in the wider area of Dreamland while facing periodic Crystal visits to ensure that neither the Hooks nor the Dreamers were attempting to raise an army.

The Crystals knew that even though the Dreamers were extremely weak, the Crystals could not force the Dreamer police to track down each individual Hook settler, whether to disarm them or to deliver them to Crystal control. Nonetheless, by threatening to send inspectors into Dreamland at unwarned intervals, the Crystals figured they could tie down what little remained of the Dreamers' land army and police force, making them even more vulnerable than before, and allowing the Crystals to force Dreamland into more unfair treaties by threatening a full military occupation if they did not comply.

Dissolution of peninsular aboriginals

Note by this time that the Dreamers had so enfolded the peninsular aboriginals (not the hooks) that even though the Crystals declared their support of the aboriginals, the aboriginals chose not to participate and instead embraced Dreamland. This was because they felt they were better off at the bottom of Dreamer society, even if Dreamland was losing a war, than they would be if forced to fight that war and face disproportionate casualties as they would be much more vulnerable then the Crystals despit ebeing on the winning side.

Dreamer underclass

Because of these unfair treaties, the recently freed Lenian slaves (that is, the ones descended from Dreamers) in Crystal-run Baeba began to turn against the Crystals. However, the other freed slaves (aboriginals) continued to support the Crystals. This led to a racial conflict in Baeba Swamp, and because the Thunderers were also Lenians, it pulled the Thunderers into a diplomatic conflict with the Crystals, threatening to divide the Lantern alliance. The Crystals responded to this by pushing the Lenians to the bottom of Baeban society, although they were not enslaved and not legally discriminated against; they were simply denied any paths to power in Crystal society and were encouraged to move north into the Thunder nations.

Actually, the Crystals really did discriminate against the Lenians, who increasingly came to identify themselves as Dreamers (though not all did; see "Nunabetari" below). The discrimination was indirect, however, enforced by cultural agreements, rather than being built into the law. For example, Crystal courts were more likely to convict perpetrators of crimes if they were Dreamers, and more likely to assign harsh punishments. One common punishment for violent crimes was to prohibit the criminal from having access to sharp objects, even kitchen utensils, meaning that they would struggle just to feed themselves. The Crystals courts sometimes applied this punishment to Dreamers even for nonviolent crimes, forcing them to buy prepared foods that they could hardly afford.

Barriers to conversion

Male Dreamers could not simply join the Crystals party, because the Crystals required them to undergo military service, and warned that their military had the necessary command structure in place to legally force the ex-Dreamer soldiers to fight a war that the other Crystals could withhold themselves from, and that such a war would be against fellow Dreamers or against an outside power that would help the Crystals and not the Dreamers. This was similar to Dreamland's own military, in which individual states could vote themselves out of a war and thus force the other states to fight against disproportionate odds. Unlike Dreamland, though, the Crystal military was able to start a war without the consent of the soldiers involved, because this was done through a central Crystal party committee that was not under the control of the Crystal military.

The Crystals allowed female Dreamers an easier path to conversion. Since mixed marriages were rare, the Crystals realized that the Dreamer men would run out of women to marry, and that their population would decline. One reason mixed marriages were rare was because of anatomical differences, with Crystals having a higher average birth weight, such that a Dreamer woman carrying a baby from a Crystal father was liable to miscarry or suffer dangerous injuries if carrying the baby to term. This was not a problem when a Dreamer man married a Crystal woman, but Crystal women who married Dreamer men were stereotyped as exploiting their husbands and were looked down upon by other Crystals.

Thunder criticism

The Thunderers criticized the Crystals over this situation, never actually helping the Dreamers, but all the while claiming that the Crystals were oppressing the Dreamers, who the Thunderers saw as close ethnic allies. Since the Thunder Empire had not abolished slavery, some Thunderers put Crystals and other dark-skinned people to work on plantations, saying that they would not stop until the Crystals stopped oppressing the Dreamers in Baeba Swamp. But the Thunderers opposed Dreamland on ideological grounds and refused to escalate beyond this sort of indirect harassment of the Crystals. Meanwhile, the Thunderers continued to tighten their control over the Dreamer settlements that they had conquered, and which were now part of various Thunder states, and many Thunder states invited Crystals to move into their territories even as other Thunder states pushed the Crystals into slavery. This was all legal because both the Crystal and the Thunder Empires were loose confederations with few global laws, just like Dreamland. As the years passed, the Dreamers' hope of an alliance with the Thunderers fell apart.

Role of Tata

One Dreamer area which the Thunderers never fully subdued was Tata. The Thunderers had drawn most of the borders here, as the preexisting Dreamer inhabitants had clung to the coast and did not seek to draw land borders. Nonetheless, even when they dominated the interior, the Thunderers never pushed the Dreamers off the coast or built free-standing Thunder cities there.

Other notes

NOTE, an unpublished writeup uses the party name "Hook" for the aboriginals, but this may be a term of convenience, and though the war is undated, it seems most likely that it took place around 2700 AD, and there was no Crystal involvement. This implies that Sessi was actually invaded twice.

Building of a confederation

Foundation and early philosophy

Dreamland was an explicitly political nation: rather than being founded on the basis of membership in a particular tribe or belief in a particular religion, people living in Dreamland were made to agree to certain political beliefs.

1. Economic equality: The Dreamers believed that property should be owned communally, and while they did not abolish money, they used taxes to ensure that no citizen would ever be able to acquire enough wealth to command and control any other citizens.
2. Austerity: Likewise, the Dreamers directed their economy towards the provision of food and medicine first, with all other economic activity being classified as luxury living and subject to high consumption taxes.
3. Education: The Dreamers ensured that their people would be the world's smartest and best educated by eliminating child labor and opening schools in every town.
4. Urbanism: The Dreamers believed that humans were strongest when they lived in compact habitats, and therefore directed people to live in cities rather than spreading out over the countryside. The climate in most of Dreamland was such that most food was taken from bodies of water, and most people tended gardens of their own rather than relying on large cooperative farms.
5. Racial harmony: The Dreamers abolished tribal boundaries and declared that all citizens were members of the Dreamer tribe, to which anyone could enter merely be declaring themselves a member. Thus, even though the founding Dreamer tribes were all subtribes of the blonde, blue-eyed Lenian confederation, they predicted that they would soon develop into a rainbow of many skin and hair colors.
6. Centralization: The Dreamers believed that the best government was a centralized one, and that there should be only one Dreamer nation in the world.
7. Territorial growth: Although the Dreamers lived in a tropical climate, it was fairly dry, and like many other empires in the past, they planned to conquer the tropical paradise of Baeba Swamp and make it the capital of the future enlarged Dreamland.

Naming

When Dreamers interfaced with diplomats from other nations, they preferred to translate their empire's name into the other language's words for "dream land" or "land of dreams" instead of using the toponym (Dolphin Rider Neumu and Baywatch Nennu). Therefore, it was not a placename. In English this can be expressed by pronouncing the -land suffix with a full vowel.

Early internal conflicts

Early in Laba's history, several nations broke away and abandoned the Laban way of life. This was not within Dreamland at the time, but eventually these nations came to be absorbed into Dreamland. They were much poorer than average, though at least one may have been an economic power.

The Pupa Valley War

Dreamland fought an internal war between the states of Popa and Pupa, which were named after the same geographical feature, possibly a river (though it was not the most prominent river in Pupa).

Up until this point, the southern tribes (not DPR, but those which eventually came to be ruled by DPR) had been winning the most territory, and this was because they were hunter-gatherers, whereas the Baywatch tribes were mostly depending on fishing the sea. But Baywatch also wanted access to Baeba Swamp and to the east, so they fought the southern tribes for control of the uplands in this area only, and in the end, they won.

This may have been a tripartite war, with the aboriginals also participating, or even multipartite if the Crystals or some other powers also fought in it. There may also have been more than one war, with an early conflict setting the western border and future conflicts defining the rest.

Battle for Baeba Swamp

Shortly after its founding, the Dreamers divided their nation into six states. These corresponded loosely to six preexisting Crystal claims which they had taken over. Dreamland considered itself a single nation, but its constituent states had more independence than did the states of the nations of the other empires.

To achieve their goal of territorial growth, the Dreamers declared war on the Crystal Empire, which controlled Baeba Swamp. The president, a man named Usassa, announced that only with Baeba firmly in their control could they achieve all of their goals, and banished all Crystals from Dreamer-held territory. Since the Crystals were dark-skinned people, Usassa further announced that dark-skinned people would not be welcome in Dreamland, and that racial harmony would only come once the Dreamers had eliminated all of the foreign races from their midst.

Birth of the Nunabetari

A battalion of Dreamer soldiers moved south into Baeba Swamp and told the Baeban leaders that they were switching sides and would help the Baebans fight off the other Dreamers. These people called themselves Nunabetari. However, later generations of Nunabetari people said that what they really supported was interracial harmony, and that to achieve this, they needed to convince Baeba to endorse slavery of dark-skinned people so that the Nunabetari could be on top and have the Baebans muddle along in a position of servitude. When Baeba refused to convert its government to the Nunabetari's model, the Nunabetari seceded from Baeba and declared a permanent war against the people around them.

Baeba's government could not fight back against the Nunabetari without angering the racists in the Thunder Empire, and so they decided to tolerate the presence of their new parasitic minority. Likewise, the Nunabetari soon realized they could not fight a serious war against such an overwhelmingly more powerful enemy, and so they set up private properties within Baeba and declared them to be petty monarchies, within which all Baeban laws were suspended and all Baebans would be forcibly enslaved. The Nunabetari sent diplomats into the Thunder Empire, saying that Baeba was oppressing them and that in the name of racial unity the Thunderers should invade Baeba Swamp. But the Thunder Empire chose not to do this, as they were suspicious of the motives of the Nunabetari, who refused to move to anyplace with a cold climate.

The Nunabetari were much poorer than the native Baebans and lived very close to nature. They taught their children that they were excluded from Baeban society because of their racial background and therefore could only live in the areas of swampy wilderness that persisted within and around the city. Baeba's government made many attempts to adopt the Nunabetari children but the Nunabetari spoke their own language and within a few generations had abandoned all memories of their former allegiance to Dreamland in favor of a simple goal of staying within nature. They believed that the animals of the swamp were on their side and would not attack them because they respected the animals and the Baebans did not. They armed themselves with weapons and attacked any outsiders, even unarmed ones, who attempted to intrude. They had a high birthrate and quickly filled their habitat to its maximum capacity, whereupon they began to compete with Baebans for control of the sea.

The Thunderers were pleased when they heard what had happened. Even though the Nunabetari had abandoned their politics, they hoped that in a future war the Thunderers would be able to invade Baeba Swamp and immediately win the favor of the Nunabetari on racial sympathies alone. However, the hostile empire of Dreamland was also racially similar, and many of their military leaders had the very same plan.

Womb Justice War

The feminist Womb Justice party invaded Dreamland at some point^{need to find this year} and easily won its war, occupying a small area around the city of "Jecaja".

Wildfire Era

In 3884, the Thunderers overthrew Dreamland's Baywatch occupation army using only their own soldiers, and therefore they did not need to sign a treaty with a foreign power. All Dreamers remaining in Thunder territory were then enslaved. Additionally, all Crystals in Thunder territory were enslaved as revenge for the Crystals' earlier occupation of the Empire, and dark-skinned people of any party were prohibited from immigrating into or even visiting the newly free Thunder Empire. Furthermore, anyone with dark skin was banned from joining the Thunder party, and the Thunder party reserved the right to enslave any non-Thunderers.

The Thunderers declared themselves to be Lenians, and said that only people of the typically blonde and blue-eyed Lenian body type should wield power in their new Empire. There were some areas where dark hair was locally dominant, but no dark-skinned people were allowed to remain in the Thunder party, even if their ancestors had been Thunderers for many generations.

They promised that the Dreamers, despite having the same physical appearance, were not Thunderers and never would be.

The Thunderers were able to enslave the Crystals while remaining formally allied to the Crystal Empire only because both empires opposed Dreamland.

Role of STW

In 3915, a large number of dark-skinned Crystal people settled in the Thunder city of Lypelpyp. Here, they founded a corporation, STW, and took control of most trade routes with the Crystal Empire. Trade with the Crystals had continued despite the Thunder government's internal anti-Crystal policies because even the tribalists had promised to remain allies of the Crystals, as both empires considered their longstanding tribal rivalry to be of a much lesser importance than their shared hatred of Dreamland and resistance to Dreamland's attempts to invade both of them. STW used slave labor to deliver and manufacture its merchandise, and most of their slaves were from Dreamland. They controlled Lypelpyp, and therefore controlled the only viable trade route between Baeba Swamp and the vast Thunder Empire.

STW's founders were dark-skinned people mostly from Baeba Swamp and its environs, and therefore, merely by entering the Thunder Empire, they were breaking the law.

But now the STWers began constructing large houses for the STW members to live in, and these buildings quickly overshadowed the Lenians' older, more delicately built homes. Racial tension dominated life in Lypelpyp, as the Lenians had been promised just thirty years earlier that they would be allowed to enslave all other races of people, and yet their military had allowed a dark-skinned tribe to invade and colonize them.

Some Lenians in Lypelpyp tried to revolt, but STW was ready for them, and quickly defeated them with its own army comprised of illegal immigrants. When the police attempted to arrest the STWers, STW's private army overpowered them and carried them off to a slave camp where the soldiers enslaved them directly. When the Emperor learned what had happened, he ceded Lypelpyp to STW and began to speak of STW as a nation called Lindasia. But STW ignored this, and forced the Emperor to readmit STW and Lypelpyp to the Empire and to admit that STW was strong enough to violate the Thunder Empire's laws and fear no penalty. Lypelpyp accused the Thunder government of abandonment, as they had not only broken their promise of eternal slavery for all tribal enemies, but had allowed a foreign army to enter an important city and attack unarmed native citizens who had protested the invasion. The Thunder government refused to respond to this complaint, but in secret signed an agreement with STW in which they recognized STW as a legal entity so long as STW paid taxes to the Thunder capital. Previously, STW had refused even this, saying that because all of their employees were illegal immigrants, they were not citizens, and should not pay taxes.

Revolt of 3919

In 3919, a revolution in the Thunder Empire forced the Thunderers to free all of their dark-skinned Crystal slaves, but the captured Dreamers were not set free. STW was formally legalized and the illegal immigration of dark-skinned tribes became legal. The ban on conversion of dark-skinned people to the Thunder party was lifted. Soon, immigration sped up, and the Thunderers found themselves a minority in many important regions of their Empire even as they retained formal full control.

The new Thunder leaders practiced a milder version of the Thunder philosophy, and upon their victory, they publicly repudiated racism and immediately ended the slavery of all Crystals. They sanctioned STW's invasion of Lypelpyp and forged a new alliance with the Crystal Empire and the STW corporation which the Crystals had founded. This coup ended the hopes of the Lenians in Lypelpyp that they would ever be restored to their promised superior status, and therefore the Lenians began an underground resistance movement seeking to restore the earlier, more militant government. They realized that STW had been very clever to invade Lypelpyp only, enabling them to control important trade routers without launching a large-scale military invasion, as previous invaders had done. Since the militant Lenians were out of power, they declared themselves an independent nation and built settlements in areas of the wilderness which no outside party considered worthy of settlement.

Ironically, by pledging to oppose the Crystals on racial grounds, the submerged Lenian resistance actually improved their standing in the Crystal capital city of Baeba. Baeba was suspicious of STW, as STW's founders had tried to evade paying taxes to the Crystals as well, and seemed intent on drawing as much power as possible from their opportunistic invasion while giving nothing back to either empire. Baeba saw the Lenians' racial resistance to the illegal invasion as proof that the Lenians would be more reliable opponents against STW than would the mainline Thunderers who opposed STW only on economic grounds. In return, the Lenian resistors promised to respect the Crystals as allies in the greater war against Dreamland, and Baeba Swamp's government allowed them to build an embassy in Baeba and attain recognition as the new, independent nation of Lypelpyp.

Despite this, the Crystals still preferred to interface with the more powerful mainline Thunder government, not the Lenian resistance, and since both parties claimed control of Lypelpyp, the Crystals promised not to intervene in this conflict, even if the Thunderers decided to crush the resistance. In anticipation that the Thunderers would eventually do this, the Crystals promised the Lenians refugee status in Baeba Swamp, further heightening the irony by promising the only safe place for a tribe of people who hated all dark-skinned people would be in the center of the world's oldest city founded and run by that same tribe of dark-skinned people.

Foundation of the Găpa party

Because the only group still in slavery was the Lenian Dreamer tribe, and yet the Thunderers were also Lenians, some Thunderers began to feel compassion for the slaves. The Thunderers who were uncomfortable with their empire's new order formed a new political party called the Sweets (GAP; Khulls name Găpa), but they kept a very low profile because they were worried that the reigning Thunderers might consider anyone promoting the interests of the Dreamers to be Dreamers themselves, and thus suitable for slavery. The literal meaning of the party name was "pity".

The Sweets were uncomfortable with Dreamland, and claimed that although all Lenians should band together for their interests, the Dreamers deserved to be enslaved because they had attacked other Lenians. Thus, they considered themselves allies of Lenians as a whole but not every individual Lenian tribe.

As news of the emancipation reached wealthy slaveowners, some fled into Crystal territory, and even into the Crystal capital city, Baeba Swamp, where illegal slave plantations persisted despite formal emancipation. Here, the Thunderers declared themselves to be as one with the Nunabetari and worked towards a common union of all Lenian peoples and the enslavement of all of their enemies. However, very few of these people were able to reach Baeba with their slaves in tow; they instead tried to buy slaves from the existing slaveholders.

Rise of Adabawa

In the extreme southwest of Dreamland, the ancient Wild party had for hundreds of years remained more popular than the Baywatchers. They considered themselves superior and stated that they had the right to attack other nations without fear of counterattack. However, they also prohibited the creation of a centralized military, so each Wild state had its own military and the states functioned as if they were independent nations.

Around 3946, the Wild party began plans for a major war against the Crystal Empire and particularly against the STW corporation, whose private army now had control of thousands of Dreamer slaves. This corporation had in fact declared war against Dreamland on its first day of business in 3915, and had derived much of its profit from the illegal slave labor of Dreamers both in Dreamland and in the Crystal Empire. The Wild party's military leader, Ntampamwa (also known as Adabawa), considered destroying STW the main objective of his planned war, and promised that non-STWers would be treated kindly if they submitted to Ntampamwa's coming rule.

The Thunder Empire was still bound by a treaty they had signed with the Crystals. To maintain the right to trade, they had to formally declare allegiance to the Crystals. Thus, although Adabawa had not declared war against the Thunderers, the Thunderers prepared for an invasion. They knew that Adabawa was planning to invade Baeba Swamp first, however, and that his army would do far more damage there than in the Thunder areas.

Opposition within Dreamland

Adabawa rose to power in the extreme west of Dreamland, where STW's slave operations had no power. He believed he was fighting a humanitarian war, risking his own soldiers' lives to help save the other Lenians living further east. He thus hoped that the eastern states would push harder in the war than his own western states would. However, pacifist sentiment was strong in many areas, and Adabawa was forced to contend with the rise of a new rival, a woman named Nesepa. She opposed the war on humanitarian grounds, and warned Adabawa that she would not let his army cross through her territory in order to invade Baeba or any point eastward. Even the Wild party had always supported the right of Dreamland's states to pursue their own foreign policies and raise their own armies, so there was little Adabawa could do about Nesepa's pacifist blockade.

A more extreme response came from a group of tribes calling themselves Lohi. Lohi's people were descended from dark-skinned immigrants from Baeba and other nations. When they heard that Adabawa's Wild party wanted to wipe out all the non-Lenian tribes, the Lohians seceded from Dreamland and declared that they would overthrow Adabawa from inside his empire. Lohi's navy was very weak, so they planned to join Baeba and merge the Baeban navy with their own.

Meanwhile, the Baywatch party supported Adabawa's ideology, but opposed the new war because they felt they had little chance of victory in a war against both the Crystal and Thunder Empires, given that the Thunder Empire alone had overthrown the Baywatchers sixty years earlier. However, public outrage at STW's continued excursions into Dreamland led public sentiment in Baywatch strongholds to shift towards the militant Wild party, and Adabawa predicted that he would soon have a continuous path from his homeland to Baeba Swamp without needing to force his army through a neutral territory.

Relationship with Moonshine

Adabawa signed a treaty with the pacifist nation of Moonshine, which had been founded only ten years earlier by women of Crystal ancestry. Yet he abducted a Moonshine diplomat named Maninasa (also known as Siučitam) and assigned her the task of drawing the Thunder Empire into the war on Adabawa's side. He promised her that if she disobeyed him, he would invade Moonshine after all and turn it into a Dreamlandic military outpost. Maninasa was of Pabap ancestry.

Thunder Empire debates

Meanwhile, the Thunder Empire was still officially neutral in the war, but because they housed all of STW's bases, they were indirectly participating in the war on Baeba's side. Adabawa hoped that Maninasa would help win over the support of the mainline Thunderers, but in 3952 the Thunder Empire's Feminist War Council, the highest military authority in the empire, declared that they would not participate in the war.

The Feminists then organized a debate between Maninasa and the Wild party, and Adabawa's allies forced him to send a representative. Thus Adabawa realized he was in danger of losing the support of even his allies, if he could not outperform Maninasa at the debate. The women were intending to issue a formal military surrender to whichever party won the debate. Baeba's Crystal party was not invited, even though the Thunder Empire was still nominally an ally of the Crystals. The result of the first debate was inconclusive, as the judges had simply voted along their instincts, and so they ordered a second debate with a much broader scope.

At the second debate, the diplomats were again present, but the women also called in diplomats from third-party nations such as Nama. These nations had their own sympathies, with most favoring Laba, but many of the pro-Laba nations were strongly anti-Thunder.

This time, the Dreamer diplomat, Perebampo, offended the female audience by threatening to rape Maninasa, while Maninasa replied only by making fun of Perebampo's clothes. Perebampo had been trying to show that pacifism was an absurd ideology, but he quickly alienated the judges, and the Feminist War Council decided unanimously to endorse Moonshine and become a pacifist empire. Because Moonshine had not been involved in the war, this treaty did not end the war; Adabawa's army was still invading. However, the Council ordered the military to build barricades in various areas of the Thunder Empire that would help repel invaders, but also make it difficult for the Thunder soldiers to pursue their enemies. Funding for weapons production was halted, leaving soldiers with an ever-dwindling supply.

Battles in Baeba

Despite the many embarrassing diplomatic defeats, Adabawa's conventional attack on Baeba Swamp went wholly according to plan. Baeba's Lenian minority rebelled against the Crystals, and the Feminist War Council withheld the Thunder army from helping the Crystals. Baeba Swamp formally seceded from the Empire so that its people could fight for their city unencumbered by the legal handicaps of the Thunder-Crystal treaty, but they were vastly outnumbered by the Lenians.

Thunder-Nama relations

In a surprise move, the Thunder Empire's Feminist War Council voted to disband their military altogether and submit their people to the control of a Sakhi woman named Likòko (Khulls Likʷàkʷa), who represented the Fairy party. The Fairies stripped all males of their voting rights and claimed it was a necessary step to eliminate the threat of civil war.

The remaining Crystals declared themselves independent, although even in Crystal territory there was significant support for pacifism. Lohi also reaffirmed its commitment to the war.

Paba-Nama treaty

Meanwhile, Paba and Nama both joined the war on Adabawa's side. Nama's claims overlapped with the Thunder Empire's, and though Nama was a very weak power, the Thunder women's recent decision to scrap their army meant that Nama's generals felt they had a chance of reclaiming their land.

Rise of Lohi

Lohi was a nation within Dreamland that had long been friendly to the Dreamers but which had later established friendly relations with the growing Crystal Empire. Their political party was called FED.

Lohi was fairly far to the west, around 25N and 16W. They were largely descended from HP-3 speakers who had colonized Dreamland after their earlier colonies in the tropics were overrun by larger empires. Thus they were dark-skinned, although they soon attracted other groups of colonists, including more Lenians.

Declaration of war

Lohi had been traditionally allied to Dreamland. But its people demanded ever-larger areas of the coastline, saying that their homelands in the tropics were no longer safe, and planning to control sea travel as well to trap the Dreamers inland in their own territory. Adabawa's Wildfire party (MWZ) declared that Lohi was not welcome in Dreamland and that it would soon be handed back over to the Lenian settlers of earlier generations. (Adabawa is also known as Ntampamwa.)

Lohi prepared for a Lenian invasion, but Adabawa's declaration of war forced Lohi into an alliance with the distant Crystal Empire, which ordered Lohi to prioritize the Crystals even if it meant Lohi would lose its own territory. Furthermore, sharp political divisions within the Crystal Empire quickly appeared, and Lohi realized that they could not count on the Crystals to defend them even if their soldiers obediently arrived on the battlefield to take on the Crystals' other enemies. Lohi instead formed closer ties with the even more distant Thunder Empire, which had just ceded its own capital city to Adabawa's invading army in order to minimize their losses in the rural areas of the Empire where their political party had been traditionally strong.

Lohi invades Nama

Obediently, Lohi's army swept through Baeba and invaded Nama without bothering to help the Crystals hold Baeba. They wanted to conquer Nama because of its central location; even if they lost Baeba, they could prevent any blockade of Baeba by holding Nama. They spread propaganda to the Naman villagers which convinced them that Laba saw them as inferiors, and when Adabawa sent his own army into Nama to fend off the Lohians, he found that the Namans had mostly switched sides and were now fighting for the Crystals.

Early writeups describe Lohi as being ethnically Laban (Lenian), not Crystal, but these are derived from a text which does not mention Dreamland at all, though it is implied that Baeba's aboriginals were living on land that later came to be part of Dreamland. Thus, it is possible that neither Dreamland nor the Crystal Empire existed at the time, and that there are two unrelated political entities called Lohi. The first Lohi was mentioned in the 3300s, and the second in the 3900s. It may be that the second was named after the first, since they were founded on adjacent or perhaps even the same territory.

The second Lohi is described as being an ally of Laba, but not as part of Laba, and still not described as being part of Dreamland. The second Lohi absorbed many refugees from Baeba Swamp, specifically dark-skinned Crystals, but this does not mean that its original population was also dark-skinned; indeed, it is much more likely that they were in fact Dreamers. Dreamland attempted to seal the borders of Lohi (which was landlocked) to stop the arrival of refugees. The writeup strongly implies that Lohi fought its war against Dreamland from both directions, as they were surrounded but had connections to the outside, that they had two separate armies for the two major tribal groupings, and that this division had been mutually agreed upon by the original inhabitants of Lohi and the new arrivals. Indeed, the new army was the one in which the original (Dreamer) inhabitants served, implying that the refugees came ready for war, whereas the largely civilian population of Lohi had either voted itself out of the war or had expected not to be attacked.

Despite all this, it also seems that the native Lohian stock were considered to be good soldiers, as they began winning battles in Nama without the need of any reinforcements. It may be that the native Lohians were initially war-shy because in their hearts they were hostile to their neighbors, and would have chosen pacifism as their outward approach to avoid the other nations' preemptively attacking them.

Lohi's Dreamer battalions then invaded Nama (particularly "the South"), as commanded by the Thunder Empire (not the Crystals). The Crystal/Thunder alliance had by this time fallen apart over racial divisions, with the Thunderers abandoning the Crystals in the hopes that Laba/Dreamland would conquer the much more vulnerable Crystals and then agree to a ceasefire. Laba then invaded Nama to take back control, but found the Namans uncooperative. "The South" may have been a part of Nama that was already known to be pro-Laba.

Lohi is not mentioned in the writeup after this point, and it is possible that they were smothered by the Wildfire army, the Baywatchers, or the Dolphin Riders. Alternatively, even if Lohi's side lost the war, they may have weathered the occupation just as the other nations did, and perhaps even come to see their territory as a part of Baeba Swamp. It is also possible that refugees other than the Crystals fled into Lohi, even though the Crystals were in the most dire situation. The early writeup states that "a few" refugees from Nama fled to Lohi. This would have been a risky decision, as they were fleeing directly towards their attackers, and it is likely that any who made this move came ready to fight.

Laba was at this time led by Adabawa, who was attempting to flush out all of the ethnic minorities from Dreamland, and then go on to make what was left of Nama also ethnically Laban. He wanted to do this in Paba as well, but was overruled by his ally. This is unrelated to the later rise of Creamland's ethnic conflicts.

Other developments involving Lohi

There was a second pacifist movement within Dreamland's territory, not a survivor of PDP and almost certainly not near where PDP had been.

Two different writeups describe two different leaders named Taboo in the same era; there is a third Taboo who lived much later on. Of the two contemporary leaders, one lives in Dreamland and holds power in DPR, while the other may have lived in Paba. The "has echo names" writeup indirectly lists both of them, inasmuch as it describes Taboo slaughtering the Tabooites.

The two Taboos may represent Adabawa's supporters in Dreamland and Paba, who were initially close allies but grew apart as Adabawa's victory became certain but his control over the vast new conquered territory passed to the deputy leaders such as the Baywatchers and the two Taboos. Even so, it is unlikely that the two Taboos would have ever met up; the conflict in which one slaughtered the other could instead refer to a small, futile movement within Dreamland that supported the distant empire of Paba. Alternatively, DPR could have managed to win even in Paba, as Paba had been chaotic even before the war reached them, and any native-born military leader such as "Taboo" would have been vulnerable to even a distant oppent like DPR.

Other developments

Sentiment in the east

Adabawa, however, was also spreading propaganda of his own. He had earlier helped drive the Thunder Empire into a pacifist stance, making them helpless to stand against even a weak invader. Much of the Thunder Empire had been taken over by the feminist Moonshine and Fairy parties, and their voting power blocked the men from mobilizing their army. Yet even as Adabawa celebrated the women's increasing hold on power, his spies distributed anti-Fairy propaganda intending to get the Thunder men to rise up in revolt against the women who now controlled the only legal army in the Thunder Empire.

The intent of this two-pronged propaganda campaign was to not only greatly weaken the Thunder army, but to also create opposition to the national unity, and draw men's instincts towards the opposite side.

Relations with Nesepa

Then, the pacifist leader Nesepa broke her earlier promise of neutrality and joined the war on Adabawa's side. Her army was extremely weak for its size, and her commitment to help Adabawa was important mostly because it gave Adabawa crucial access to land and sea areas that she had previously ruled him out of.

Adabawa decided to invade Nesepa's territory, saying a weak ally was no different in his eyes than an enemy. At this, she switched sides and declared herself an ally of the Crystals. But the people rejected this, and therefore Nesepa was forced to flee into Baeba Swamp, from whence she moved on to meet up with the Fairy army.

The Fairy leaders forced Nesepa to submit to their rule. She refused, and tried to flee back into Dreamland, but Dreamland had ruled her out entirely. Thus she returned to the Fairy army once again and agreed to follow their plans.

Masculine revolt

A detachment of the Fairy army called the Sparks attacked the wider Fairy army and won an easy victory. The Sparks were nominally under Likoko's command, but they had attacked upon the orders of two men who had remained in power despite the earlier command to fire all male leaders. They had actually mistaken the Fairies for Adabawists, but when the Fairy leaders realized how poorly their own soldiers had performed, some began to question the decision to implement an entirely female power structure in their military. But the Feminist War Council refused to move, and Likòko retained the sole authority to mobilize her military. Some men now called for a revolt against their female leaders, repeating the claims earlier written in Adabawa's anti-Fairy propaganda.

The embarrassed Fairies quickly purged the few remaining male military leaders. These had been allowed to remain for various reasons; some were allied to STW, to Lohi, or to other foreign nations. Talahā was the most powerful male leader still remaining; he had been assigned to obey a woman named Lohaxăra who supported the Feminist program but had protected certain men she was fond of. But now, the Fairies overruled Lohaxăra and relieved the man of his authority, and he declared he would switch sides and fight for Adabawa. He fled into the nation of Wax, but quickly left Wax and moved to a very small nation called Yup which had been founded by a traitor similar to Talahā. Here, he worked spreading pro-Wild propaganda intending to get the Thunderers to support Adabawa, whether they overthrew their female leaders or not.

Meanwhile in what remained of the Thunder Empire, the Ilhina party signed a treaty with their enemy, Adabawa, and aided his invasion of their home territory. The Fairies and other parties were unsurprised, as the Ilhina party had long been known for siding with the strongest power in any conflict, even when that power showed no sign of doing any favors for the Ilhina.

Adabawa invades Lohi

Up until this point, Lohi had refused to allow its soldiers to fight within Dreamland, and Adabawa had likewise respected Lohi's promise to instead fight a proxy war in foreign territory and had not sent his own soldiers to invade Lohi. But when victory in the east became certain, Adabawa decided to at last invade Lohi, and Lohi was prepared for the new war.

Indeed, Adabawa's Wildfire army lost more than 8,000 soldiers just to kill 825 Lohians, as other Lohians fled by boat, most seeking a safe place to live but with some intending to remain at sea catching fish indefinitely. Nevertheless, despite their poor performance, the Wildfire army eliminated armed Lohian resistance fairly quickly and retook control of the state.

Fairies flee to AlphaLeap

Lohi and the Crystals admitted defeat in 3958, leaving the Fairies as the only army still opposing Adabawa. But Adabawa now also turned his sights towards the neutral territories within Dreamland that had previously kept him at bay. This bought Likòko much time to prolong the war, and she prepared to hand power to a woman named Lakah (Lakăxʷ).

Reform in Sakwalo

Adabawa's victory over the Thunder Empire led to a revolution in the state of Sakwalo that actually returned a stronger Thunder government to power; these people revived the strictest form of racial discrimination that had ever been practiced by banning all non-Lenians from living in Sakwalo and enslaving those whom they could not push out. Sakwalo had no military to patrol its borders, but since the capital of Sakwalo was in a remote area, Adabawa's armies had not been able to occupy it, and the radical new Thunder government maintained its hold on power.

Sapeepa-Taryte relations

Meanwhile, the state of Sapeepa reacted to their defeat by launching a new war against Taryte, which had been helping them against Adabawa but whose people had a longstanding mutual blood feud stemming from a war in 3704 in which Taryte had invaded and killed many Sapeepans. The Thunder military leaders refused to allow this war, and therefore Sapeepa seceded from the Thunder Empire, which was still in control of Sakwalo, cutting themselves off from any hope of power even if the Thunderers were to later reemerge from their defeat in Sakwalo and restore their original borders.

Both sides of this war also refused help from Adabawa, as they realized that Adabawa would almost certainly violate any treaty his people signed with a small, isolated power such as Taryte or Sapeepa. Therefore, the four armies of Sapeepa, Taryte, Sakwalo, and Adabawa were all at war with each other, each refusing even a temporary alliance with any of the other three. However, Sakwalo's forces had been so utterly destroyed that they realized their participation would be limited to the choice of which of the other three armies they would prefer to be invaded by. Likewise, Adabawa chose to let Sapeepa and Taryte wear each other down so that when their war was over he would have a much easier time invading and destroying both of them.

Surrender of Nama

The Thunder Empire had been long ago founded on land taken entirely from Nama. In 3953, after Adabawa had conquered all of Altotta and secured an unconditional surrender, Nama had reaffirmed its independence from Altotta, and continued the war with its own much weaker military. Nama declared that its borders encircled all of the land not yet under control of Adabawa's military, figuring that even triply hostile states like Sapeepa and Taryte would sooner side with Nama than with Adabawa. Since Sapeepa and Taryte had not yet been subdued by Adabawa, Nama claimed that Sapeepa and Taryte were part of Nama. However, Nama also insisted that in order to earn Nama's hand in an alliance, each of those states would need to first surrender unconditionally to Nama.

Like Sakwalo, Nama consisted primarily of difficult terrain, whose inhabitants were militarily impotent but also difficult for Adabawa's armies to reach. Adabawa had originally considered a treaty with Nama in which he would respect Nama's independence so long as they promised to remain neutral and form an economic compact with Laba's armies. Though Nama had once been the world's foremost military power, their fortunes had been declining for more than a thousand years, and Adabawa hoped that he could entice Nama into an alliance with the promise that Nama would regain its lost territory and the ability to once again make colonies of surrounding nations. Most Naman leaders favored Adabawa because he had defeated the Thunder Empire which had taken the most from Nama.

But the leader of Nama's independence movement, Likwàkwa, had taken full control of Nama's army, and therefore the will of the generally pacifistic Naman confederation had no standing. She refused to surrender, and Adabawa chose to engage his army in a full-scale invasion of Nama, planning to bring even the most remote areas of resistance under his control. Adabawa thus strove to conquer Nama only, figuring that minor regional powers such as Sapeepa and Taryte would fall apart on their own once Nama was his.

Likwakwa's army held off Adabawa for many years before she handed power to her successor, a woman named Lakaxw (in Moonshine , Lakaf). Lakaf's army in turn held off Adabawa as he became more and more detached from his military campaign. Though he had preferred to be present near the front lines of combat, as the armies spread out Adabawa was forced to remain geographically distant and delegate decisions to commanders over whom he had little control.

Nevertheless, Adabawa's army steadily penetrated further into Lakaf's upland forest refuge areas, and as the war dragged on, more and more often it was she who had no reliable means of contact with her increasingly scattered military holdouts. Adabawa was invading primarily from the north, and pushing ever southward into Nama, and into ever drier climates. By 3976, Adabawa had cut through all of the prairies and pushed her up against the Hykwus Mountains, whose climate was far too barren to support her population. She agreed to finally surrender to Adabawa, but rather than issue a formal diplomatic surrender, she and her army scattered throughout the mountains, separating even from each other, hoping to buy time for a coordinated escape to the ocean while Adabawa's army struggled to find out where she had gone.

Survival at sea

To reach the ocean, Lakaf's army had to pass through territory that had been neutral in the war but had been forced into economic cooperation with Adabawa. Once they reached the ocean, however, they knew they would be safe, since even after his total victory Adabawa had no means of patrolling the long, winding tropical seacoast securely enough to discover even a tiny, disorganized army such as hers. Her most immediate trouble, she realized, was that she would need to either purchase or pirate a fleet of ships to bring her and her army to a place where they could be free from all governments, even friendly ones, as she realized that Adabawa was interested in controlling the entire world.

Nama-Sakwalo relations

When the governors of Sakwalo learned that Lakaf's army had held off Adabawa for many years longer than Sakwalo itself had, they offered Lakaf total control of Sakwalo, even if she demanded the Thunder resistance to abdicate and set up a tyranny with absolute power reserved for Lakaf. Lakaf agreed, and therefore Sakwalo's leaders formally seceded from the Baywatch-run Anchor Empire and set up a new monarchy to begin when Lakaf and her fleet arrived. Power was formally transferred to Lakaf even though the Thunderers had no guarantee she would ever arrive; most of the world had sided with Adabawa in this war, and Adabawa promised a reward for Lakaf's capture.

At this time, Sakwalo was restricted to inland areas around 45°N, which had been Sakwalo's capital all along. Lakaf's ships were fairly close by — docked along the coast of Kava at around 27°N at the same longitude — but in order to reach safety, she would need to circle around the entire continent, a sea journey that, no matter in which direction she began, would be more than ten thousand miles long and pass through many hostile territories. She hoped to find a much shorter path, even if it involved abandoning her ships after a journey to a hostile but out-of-the-way nation such as Thaoa to the east or Taryte to the west. And she knew that, just thirty years earlier, the Moonshine people had been in the same situation, and had arrived safely at the same destination despite passing through much hostile territory.

Queen Lakaf promised the Sakwaloans she would bring a stable and internally homogeneous government, but she directed what remained of their combined military forces to focus entirely on defense, and that they would make no attempts to gain any additional territory for their monarchy.

Anchor Empire

In 3977, just one year after the Fairies' final surrender, the insurgent Dolphin Rider party (DPR) seceded and declared war against both the Wild party and the Baywatchers. They considered themselves a nation defined by politics rather than tribal identity, and stated that to join the Riders one must follow certain rules:

1. Harmony with Nature: Humans are a part of nature, and are required to respect their role. Therefore:

   Dolphins are recognized as the rulers of the sea, and humans as the rulers of the land. Since humans need access to the sea, they must respect and obey the dolphins when they leave the shore.

   Clothes are forbidden except for those working dangerous jobs or in the military. Protection from the sun is also discouraged; people are encouraged to live in open-air buildings where the sun pours in from the top. (The Riders were founded in a sheltered valley, where they received little rain.)

2. Invincibility: The empire of Laba has the right to attack any foreign nation for any reason without fear of a counterattack. All foreign nations are to be submissive to the will of Laba. Anyone claiming allegiance to Laba is part of Laba. The Dolphin Riders are part of Laba.
3. Freedom: Freedom is the most important goal to strive for, above even the goal of building a better state.
4. Truth: False knowledge should be forbidden, and since the Rider philosophy is true, all ideologies opposed to the Riders are forbidden.
5. Militarism: Peace is a goal, but war is the only way there.

The resulting civil war forced Adabawa's Wild party to pull back entirely from the newly conquered territory in order to reinforce their control over Dreamland. Many of the countries Adabawa had been occupying remained in alliance with each other, but they no longer considered themselves to be fighting for Adabawa.

Dreamland's Baywatch party soon emerged as the leader of the remnant coalition. Thus, even though the Baywatchers had done relatively little fighting, they profited the most because they became the guarantor of the whole of the newly conquered eastern territory. The Baywatchers called their territory the Anchor Empire, and created a decoy party with no opinions of its own, to which all of the subject parties were required to pledge allegiance in order to participate in the new Anchor government.

Sapeepa-Taryte treaty

When the leaders of Sapeepa and Taryte, who had revived a 300-year-old blood feud, heard that Adabawa had fallen from power, they declared a truce in order to fight the Baywatchers. When Adabawa had been in control, the Baywatchers had obeyed his commands to shift the focus of their military campaigns towards targets more valuable to Adabawa. But now that Baywatch was back in charge, they returned the struggle for Baeba to their top priority, and therefore the Baywatchers pulled their army out of Sapeepa and Taryte even as Sapeepa and Taryte mobilized their own armies against Baywatch.

Contact with Lohi

The Dolphin Riders signed a manifesto declaring themselves a political alliance and not a tribe, and pledging they would be open to all ethnicities, including the diverse peoples living in Lohi. Then, as a surprise move, they invaded Lohi by sea, and won the support of the Wildfire soldiers who had just twenty years earlier failed to subdue Lohi. Because the Dolphin Riders came to power in an area just to the west of Lohi, and were primarily a naval power, they were much better able to win their war than the land-based Wildfire army had been.

The Dolphin Riders' upset victory weakened the resolve of the Wildfire soldiers, who began to desert their commanders and join the lower ranks of the Dolphin Riders. Furthermore, the Dolphin Riders were winning support among the youth, and the Rider commanders figured they could win over the population by at once pursuing peace and war: peace to win the young people and the various groups of disaffected Wildfires who had one way or another lost relatives in the recent war against Lohi, and war against the battalions who remained loyal to Adabawa and his deputies, and who often considered themselves morally superior to the Riders and were beyond the reach of debate and diplomacy.

Riders increase power

As Rider support grew, party leaders backed down on their beliefs in invincibility and the censorship of opposing ideas. They remained a single party, and therefore their leaders' decisions affected all Riders, but they had many internal divisions where people who disagreed with each other on various ideas promised to cooperate with the other Rider factions even so.

In 4011, the government instituted a naval blockade of the entire southern coast, as well as its border with Baeba Swamp. They did not fortify the northern areas as they expected no invasions from the north either by land or by sea; this area was dominated by the pacifist empire of Moonshine.

Conquest of Baeba

As the Dolphin Riders were coasting to power in Dreamland, the Baywatch party solidified its control over Baeba Swamp while holding the Dreamlandic state of Popa for itself.

Nonetheless, by the year 4086, the Womb Justice party (which had formed hundreds of years earlier) still had control of an important area of territory in the Baywatch area, and the Baywatchers could not push them out.

As the Riders won decisive battles against the Wild army in Dreamland, more Rider troops became free to continue eastward and attack the Baywatch army. Thus the Baywatchers had troops facing the Riders in Dreamland, troops patrolling the Baywatch home state of Popa, and troops attempting to keep order in the vast conquered Anchor Empire.

It is possible that there were also scattered conflicts between the Baywatch and Rider armies inside Baeba Swamp, despite the presence of the much more numerous Crystals which were against both of them.

Restoration of the Gold Party

See Dolphin Riders.

The Dolphin Riders soon renamed themselves to the Gold party (GDX-6), claiming they would pick up where the previous Gold party had left off hundreds of years earlier.

NOTE, THIS MAY MEAN THAT DOLPHIN RIDER IS THE LANGUAGE SPOKEN THROUGHOUT ALL OF WHAT WAS ONCE WILDFIRE TERRITORY.

Note also that there is a GDX-7 which is also led by the Dolphin Riders, suggesting that the two identities had become the same.

Reformation of government

The Dolphin Riders restored ancient Gold laws and created a government based in central Dreamland where all nations could send representatives to vote on the foreign policy of the Sixth Gold Empire.

The Dolphin Riders also reaffirmed the traditional Gold policy of maintaining a single Gold party, where internal factions could compete for power but could not split from the party to seek independent power unless the Dolphin Riders agreed to recognize them as a wholly independent party. If the Dolphin Riders chose to recognize a rebellious movement as a separate party, that party would then gain vast political power, since the global Dreamland Parliament afforded equal representation to all parties regardless of their size. However, only the Gold party was allowed to maintain a military, and therefore citizens who did not belong to the party identifying itself as the Gold party would have no military of their own. Nonetheless, the Dolphin Riders maintained the historical Dreamer policy of allowing the individual states of their empire to have their own private militaries, meaning that a state in which one party had a clear majority of the population would have a military which was for all practical purposes controlled by that one party.

Conflict with AlphaLeap

By 4108, the Baywatchers were so overwhelmed that vast areas of the Anchor Empire had no Baywatch troops at all. The tropical empire of AlphaLeap then invaded the south coastal region of Paba and promised to soon bring the whole of the Anchor Empire under their control. The Leapers renamed the empire Halasala and immediately closed all schools in the territory they occupied so they could force the children to work in plantation labor and the manufacture of clothes and basic goods for the Leaper occupiers.

Play War

In 4132, the Baywatch party declared war against AlphaLeap and invaded the Anchor Empire from the north. The Empire contained more than half of the habitable land on the planet, but the Leapers had moved the capital to Paba, more than a thousand miles from the Baywatchers' stronghold in Baeba.

Paba's population consisted largely of young children whose parents had starved to death or been killed in recent wars and natural disasters. Paba had a traditional government run by the occupying Leaper party, but popular sentiment in Paba favored the indigenous Play party (Pata), which was run by women because all of the able-bodied Player men were required to be battle-ready at all times and there were very few disabled people.

When the female Play leaders learned they were being invaded, they immediately surrendered the vast majority (about 85%) of their empire to the Dreamers, and promised they would not fight back unless the Dreamers decided to also invade the rump state, which contained Paba, Blop, and some other important cities. Because the Leaper government was unpopular in Paba, they could not overrule the women's surrender, and Halasala's soldiers obeyed the women's orders to retreat. The Leapers had a private army of their own, but knew that they could not defend their land claims without the much larger imperial army on their side. When Dreamer generals began quickly coursing through the territory the Player women had given them, the Leapers retreated, and most of the population submitted peacefully to the Dreamers. Thus it was now Dreamland that had the world's largest empire, and by a very wide margin. However, the Dreamers enacted new laws that confiscated the property of the rich, and therefore the upper class of the conquered people came to have pro-Leaper sympathies.

The Dreamer generals celebrated their easy victory over the Leapers, but could not overcome the temptation to invade the rump state of Paba. The Pabaps had been expecting this, however, and had learned of the continued invasion beforehand by communication from trade routes. For example, even though Baeba Swamp was within the territory that the Players had surrendered to Dreamer control, and Baeba Swamp had always tempted the Dreamers, the Dreamer army simply ignored Baeba as they rushed towards the southern part of Halasala, where Paba was.

The Play party evacuated most of the Pabap countryside, leaving the farms barren throughout the harvest season. Instead, farmers retreated to the southern coast, which still had a plentiful supply of fish so long as the people were willing to sail great distances out to sea. Paba itself remained settled, however, and the Pabaps expected that a great battle would soon take place there.

Play party politics

Decades of civil war and famine had made survival very difficult in Paba, and because Pabap culture favored protecting the lives of children even if it led to orphanhood, Paba's population had become very young, with children vastly outnumbering adults. AlphaLeap had shut down Paba's school system early on in order to impose forced labor, so children in Paba were used to working for a living and some could survive on their own. But there were so many orphans and so few adults now that Paba's ruling Leaper party decided to further increase the children's workload, with a focus on personal hygiene in order to reduce disease and dispose of waste. Earlier, hygiene had been abandoned, with Pabap nurses simply throwing waste products into a pile in the middle of each city, figuring that local animals would take care of the problem over time. The Leapers realized that burdening children with such a severe workload was cruel, but that it would be even more cruel to enlist children into the army, and that both the army and the civilian labor force were necessary to keep a nation's population alive and healthy.

But the Play party, which consisted entirely of women and children, disobeyed the Leapers' commands, and Paba collapsed into pestilential conditions. Plagues and diseases coursed through the population, killing many of the orphans who no longer had doctors to care for them. Meanwhile, with the adult male farmers gone, and most women occupied with childcare, farm labor was performed almost exclusively by young children. Furthermore, large farms in the interior plains had been abandoned for fear that they would be quickly taken by the advancing Dreamer army. With very little farmland still in use, the intensity of the famine increased even as the weather began to turn in their favor.

Players came to realize that the only reliable source of food was the sea. Though fish were as abundant as ever, the entire nation now depended on children to provide their food, and young sea captains had difficulty steering the ships and frequently suffered debilitating accidents and deaths. These children divided themselves into two groups: the keu paa šābā, who stayed within sight of the shore and caught only a few fish, and the bim pia, who went further out to sea, suffered many accidents, and caught many fish. Many of the children in the second group were orphans and also had no siblings. Some families had older children in the bim pia group and younger children in the keu paa šābā group.

The keu paa šābā survived by feeding their families first and selling extra catches to private markets; on days when they caught no fish, their mothers would go to these markets and buy the fish caught by other children. Meanwhile, the bim pia lived dangerously, but became rich by forming an alliance with each other and charging high prices to the private fish markets. Since there was little else that their money could buy, the children had little incentive to undercut each other on price.

A small number of Leaper adults sympathized with the Player children, and offered to fish the sea and supplement the catches of those children who had caught the least each day, but the children believed that each fish caught by the Leapers meant one less fish for the Player kids, and banned all adults from the seashore. They told the Leapers that the best way to help the Play party would be to convert to the Play party themselves and then join the land army.

Dreamers move south

The Dreamer army felt they had a good chance of victory in Paba for several reasons:

1. As the Dreamers had swept through the countryside, they noticed many adult males welcoming them. The Dreamers knew that Play party policy required all able-bodied adult males to serve in the military, and to obey the orders of the Player generals. Since the Player generals had ordered a full retreat, by law these men were required to leave their families and move to Paba in preparation for a war, but had not done so. The Dreamers took this to mean that Paba would have relatively few soldiers and that the soldiers in the conquered territory would not rebel against the Dreamers.
2. A persistent famine in Halasala had stunted the growth of its lower classes, and therefore those soldiers who did resist the Dreamers would be weak and poorly nourished.
3. Paba's adult male population was war-weary already, having been involved in a civil war for the last 24 years against the Leapers who now nominally controlled them.
4. Paba had long been a pacifistic empire, and lacked many natural defenses such as walled cities. The Dreamers hoped that the Pabap soldiers would have poor strategy, and noted confidently the the traditionally violent tribes such as the Raspara were in the territory that had been ceded to them and had not rebelled.
5. All of the political decisions in the capital city of Paba were being made by women, since the Play party had the most popular support in Paba, and the Players did not allow men to remain in civilian occupations during a war. Many of these women had lost husbands to the Leapers, and struggled to find enough food to keep their children healthy. The Dreamers hoped that, if they could quickly cut their way through the Player army, they could surround the women in Paba and present them a peaceful way to surrender that would help improve their lives.
6. Many Player soldiers had been abused by the Leapers as children, and the Dreamers hoped that they could convince some soldiers, still fearful of the private Leaper army, to defect to Dreamland. Many Dreamers considered this an honorable strategy, and stated that by pursuing this goal the Dreamers could claim the moral high ground.
7. Although the Dreamers had never seen the Player children's fishing colonies along the south coast, they knew that adult males were not allowed to work outside the military and that most Pabap women worked in the cities, leaving children the job of finding food for themselves and their parents. Furthermore they knew that the ocean was the most reliable food source. The Dreamers hoped that they could stumble upon a group of weak, hungry children, ideally orphans, who would submit to them without a struggle and then lead the Dreamers to other children they could also adopt. However the Dreamers knew that reaching the coast was very difficult, and that they would need to approach the children very cautiously, as the primary means of fishing was with spears.

AlphaLeap revolts

Meanwhile, some Leaper soldiers had chosen to leave Paba and return to their original home states of AlphaLeap and Wax rather than face the Dreamers. They informed the central government in AlphaLeap that the south coast of Paba was now populated entirely by children, who had ruled out all adults, even their own relatives. The Leapers saw this vulnerability as a potential path back to power, and therefore planned a conventional naval attack in which the Leapers would pilot warships and crush the children's boats, forcing them into the sea, either to drown or to be kidnapped by the Leaper navy. They also brought range weapons such as arrows and slingshots so they could hit the children without being hit back. The combination of murder, kidnapping, and the loss of their main food supply would drive Paba into a panic, they hoped, and lead Paba's female government to surrender to AlphaLeap before the Dreamer army even reached their borders.

Thus, both the Dreamers and the Leapers sought to control Paba's vulnerable children: the Dreamers wanted to adopt and embrace them, while the Leapers wanted to abduct and enslave them. The Leapers sailed a single warship to southwestern Paba and combined all three strategies: they shot children who were fishing for food, tore open their boats, and kidnapped any children who managed to stay afloat. However, some children managed to escape and quickly alerted the government, who promised to revive Paba's navy in order to patrol the sea, even though this meant a further reduction in the size of Paba's land army. AlphaLeap's pirates responded with a full naval assault, in which they killed children, stole their food, and also killed the adult sailors who had been sent in to stop them. Therefore Paba prepared to fight both AlphaLeap and Dreamland simultaneously.

Land battles

When the Dreamers approached Paba, the Player army put up stiff resistance, such that the Dreamers were unable to break through and reach Paba itself. More Pabaps than Dreamers were dying in this war, but most Pabap casualties were due to disease and continuing struggles with finding food, since the soldiers were required to procure their own food in order to spare the children and women at home.

After six years of war, the Dreamers still had not yet sieged Paba. Without formally admitting defeat, the Dreamer generals began to pull back their soldiers and focus on building new Dreamer settlements in the countryside that the pro-Play Pabaps had surrendered to them at the beginning of the war. But they also suspected a counterattack was coming, and that the target would be Dreamland itself rather than its colonies, since the Dreamer military had been largely excused^typo?? through the six years of war.

Because AlphaLeap had declared war on the Pabap children fishing the south sea, the dominant Play party had fired the few remaining Leaper politicians from the government, and therefore Paba became a one-party state led by the Players. With their new power, the Play party rejected pacifism and stated that Paba was now a military champion and could seek its own interests rather than forever being subservient to other, more violent empires as they had throughout their history. They decided to launch a direct invasion of Dreamland, exactly mirroring Dreamland's invasion of Paba six years earlier. They restored Paba's claim to all of the land that they had earlier ceded, and claimed that they would reconquer it back for Paba after they had first defeated the home nation of Dreamland. They renamed their new empire Vaamū, abolishing the use of the name Halasala.

As the Player army roved towards the north, they faced some resistance, both from the Dreamers and a few citizens who had decided to side with the Dreamers. The strongest of these was the small nation of Puap (Pwâet), located in the region of Subumpam. However, the Puap army decided to spare Paba and instead attack the tail of the Play army that was heading towards Dreamland. They thus stated that they were not declaring war against Paba, but against the Play political party, and that Puap considered itself loyal to Paba.

Although the Play party was run by adult women, they taught their children about daily events to ensure the children stayed faithful to their people. As the children grew older, some formed opinions of their own. Now, some Play boys wanted to destroy not just Dreamland, but every other nation on the planet, and every other political party, including the Leapers who were still abducting children from the sea. But the wiser adult military generals still pressed on to invade Dreamland and Dreamland only, promising the eager young boys back home that they would have time to destroy the rest of the planet once Dreamland had been subdued.

Counterinvasion of Dreamland

The Player army entered Dreamland and began its conventional war much more quickly than the Dreamers had earlier; they were there within months, whereas the Dreamers had taken three years to reach Paba and another three years to give up. The Dreamers were weak, but had regrouped, and had several advantages: they were fighting a defensive war in mountainous terrain, which they were well accustomed to; there was no significant dissent in Dreamland, whereas Vaamū was on the brink of civil war; and the Dreamer soldiers were physically superior to the Players, both because they were taller and because they were better armed. This last difference was not due to Vaamū's young population, as even now the army still only allowed adult males, but because of a combination of the Vaamū people's naturally small stature and a persistent famine.

Against this, the Player soldiers had only intangibles: they were more obedient than the Dreamers, because they knew that the Dreamers would refuse to accept defectors; and they were mostly people who had left family back home and were fighting not just for Vaamū but for the possibility of returning home to their families and giving them the guarantee of safety. Even so, the Play generals motivated their soldiers by promising them control of Dreamland after the war, so that people who wanted to stay in Dreamland could gain power by doing so, and if they wanted, also bring their families.

The Play generals were well-educated, but had never fought an offensive war. They knew that Dreamland's strategy for invading Paba had failed, however, and sought to ensure they did not copy Dreamland's strategy. Rather than trying to force Dreamland into surrender by encircling the coast and causing a famine, they decided to attack the army head-on.

Despite the Dreamers' earlier humiliating defeat and their foreknowledge of their coming invasion, the Dreamers were ill-prepared for the next phase of the war. Both nations had a standing army of about 1 million adults, with the Dreamer army being physically more powerful and better armed, and having the advantage of occupying difficult terrain. But the Play army invaded from the north, and they quickly cornered the Dreamer battalion holding that stretch of land into a peninsula, where they were forced to surrender. This early victory was due to a quirk of Dreamland's geography: its northern border was easy to invade and difficult to defend.

The Play army conquered no major Dreamer cities during this battle, but the victory surprised the Dreamer generals, and the Dreamer civilians were horrified when they realized what was about to happen to them. They realized that during the Dreamers' six-year campaign to invade and conquer Paba, they had never reached any civilian territory at all, since the countryside had been evacuated and the people remaining in the cities were protected by a sturdy wall of soldiers who were ready to die to save their families living close behind them. Yet it had taken the Players only a few days to penetrate Dreamland and claim their first civilian casualties.

Animal symbolism

The Dreamer generals compared the Players to insects attacking a human: though its core, Paba, was small, their nation was protected by a sturdy outer wall of soldiers, and attacks against the Players did not affect the inner civilian population . By contrast, even though the Dreamers were larger and more prosperous, their civilians had settled the entire nation, and therefore even a minor invasion led quickly to high body counts for civilians. Furthermore, like blood-sucking parasites, the Play soldiers fed on the captured Dreamer people and sent them as slaves to their homeland.

Further battles in Dreamland

The easy conquest of the northeastern headlands had given the Play army 1/3 of the coastline of the Dreamer state of Tēyexīl, which contained the vast majority of Dreamland's population. From the enslaved Dreamer civilians, the Players learned that most of Dreamland's population was concentrated in two cities, Gadanas near the coast and Xʷakaràna, the imperial capital, further upstream. By conquering these two cities, the Player army realized they could conquer Dreamland. They realized that the Dreamers had been fools to invade Paba several years earlier, when they had been given control of the vast majority of AlphaLeap's territory with no struggle at all. Though the Players knew that they would be fighting an uphill battle in difficult terrain, they believed that they would easily defeat the two Dreamer cities and force a total surrender.

When the Dreamers realized that the Player army was advancing on Gadanas, they relocated their entire military to the river just downstream from the city, leaving the rest of their territory, including Fakarana, undefended. Here they advanced towards the Players, intending to deny them as much territory as possible. The Player army was also traveling as a single unit, betting everything on the Battle of Gadanas, where they vowed to fight agaisnt the disadvantages of terrain, physical inferiority, and the civilian resistance. They realized that, though it had not been their intent, they were about to cut off both Dreamer cities from the sea, and knew that the Dreamers would starve if the battle ended in a stalemate.

The two armies met up several miles from the sea, where the Dreamers balanced their desire to fight on superior terrain with their need to prevent the Players from penetrating too far inland. The Dreamer civilians started fires that spread only downstream, intending to weaken the Play soldiers without weakening the Dreamers. Fire soon encircled the Players, meaning they could not retreat if they were to lose. However, the fires began to spread to villages along the coast, which the Players then claimed as theirs since they knew that neither army could easily reach them. THen they pressed up the river towards Gadanas to launch another conventional battle, figuring that their surprising early victory had gained them a numerical advantage that would counteract their other disadvantages.

In Gadanas the two armies fought the bloodiest battle yet, and both suffered body counts above 200,000, but in the end the Players pressed onward and upward over the corpses of the defeated Dreamer soldiers while those Dreamers who had survived the battle made a hasty retreat into the wilderness, realizing that if they surrendered they would become slaves. The Play army sieged the city of Gadanas and made the inhabitants their slaves, but here they stopped their invasion, and offered a peace treaty in which the Dreamers would be allowed to hold the upland capital city of Fakarana while the Players would take control of Gadanas and the entire northern coast. The Dreamers knew that without access to the sea, they would be helpless, but agreed to the treaty to save the lives of their soldiers. Thus the Play army was declared the winner of the war, de facto control of Dreamland was given to the Play party, and the Play party assumed control of the entirety of Vaamū.

Postwar reforms in Dreamland and Paba

The new Player-led government of Dreamland allowed the Dreamer party to persist and dominate power in Fakarana, but they moved the capital of Dreamland to Gadanas, which remained under Player martial law. They offered the inhabitants of Fakarana a choice: they could move to Paba as slaves, or wait until the Player army cut off the food supply and made slaves of them there. The enslaved Dreamers built a 400 mile road connecting Fakarana and the western edge of Vaamū, from which they could be transported to Paba to work as slaves. The Players divided the Dreamers being shipped into Paba into two groups: those who would be owned by the government, and those who would be owned by individual families.

With the return of the surviving Play soldiers to their homes, the economy of Paba rapidly improved. Farming was restored, and fishing yields increased, ending the famine in a single season. The leaders promised to enact a nationwide system of education for children. Hygiene standards improved with the restoration of clean water supplies, and the problem of dirty diapers in city centers, some which had lain there for more than ten years, was solved when the Player governors had their captured slaves gather up the diapers and carry them for 4000 miles over the mountains and down the newly built road to Dreamland.

Spread of plagues

The Play party told its people that hygiene was a waste of time and resources, and therefore many Play soldiers had not bathed for years. When the Players set up slave operations in Dreamland, they maintained the same policy and told their slaves that hardy people could endure natural contaminants that would sicken and kill the weak. Thus, the occupying Players held to the traditional principle of găya: a life of extreme poverty, close to nature, in order to produce an environment where only the hardiest people could prosper. The Players believed that despite their small physical size, they were much hardier than the Dreamers, and could survive in an environment where the Dreamers could not. However, the Players exposed their slaves to more diseases than the Players themselves faced. For example, the Five-Year Flower Disease, which killed children slowly over the first five years of their lives, spread through Dreamland as the Dreamer slaves carried contaminated diapers and other waste products that the Player children had produced but quickly disposed of. Thus, even as the Five-Year plague spread through Vaamū, Dreamland experienced a much more severe version of the same plague.

Cut off from the sea, the combination of famine and pestilence drove the defeated Dreamer republic to the brink of extinction: now, even the animals were living better than the remaining Dreamer humans. Dreamland surrendered to the Dolphin Rider empire to the west, thus reviving the name Dreamland for the full extent of both empires. They had hoped that the Riders would respond by pushing the Play army back out of Dreamland, but the Riders announced they would not defend that territory.

Player occupation government

The Players were ideologically similar to the Dreamers they were attacking, although they had developed their ideology independently and felt no sympathy for their enemies. The Players were nationalists, and therefore refused to make transnational alliances based on ideology, but the Dreamers who fell under Player occupation hoped that they could assimilate and become accepted as Players themselves, even though the Players were forcing them to live in such poverty that more Dreamers were dying than being born.

One of the few differences between Players and Dreamers was their attitude towards disease. The Dreamers were individualists, meaning that they cared for sick people even if curing their diseases was expensive or impossible. By contrast, the Players would only treat diseases they felt could be overcome, and ignored those they attributed to the sufferers' frailty. When the Players heard that their waste products were spreading plagues throughout the Dreamer population, they increased the workload of the Dreamer slaves assigned to dumping waste products and began to pour contaminants into the Dreamers' water wells. The Players reminded themselves that they did not need slaves to live; only weak, pampered peoples lived like that. Thus, driving the Dreamers to extinction through disease took priority over using the Dreamers for slave labor.

The death toll of the war and its associated plague soon surpassed 1 million, more than ten times higher than any other war in known history, and the plague began to spread into the Dolphin Riders' region of Dreamland. The Riders were better equipped to handle a plague because they had control of their government, but because the Five-Year plague could hop from one adult to another without any visible signs of infection, the child population of the Rider state soon began to suffer the plague as well.

Postwar contact with the Players

While the Player army was conquering Dreamland, they had also fighting a war against their traditional ally, Tarwas, and managed to conquer it as well. However, the citizens of Tarwas put up tougher resistance than those of Dreamland, and the Players were never able to secure a lasting peace.

Rise of the Bees

Four years after Vaamū's Play army had defeated and enslaved Dreamland, a new political party arose in Vaamū: the Flower Bees (Sui si). The Bees were only the third political party in Vaamū's entire history, the other two being the militant Players and the defeated, unloved Leapers.

The Bees launched a civil war against all other nations and political parties, saying that the Bees had the sole right to rule on their planet. Most Bees were teenagers who had grown up during the late years of AlphaLeap's rule and had never been allowed an education of any kind, but had been too young to participate in the wars that had preceded their rise. They remembered the promise of the early Play generals that once Dreamland was subdued, the rest of the planet would soon follow.

A split in the Bee party led to a massacre of many of their leaders early on, but the group survived and soon launched an invasion of the nation of Rasparia, a province of Vaamū which had recently declared independence.

The Bee invasion failed, however, and the Raspara enslaved the Bees who surrendered. Then the Raspara declared war on another new political party, the Laaatalalatataaa, an Andanese party which had no translated form of their name. However, a split within the Laaatalalatataaa resulted in the assassination of many of their leaders, and the Raspara took over the Laaatalalatataaa the way they had taken over the Bees just months easlier.

In 4145, a small tropical nation called Amade invaded Vaamū, having just signed a pact with Tarwas promising to meet in the middle and squeeze the huge but hazardously unstable Vaamūan Empire between them. They won this war, but realized that occupying the whole of Vaamū would be suicidal, and instead focused on getting the Vaamūans who were still living in Tarwas to accept a submissive lifestyle or move back to Vaamū.

At this point, the Raspara declared war on all of the other political parties in Vaamū, claiming no alliance to Tarwas, Amade, Dreamland, or any other outside power. They promised that they would eliminate all of the dissenting armies in Vaamū by themselves and therefore gain uncontested rule of all of Vaamū.

This war was over in a mere four days with a clear Raspara victory. The Raspara set the calendar back to the year 0 and enslaved all surviving Vaamūans who were not part of the Raspara army or a family member of a veteran.

Contact with the Tinks

Raspara rule of Vaamū lasted about two years. In 4149, a group of slaves calling themselves the Tinks declared war on their Raspara masters. The Tinks were mostly elderly men who had control of the slave laborers in the weapons industries, despite being officially still slaves themselves. They were among the very few people in Vaamū who had ever been to a school of any kind.

The Tinks locked their masters out of the weapons supply and therefore had both the advantage of numbers and the advantage of better offensive power, and quickly defeated the Raspara in a single bloody battle. They renamed the country Anzan and enacted sweeping reforms: they killed all of the Dreamer slaves, they created a nationwide school system (a promise of the earlier Play party which had gone unfulfilled due to unrelenting civil war), and they created a new system of government based on democracy, unique in the world at the time. However, they also affirmed the right of their new empire, Anzan, to be an empire, and therefore to revoke democracy in areas of the empire they felt unfit for self-government. The name Anzan was chosen to honor the Andanese people, who had never had a nation of their own.

Within a few months, the Tinks declared war on their female population, alleging that they were largely disloyal to the imperial goals and needed to be forced out of power into a submissive position. Many females at this time had used their newfound democratic rights to join the Crystal party, and to declare that the Crystals were the enemies of the Tinks. The men fought the women for several months, and then turned against their children. Soon the Tinks had killed off so many of their own friends and family members that they were no longer the majority in their empire, and the empire came to fall under the control of six mutually hostile armies, each based in a different geographic region of the empire. These were the Crystals, the Tinks, the Repilians, the Zenith, the Raspara, and an allegiance of FILTER tribes living in Subumpam and Lobexon who protested the new form of government and preferred to identify as an alliance of ethnic groups rather than a political party.

Of the six groups, only the Raspara had received any significant formal education, and they were the smallest of the six armies. Although the Tinks had been founded by learned elderly men, these had been quickly eliminated in war and had handed control to an alliance of young boys and young girls who had promised not to declare war on each other. Thus the vast empire of Anzan was engulfed in a civil war directed by generals who could not read any language or count beyond 10. The Dreamers realized their attempt to conquer AlphaLeap had been a horrible mistake: had they merely waited another fifteen years, AlphaLeap would have destroyed itself. Some Dreamers now wanted to revive the war and invade Anzan as a seventh power, but the majority in Dreamland wanted to wait long enough to see whether it might be more prudent to ally with the likeliest among the six armies to be the ultimate victor.

Hipsoft War

Note the gap of 33 years between the settlement and the war. This section will almost certainly be broken up by unrelated events.

Despite their stated opposition to immigration, in 4150 the Dolphin Riders voted to resettle more than 10,000 immigrants from Baeba Swamp in Dreamer territory, even though these immigrants admitted they supported Dreamland's enemy, Moonshine. The immigrants stated that they were fleeing the Leaper invasion of Baeba Swamp, and therefore had a common enemy with Dreamland. These immigrants were directed to the Dreamer state of Susileme, near Lohi. Here, they built a new city called Sēreni.

As the immigrants settled in, the Dolphin Riders formally registered the new Tipper party as a legal party in Dreamland, and because Dreamland's government at this time afforded all tribes equal representation in Parliament regardless of their population size, the new Tipper representatives in Parliament had the same voting power as the much larger Dolphin Rider party.

Formation of the Combs

When the locals in Susileme objected, the Dolphin Riders voted to expel those opposing the immigrants from the Dolphin Rider party. Since the opponents of the migration were concentrated in the area into which the immigrants had moved, they quickly banded together and formed their own party, the Combs (Sepu Resinio), though some joined the Baywatch party instead, figuring they would have a better opportunity winning support for their cause if they tethered it to the Baywatchers' preexisting unrelated conflicts.

By acknowledging the Combs as a legal political party, the Dolphin Riders elevated them to equal status in the Dreamer Parliament, meaning that the Combs could cancel out the Tippers' votes on all issues in which they were at odds. The state governments (which the Dreamers now analyzed as nations) were run differently, however, and relied on population size. That is, the state of Susileme had its own representation in a different part of Dreamland's government, and its vote was the sum of the votes of its population. The Tippers had not become a majority, but they were more strident in their political beliefs than the Combs, and therefore the Tippers sometimes outvoted the Combs.

Because the Combs were not part of the Dolphin Rider party, they could not join the Dolphin Rider army, and had no way to oppose the immigrants even when the Dolphin Riders began transferring large areas of Comb property both to the immigrants and to Dolphin Riders who had moved in during the immediately preceding years. Neither could they form an army of their own, as the Dolphin Riders did not allow minority parties to form their own militaries. However, the Dolphin Riders did allow the states within their empire to form their own militaries, so the Combs hoped they could become a majority in their territory, and then unite to push out the immigrants and return their property. The Combs lived peacefully with the immigrants for more than thirty years, but never won support for their cause.

Hipsofts rebel

When local support failed to build up, the militant Hipsoft faction broke away from the Combs in 4183 and declared war against the immigrants.

First battles

This section may be expanded to include details of individual battles, and to help explain why the Hipsofts performed so poorly even compared to Dreamland's other recent wars.

The Dolphin Riders declared themselves neutral, and expelled the state of Susileme so that they would not be legally bound to participate in the war. Thus, the Dolphin Riders no longer had control of the Hipsoft and Comb parties.

Though most Tippers had not been soldiers, they had been legally allowed to join Susileme's army. But the Hipsoft party had no means of building an army in such a short time, so Hipsoft lost their war even though they had vastly outnumbered the Tipper immigrants by a ratio of more than six to one (there had been 80,000 Hipsoft civilians and 3,119 Tipper soldiers).

Hipsoft surrenders

At this point, the Dolphin Riders declared that the war was over, but the surviving Tipper soldiers continued the war, even invading the Dreamers who had been politically sympathetic to them, claiming that they were fighting for Moonshine and would not stop until the Dolphin Riders surrendered the whole of their territory or stopped supporting Moonshine's enemies in foreign conflicts.

By the time the Hipsoft war was over, the Tippers had killed more than 6,000 Dreamers, and while the Hipsofts had succeeded in destroying the hastily built city of Sēreni, most Tipper soldiers had merely dispersed rather than surrendering or being killed by the Hipsofts. Thus, thousands of Tipper soldiers still roamed around Dreamland, and the only change was that they were now more hostile than they had been before.

Dreamer military reflection

The Dreamer military strategists realized that they had lost 6,000 soldiers to the Tippers, and that the Tippers had not even invaded Dreamland, but rather had been invited. They realized that in the event of a traditional invasion, their military prospects would likely be even worse. Dreamland had prided itself on its strong navy, preventing invasion by sea for nearly two hundred years, but by 4183 the Dreamer navy had become so weak that they had been unable to stop the Tippers from boarding their own ships, sailing through the Dreamer naval blockade, and breaking through the naval blockade again as they moved their ships to nearby Dreamer ports.

Meanwhile, Dreamland's military performance on land had also been embarrassing. They had lost a war against the Play party in 4138, and then suffered tens of thousands more deaths from a plague that the Play army had spread to them. The Dreamers had never recovered the lost territory, which had been annexed to Tata, although Tata's government did allow the Dreamers (in 4175) to register as a political party in Tata.

Further contacts with the east

Bee invasion

The Tinks soon renamed themselves to the Swamp Kids and pledged to one day conquer and settle their people in Baeba Swamp, a tropical paradise protected from invasion by water and tall mountains. Baeba Swamp was near Dreamland, but Dreamland had given up trying to conquer Baeba Swamp hundreds of years earlier. They predicted that the Swamp Kids would fail miserably given the pathetic state of their empire at the current time, but were aware that, in the future, the Swamp Kids might be able to unify their empire again and become as strong as they had been when they had invaded and conquered Dreamland less than twenty years earlier.

In February 4156, the Flower Bee army invaded Dreamland and quickly lost, giving Dreamland its only military victory in recent memory. But the Flower Bees had been poorly equipped for this war, as they were invading against the will of their own homeland and had not been given weapons nor armor to protect themselves. Yet this war showed the Dreamers that their vast neighbor to the east had become desperately unstable, as the invading Bee soldiers had failed to even injure the Dreamers, let alone kill or make captives of them. As prisoners of war, the Bee soldiers lived better under the Dreamers than they had in their own country.

When news of the catastrophic defeat reached the civilian Swamp Kids, many Swamp Kids considered defecting to the Dreamers. The Swamp Kids still believed in democracy, and allowed a Dreamer party to exist in Anzan, but the other side of the Swamp Kids had reacted to the defeat by vowing to invade and enslave Dreamland, taking a million Dreamers captive to avenge the thousand that the Dreamers had taken of them. Thus the Dreamer party remained underground and did not advertise its existence to the mainline Swamp Kids. This caused the mainline Swamp Kids to gravitate towards the more militant wing of the party that wanted to add a war against Dreamland to the many civil wars the Swamp Kids were already dealing with in their own territory.

Firestone invasion

In 4162, Anzan's only pro-Dreamer party, calling themselves the Firestones, marched through Tata and asked for permission to resettle in Dreamland, but Dreamland denied the Firestones the right to move to Dreamland, saying that they were too militant and would cause more problems for Dreamland than they would solve. The Firestones then marched thousands of miles further and sought refuge in the tropical nation of Amade, which at the time was run by a wing of the Crystals calling themselves Eggs.

After about eighteen months in Amade, the Firestone refugees declared war on their rescuers and slaughtered many Egg civilians. In response, the Swamp Kids added the Firestones to the list of nations they were at war with, and the Swampy generals promised to do their best to restore power to the Crystals in Amade even as they fought battles against the Crystals in Anzan. In response, the Eggs became Swamp Kids themselves, and cut their ties with the Crystal party, noting that the wider Crystal party had done nothing to help them. But at this point, the nation of Wax, an ally of AlphaLeap which had retained a presence in the tropics as the Leapers had moved north, sided with the Firestones, and patrolled Amade's coast to keep the Swamp Kids out.

Contact with the Players

In 4168, the Players in Tata signed a pact of peaceful coexistence with the mainline Swamp Kids, and promised that, unlike the Dreamers, they would seek no war and would prefer that Tata remain a part of Anzan rather than Dreamland. They strengthened their claim by pointing out that, regretting the tragic mistake that had happened in Amade, Dreamland had invited the Players to move to Dreamland, and that many had chosen to remain in Anzan.

First Play war

In early 4168, Dreamland invaded the Players in Tata, claiming that there should be only one pro-Dreamer nation in the world, and that pro-Dreamer colonies in other nations belonged under Dreamland's control. The Swamp Kids joined the war, seeing the Dreamer invasion as proof that the Players had been lying about preferring to live in Anzan. When the Swampy army approached the Dreamer army, the Dreamers retreated in terror, as they had until then still believed the Swamp Kids incapable of patrolling their own territory, let alone fighting a war against a foreign power. The Swamp Kids finished defeating the Players by the summer of 4170.

Although the Swamp Kids stopped their advance at the Tata-Dreamland border, the Dreamer generals considered this war yet another military embarrassment for their nation, and realized that they had exposed their weakness to the watching world, which put the Dreamers at risk for an outright invasion in the future.

Second Play war

After the war, however, the Swampies were unable to control the citizenry of Tata, and the Players decided to declare the state of Tata a separate nation, neither part of Anzan nor part of Dreamland, in January 4172. Tata allowed democracy, and permitted multiple parties, unlike the original Play homeland which was by this time calling itself Memnumu (Creamland; also known as Žayūas).

In the summer of 4172, the Swamp Kids invaded Tata in an attempt to finish what they had failed to do two years earlier. They defeated Tata by early 4173. However, by this time, the citizens of Tata were growing annoyed at the constant harassment by the Swamp Kids, and many chose to settle in the Swamp Kids' territory in order to escape the Swamp Kids. This perverse logic worked in their favor because, in Anzan, there were so many insurrections that the Swamp Kids were forced to side with one enemy against another, and had to be careful in battle to avoid accidentally killing an ally. By contrast, in Tata, nearly the entire population supported the Players and there was no incentive for the Swamp Kids to seek defectors among their enemies, nor to be cautious about whom they killed.

Dreamland-Raspara relations

In the autumn of 4175, the Swamp Kids surrounded the parasitic colony of Sikel, which had been founded by Raspara several years earlier and survived by capturing and enslaving Swamp Kids who wandered within their range. Dreamland immediately invaded the Swamp Kids, having signed a secret pact with the Raspara just months earlier. Within just a few months, the Raspara-Dreamer alliance conquered the Swamp Kids and forced them to surrender.

Faced with an unexpected defeat, the Swamp Kids declared war on Repilia, a weak power in the far north that had been neutral in the war. They blamed Repilia for not helping the Swamp Kids, saying that because the Swamp Kids had conquered Repilia, Repilia owed the Swamp Kids a promise of complete military allegiance. But the other nations joined the war to protect Repilia, and the Swamp Kids were defeated even more quickly and profoundly than before.

Third Play war

Dreamland invaded Tata now in order to gain easier access to Anzan, since Tata was now the only lowland connection between Dreamland and Anzan. By this time, although the Play party was still the dominant power in Tata's democratic government, power was rapidly shifting to the insurgent Raspara party. Both parties were united in their support of Dreamland's recent invasion, but the Dreamers were uncomfortable allying with a nation in which power might change hands from one year to the next, and made it known that they preferred the Players to the Raspara. Thus, the Dreamers asked the Players to convert to a one-party state.

Raspara regroup

As the invasion of Anzan progressed, the Dreamers began to take over the government of Tata. Tata's two political parties had both endorsed the invasion, because both stood to benefit from it: the Play party was aligned with Dreamland, and the Raspara party was aligned with the Raspara party of Anzan. But Dreamland was suspicious of the Raspara, who had been blood enemies of Dreamland for hundreds of years, and the Dreamers suspected that the Raspara were planning to suddenly switch sides near the end of the invasion in order to steal territory gained by the Players and transfer it to the Raspara.

Dreamland knew that occupying Anzanan territory without the cooperation of Tata was impossible, since the only road between Dreamland and Anzan that did not pass through Tata was the one that had been laid by slaves and passed through cold, rugged terrain that was easily occupied by rebellious Raspara, but made difficult travel for the Dreamers. Although Tata was a democracy, and supporters of both parties were scattered throughout its territory, the Raspara had made military preparations only in the cold, rugged interior, and felt at home there. Likewise, although many supporters of the Play party lived in the interior, the Players had stationed their military mostly along the coast, which was easily invaded but far more valuable to civilians than the interior. This was largely a reflection of the historical lifestyles of both parties; the Players were descended from a culture with a traditional reliance on fishing, whereas the Raspara were descended from hunters and farmers.

Dreamland realized that this bipartisan division could lead to another civil war in Tata, and ordered the two parties to merge their battalions and for both to submit to Dreamer supervision. The Dreamers promised that any territory won by the combined army would go to Tata's control, and not Dreamland's. The Raspara agreed to this plan, promising their soldiers that they would ensure that any land occupied by a Raspara army would be controlled by Raspara only regardless of its formal political definition. The Players also agreed, but many Players were suspicious of the Dreamers, who had earlier claimed that all of Tata belonged to Dreamland for ideological reasons. This earlier botched invasion also motivated the Raspara, who saw it as proof that even a pro-Dreamer party would be seen as an enemy by the Dreamers, and that allying with Dreamland was futile.

As the war progressed, other armies within Anzan joined the fight on the side of the invaders: the Crystal colony of Ekinakia (part of Xema) seceded and fought battles against the Swamp Kids living within Ekinakia; and some Repilians joined the fight without issuing a formal declaration of war or secession.

Eaten up from all sides, the Swamp Kids rapidly began to lose ground. But they took note of the fact that, of their five invaders, Dreamland was having the most difficulty in occupying territory, and seemed to be entirely reliant on cooperation from Tata, which was unreliable because its two political parties had both recently fought wars against Dreamland.

Reaction in Anzan

As the Raspara army pushed deeper into Anzan and tortured more captured Swamp Kids every day, some Swamp Kids began defecting to the Raspara. Their reasons for this were complex, and the Raspara voted narrowly to allow the defectors to remain neutral in the war, even though the Raspara generals predicted that they would be worse off with the converts on their side than they would have been had the converts remained enemies, as they tended to make easy prey for the invading Raspara. The difficult situation caused Anzan's Raspara party to split into two hostile wings; however, news of the split did not reach Tata, and the Raspara in Tata continued to see themselves as a single entity, meaning that decisions made by the party leaders were obeyed by all. The Raspara leaders in Anzan declared that this meant there were actually three Raspara parties: the Blonde and Blue parties, based in Anzan; and the Green party, confined to Tata and largely ignorant of the internal struggles of the much larger Raspara parties in Anzan. The Raspara leadership believed that Tata's Raspara would likely choose to remain united, and if forced, would vote to side with the Blonde wing rather than the Blue, as the Blondes were more militant against Dreamland and less interested in controlling Anzan.

Reaction in Tata

Tata's Raspara party was much younger and less organized than the parent party in Anzan, and its leaders pled to the Anzanan Raspara for help in maintaining order, even at the risk of alienating their own members. By tradition, the Raspara never expelled members for any reason, even treason: Raspara had to leave of their own will. But now the Raspara party had split into two factions who supported opposite sides of the war between Dreamland and the Swamp Kids.

The Raspara parent party came to decide that the Tataan Raspara were struggling because they were much poorer than the Raspara in Anzan. Rasparas living in Anzan had major ideological differences as well, but they diapered up their problems by sharing their gains, particularly their still-growing pool of slaves, and pursuing their common goal of self-sufficiency. Thus the Raspara voted to help the Raspara in Tata gain control of slaves as well, and the Blondes and Blues agreed to let the Tataans pick which wing to ally with, and to allow them to remain as a third "Green" wing if they chose to ally with neither.

By this time, the Swamp Kids had definitively lost their war against their many invaders, but had refused to sign a surrender treaty; instead, they persisted in their fight, taking the battle to Repilia, which had been mostly neutral in the war but had proven very weak in the past. As the Swamp Kids focused on Repilia, the Raspara army penetrated even deeper into Anzan, and the Raspara were able to lock the other invaders out of the newly gained Raspara territory. On this land, the Raspara enslaved all of the Swamp Kids they could capture and distributed the slaves among the Raspara colonies. The Raspara figured that they had gained enough land in this most recent advance that they could afford to send slaves into Tata to help satisfy the desires of the Raspara living there for a large pool of helpless and easily abused slaves.

After being visited by a delegation of Raspara from Anzan, the Tataan Raspara party announced yet another new war, this time against both Dreamland and the Swamp Kids. Their long-term plan was to conquer and enslave the Swamp Kids, and then use them to conquer and enslave Dreamland. In this, they united the goals of the Blonde and Blue Raspara, with the Blues' war taking first priority and the Blondes feeding on their successes. The Dreamer army was aware of the new war but, despite having just won a clear victory over the Swamp Kids, was unwilling to invade the upland areas of Tata where most Raspara now lived. Instead they fortified their strongholds along Tata's coast and promised the civilians there that their cities would be safe from both the Raspara and any potential attempt at reconquest by the Swamp Kids.

The Honeypot War

In 4177, the Raspara party announced the Honeypot War (Gapeyes), an invasion of Anzan to be launched from Tata. The Tataan Raspara sent a very small battalion of soldiers into Anzan, hoping to provoke the Swamp Kids into reviving their war yet again. The Raspara announced that they were fighting in the name of Tata, not the Raspara party, and that they had put aside their differences with the Baywatch party of Tata. The Raspara battalion deliberately attacked a much larger Swampy army, and then quickly retreated, taking with them as many prisoners of war as they could hold. The Raspara were happy when they realized that they had indeed triggered the Swamp Kids to counterattack, and that the Swamp Kids had launched an invasion of Tata.

The Swamp Kids were unaware that they had been tricked, and as they entered Tata they focused their attacks on the Baywatch strongholds along the coast rather than the mountainous terrain of the Raspara. To do this, they invaded through the Anzanan border state of Puba, which had been conquered by the Dreamer-Raspara coalition and assigned to Tata, but whose civilian population consisted mostly of pro-Swamp resistance and pro-Raspara rebels. The Raspara here ordered their supporters to hold back and let the Swamp Kids invade their territory, promising the Raspara that all territory involved in the fighting would be under Raspara control when the war was over. Some Raspara, however, pulled yet another trick: they disguised themselves as Baywatchers (who mostly had the same language), and claimed to be rebelling against Baywatch control. Many of these rebels had covert sympathy for the Swampies, and wanted to see the Swamp Kids win their war against Tata even if it produced no benefits for the Raspara watching from the sidelines. They thus effectively became Swamp Kids, but for the fact that without formal secession from the Raspara party, the mainline Raspara were not allowed to attack or enslave them.

The Swamp Kids soon pushed through Puba and advanced towards Tata's capital city, Pĭdu. The Swamp Kids were still unaware that they had been tricked, as were the Baywatchers whom they were now attacking. The Swamp Kids thus had the advantage of surprise, as the Baywatchers had considered an attack from the Raspara more likely than an attack from the Swamp Kids.

As the Baywatchers fought the Swamp Kids, the Raspara army prepared to mobilize from their campsites in upper Tata. They waited patiently as the battles raged along the coast, with the Swamp Kids making slow progress as they took control of one city at a time. When the Swamp Kids had control of 1/3 of northern Tata, the Raspara army cut through the forests and pulsed downwards to the capital city of Pĭdu. The Raspara were much more efficient soldiers than the Swamp Kids, and had the advantage of facing a mostly-civilian population, as the soldiers were mostly preoccupied fighting the Swamp Kids. Thus the Raspara soldiers obtained a body count ratio of more than 20:1 as they fought their way towards the coast, and they conquered the capital city within less than a month. The Raspara abolished democracy and forced the Baywatchers into slavery, where they built fortifications around Pĭdu to prevent any other army from seizing control.

Thus, when the Swamp Kids reached Pĭdu, they found Raspara guards stationed outside the city who refused to let the Swampy soldiers in. Faced with the prospect of defeat after an extremely deadly war, the Swamp Kids signed a power-sharing agreement with the Raspara establishing joint control of Tata's government: the Raspara would rule without democracy from the capital city of Pĭdu, and the Swamp Kids would hold monthly referendums where their people would vote on how best they could serve their Raspara masters in their new labor camps.

Internal conflicts and developments

Language evolution

The upper class of the Dolphin Riders began to learn the Leaper language for diplomacy, and, against all precedent, may have come to teach the language to the common people as well. (This would call back to an early writeup saying that Moonshine was the primary language in Dreamer territory; at the time, Moonshine and Leaper would have been dialects of the same language.)

Hipsoft

On August 7, 4183, the militant Hipsoft faction of the ruling Dolphin Rider party declared war on the recently arrived Tipper immigrants, but the Tippers won their war easily and gained far more territory than they had had before the war. This was in part due to the Hipsoft army's incompetence, and in part due to lack of support from the rest of Dreamland, as the Tippers were concentrated in just one small area of Dreamland and had made no unprovoked attempt to wrest control of the areas around them.

Dreamland was embarrassed, and even though the war was geographically confined, they lost so many soldiers that they found themselves suddenly unable to participate in the war raging to their east. In the early 4190s, the Dreamers were forced to turn over their empire to the command of a much smaller nation, Tata, which was at the time run by the slave-hoarding Matrix party. The Matrixes were enslaving the ancestors of the Tippers, and the Tippers knew this, but the Matrix did not attack the newly swollen Tipper lands because they knew that the Tippers had proven themselves to be good soldiers and hoped that they could bait the Tippers into attacking the Matrix strongholds in Baeba Swamp or Tata, where the Matrixes would have the home front advantage. Neither of these things happened, though; the Matrixes were alternately in and out of power as they fought constant wars against outside powers while trying to hold down rebellions in their occupied territories. Because Dreamland was still nominally under the control of the Matrixes, the Dreamers' fortunes rose and fell with those of the Matrixes, and the Dolphin Riders (including the remnant Hipsoft faction) hoped for a Matrix victory so that the Dolphin Riders could share in it.

Nevertheless, by 4206, the Dolphin Riders were once again in control of Dreamland, and once again able to exert their control over the lands to their east; they formed the seventh Gold party (GDX-7).

Note that, as above, they had probably declared themselves to be GDX-7 around 4108, after deposing the Adabawists, rather than waiting until they overwhelmed the Crystals. Thus the Crystals joined this existing party in 4206 rather than participating in its foundation. This would mean that the GDX-6 date would need to be pushed back to the 3900s, even though they did not think of themselves as Gold at the time.

Dreamland in the Cosmopolitan Age

Dreamland's government survived unarrested into the Cosmopolitan Age, and although they had lost important territory in the east, they remained a unitary government as did the Players in Creamland.

See Dolphin Riders.

Other information

Modern Dreamers still exhibit the blonde, light-skinned body type of the Lenian settlers. They are a blend of two distinct Lenian types, one adapted for cold weather and the other for warm. As Dreamland's climate is warm, the modern Dreamers resemble this phenotype more than the other, but many cold-adapted traits remain.

Dreamland's climate is ideal for human habitation. However, it is among the least densely populated areas of the planet for humans because it is also the ideal climate for many species that prey on humans.

Language

The surviving Dreamer languages were those descended from the Dolphin Rider and Baywatch branches, with Dolphin Rider languages the clear majority. However, Play and Moonshine also left descendants.

There may have been more than 100,000 Players in Dreamland, unless this refers to Tata.

Susileme

Note that this is a duplicate of the Hipsoft War section above, but contains additional useful information.

Some Crystals from Baeba Swamp migrate to the Dreamer state of Susileme, centered around 23°N, 20°W. This is historically Dolphin Rider territory, though the name here is given in Baywatch. These Crystals spoke the underclass Middlesex language, not Leaper, and may have been economic migrants, trading their status at the bottom of a wealthy society for an attempt to reach the top of a much poorer society.

It would seem that the name of the state is the same in both Baywatch and DPR.

Though the migrating Crystals (of the Mhù tribe) were not inherently hostile to the Dolphin Riders, they would have maintained strictly separate societies within their shared territory because of the great differences in their body types. Though they differed sharply in skin and hair color, they were more aware of the differences in stature: Crystal women were taller than their men, while the Dreamer tribes showed the opposite pattern. Dreamers were also somewhat taller, overall, than Crystals, though not by much. (The Crystals had originally been very tall, but the population that grew in Baeba was largely derived from aboriginals.)

The Mhù would have tried to exert control over the coastline, but may or may not have been successful. Certainly the Crystals were more advanced in food production than the Dolphin Riders, who had never developed agriculture, but this may not have helped much in such a climate. There is no major river in this territory; a minor river forms its western border, and a major river is found in the mountainous north, but the fishing economy was based on the sea catch, and the hunting was not concentrated in any one area.

It is even possible that the Mhù people migrated before the Cosmopolitan Age, though it would need to at least postdate the Leapers' move to Baeba Swamp, as the Crystals had been the ruling class in Baeba up until then, and the Mhù migration was not a conquest or even an extension of power, but rather an attempt to escape their low status in Baeba.

Despite the Dreamer-allied Firestone party having invaded Crystal territory in 4161, and then enslaving the Crystals without remorse, the Mhù people held no grudge against Dreamers in general, and did not consider their move to Susileme to be a revenge for the invasion in the tropics. (And it is even possible that the Mhù migration was earlier.)

It is possible that a third language exists in Susileme, for the Dreamers who had lived there before the Dolphin Riders took over. They were hunter/gatherers. However, as DPR changed so slowly towards the end of its maturation period, it is likely that any two such languages would be mutually intelligible and have quickly merged even if the two tribes considered themselves divided by habitat or lifestyle.

The Players writeup states that Dreamland had a population of 584000 people around the year 4180, so Susileme would likely have had a population of only about 85,000, even in the assumption that it already had a large population for its size. The Mhù migrants would have been coming from a Baeban underclass of at most 100,000 people, but it is likely that most remained in Baeba, and therefore only a few thousand people, perhaps as many as 10,000, moved to Susileme. Here they would have lived within the same city as the Dreamers, and sometimes even on the same roads, but nonetheless maintained strict social separation.

One state to the east of Susileme has a name, Neyîta, suggesting it may have been part of the Crystal sphere of influence, although hostile.

Animal attacks

Human civilizations declined rapidly at the start of the Cosmopolitan Age, and in many areas, animals took their place. New predators spread to Dreamland as the United Pacifist League became the dominant human population in areas further east. UPL members (called Blossoms) refused to protect themselves from predatory animals, and the predators evolved towards more aggressive behavior with each new generation, since the predators who ate humans reproduced faster than those with more timid habits.

Firebirds

A drastic development came when the firebird reached Dreamland. Firebirds were very large, very intelligent birds restricted to maritime habitats who had traditionally eaten only fish. But when firebirds invaded UPL colonies in Nama, the humans did not fight back, and the firebirds rapidly evolved towards a new diet incorporating both land and sea animals. Humans were their ideal prey, and although the firebirds preferred to attack the weaponless, helpless Blossoms, internal conflicts among the firebirds led flocks to migrate west as there were soon too many birds sharing a dwindling supply of humans.

When the firebirds reached Dreamland, they found much higher population densities than they had seen in Nama. Although the Dreamers had dealt with firebirds in the distant past, the newly evolved firebirds were much smarter than before and were able to coordinate planned attacks on Dreamer cities in which an entire flock would swoop in and attack a throng of humans. These battles would lead to a mess of claws, beaks, and bloody hands as the firebirds bit the humans while other humans tried to pull the birds away. By biting the hands first, firebirds prevented humans from competently handling weapons, and could kill many humans without suffering any meaningful damage themselves.

The firebirds never evolved a heat-tolerant metabolism, and therefore they never attacked Baeba Swamp or the south-facing coast of Dreamland. Dreamland was tolerable because of the cold current off the west coast, which created cool zones near the immediate shore. Thus, humans began to move to warmer areas within Dreamland, even though other dangers awaited them there, and the food supply was less reliable.

To-do

1. Explanation for why Tata quickly fell to Matrix control, despite the Matrixes failing to gain any significant ground in Anzan.
2. Cut down paragraphs that are mostly about Tata, and copy the longer versions to Tata.