Tamta/later history

Matrixes resurge

June 29, 4197

The Matrix army retook Baeba Swamp within a few months. The Slopes remained in their fortified castles in Erala and did not help the Zeniths. The Zeniths had expected no help, and therefore were not surprised when they got no help.

Creation of the Dolls

Shortly after the Matrixes had fended off the Zeniths, they reinstituted slavery, and declared that all Moonshines living in their territory would be enslaved. At this time, many Moonshine humanitarian workers were still living in Baeba Swamp, watching the heavily armed soldiers of the Matrix-STW coalition battle the heavily armed soldiers of the Zenith-Tink coalition. The Moonshines themselves did not have weapons and did not want them; they hoped if that they appeared harmless, other soldiers wouldn't kill them as much. For the most part, the soldiers had respected the Moonshines' wishes to remain unarmed, although both sides had forced the Moonshines to work for their respective militaries in noncombatant roles, when they had originally come in the hopes of improving the economy.

The Matrixes also announced the enslavement of all Crystals and Soap Bubbles. However, because they had just recently freed these people and given them weapons in the hopes that they would be pro-Matrix, it was much more difficult for the Matrixes to capture and enslave the Crystals and Bubbles. Meanwhile, the Crystals in the Slope territory had not been armed, and the Matrixes realized that they might need to invade the Slopes in order to recapture a significant troop of slaves.

The Matrixes announced the creation of a new political party: the Dolls (known as Pussamupimi in a Matrix cipher; also known as Mumpum in another Matrix cipher). This was an involuntary party similar to the various Tadpole parties that had existed in previous years; all Dolls would be slaves and these slaves would be the exclusive property of the Matrix. The Matrixes said that they would focus on gaining Dolls from physically small tribes since they would be easier to control, but also said that they would breed with their slaves to establish family ties, even as they knew that future generations of Dolls would therefore become physically stronger. They said that they would use mind control tactics to prevent the later generations of Dolls from outmuscling their masters.

First Matrix-Slope war

The Matrixes then declared war on the Slopes, stating that they wanted to regain access to a sizable pool of Crystal slaves, whom they now referred to simply as Dolls. They believed that the Slopes, who lived in fortresses and were reliant on Crystal slave labor to find food, would be unwilling to leave their forts to keep the Crystals from being abducted, but the Matrixes also admitted that the Slope army as a whole was now most likely stronger than the Matrix, and therefore the Matrix soldiers would need to carefully approach plantations where the Slopes were on patrol, and in some cases avoid them altogether in order to focus on abducting women from undefended Slope territory.

The Matrixes also declared war on their own slaves, the Dolls, saying that even those few pro-Matrix slaves were collectively responsible for the acts of resistance by other slaves since they were of the same party. They added these wars to their existing war against the Zenith, which they believed was still loosely allied to the Tinks and to the many Lilypad parties of the east, though the latter had proclaimed neutrality.

Slopes' response

The Slopes, whose median age was still 14, promised that they were ready to take on an army of men, and would win easily because their own slaves, the Crystals, would fight to remain with the Slopes rather than be abducted by the Matrixes. All the Slopes needed to do to ensure this was to separate the Crystal women from their children, threatening to kill the children if the Crystals did not fight on the Slopes' side in the war. These were the biological children of the Crystal women and their now-lost Crystal husbands; even though the Slopes had openly admitted and even encouraged sexual assault, there were very few babies born from this because the Slopes preferred to maintain themselves as a separate overclass who would reproduce only with their own kind (unlike the Matrixes).

The Slopes were so confident of their safety that they were even willing to give weapons to the Crystals, since even with weapons the Crystals could not easily turn back and attack the Slope captors, who would simply remain in their castles, because their power did not depend on extending their authority over a large land area, and therefore they had no need to expose themselves to the battlefront.

The Slopes thus needed to exert control over even the free Crystals. Previously, there had been free Crystals and slaves, and the slaves were better protected, so some felt that the slaves were actually better off. Now, in order to ensure they could freely abduct children, the Slopes wanted to increase their surveillance of the free population. They knew that if they were unable to do this, some Crystals might in fact choose to side with the Matrixes. However, the Slopes had no interest in arming these women, and so they figured that the worst they could do would be to run away, rather than to actually attack the Slopes.

Matrixes renamed

At this point the Slopes, Lilypads, and some other Play speakers discarded the Matrixes' self-assigned Play language name Yapī, which referred to a grid or matrix, and began calling them Papaaši, an ambiguous compound which the Slopes claimed referred to a disease common among elderly people in which wounds yielding a burning sensation would accumulate and not heal. They believed that the Matrixes, who by definition could not reproduce with their own kind as they were all men, were doomed to die of a disease they would seek desperately to spread to their victims but fail to do so.

The Slopes said that the Matrixes deserved no sympathy for the suffering they were about to endure. The Matrixes hearing this stated that it only proved that the Slopes still had the minds of children, believing that an invisible disease could bring down their taller, stronger, and much better-armed enemies.

Matrix propaganda

The Matrix commanders were unsure of their chances of victory, and although they had a rigid command structure, meaning that the whole of the Matrix party was committed to the new war, they wanted to send only a few soldiers into battle because they feared that the Slopes were now much stronger than the Matrixes and could potentially defeat the whole Matrix army if given the opportunity.

The Matrix commanders told their soldiers that though they were outnumbered, they had a good chance of victory because the Slope-Crystal nation consisted entirely of women and children while the Matrix army consisted entirely of strong adult men. They also said that the Matrix should feel no guilt over this, as it was the Slopes who had chosen this model for their nation, refusing adult help even from their allies, the Zenith.

Slope propaganda

Largely reliant on the Leapers, the Slopes distributed their own propaganda in Baeba Swamp; the Leapers were helping them because even though the Leapers had helped the Matrix in the recent past, they believed that the Matrix was too powerful on its own and wished to check their power by establishing a counterweight besides the Zenith.

The Slope propaganda admitted that the Slopes were very violent and were abusing innocent Crystals. They thus avoided appealing to morality, and instead stated that they deserved support because they were the most stable power in the region. Thus, the Slopes spent much time talking about how pathetic the Matrix army was, for all their boasting, and that the Matrixes seemed to change their policies every few months while the Slopes had not changed their party platform at all since their formation.

The Leapers had control of the distribution of this propaganda, and decided to aim it mostly at slaves and the underclass, many of whom had been slaves until recently. The Leapers encouraged the Matrixes' slaves to become pro-Slope even though they knew that the Matrixes could simply slaughter any rebellious slaves and that the Slopes would do nothing to stop this.

Return to tribalism

As the Leapers warmed their hearts towards the Slopes, the Slopes began writing racist propaganda against the dark-skinned Leaper leaders, saying that they were so weak that they were embracing the Slopes who openly admitted their intents to exploit all of the peoples around them. That is, the Slopes used every piece of the Leapers' pro-Slope propaganda to create their own propaganda saying that the Leapers by all rights should be anti-Slope but had been cowed into submission without a fight and were now working for the Slopes.

To the Slope leaders, the Leapers were just Crystals who were temporarily sheltered from the abuse affecting the Crystals under Slope control. (The Leapers had for a period of time claimed to be Crystals because it was politically convenient at the time; they had abandoned this when it became disadvantageous.)

The Slopes were not a single tribe, but a broad coalition; because they saw their future as cosmopolitan, they claimed that their racism was against the Crystal minority, not the Crystal majority. They claimed that the Crystals would be the bottom of the hierarchy and that other tribes would be welcomed into the Slope ranks in the future.

Leapers attempt to solidify their power

The Leapers bet heavily on the Slopes and their allies becoming a stronger power than the Matrix in due time, and stated that it most likely had already happened. The Leapers were afraid to leave their homeland in Baeba Swamp, however, and did not expect that they could offer the Slopes anything which would convince the Slopes to move in and drive out the Matrix. However, the Leapers were not simply pro-Slope and anti-Matrix; they were supporting the Slopes mostly because they believed the Slopes were the stronger power, and therefore the Leapers' plan was not based on ethics.

Matrixes invade Erala

Still in 4197, the Matrixes launched their invasion of Erala, intending to abduct Crystal slaves from the Slopes, and using horse-drawn wagons owned by STW for transportation. They needed STW's support as they did not have pack animals of their own nor could they reach the interior areas of Erala by sea.

There were a mere 317 Matrix soldiers in the invading troop, and their motivation was that they would have exclusive ownership of any slaves that they captured, while the Matrixes as a whole would be financially indebted to STW for use of their wagons. Thus, the war was actually a net loss for the non-participant Matrixes, but they agreed that the Matrix party as a whole would benefit from testing the strength of the proud, confident Slopes.

Matrix battle plans

Figuring that the western Slope castles would be the best-defended, the Matrixes went into the mountains of the southern part of the Crystal nation of Lamiŋās (Twădu (which corresponded to the new Slope territory of Mayutasue)) and said that they would re-emerge well to the east and try to attack at night since they knew that even though the Slopes kept guards up at night, the Crystals might be sleeping unprotected and thus the Matrixes could abduct the Crystals without them alerting the Slopes.

The Matrix army was very small but consisted of elite soldiers, some of whom were protected by trained animals. The Matrix animals were mostly intended to absorb the attacks if the Matrixes were forced to retreat, but the Matrix battle strategy incorporated some animals in an offensive role as well.

Slope battle plans

Hearing that the Matrixes relied on trained animals, the Slopes hoped to turn the animals against them, revealing the Matrixes to be frail, delicate humans just like their enemies. This was the ilhina strategy, which the Slopes believed could only be successfully implemented by a group of humans who had invested in sulalaka, the practice of creating fortress habitats that would be safe for those inside even if the enemies attacked so viciously that all land outside the forts became unsafe for humans. The Slopes hoped that the animals would starve and simply turn back on the Matrix soldiers, but knew that with their armor, the Matrixes would not be the animals' primary targets.

Ilhina had no native Play name as it was not a native Play concept; the Plum language had once referred to it as yunža yiba.

Puba theater

The Matrixes then moved east as planned to invade the Hipsides' Southern Puba territory (an aboriginal name, not a Play name), which the Hipsides had already promised not to defend. This, containing some area around the Nwigo River (a trade name, again not a Play name), had been assigned to the Hipsides because it had not earlier been a Crystal territory. Thus, the Slopes had not invaded it yet either, though they were just a few miles away in another river valley. The Matrixes declared that Southern Puba would soon become Eastern Tata.

The Matrixes wanted to attack the Slopes at a weak point, but did not have enough soldiers to encircle them. This is why they had moved east.

The Squares then rushed into Puba as well, seeing the Matrix invasion as a threat to their own territory, but pled with the Slopes to at least cooperate, since the Slopes had the headwaters of the river valley and could thus with just a small advance downstream make the Matrixes' connection between Tata and Upper Puba much thinner and more difficult to protect.

The Slopes and Squares soon came to call this territory Vamna-Vuna.

Hipside protests

At this point, the Hipsides living along the north coast launched a series of pacifist protests against the wider Lilypad government, showing that they had dropped their weapons and would not fight any further war. The Hipsides retained greater autonomy than the other Lilypad groups and had never committed themselves to fight a war, even defensively. But now they said that even what they had done for the Lilypads was wrong. They apologized for the few battles they had already fought, such as to establish the base of Pāpuname, saying that they deserved to be slaughtered for doing this even though they had committed little violence.

Likewise, the Hipsides criticized the eastern Lilypads for opposing the gangs of men invading their territory, saying that those men had the right to live on land that had been earlier set aside for true refugees, which they were, and which the Lilypads were not. The Hipsides' solution was not for the Lilypads to abandon their cities, however, but for them to serve as hosts for the kidnappers and find a way to live in harmony with them.

Drawings of soldiers

The Hipsides had fully embraced the Rider art style by now and made sure that their protests and the literature they produced reached outside parties (who were numerous in the Hipside nation). They drew their soldiers as small, scarcely able to grasp their soft harmless weapons, such as supposed hammers resembling merely a ball or a cube on a stick, and some had dropped these weapons in order to stand their arms outstretched in gestures of beckoning and love.

Others were shown with stuck-out tongues (tamīpta), for reasons left unclear because these people mostly did not carry signs with words. The Matrixes were familiar with this as being a recently popularized obscene gesture, which had been until recently been forbidden in most Lilypad cultures, the prohibition having lifted with the spread of the more permissive cultures of the west (the Clovers and their intermediaries). The Matrixes mostly did not understand that this gesture, even as it was considered obscene, could be used as a message of solidarity and therefore assumed that the Hipsides were saying that there was a group among them who was protesting even the pacifist protests, as though they were not going far enough and needed to support an invasion of their territory.

Other Hipside politics

The Hipsides also staged debates between opposite-sex teams, ostensibly about the roles of males and females in their society, saying that the conflicts between boys and girls was the only problem facing their society now that they had eliminated all crime and war. They took turns outdoing each other with great pronouncements. For example, one boy promised that any time the teams of 10 boys they proposed to make new laws met for Parliament, there would be 4 girls present: one to cook their food, one to set the table, one to pour their drinks, and one to pick up the trash they threw on the floor.

The Hipsides were unable to draw crowds of outsiders to these debates and therefore these, too, were distributed primarily through literature that they hoped others would copy and spread by word of mouth. But it was more difficult to copy words than pictures, so the Hipsides did not put much effort into this.

Matrixes react to propaganda

The Matrixes believed that the Hipsides were clearly trying to bait the Matrix army to ignore the Slopes, abandon their search for Crystal slaves, and attack the Hipsides. The Hipsides lived just to the north of the other groups and had a navy with which they could quickly flee if they were overwhelmed by a land army; but if they did this, they would lose most of what they had built and the non-Hipside residents would have a strong motivation to side with the Matrixes.

The Matrixes were unsure, however, of the Hipsides' motivations. They knew little of the Hipside military, and did not know whether the Hipsides believed they could defeat the Matrix army. Some Matrixes felt that the Hipsides were genuinely sacrificing their lives, potentially even submitting to slavery, to protect the other Lilypad armies; then, even if the Matrixes easily swept into Hipside territory, the as-yet fearful Slopes could abandon their castles and launch an attack against the Matrixes. A rumor had been spreading that the Slopes were very tightly controlled, unlike the Zenith, and that their as-yet refusal to leave the safety of their castles would change all at once someday as they converted into a traditional territory-seeking land army.

Few Matrixes even considered that the Hipside propaganda might in fact be sincere. Even those who were open-minded pointed out that if the Hipsides were protesting against the Lilypads, they would not have made such an effort to get their literature to the Matrixes. The Hipsides had said similar things in the past, even saying that they would make ideal slaves and that their male population was best fit to serve the virile men of surrounding tribes, but nothing of the sort had conspired as the Hipsides slowly built their way westward along the north coast towards the Matrix homeland of Tata.

Formation of the Worldpool

The Lilypads reaffirmed that they were on the Slopes' side in this new war, and that the Lilypads were themselves also planning to fight a war against the Matrixes, but that they did not feel compelled to participate in the war at this stage.

Nonetheless, as they assumed a war against adult armies was coming to them one way or another, the Lilypads reformed their government, breaking away from the Slopes' nation of Simusa-Māsa but still declaring themselves neutral in all wars involving the Slopes. They referred to their new government as Sapīmpama, a soundalike word that could be represented in English as the Worldpool. They retained the Lilypad name for diplomatic purposes, iterating their party identifier to LPD-3 to show that they were on their third government, where LPD-1 had been everything up to and including Tatevas, and LPD-2 had been Simusa-Māsa, the cooperation with the Slopes that allowed adult parties to join.

Borders

The Lilypads cast a symbolic claim to all of the lands of the Crystals and Soap Bubbles that were not already under the control of some other empire (such as Moonshine). This put them legally in control of territories that had been independent for hundreds of years, which even the Anchor Empire at its greatest had never claimed. The Lilypads believed that these nations were very weak and that the Lilypads, if they could keep themselves out of other wars, could subdue or even conquer them. They also felt that if the Slopes rapidly conquered territory in the immediate future, those conquered peoples might later change their affiliation to the Lilypads rather than seeking independence.

However they maintained that their first priority was to protect their own nation, and that they still expected to go to war against the Matrix army before any war against the Crystals.

The Lilypads then worked on creating Play-language names for all of the towns and features in these territories. They did this for its own sake, but realized that in the future it would help them connect with conquered peoples who had been forced to learn Play by the Slopes.

Suspicions about Moonshine

The Lilypads no longer identified as children's parties, and for the first time expressed irritation towards Moonshine diplomats' maternal instincts, thanking them for their unconditional support in the past but insisting that the time for treating the Lilypads as vulnerable young children had passed.

The Lilypad leaders were certain that Moonshine's belittlement was due to their fear of rising male power, having seen teenage boys come to power in the warmer climates of the western states and begin organized assaults on women. There had been little evident violence in these states when the boys living there thought of themselves as children, little different from the girls in their parties, struggling to meet their daily needs and eager to forge friendly relations with other children's nations. But as soon as the kids grew up, the boys among them became much more violent. This pattern seemed to confirm what the various young leaders had been saying for years: that violence was committed by adult men, not by boys, and that the children's nations, though extremely poor, had always been safe for their citizens during those periods when adults had been successfully kept out.

But the Lilypads underscored the difference between crime and war; these western boys' armies were only attacking Crystals, not their own girls, and the Lilypads stated that the armies' strong in-group identity would keep them from turning their aggression on their own girls and women even if they achieved absolute power. Thus, according to the Lilypads' definition, the violent crime rate in the Slope and Square states where the greatest abuses of Crystals were happening was very low.

The Lilypads claimed to have a strong in-group identity as well, and that they did not need Moonshine-style laws designed to keep men and boys so vulnerable that they were in danger just roaming about since they would be easy prey due to not having weapons or armor. Moonshine not only kept their men physically vulnerable, but seemed to pass new laws restricting their basic rights each day; recently, a new law had been passed in the Moonshine state nearest Hōki stating that no man had the right to start a conversation with a woman, nor to address more than one woman at a time. The intent of this was to stop men who had heard of happenings in the west from spreading the knowledge to the women of Moonshine. Men were still allowed to freely communicate with other men because they could do nothing on their own.

Role of Moonshine in the Crystal party

Moonshine had voted to start the war that caused the Crystals to send their male population westward, leaving them vulnerable to attacks from armies of roving men. Because the Moonshine faction was pacifistic, they did not send any of their own soldiers to battle. Moonshine claimed that losing the war was harming the Crystal party as a whole, because the Crystal taxpayers before the war had been sending money to the wider party apparatus, and now that the Slopes and others had taken control of the Crystal women as well, they had lost their western tax base entirely. Moonshine also asked the Lilypads for an estimate of how many Crystal women had been sexually assaulted in Erala since the Slopes took power, figuring that if the Slopes won the war they could ask for monetary reparations to be sent to Moonshine by a third party as restitution for the pain dealt to the Crystal women as a whole.

When the Lilypads heard this, they were unsurprised, since it had become plain to them that Moonshine always sided with the winner of any war rather than the morally superior party. Yet Moonshine claimed the moral high ground because the Lilypads were doing nothing to stop the rape and slaughter in their western territories. The Lilypads said that perhaps some day very soon they would send their own soldiers north into Moonshine, abduct the entire child population to bring back to the Worldpool, and then demand Moonshine pay them reparations for the cost of the journey.

Exclusion of traditional powers

But the Lilypad leaders also stated that they would continue to exclude parties of the older generation from their government, stating that their many rapid reforms were keeping their government fresh, and that tying themselves to old powers would stifle their ability to represent their citizens and perhaps unprotect them from revolution.

Exclusion of Deer Paws

The Lilypads still also opposed power sharing with the much younger Deer Paws. The Deer Paws' territory was still the capital of the Lilypad Association, and their leaders were still mostly less than ten years old and much less educated than the Lilypads had been even at that age. The Lilypads understood that this younger generation would never be able to access the sort of education that would make them good leaders, and therefore that the Lilypads were better equipped to run a government than both the adults and the younger children outside their party umbrella. Therefore, to prevent the Deer Paws from overthrowing the Lilypads, the Lilypads stated that they would keep the umbrella government under constant reforms.

Nonetheless, the Deer Paws did have some exclusive powers in their territory. The Lilypads gave the younger children what they felt was fair, though since there was no precedent for a government run entirely by such young children (the Clovers were just as young but had firmer ties to adolescent leaders), there was no standard by which to judge what was fair.

Beginning of the Whirlpool War

See Dolls.

The Lilypads prepared for what came to be called the Whirlpool War (Pama Vapias), because it was fought in the Worldpool and was based on a plan of moving cyclically so that the Matrixes would end up chasing the Lilypads in a circle, ending up back in the original Matrix territory. They believed they could do this because they had a navy and the Matrixes didn't; thus, they could bait the Matrixes into reaching the coastline and then keeping them at bay as they moved westward towards the Matrix plantations. (Worldpool had been a Play-language pun whose underlying meaning was Whirlpool.)

The Matrixes had already anticipated this plan months earlier when the Hipsides seemed to bait the Matrixes into attacking them, saying that they wanted the Hipside pacifist democracy and the slave-seeking Matrix military battalions to share the same territory. Now it was not just the Hipsides, but the entire Lilypad military, that was joining the war, and they outnumbered the Matrixes by a tremendous margin. But the Lilypads were still very young and most did not have even primitive weapons or armor; the Matrixes consisted entirely of adult male soldiers, all with advanced weapons and protective armor.

Use of ciphers

The Lilypads used ciphers of their languages (Play and Late Andanese) to conceal their communications even though they knew that the Matrix had also learned some of these ciphers. They figured the Matrixes would be spying on them anyway, and were actually more interested in keeping their communications secret from their allies, since recent history had shown that their allies often became enemies in short order. These ciphers produced names outside the phonology of Play; for example, one cipher whose syllables were all (C)V produced names like Sapepulasapapara, Mumemipopasopa, and Papumopupumati, using a five-vowel inventory like the Leaper language but unlike Play (/a i u ə/ with long vowels /ā ī ū/) and Late Andanese (/a i u/ and no long vowels).

The Lilypad Military Cipher Committee consisted of just two girls and two boys; these were Stargazer and three of her close friends. They stated that they would send their ciphers to the wider Lilypad government for approval but that they would actually be less efficient if they had more people helping them develop the ciphers because they all needed to think alike for their plans to work.

Slopes learn ciphers

Weapon supply

By this time, the Slopes had acquired a surfeit of weapons, and realized that if they were attacked, the dropped weapons would mostly be looted by their enemies before any surviving Slopes on the battlefield could recover them.

Slope-Lilypad arms treaty

As a surprise to all, the Slopes decided to arm the Lilypads in return for the Lilypads teaching them all of their ciphers along with the Late Andanese language which was required to understand most of the decoded messages.

Moonshine was shut out of this and the Lilypads said that they might no longer need OHB to deliver them weapons, but yet they reaffirmed their alliance to OHB because doing so cost them nothing and the Slopes stated that they would not attack the Lilypads even if they chose to move even closer to Moonshine.

Earlier, the Slopes had claimed that they were the most intelligent people in the world, and outside parties had expected the Slopes to either create their own ciphers or crack the codes of the existing ones. But the Slopes said that the most intelligent strategy was to learn the ciphers from the Lilypads in exchange for arming the Lilypads, and that because the Slopes could see the world clearly, they knew decisions such as this proved rather than damaged their claim to be intelligent.

A later Leaper estimate put the value of the traded weapons at about Ξ20 million, equivalent to the annual labor production of 300 average Baeban citizens, but a huge sum of money for a nation of children living in much rougher conditions. The currency used here was an artificial one based on food supply; no healthy free citizen, even if unemployed and homeless, could have an income lower than Ξ5,000 in this system because by definition, meeting one's food needs would require that much money (the currency was originally based on a figure of Ξ4 as the minimum price for a satisfying meal.)

This treaty ended any serious adult resistance in Tāmta, as the Lilypads now had clear military superiority over the indigenous adult population. It also ended the Lilypads' dependence on Moonshine, who had provided them access to weapons and to basic material goods but had refused to support them militarily or even to allow them entry into Moonshine territory. The Lilypads wanted to continue trade with Moonshine, and because they controlled much of the coast, the adults in Tāmta were dependent on the Lilypad kids for their own material needs, so the kids assumed that trade with Moonshine would continue much as it had been.

Stargazer's cipher

The Lilypads thus revealed the secrets of Stargazer's cipher, which had the consonant inventory

Bilabials:      m
Coronals:       n   r   l   s

And the vowels /a i u e o/.

Stargazer had created the cipher six years earlier, at the age of 11, featuring only her favorite sounds, and within a year the Play army was using it in their own internal communications alongside their own more advanced ciphers (which Stargazer also understood). She had designed her cipher to be difficult for enemies unfamiliar with it to break, but not so difficult that the intended recipients would also have trouble decoding it. This moderate difficulty level had helped her cipher spread among the Lilypad military commanders; she had also taught them the Players' more advanced ciphers, but the Lilypad kids believed that using these would hamper their internal communications without meaningfully protecting them from interception.

Although the Late Andanese language had thirty syllables, and an alphabet of five consonants and five vowels could thus be used to create a direct one-to-one CV syllable correspondence between the language and the cipher (because of vowel-initial syllables), Stargazer had rejected this simple design by obscuring the syllable boundaries. Some Andanese syllables corresponded to two-syllable sequences in her cipher, and some were subsyllabic. This is why such a superficially simple cipher was difficult to break: anyone intercepting a message written in the cipher, even if they were passingly familiar with Late Andanese, would see the encoded words as inseparable wholes and struggle to find the underlying syllable boundaries. The other Play ciphers obscured the morpheme boundaries even more than this, making them much more difficult.

Initial changes to Stargazer's cipher

The Lilypad cipher committee added five "mirror" consonants p t d c h to complement the five /m n r l s/, to replace consonant clusters of s followed by another consonant; Stargazer had been personally fond of such clusters, but they occurred so frequently that the other kids felt they might provide a clue to those seeking to break the code. Other clusters, which were rarer, were retained. The c here spells IPA /ts/, but its pronunciation was variable, as Play did not allow a /ts/ cluster, and also did not allow clusters of any kind at the head of a syllable, so the Lilypads believed that the users of the cipher would be more comfortable if they were to think of it as a single consonant. Despite Stargazer having designed the code to resemble the sound of Dreamlandic, there was still no /k/ sound in the inventory.

The Lilypad kids planned to use this derivative of the cipher in their own writing alongside Stargazer's original cipher, stating that the two could not be confused with each other and therefore both would continue in use. Their addition of the new consonants was for aesthetic reasons only; the other three members admired Stargazer's five-consonant inventory but disliked the /s+C/ consonant clusters. Stargazer herself agreed to this, and also promised to work with them on future endeavors.

One very noticeable feature of her cipher was that it often produced vowel-initial words, regardless of what the first consonant in the input word was. Because it had so many initial vowels, the Stargazer cipher was often spelled backwards even though this added very little additional mystery to the ciphered text. The Lilypads proposed reversing the letters rather than whole words, saying that this would allow users of the cipher to achieve both types of acoustic effects but that the individual letters would still be in the same order.

New ciphers

A refinement of the reversed Stargazer's cipher had the consonant inventory

Bilabials:      p   m   b   w
Coronals:       t           l   s

And the Play vowels /a i u ə/. This was based directly on the Lilypads' expanded version of the original, which had 10 consonants and five vowels. The new cipher they created had only seven consonants and four vowels, yet it matched letter-by-letter to the Stargazer version, so any text in one could be copied to the other without loss of information. This was because the new version allowed richer and more frequent consonant clusters.

This cipher introduced new consonant clusters that did not occur in Play. Likewise, it allowed consonants in positions that would ungrammatical in Play. One example is the word passab "weapon", which was nara in Stargazer's cipher (and upa in Late Andanese, though this, like many military terms, is taken from a root without its classifier prefix).

In this cipher, clusters occasionally appeared even at the end of a word. For example, Stargazer's word for war, elasanas, became Wampapass, with a cluster at the end of the word. Indeed, any word ending in a consonant in Stargazer's cipher would end in a cluster in theirs. Stargazer disliked this, and although she adopted the new ciphers, she stated that she preferred to spell the words "forwards" as she always had been.

More than half of all words began with the voiceless bilabial stop /p/. The designers did not think that this easily noticeable trait would give too much away, any more than did the original cipher's words so often beginning with vowels. This was both because the word-initial p gave the hopeful code-breaker no direct information about the initial consonant of the Andanese original, and because this mismatch was for a different reason than Stargazer's cipher's mismatch. That is, some words that began with vowels in the original Stargazer cipher did not begin with p in this cipher, and vice versa.

Slopes' plans for ciphers

The Slopes admired the new cipher, and stated that they felt the small consonant inventory could be used to derive clones of the cipher which would each belong to a party or faction. That is, the Slopes would use one version, the Lilypads another, and so on. Their intent was not to obscure communication, since cloning the ciphers would add no significant obstacle to breaking the code, but to add a sense of character to each of the messages. This was in keeping with the new Rider art style in which each party's members had their own distinct appearance. Now, with the ciphers, it would seem as if each political party spoke a separate language too.

The Slopes said that they would rename all of their Crystal slaves with cipher names, instead of respecting their ancestral Leaper names. They also created a cipher for the Matrix party, which resembled Late Andanese because the Matrixes had spent great effort in learning Late Andanese in order to break the ciphers used by the Lilypad kids.

New impression of Lilypads

The sudden development of the Lilypads into a heavily armed faction surprised the Moonshines and other parties, who had expected the young, mostly female-led group to remain passive and perhaps to allow the boys among them who wanted to fight to join the westward boy-led parties. Even when news of the arms deal broke, many especially in Moonshine had expected the Slopes to betray the Lilypads and deliver them no weapons, or even to simply invade and take over the Lilypad territories. But it soon became plain that the deal was genuine and that the Slopes were taking nothing tangible from the Lilypads.

They realized that the Lilypads shared a lot in common with the notoriously unpredictable Slope army, and yet again worried that social bonds formed in the classroom were stronger than the Lilypads' oft-stated commitment to protecting women and children from the desires of predatory men.

Harmony codes

The Lilypads then developed yet another new code. This time, it was an entirely new language, mixed with a heavily ciphered version of Dreamlandic for proper nouns. The new words were coined so that people such as the Matrixes, who had learned many ciphers and also often spoke Andanese, would still lack the ability to decipher at least one of the Lilypads' codes. The ciphered names were used because it would be problematic to create new names for towns and other locations since there were so many names on the map that could theoretically come up in a coded message. Some placenames, however, were represented numerically, and these numbers were still ciphered.

The Harmony codes produced very exotic words. The phonology was largely based on Leaper, but letters were combined in unusual ways, often difficult to pronounce, which the creators felt was no problem because most of the messages would never be read aloud. Their word for "strike, injure, attack" was zgt. There was no /z/ in any language known to the Lilypads (Play, Andanese, Dreamlandic, or Leaper), nor could any of those languages end a word with /t/ or have a fricative consonant as a syllable peak (although Leaper allowed syllabic /s/, it appeared only when no consonant followed).

The grammar was simple, and based on Andanese. Play's grammar was difficult and had proven a barrier to spies in the past, but most Matrixes already spoke Play, and furthermore, many aspects of Play's grammar were tied to the phonology of Play in such a way that they could not be easily carried to a different language or even to a cipher.

Whirlpool War continues

Expulsion of human traffickers

The Lilypads declared war against the child traffickers and other adult men who had invaded their nation, quickly winning their battles as their newly acquired weapons gave them the advantage in battle, and they soon realized that they had greatly overestimated the population of the indigenous adult groups.

These traffickers left so quickly and obediently, releasing their remaining child slaves without question, that some assumed the Lilypads had signed an amnesty pact with them stating that they would be spared so long as they left Lilypad territory, or perhaps only if they left and additionally pledged to move to an enemy nation to help the Lilypads by making life difficult for their enemies. But it was not clear to either the Lilypads or the outside diplomats how these people would have managed to sneak behind enemy lines, so this was only speculation.

Further actions

Then, the Lilypads and others focused their attention on the nation of Tata, the area in which their primary enemy, the Matrix, had first attained absolute power. Tata was still the only nation in which the Matrix had any exclusive territory of their own; their army patrolled much of Baeba Swamp, but this was a democracy in which they could theoretically be voted out of power at any time.

Some said Tata was more of a corporation than a nation, as it had no native language, tribe, or history of its own. The Lilypads had diverse origins but a shared common culture, and many Lilypads had come to consider their ever-changing nation to be the successor state to the Anchor Empire. By contrast, they viewed Tata as an artificial creation. Many Lilypads talked about partitioning Tata with their enemy, Dreamland, saying they would be willing to allow the Dreamers to gain important territory along the coast just to destroy Tata.

Tata's cities had banks, stores, and other entities that belonged to the nation as a whole and not to a political party. It was much richer than the nations of the east, and this wealth consisted mostly of tangible products rather than mere currency. Thus it was a tempting target for piracy, but had been largely safe in recent decades because the Matrixes, though not a naval power, kept tight control over the land.

T4T

Around this time, the Lilypads created T4T (Play Yutas Pausanap), an ostensibly pro-feminist, anti-Slope, and anti-slavery organization within the Lilypad party. It was not itself a party or faction, and the Lilypads said that anyone of the tatea generation or younger who was not a Slope could join the group. They were nationwide but most members lived near Slope settlements.

Initial reactions of outsiders

T4T produced much propaganda with simple messages, stating for example that slavery was immoral and that therefore the Lilypads would oppose it.

However, it was plain that T4T was very weak, and many outside observers took T4T as yet more proof that the Lilypads would go to great lengths to avoid attacking the Slopes. These critics assumed that by creating T4T, the Lilypads would soon be claiming that they were doing the best they could to stop the Slopes, even though T4T did absolutely nothing, and that the Lilypads would do no more than this despite their now having weapons.

It soon became commonplace that when the Slopes committed a violent crime, T4T would threaten a nonviolent response in retaliation, sometimes even one that would only weaken the Slopes' victims. Yet these messages always appeared sincere. Because T4T used such simple messages, and yet never acted upon them, some outsiders felt that the Lilypads were discreetly signaling that they no longer opposed slavery, and that in general anything T4T claimed to oppose was something the Lilypads had decided to tolerate or even support.

Further literature produced by T4T

It soon became difficult for outside groups to take T4T's propaganda seriously. After a Slope gang committed a mass rape in a Slope-held city, T4T's leaders expressed anger and threatened to report the Slopes to the Leaper administrators stationed a few miles away, just as soon as the Slope guards moved out of the way so that T4T's messengers could get by without themselves being slaughtered. One T4T leader expressed remorse that the T4T's were not on the scene at the time of the crime, implying that they might have been able to satisfy the Slopes' desires at least temporarily.

Claiming to have won the support of the Deer Walker orphans, who were still mostly under ten years old, T4T invited the child traffickers of the UAO, Rain, and Raspara parties to meet the orphans in the middle of their refugee colony (Šanataŋūs), so the children could explain to the predators why it was immoral to hurt children and why society would be so much better if the children and their predators could learn to get along.

The Hipsides had produced masochistic propaganda in the recent past, frequently wishing harm upon themselves, but T4T had a very distinct style. One reason for the Lilypads' change in attitudes was that, now that they were heavily armed, they had quickly pushed out the child traffickers from their territory and felt that by making jokes they could overcome the painful memories. But the Lilypads knew that the child traffickers were probably still in operation somewhere nearby.

New Slope laws

The Slopes created a new social ladder (taāmava) to rule their society, saying that they were building on the Crystals' racial discrimination program and filling in the gaps. The new system grouped all of the Crystals together; the Slopes said that if the Crystals wished to continue discriminating against their own members internally, they were welcome to do so, but that the Slopes would not bother to memorize which were the high-ranking Crystals and which were the lower-ranking ones.

The Slopes however agreed with the Crystals in saying that they, too, reserved the right to discriminate against fellow Slopes. Indeed, like the Soap Bubbles, the Slopes said that even their own members could fall to the bottom of the hierarchy for various reasons, even things that they might not perceive as their own fault, such as being unintelligent. This was a rare change of social policy for the Slopes, who had so far strictly held to their founding party platform, in which they had stated that even the least among the Slopes would forever be of higher status than the best among their slaves. The Slopes thus rejected the policy common among various parties in which social misdeeds by a party member could lower their social status only to a fixed floor beneath which they could not fall. Now, the Slopes could expel party members and promised the right to vote them into slavery, although they said this punishment would be very rare.

Effects

Thus, the Slopes had become a closed-entry party, similar in structure to a tribe, and also stated that they had the right to expel their members. Thus they resembled Moonshine, whose courts often deprived men of citizenship, making it illegal for them to live in towns. The Zeniths by contrast were open-entry and could not expel any members. The Slopes hoped that their new policy would encourage Slope supporters they felt unfit for tribal membership to join the Zenith, where they could be among people who thought like them, rather than joining an anti-Slope party out of spite.

Vampapūsuu

Still, the Slopes opposed racial discrimination, as did Moonshine. Moonshine had always said that they would never discriminate by race within their nation, and that restricting their nation to a single race ensured that racial discrimination could never arise. The Slopes admired this but said that they did not need clever logical arguments to justify their policies; though the Slopes had also long claimed to oppose racial discrimination, they stated that they reserved the right to discriminate against other races while opposing the right of other tribes to do the same.

TPM

Young people who wanted to ally with the Slopes even though they knew they could no longer get Slope party membership, and also felt unsafe in the Zenith army, were called the Tašapaimma (TPM) tribe; note that this name was not related to the girl's name Tapaīmma, with a long /ī/ vowel. This was in contrast to Šatapi, one byname of the newly created Slope tribe.

VPU and the Soap Bubbles

The TPM's were also called Vampapūsuu (VPU) for their ideology. The VPU supporters, being an ideological grouping (but not a party), included some non-TPM's, often migrant Soap men and other adults who had been locked out of the youth-based power structure of the Slopes, Squares, and even of TPM.

The Soap Bubbles were one of the few political parties who still preferred that well-educated adults rather than teenagers hold the reins of power, but they were very few in number, mostly men, and had such a strict entry barrier to their party that many of their own biological children had lost interest and therefore the Soap Bubbles were in danger of dwindling away to nothing. Some teenage children of Bubbles, realizing they were likely to fail their own party's entry test, wished to move from Soap to Slope but now despaired at the Slopes' own entry test, largely based on intelligence, and worried the Slopes would not only refuse to admit them to their party but also target them for abuse. These people felt they might have a better chance if they tried to join an ally of the Slopes rather than the Slopes themselves.

Because VPU was not a party, the adult Soap Bubbles could join without relinquishing their party membership. However there were other people in VPU who were not Soap Bubbles.

By allying with TPM these people agreed to let the teenage VPU's make most of the decisions because they felt that being youth-led was their only chance of earning respect from the Slopes, even as they acknowledged that any ways in which the Slopes cheated the TPM leadership would probably be passed on to the adult VPU members and that they were thus doubly disadvantaged. TPM as a tribe had fully embraced VPU ideology and therefore non-VPU TPM's were rare and at risk of being captured as slaves by the other roving armies.

The Slope leaders decided that VPU's could own slaves, whether they chose to pay Slopes for their previously existing Crystal slaves or win control of their own slaves through combat. But the Slopes said that no Slope was obligated to sell any of their slaves to VPU buyers, just as they were not obligated to sell to each other.

The Slopes realized that their ideological allies, who knew that they could never become Slopes, might attack the people of their own tribes in order to spare themselves from Slope attacks, and that the Slopes therefore would never need to offer them a proper reward.

Yāsauŋa

The Slopes helped establish a corporation called Tanunaita whose employees, the Yāsauŋa, were paid to do slave-like labor alongside the Crystal slaves who were not paid. They were also in charge of those slaves. Thus the Yāsauŋa saw their paid position as giving them authority, not responsibility; they were paid because they were superior, not because of their behavior. But the Slopes insisted that the Yāsauŋa, despite their superior legal status, must do manual labor and not merely give orders.

Plans for the future and rules about marriage

The Slopes had always discouraged their members from marrying enslaved Crystal women, but also made it clear that they would not prosecute sexual assaults against them. The Slopes said that the young Crystal children, who were both boys and girls, would be the future slave pool for the Slopes, and therefore that the Slopes should reproduce among their own kind and not have a mixed ancestry class. But now, since the Slopes were denying converts and expelling their own members, they said that these pro-Slope non-Slope men would have the right to marry Crystal women over the age of 18, with or without consent from the woman, so long as they agreed that all of their offspring would be legally equivalent to Crystals and therefore liable to be enslaved. The minimum age of 18 was chosen because the Slopes were all teenagers and did not want to compete with adults for marriage.

Many Slopes had been sexually assaulted by Zenith men when they were younger. These included both boys and girls. Indeed, at the Slopes' very founding meeting, Zenith men assaulted a teenage Slope girl after nightfall, and the Zeniths celebrated what they came to speak of as their intimate relationship with the young Slopes.

The Slopes had still not fully protected themselves from the Zenith rapists, whom they agreed to tolerate and even consider allies. The Zeniths meanwhile tolerated Slopes' attacks on them, saying that Zeniths were not required to defend other Zeniths, and that because they also refused to expel rapists from the Zenith party, all of the Slopes' revenge attacks on them were justified, even if they attacked a Zenith man who had not commiitted any crime.

The Slopes almost never sexually assaulted the Zeniths, even though there were female Zeniths, but simply used violent attacks. The Slopes had come to refer to Zeniths as pauni tamakusu, a derisive Play term implying that they felt little pain, and that a Slope man who attempted to sexually assault a Zenith would only be wasting his time, as the target would feel more pleasure from the experience than pain. Thus the Slopes even discouraged castration, saying that the only proper response to the Zeniths' attacks was to kill the Zeniths. Meanwhile, Slopes who had been victims of Zenith sexual abuse preferred to re-enact the scenes of abuse with helpless Crystal women.

Moonshine-Matrix war

The Matrix by this time had taken hold of humanitarian rescue workers from Moonshine, mostly women.

Though avoiding a formal declaration of war for the time being, the Matrixes realized that by enslaving the Moonshine humanitarian rescue workers, they would likely soon face retaliation from Moonshine. They prepared their army to launch an invasion, as they preferred to be the aggressor in this war rather than the defender.

Matrix propaganda

The Matrixes used propaganda to improve their troops' confidence, as the Matrix soldiers knew that they were having difficulty even staying in power in their home city, and many thought that invading a foreign empire, even a pacifistic one, would be unwise.

The Matrixes identified themselves with male power, and they predicted that their traditional male-led army would be victorious over the female-led Moonshines by forcing its way into Moonshine territory and attacking the Moonshine capital city of Wōm. They claimed that although Moonshine's army was largely male, it was run by females, and would likely take a feministic approach to the war by allowing the Matrix army to slice its way deep into Moonshine territory and focus on trying to absorb the Matrixes rather than fighting them.

They pointed out that Moonshine was so exploitable that its own army, which consisted of enslaved humanitarian workers, was actually helping the Matrixes even while the Matrixes drew up plans for a war against them.

However, the Matrix generals felt that it would be wise to hold off on actually invading Moonshine for the time being, because they thought they could win an even greater victory against Moonshine if they were able to trigger Moonshine into being the aggressor. To do this, they made a formal declaration of war, but did not send out their army. Instead, they stated that they would treat the Moonshine humanitarian workers as prisoners of war and torture them in every way possible.

The new STW-Matrix coalition government announced their war by sending a team of diplomats into Moonshine territory to announce what they were doing in Baeba. The Matrixes told the Moonshines that they were now extending the demand for slave labor even to children. They openly announced to Moonshine that they were raping the Moonshine population held captive in Baeba, and that they would not stop, nor would they seek to punish any of the rapists. They declared that there could be no possible revenge for Moonshine here, and that the Matrixes would soon have their way with the Moonshine women even in Moonshine. The Matrixes declared that they preferred to enslave pacifistic people because they could rape the women without worrying about revenge attacks from the men.

When Moonshine's leaders heard that the Matrixes were raping and abusing Moonshine people in Baeba, they sent another troop of humanitarian workers into Baeba. The Matrixes were happy to see them and quickly put them into labor camps alongside the slaves that had been captured several years earlier. Moonshine had been hoping to rescue both the enslaved Moonshines and the wives and daughters of the Matrixes, who were also victims of abuse.

Matrix battle plans

Moonshine's avoidance of violence encouraged the Matrixes to invade preemptively after all, figuring that they would face little or no resistance even when they reached the Moonshine capital. In order to invade Moonshine, the Matrixes in Baeba Swamp would need to climb the very steep mountain range that marked Baeba's outer borders. This was easy, as even the Matrixes' enemies in the Swamp were concentrated in the lowlands.

But Baeba Swamp did not border Moonshine directly. Trade was possible because of a pair of conveniently located rivers, but both rivers required the cooperation of a third nation. Once they crossed the mountain range, they could sail down either the Nyufan (southern) or the Tănya (northern) River in order to reach Moonshine territory. Choosing the Tănya River would put them in Tata, their old homeland, in which they no longer had any power. Choosing the Nyufan would send them instead through Anzan, which was nominally under the control of the Swamp Kids but in fact had no secure government at all, as the Swamp Kids' historical enemies had overpowered them and begun to fight each other. Both nations were hostile to the Matrixes and friendly towards Moonshine, but the Matrixes believed that both nations would be no threat to their soldiers as they quickly passed through.

There were actually three separate states in Anzan that the Matrixes would have to cross through. The first was Tʷădu, the second Yīspʷilinâ, and the third Mikagu (Poise). Of these three, Yīspʷilinâ was the most racially diverse, meaning that there was a sizable minority of light-skinned people living there, whereas the other two states were composed almost entirely of dark-skinned people. The Matrixes thus figured they would have the best opportunity to set up forts in Yīspʷilinâ without being attacked, as they could pretend to be natives.

Once inside Moonshine, they would start heading uphill again, as Moonshine's capital city had been deliberately founded in a sheltered location. Since they would need to abandon their boats in order to proceed uphill, the Matrixes considered avoiding the rivers entirely and entering Moonshine territory on land. But using the rivers would give them the advantage of being able to prey on fish and other animals as they went, whereas they did not expect to find abundant wildlife in the forests. They realized that they could even prey on people, as any trading ships they happened to pass along the way would be either unarmed or very lightly armed, and therefore easily taken over.

Despite the relatively small distance between their two nations, the climates of Baeba and Wōm differed markedly. Baeba was tropical, and Wōm was snowbound for more than half of the year. The Matrixes did not want to attack in winter, as they realized they would be out of their element. However, they told their troops that their war, even in the best possible scenario, would likely last more than one year, and that the troops would need to learn how to survive in cold weather even so.

Lilypad report

Hearing this, the Lilypads warned that if the Matrixes invaded their territory and began assaulting them, the Lilypads would retaliate by sending rescue missions into Matrix territory to bring back the abused children the Matrixes had captured in previous raids.

Lilypads invade

In August 4199, having reached adulthood, the Lilypads marched westward and joined the war against the Matrix-STW coalition, seeking revenge for what had been done to them as children.

The Lilypads left their entire child population behind, saying that the Blue Cocoon would return to its original purpose as a safe colony for small children. Many of these children were less than five years old. However, although many young women had joined the coalition army, others stayed behind to care for the children, so the children were not as helpless as had been the Third and Fourth Classroom orphans.

The Lilypad army identified itself as the Tippers (Play Vaunas Pava) and stated that if the female Lilypads ever voted to stop the war, the Tippers would secede and become a sovereign nation of their own without children. They also began to state that the Lilypad name properly belonged to the young children only. The Tippers were still interested in adopting the Fourth Classroom orphans, who were intermediate in age, but believed that their primary goal was to stop them from being captured by the Matrix slavers, which would be even worse than orphanhood.

The Tipper army contained both men and women, but was predominantly male, as they felt most armies should be. The women had joined the army because they felt that winning the war was their nation's only goal, and that enough women had stayed behind to care for and protect the young Lilypad children. The Tippers thus resembled the Hipsides by sending women into a combat role, although they did not feel that they would be preyed upon for this reason as the many civilians caught in the battle were far more vulnerable.

Matrix invasion of Wōm

In fall 4199, the Matrix army began their long-planned invasion of Moonshine. They did not know that the Lilypads were at the very same time invading them, and the two groups had taken different routes, since it was easier for the Matrixes to go inland and easier for the Lilypads to hug the coast. Yet the Matrixes' route took them into the Lilypad territory of Tamta before they reached Moonshine proper; since their route did not intersect the Lilypad army's route, they had a clear path into Moonshine with no hostile armies in the way.

The Matrixes sailed down the Nyufan river and entered the Andanese state of Tʷădu. The government of Tʷadu had signed a treaty with Moonshine stating that the Tʷaduans would help Moonshine if they were invaded, but at this time Tʷadu's ruling party had no power over their own people and could not fend off the Matrix. The Matrixes, for their part, did not want Tʷadu to participate in the war and they tried to press through Tʷadu as quickly as possible. Within a few days, they had moved through Tʷadu and entered the state of Yīspʷilinâ.

In Yīspʷilinâ, they also found hostility, and realized that they would likely not be able to set up fortresses in Yīspʷilinâ's territory, as they had hoped to do. They thus quickly moved on to a state whose trade name was Mikagu (and whose native name was Poise). They planned to reach Moonshine territory so quickly that they could fight their war entirely within Moonshine, rather than needing to defend a battle front that was within Anzan. Even though Moonshine was more hostile towards the Matrixes than was Anzan, the Matrixes preferred to fight in Moonshine territory both because they believed that the Moonshine army was extremely weak and because they hoped that if they stayed out of Anzan, Anzan would stay out of the war.

Matrixes enter Lilypad territory

Then the Matrixes made it into Lilypad territory for the first time.

Matrixes enter Moonshine

Within weeks, the Matrixes cut through the Lilypad homelands and headed towards the Moonshine capital city of Wōm. However, in response, Moonshine finally attacked the Matrix troops with a traditional army rather than sending unarmed humanitarians to rescue wounded soldiers even of the Matrixes. The war began to turn in Moonshine's favor, but this was mostly due to outside help rather than because of Moonshine's temporary suspension of absolute pacifism. A coalition army formed in Tʷădu, and another one formed in Poise. The first army attacked the Matrix-STW coalition in Baeba Swamp while the second army moved north to help protect Moonshine.

Matrix war strategy

Because of mikagu's counterattack, the Matrix soldiers were surrounded on all sides, and had no hope spread into of establishing contact with baeban2matrixes. .

The Matrixes used propaganda extensively to improve their soldiers' resolve. They stated that there were no men in Moonshine; Moonshine women were very feminine and Moonshine men were even more so. Many Matrix soldiers in this war had also participated in an earlier war against the Swamp Kids where similar propaganda was used. Although the Swamp Kids had won that war, they had sustained a far higher body count than the Matrixes did, and only began to win once they secured the help of many allies.

The Matrix generals promised their soldiers that, once they had eliminated most of Moonshine's traditional male army, they would be facing an entirely female nation, and that despite their strongly feministic belief system, the Moonshine women would be so enraptured by the sight of a strong man that they would forgive the Matrixes for invading and submit themselves completely to Matrix rule.

Privately, though, the Matrixes envied both the Moonshines and the Swamp Kids. The Matrixes noticed that men in Moonshine seemed to readily admit that they were weak, and identified themselves with smallness and other childlike attributes, leaving their women to stand tall as the true picture of their society. Moonshine women, meanwhile, were proud of their femininity; the stereotypical Moonshine woman had large breasts and wide hips, a body type that was seen as embarrassing by the women of the Matrixes. Moonshine men even went so far as to boast of their own feminine attributes, though admitting that they were much less noticeable than those of their women. In essence, all Moonshines were feminine: the women were extremely feminine, and the men were somewhat less feminine, but both sexes were on the same side of the divide.

Meanwhile, the Matrixes were jealous of the Swamp Kids for a similar reason. The Swamp Kids had a very masculine culture, but their men were physically small and they referred to themselves as "boys" rather than men, and did not seem to be ashamed of this, nor envious of the more robust figures of the men of the Matrixes. Thus, the Matrixes had a difficult time intimidating the Swamp Kids, and attempts to befriend their women proved fruitless.

Final battles

The Matrixes defeated the young soldiers by January 4202, at the Battle of Papilalapapi (an Andanese name, not a Play name). Then they launched the War of the Sexes by invading the women who had stayed behind in the refugee colony of Hoki. The Matrixes promised to kill many women, enslave the rest, and then invade Moonshine to continue their war.

By January 4202, the Matrixes had won their war against Moonshine, meaning that Moonshine could no longer rescue the humanitarian aid workers trapped in Baeba's territory. The Matrixes still had other enemies to fight off in Baeba, but Moonshine had been driven out and would not return for hundreds of years.

The Matrixes took control of all of the land between Baeba Swamp and the Moonshine border, and they signed a treaty with STW and the Swamp Kids declaring that the Matrix army was the legal owner of all of the land in Anzan, Tata, and Dreamland. This was more than 90% of the land in the world, and the Matrixes were not planning to actually spread out over all of this land; they merely wanted legal recognition that any non-Matrix army in any of the four countries would be considered an illegal uprising. (Anzan included Lobexon, and was now also referred to as Erala, Rapala, or Paptubia.) However, the Matrixes did execute a genuine occupation of Tata, which had been their former base of power, and was in a convenient location which the Matrixes felt they might need to use if they were pushed out of Baeba.

The Matrixes signed a peace treaty with Moonshine promising to never again invade their territory, and decided to celebrate their treaty by invading deeper into Moonshine territory. They told their soldiers that their dream had finally come true; they had violated and subdued a nation run entirely by women, and those women were now their property. The Matrixes had killed and abducted so many Moonshine males that the remaining able-bodied adult population was almost entirely female, many of whom only learned from the Matrixes that their husbands had died.

However, the Matrixes were now more interested in dominating the refugee safehouse of Xómeye, into which many escaped slaves had fled, than in dominating Wōm. The Matrixes won at first, but later on, the other inhabitants of Xómeye stopped stabbing each other and united as one to kick out the Matrix. Once the Matrix had been chased out, the people of Xómeye started killing each other again. Another peace treaty was signed, with both sides expecting another war would soon erupt.

Matrixes in Moonshine territory

The Matrixes wanted to establish parasitic colonies in rural Moonshine territory. They had adopted this idea from the Raspara party, which had parasitically colonized the empire of the Swamp Kids a few generations earlier. However, the Matrix plan was more difficult than the Raspara plan for several reasons:

1. The Swamp Kids had always welcomed minorities in their empire, and in much of their territory, the Swamp Kids were a minority. Thus, the Swamp Kids could not tell apart a citizen from an invader on sight. By contrast, outside of the state of Xómeye, Moonshine territory was entirely walled off to all non-Moonshines; outsiders could not even visit Moonshine territory unless accompanied by Moonshine officials. The Matrixes, despite being a political party whose members came from diverse racial types, did not physically resemble the Moonshines, and could not disguise themselves as Moonshines.
2. The Raspara party was able to exploit the fact that the Swamp Kids were physically small and frail people, even to the point of calling their adult males "boys" and forcing the Swamp Kids to address Raspara men with separate adult-male pronouns. Often, an entire room of Swamp Kids would stop talking if just a single Raspara male entered their company, as they were all afraid they were about to be kidnapped. By contrast, the Moonshine people were only slightly more frail than the Matrixes, and had no fear of the Matrixes.
3. The Matrixes were in perpetual danger of being pushed out of power in their own territory, and could not afford to waste valuable manpower on an invasion of Moonshine when they needed their military to keep them in power at home. However, the Matrix leaders promised that if they were indeed thrown out of power in Baeba Swamp, they would invade Moonshine rather than trying to win back Baeba Swamp.

Relations with STW

At this point, Baeba was governed by a coalition of the Matrixes and STW, with the Matrixes in control. However, STW had an independent army, and this army sometimes fought battles against its enemies without asking for help from the Matrix. Moonshine hoped that in the future, STW might become the stronger partner of the coalition, and force the Matrixes to back down from their brutal slavery operations. However, it seemed that as STW grew, its own slavery operations were becoming more and more like those of the Matrix, and in some cases were even worse.

Further relations with the Matrixes

However, a surprising turn of events brightened the situation for Moonshine beginning in the summer of 4202. The Crystals had worked out a peace treaty with the Matrixes which gave them very little but the promise that the Matrixes wouldn't simply kill them off. This treaty was of a type that had traditionally meant the creation of a coalition government, but the Matrixes gave the Crystals no power and did not even free their slaves. Their only promise was that the Crystals would be allowed to live. This meant that Moonshine humanitarian workers could once again move to Baeba Swamp and help people there without being killed on sight.

Crystal party split

At this point, an unrelated internal struggle split Baeba's Crystal party into two mutually hostile entities: FILTER and the Phoenixes. FILTER was named after a feminist organization, FILTER, that had existed long ago in nearby areas, but was not actually derived from it. FILTER soon declared itself to be the true Crystal party and its members began calling themselves Crystals.

In response, the Phoenixes signed an alliance with the Rasparas, who were members of a party that had lived parasitically in Swampy territory for about 50 years, toying with Swampy politicians and soldiers at their will, before being defeated and forced into minor party status. The Rasparas admired the idea of a female-led party that shared its political enemies.

The other Crystals were afraid to sign an agreement with men, particularly men of a group that had historically oppressed outside groups and declared that the adult males of their oppressed people were merely boys and not men.

They also pointed out that the Rasparas were close cousins of the Matrixes, who were famous for their use of offensive sexual imagery, such as firing arrows at women's breasts for target practice. The Matrixes did not even allow females to identify as Matrixes, as they felt that only men should have opinions on politics. The Matrixes killed their wives when they became too old to bear children, and said that it was sometimes allowable for a man to kill a woman who was disfigured by an injury and no longer attractive. Moreover the Matrixes had in 4188, just a few years earlier, betrayed their ally, the Swamp Kids, by signing a military peace treaty and then invading the Swampies' army from behind. However, the Phoenixes insisted that the Raspara were not as evil as the Matrixes.

Because the Matrixes consisted entirely of males, whereas the Moonshines allowed only women to hold power, all meetings between Matrix and Moonshine diplomats were contests of males against females. The Matrixes believed that casual violence against women was acceptable, and told the Moonshine diplomats that the Matrix diplomats might assault the visiting Moonshines to help win a difficult argument.

4202 war

Moonshine's pacifist war council declared that it was impossible for a war to erupt in a refugee colony and therefore that the Matrixes' invasion could be handled by the Lilypad women's police force.

Slope rule

The Slopes by this time were the only one of the original children's parties that still had a strong army with territory all to itself.

They were the only party that had achieved all of its major objectives:

1. They had reproduced within their group, rather than by forcing unwilling Crystal women to be their wives. There had always been more boys than girls in the Slope party, but the Slope girls did not complain of reproductive overwhelm as they grew into women.
2. They had adopted tens of thousands of young children, with men taking on much of the parenting duties rather than forcing the women to do it all.
3. They had captured many Crystal slaves.
4. They had avoided a direct attack from any other parties of their generation (the tatea generation).
5. They had entirely avoided ideological splits, even as parties like the Matrix had divided and then divided again into ever smaller factions.
6. They had made converts of those in enemy parties.
7. They had driven out adult armies such as the Zeniths from their territory.
8. They had driven out other top-tier armies, the ones who had just years earlier described the Slopes as children who huddled together in castles at night quivering in fear of the world around them.
9. They had gained territory in Baeba Swamp, which they had previously not felt possible.
10. They had been legally recognized by the Leapers in Baeba Swamp, and held a large fraction of the seats in the Leaper Parliament, showing that they had won the support of the people despite their violent history.
11. They had defied the predictions of many traditional powers who had stated that even if the Slopes were to achieve undeserved success, they were bound by shared childhood experiences and would therefore lose their sense of community as they became adults who had little in common.

The Slopes had changed little in ideology or lifestyle in their eight years of existence. They still obeyed many laws that seemed intended for children, and stated that this was because they had adopted so many young children from outside groups that such laws were still needed. They saw no end to this situation, and continued to laugh at other male-led parties who believed that raising other men's children was an act of submission.

Šapei Napabapei

Both the Cold Men and the Leashes still existed in 4206, as did the Scorpions. It was only at this point that the Cold Men banned the Leash party and created the Šapei Napabapei school system, which promised children to re-enter the war against the Players as they still considered Play territory their only true homeland.

At this point the Cold Men (or the Leashes) declared that they had "no country" left.

STW reappears

STW was still a strong military force by this time; see STW#Wars_against_the_Dolls.

Pineapple rule

The Lilypads reformed their government as they achieved unquestioned power over Moonshine's refugee state of Hōki, and declared a formal secession from Moonshine applying to not only the Lilypads but to the indigenous population, some of whom were descended from refugees who had fled into Hōki hundreds of years earlier. These people were now merely captives of the Lilypads. The Lilypad rulers set up a democracy for these people, in which everyone except Lilypads could vote, but Lilypads were the only candidates for all offices. Thus, the Lilypads gave them no choice but to accept captive rule, but would listen to suggestions about how to run their occupied territories. Many of these refugees did not speak Play, and the Lilypads made it clear to them that if they did not understand the issues, their own fellow citizens would be against them if they voted randomly, since it would disrupt the elections. These people thus were allowed to assign their votes to a trusted fellow citizen, meaning that those citizens who spoke Play could acquire disproportionate voting power. The Play word for such a person was ŋaupeifua, a proxy voter. This system had been used before in many small towns where the entire citizenry agreed to vote the same way on all issues, and sent a single person to vote with the power of the entire town's population.

The Lilypads stated that their new nation, the Habitat (LPD-4), would focus on children's issues that they had grown up fighting for from the other side of the generation gap. They praised the Players for having remained committed to the welfare of children for their entire existence, and promised to do the same. Like the Players, the new Lilypads (calling themselves Pineapples but with a different word than the usual Play word) were nationalists, so their endorsement of Play politics was not an endorsement of the Play nation or its vast and bloody military gains in recent years.

They promised to build a school system to educate the youth. They stated that because an entire generation (the Deer Walkers) had missed out on education, adults of that generation could also attend school, but they encouraged the Deer Walkers to seek jobs that did not require education. This meant that the Lilypads expected to promote the even younger generation, who called themselves the Slimes (Play Tūuvām) into power before promoting Deer Walkers, and they realized that they were facing a similar situation to what had occurred in their own youth when the first children's parties emerged from a rebellion against the tiny adult male elite. This was also the first time that the Lilypads allowed people of other generations to hold power.

Campfire rule

The fifth Lilypad government was called the Campfires (LPD-5). They pivoted back towards wide-reaching politics instead of focusing on children's issues, saying that the Pineapple government had done many good things but that the children who had grown up as Pineapples had little interest to pursue since they were expected to be focused on the next generation. They stated they would not neglect the new generation, but that they would ensure their family cohesion would keeps generational bonds together.

By this time Moonshine had not only given up hope of reconquering Hōki, but had decided to shut off all refugees and all immigration, saying that refugees only harmed other refugees.

The Clover tribe

At the dawn of the Cosmopolitan Age, many of the Cold soldiers remained in the west and joined a tribe calling itself the Clovers. These people had named themselves after the children who had ruled the Clover kingdom, and some were direct descendants, but these Clovers were a traditional ethnic group ruled by adults and self-sufficient within their small mountain territory.

A small number of Cold Men moved back to the east to live in the wilderness, and soon lost their political identity along with any concept of a unitary nation-state. Thus, they too became a tribe, and over time this tribe became a collection of tribes.