Tamta

Tāmta was a nation founded by the Scorpions and whose population by 4195 consisted mostly of young Cold Men. Both the Scorpions and the Cold Men were child refugees who had fled on their own into Moonshine's pre-existing refugee territory of Hōki.

Background

When the Thunder Empire signed a treaty with the Crystal Empire, together they formed the Lantern Empire. The Thunderers were the weaker of the two powers, and some Thunderers wanted to keep Crystals out of their side of the empire to protect them from being dominated. The state of Hōmoya was one Thunder state that allowed Crystal settlement, however.

When the empire collapsed, the state of Hōmoya became independent and was settled by Moonshine migrants fleeing their own defeat in a related war. Eventually, as Moonshine became a rising power, they incorporated Hōmoya into their empire, renaming it Hōki. It had retained its character, and the Moonshines declared that Hōki would become a safe state for refugees of all wars to flee into. They promised to protect Hōki's sovereignty, but made no promise to station Moonshine soldiers within Hōki; they warned refugees that they therefore could not prevent small-scale conflicts from erupting within Hōki if refugees from both sides of a war fled into Hōki and carried their battles with them.

Lakeside territory

The richest natural environment in Hōki was at the north end, the furthest from any foreign borders, where there was a very large lake, Tulip Lake. Newly arriving refugees here tended to settle in compact neighborhoods, with an entire nationality often confined to just a single street and a few avenues leading away from it. Over time, many of these newly arriving groups expected to marry into other groups and come to identify simply as citizens of Hōki; intermarriage tended to occur mostly among groups that had common cultural ties, even if they had come from opposite sides of a war. By contrast, language and cultural barriers often kept people apart in Hōki even if they had come from politically allied nations.

Scorpion migration

In April 4192, 5,000 Scorpions fled defeat and founded their own colony within Hōki. The Scorpions were mostly children between the ages of 10 and 14 years old, led by just a tiny number of adults, and these adults had delegated much of their power to the young members. There were also a few children even younger than this, most of whom had been abandoned by their parents just a few months earlier.

These Scorpions had recently moved in from a wilderness colony called Tāmta after a small but heavily armed group of adult men calling themselves the Leashes invaded their territory. The Leashes claimed to be friendly, and to share a common enemy with the Scorpions, but the Scorpions had insisted the men not trespass through their territory for two reasons: firstly, the Scorpions were afraid of the heavily armed Leash soldiers. Secondly, they worried that the Leash migration might draw their acknowledged common enemy, the Players, into Tamta since the Players could claim anything they did in Tamta was to protect themselves from the Leashes. The Leashes acknowledged that the children had a valid reason for keeping the Leashes out of their territory. Thus, when the Leash men decided to enter Scorpion territory anyway, the Scorpions realized the Leashes might break their other promises too, and so the children fled westward to seek a safe homeland even further from the battle fronts.

The Scorpions decided that because they had only one home, their new colony in Moonshine's refugee state of Hōki would also be called Tāmta. Young but well-educated, the Scorpions braved a difficult journey in which friendly adults protected them from traffickers, and having arrived, they pushed further into Hōki in order to select the best land. When they finally reached their destination, they set up a democratic government in which the indigenous population was invited to also participate.

The indigenous people also considered themselves refugees, though they were of diverse origins: some had been there for generations, and others had only just recently arrived. Most of these refugees were not interested in politics, as politics had driven them from their original homes. Nonetheless, the sight of an arriving population consisting almost entirely of children did not frighten them so, and so the refugees announced the formation of the Hardwood political party, dedicated to cooperation with the Scorpions, with disputes to be settled through debate rather than violence. The few adults among the Scorpions relinquished nearly all of their remaining powers at this time, leaving the children in control of the Scorpion party. Because the Hardwoods did not allow their own children to vote, the Scorpion/Hardwood party system was largely a generational division, and some Scorpions hoped that the children of the Hardwoods would therefore join the Scorpions as well. Nonetheless, they made little attempt to reach out to them, since they knew that the Hardwoods could simply eject themselves from the democracy if they felt the Scorpions were trying to loosen their family ties.

Early political reforms

Arrival census

The Scorpions had counted their population as 5,383 enrolled members along with 738 children who had joined the journey west, mostly younger ones, who had chosen not to become Scorpions (earlier, the Scorpions had pledged that they would not take care of non-members, but many of these children were orphans so young that the Scorpions softened their pledge). There were only a handful of adult Scorpion members, nearly all men. They were joining a population of about 5,500 refugees, less than 1,000 of whom were enrolled in the Hardwood party, the only other legal party in Tāmta. Thus the Scorpions were about half of the population, and had a median age of 12 years old. They were about 60% boys.

Most of the refugees were not enrolled in any party, were transient, and mostly did not consider themselves citizens of the Scorpions' new nation or of any other nation; they accepted that so long as they chose to continue living in Tāmta, they would need to obey newly passed laws that they could not vote on. The Scorpions estimated that there were 4,000 of these living in Tāmta. Of these about 2,200 were children under age 18 (not 13 as was the usual reckoning age), but most of these people did not have stable employment and only lived in Tāmta because it was by the lake where there was a stable source of food. They were legally homeless because the Hardwoods reserved the structures they had built and maintained for their own kind, and therefore slept outdoors most of the time. But because Tāmta had such a cold climate, they were welcome to sleep in various large, unfurnished Hardwood buildings that protected them from the snow but offered sleepers little comfort.

The Hardwoods had only 422 children living with them, as they had mostly been in Tāmta longer than the others and had slowed down their family formation.

The Scorpions called the unenrolled people Nuŋipe because they went out on the lakeshore and lived mostly on fish.

Demographic concerns

As a refugee territory, the land the Scorpions now called Tāmta had been overcrowded even before the Scorpions had arrived, and they now planned to double the population. The Scorpions realized that most of the population was already homeless and sleeping outdoors most of the time, as the Scorpions had themselves done for most of the past year.

Assembly of parliament

The Scorpions in their tiny nation created a Parliament of 98 representatives, serving alongside a handful of at-large officials, all under the control of two overseers who in turn reported to a single head of state. This surprisingly large government was based on an ideal system the Scorpions had used in school, and also had very short terms; for example, the parliamentarians served only for six months.

The Scorpions awarded extra power to the adult Hardwood voters, saying that since the Scorpions vastly outnumbered the adults it would be unfair to run their elections based on raw vote totals.

Treasury

Within the government, the children created a treasury department, capable of levying taxes on the rest of the population and of certain other duties involving transfer of money.

The parliamentarians made up about 1% of the nation's population (100 out of a bit more than 10,000), and the Hardwoods who held much of the money in their nation made up about 12% of the population.

The tax system was modified to pay for the parliamentarians' salaries; the Scorpions announced that between this and the other new things the Scorpions needed to get around, the Hardwood taxpayers would be paying about 10% more than they had before the Scorpions arrived.

They decided to formalize this as a new 10% monthly tax (not a 10% increase) on the Hardwoods' monthly incomes, saying that most of it would be turned back to the state and therefore that the Hardwoods would not feel the hit so hard. The Scorpions' justification for the sudden change from a 10% increase to a 10% tax was that Hardwood society was so close-knit that they were in effect paying a 100% tax each month, with all Hardwood families being equally the payors and the recipients.

The Scorpions said that they would never need help with basic necessities of food, shelter, and clothing, but that because the new government offices required some of the Scorpions to devote their time to other things, these people really would need help with meeting basic needs, so their salaries would be higher than their occupation would otherwise merit.

The Scorpions then exempted themselves from the taxes, saying that they would re-distribute money among party members. Thus the new tax applied only to the Hardwoods. Since the Scorpions had not integrated fully into the cash economy, this changed little. The Scorpions also exempted the 4,000 non-Hardwood adults from the taxes, saying they were not physically capable of extracting payment from these people. Thus the Scorpions told the Hardwood minority that it would be their job alone to shoulder the tax burden for their new nation.

Plans for the future

As a majority, the Scorpions knew that they could not rely on the work of the small Hardwood minority and would need to do some work of their own, too. Yet they claimed that they were accustomed to a much lower standard of living than the Hardwoods, even though the Hardwoods were descended from refugees, and therefore that they would be able to live comfortably even if they were able to draw only a small amount of money from the Hardwoods' taxes.

Even so, the Scorpions planned to put some money aside to allow a few Scorpions to live without working in the wider economy. These children would then have the job of finding ways to extract more money from the Hardwoods and, if possible, also from the transient adults whom the Scorpions were not yet confident enough to confront. Thus the Hardwoods would be paying the Scorpions to take money from the Hardwoods.

Further changes to taxation system

The Scorpions soon interpreted their new 10% income tax as a wealth tax, saying that because the Hardwoods shared their belongings, all income was wealth and all wealth was income. Running the numbers, the Scorpions announced that they would therefore be transferring 70% of the Hardwoods' property to the Scorpions within the first year of their power. They gave the Hardwoods three semesters (18 months) to complete the full transfer of all property to the Scorpion treasurers, and the Scorpions promised that once they owned all of the property in the refugee colony they would open it up for communal use.

The Hardwoods realized that the Scorpions had never had a proper education in the field of economics because their parents' parties, chiefly the Cold Men, had always left the job of running the economy up to a small group of trained professionals rather than the entire population.

First elections in Tāmta

The Scorpions consolidated Tāmta into a single district, meaning that all elections were nationwide. Because the Scorpions were a majority and expected almost none of their members to vote for an opposition candidate, the Scorpion candidates would win every single election under the traditional direct-vote system that they had inherited from their fathers. Knowing that the opposition would see this as proof that Tāmta was not a true democracy, the Scorpions promised proportional representation, meaning that the most popular Hardwood candidates would defeat the least popular Scorpion candidates even if these Scorpion candidates received more votes.

The Scorpions said that the Hardwood candidates would win offices in proportion to the total Hardwood vote share, not the population share, meaning that if the Hardwoods showed little interest in the elections, they would not win any posts even with the amplification system.

There were no separate parliamentary elections. The officers of the executive branch were all to be enrolled in Parliament as well, serving on parliamentary committees related to their executive branch positions.

Term lengths

Each election was for a six-month term, which they called a semester. The Scorpions were accustomed to short terms from their school system, where students were expected to rapidly advance and trade places, and therefore did not realize their term length was considered extremely short by the adult populations around them. The Scorpion leaders nonetheless believed that very short terms like this were ideal, as young children might change their interests as they grew and learned more about each position in their government.

Opponents react

The Scorpions were dismayed to realize that the Hardwood refugees were largely uninterested in their new plan, even with the concession they had made to amplify the votes of the adults to ensure some non-Scorpion victories. Many refugees stated that they did not need a new layer of government and would not respect their officials. Some said that they would not vote because they felt the new government offices were so frivolous that it would be a waste of time for any adult to accept such a post. The children realized that they might have to prop up their opponents just to get them interested in the new system, since if they had nobody to run against, they could not claim to have won a meaningful victory.

The Scorpion adult leaders told the children that the Hardwoods would start taking the children seriously only when the children won their elections and began enforcing their new laws, and stated that they might need to schedule a second election very soon after the first, once the people of Tāmta realized how the voting system worked.

Impossible victories

Although some Hardwoods did sign up for the various electable posts, the children were mostly running unopposed, and soon realized that the few Hardwood candidates might automatically win due to the proportional representation promise, meaning that the Scorpion candidates running against adults would have no chance of victory even if they won an overwhelmingly greater vote total. Thus, the Hardwoods could simply pick which offices they wanted and tell the Scorpion candidates to get by with what was left. This meant that there was no point in any candidates campaigning, as the results of each election would be chosen by the Hardwood candidates from the beginning.

The Scorpions were frustrated as they realized that the Hardwoods had not outsmarted them; it was their very lack of interest in democracy that assured the Hardwood candidates of victory. The Scorpions realized that backing down on their promise would ruin their authority, and so they did their best to find candidates to fill the list, even realizing the awkwardness of begging their opponents to run against them. The Scorpions also could not join the Hardwood party to run decoy campaigns because they were too young.

Hardwood nomination process

Once the Hardwoods realized that they would be automatically guaranteed victories so long as they held themselves to seeking a small number of positions, they began their internal party nomination process so that each candidate would accept that the office they were assigned was chosen fairly and not by an unaccountable authority. They did not know the exact number of offices they would win because they could not foresee how many Hardwood citizens would turn out to vote, but they estimated that their voter turnout would be considerably lower than their share of the enrolled vote-eligible population, which was about one seventh, and so they decided to nominate only ten candidates to run against the 100 Scorpion children. Even though the Hardwoods could have nominated twenty or thirty or even a hundred candidates of their own, and still been guaranteed the same number of wins, they decided internally that they wanted to ensure every single Hardwood candidate won their election. This was largely out of the desire to avoid the humiliation of losing an election against a very young candidate, but another motivating factor was the overall lack of enthusiasm among the Hardwoods, and the realization that if they fielded too many candidates, there was a good chance that the ones who won would be those who were the least interested in cooperating with the Scorpions, and that those few Hardwoods who actually believed in the new government would be deprived of their opportunity to make it work.

Two of the 100 positions open for election were more powerful than the rest, because the government was divided into fourteen committees of seven members each, plus two overseers. These overseers had overlapping powers, and were equal, and reported to the president rather than to each other. The Hardwoods, knowing that they could automatically win simply by running for these positions, were eager to do so, but decided internally that it was an unwise idea, as they would be forced to obey a young president who almost certainly would not want them there, and also face opposition from the angry children they were tasked with overseeing. Moreover, the two overseer positions only had single votes in Parliament, and had no special powers there. Therefore the Hardwoods forbade their members to run for the overseer positions, and instead chose ten positions in the lower-level committees.

The Hardwoods waited for the Scorpions to nominate their candidates, and then chose which ones they would knock off. The Hardwoods knew that they would automatically win because of the proportional representation system both parties had earlier agreed to. The children whom had been selected by the Hardwoods understood that they had no chance of victory, and most refused to run any sort of campaign, instead spending their time arguing that the system should be overturned.

Outcome of first elections

August 1, 4192

The elections played out as predicted, with adult Hardwood candidates pushing aside children who had obtained far higher vote totals; one boy was forced to concede defeat to a man whom he had beaten in votes by a ratio of more than 6 to 1. This candidate's low vote total was because even the Hardwoods showed little interest in him, but because the proportional representation system appointed candidates according to the total Hardwood vote share, the individual candidates' totals were irrelevant and he could have won the election with just a single vote. Even some Hardwoods agreed that the system was too generous to them.

President

The presidential election was handled differently. The Scorpions nominated several candidates, while the Hardwoods nominated only one; nevertheless, the Scorpions were assured of victory because the system they used, as inherited from their forebearers, first tallied the total number of votes for each party, then eliminated the losing parties, and then appointed the winner of the most votes in the one remaining party as the new president. The Hardwood candidate knew this and did not expect to win.

The Scorpions thus appointed a boy named the Knife (Play Mapaāpi, Late Andanese Kuuhupiku) as their new president.

Protests begin

Realizing that their democracy was deeply flawed, the losing Scorpion candidates staged a protest outside the Parliament building, intending to stop the Hardwoods, and perhaps the Scorpions, from taking their seats in Parliament. The Hardwoods knew that they could simply force their way through the crowd of children, but also understood that they would greatly improve their social status if they chose instead to address the children on their own level instead of pushing through a crowd that could not push them back. The Hardwoods therefore stood in place, accepting for the moment that they were not allowed to enter the Parliament building. They believed that the other Scorpions did not support the protestors and would soon beckon the Hardwoods to enter the Parliament and humiliate the protestors, but this did not immediately happen. In the meantime, they addressed the protestors calmly and concisely.

The Hardwoods told the protestors that what they were asking for was a one-party state run entirely by the Scorpions, in which even the worst-performing Scorpion candidates would still win their elections, and that such a system was not at all what the Scorpion party as a whole had wanted to create. However, the Hardwoods knew that one reason why the Scorpions were trying to attract Hardwoods into Parliament was that they feared a violent civil war would erupt if the Hardwoods were denied a share of political power, and that the Scorpions probably secretly would prefer a one-party state.

Proposal for reform

As the other Scorpions gathered around the protestors, the protestors turned their attention from the Hardwoods to the Scorpions. They then demanded a new election, to be run with an amended system in which any Scorpions running unopposed would be able to appoint any citizen of Tāmta to run as an opponent, enrolled in the Hardwood party even if the Hardwoods would not accept such a candidate as one of their own. These candidates would therefore count as Hardwoods and would take away some of the seats assigned to the adults through proportionate representation.

The protestors said that if the Hardwoods would not agree to this, they would create a third party and a fourth party and however many more it took to drown out the Hardwood minority to such an extent that even with guaranteed proportional representation they would struggle to win elections against the young candidates in the decoy parties.

Electoral reform bill

On their first day in Parliament, the Scorpions argued for hours about not just the protestors' demands, but other complaints that had arisen among their members in the weeks leading up to the election.

Four-party system

First, they announced the creation of two new political parties: the Beetles (Vuvama) and the Top Riders (Vavāa). The Scorpion and Hardwood parties were to continue on as they had been.

Beetles

The Beetles (Play Vuvama) were to be a satellite party of the Scorpions, ideologically bound to agree with the Scorpions on all political points. They would run for elections in which a Hardwood candidate was also running. This was essentially what the protestors outside the building had demanded.

The Scorpions set the Beetle population equal to the Hardwoods', meaning that they would be granted proportional representation as well, but the Scorpions now said that the proportional representation quota would not be on a per-party basis, but by the division of the total population between the Scorpions as majority party, granted the seats their population share demanded, versus all of the minority parties counted together as one. Therefore, the number of non-Scorpion winning candidates was guaranteed to double from 10 to 20, since there were now twice as many non-Scorpions in the voting population. (They did not take a new census, assuming that even if new people had come and gone in just a few months, neither side would complain if they were slightly undercounted.)

The Scorpions stated that their new reform would potentially allow the Hardwoods to double their representation in Parliament even though their population had not changed, but that to do so, they would need to defeat each of the Beetle candidates who would be running against them. For each election that they lost, a Beetle candidate would accede to Parliament, and if the Hardwoods lost every single election, their proportional representation promise would no longer grant them any seats at all. The Scorpions claimed that this system was more than fair, and that the Hardwoods should not complain if they were defeated in the next elections.

Top Riders

Furthermore, the Scorpions created a new party called the Top Riders, ideologically untethered to the Scorpions. A Top Rider candidate would be required to run in every election, even if there was no Hardwood candidate running, in order to prove to the Hardwoods (and some skeptical Scorpions) that the Scorpions were not fielding poor candidates and then winning merely by default.

The Top Riders were outside the proportional representation system. The Scorpions said that the Top Riders would collect all the missed votes from the total voting population of the other parties; that is, any citizen who chose not to vote for a particular office would have their vote automatically assigned to the Top Rider candidate for that seat. If a citizen chose not to vote at all, they would be counted as having voted for the Riders on all seats up for election.

The Top Riders had no formal party structure or membership rolls, and the Scorpions admitted that they would be appointing the Top Rider candidates as well, but stated that they would choose dissenters among the Scorpions, people who had proven that they opposed the Scorpions and Hardwoods equally and were not merely decoy candidates intended to take away votes from the Hardwoods without affecting the Scorpions or Beetles.

Gender split

Even before the elections, the Scorpions had noticed that most of the candidates they were fielding were boys. Their population had a slight male surplus, but the candidates who had won the Scorpions' internal elections were overwhelmingly male, and the Scorpions, including boys, worried that their slight male majority was tipping the scales in the internal elections by pushing male candidates forward, even if they won the internal elections by just slight majorities, and depriving girls of their opportunity to serve in the government.

They had considered proportional representation for girls, and even splitting the Scorpions into Boy and Girl parties, but after hours of debate, the Scorpions came up with a different solution, one that at first seemed unlikely to solve the problem.

The new system would allow the party-internal nomination process to take place, except that the nomination would always produce two candidates for each seat: a boy and a girl. On the day of the final election, the boy and girl would be running against each other instead of just having one candidate win by default. Since all the seats were now contested by at least a Rider candidate along with possibly a Hardwood candidate, the Scorpions said that whichever of their two candidates got the most votes would then surrender their vote total to the other, just as in the presidential election system where four Scorpion kids had pooled their votes against the one Hardwood adult.

Because all elections would now be competitive up until the last day, and because the boy and girl candidates would be expected to mostly campaign against each other instead of against the other parties' candidates, the Scorpions said that the best candidates would win. If they still saw an overwhelming male majority in Parliament, they promised to again take up the possibility of proportional representation based on gender.

This gender split also applied to the new Beetle party, since the Beetles were ideologically bound to the Scorpions. Therefore, every seat would have a minimum of three candidates running for it, and if a Hardwood candidate joined the race, there would be a minimum of four (the Scorpions planned to field candidates for these seats as well, but would run quiet campaigns so that the Beetles would be assured the maximum vote share).

Schedule

The Scorpions told the protestors that they had been given all that they had asked for and more, but that it would be unwise to hold new elections immediately, as the winning candidates had won legitimately under the system they had been told to run for, including the Hardwoods. They therefore scheduled new elections for three months out, and stated that the new elections would be only for the seats that had been contested in the previous election, so that the uncontested winners would not need to run again to keep their seats. The other seats would continue with their normal six-month terms.

Hardwood reaction

The Scorpions passed their new reforms over the objections of the vastly outnumbered Hardwoods. Some Hardwood representatives lost their patience at being repeatedly outvoted, and one man told the Scorpions to drop the pretense and simply turn Tāmta into a one-party state run by the Scorpions with no rights for minority parties. But most of the Hardwoods who had won seats in Parliament were unusual among their kind in that they appreciated what little the Scorpions had given them, saying it was more than they deserved, and that they preferred to compete politically against the Scorpions rather than bringing their fights to the battlefield. Thus the Hardwoods accepted the reforms peacefully even as they suspected they would lose almost all of their seats to the next crop of children in the Beetle party.

The Hardwoods also realized that they no longer had any incentive to restrict themselves to just a few offices, since they could no longer be guaranteed of any victories in the campaigns they did run. This meant that they would need to recruit more candidates to run in the next election. This would in turn trigger Beetle candidates to also run, which they felt might frustrate the Scorpions.

The Hardwoods in Parliament knew, however, that their party membership was largely reluctant to even vote in the elections, much less run for office, and that the next crop of Hardwood candidates might be of poor quality.

First days in Parliament

The 100 new parliamentarians, fourteen committees of seven each plus two overseers, were paid by a 10% monthly wealth tax on the Hardwoods. Thus they were better off than most people in Tāmta.

Although many Hardwoods supported this system, saying that the young children were legitimately better educated about politics and therefore fit for the tax-supported government jobs they had assigned themselves, other Hardwoods complained that the new jobs had never been needed before and therefore still were not needed, and that the children had most likely created positions that they had remembered learning about in school when they were even younger, rather than positions that they themselves had needed when they were living independently. This would mean that the Scorpions would perform no important work in their new jobs and would not know how to perform the jobs adequately even if they were made to. Thus, the complainers stated, the 100 new Scorpion parliamentarians were being paid 10% of Tāmta's entire budget to do nothing, and yet, because they were in Parliament, the common people could do nothing to stop these payments, and the Scorpions could dispurse them however they wished, or even raise the taxes even higher to support the rest of the Scorpions.

Hardwood plans for the future

The winning Hardwood candidates realized they most likely had but three months to enjoy their power, as they would be then forced to run for re-election against five children — two Beetles, two Scorpions, and a Top Rider — in a nation whose population consisted primarily of children. Because of the new reforms, the Hardwood candidate would need to defeat the children not just on an individual level but also on a party level, since the two Beetle and two Scorpion candidates were running against each other within each party but would have their votes combined in the end.

In the meantime, they realized they were among the luckiest people in their nation, as they were paid handsomely by the government and yet had very little work to do. They had worried that the young Scorpions would struggle with basic tasks and require the Hardwoods to do both their jobs and the Scorpions', but the Hardwoods were happy to realize that the Scorpions were as well-educated as they had always claimed, and only required help from the Hardwoods for a few very basic tasks such as translating between Play and Leaper, which had nothing to do with age or experience. The Hardwoods thus hoped that even if they lost their re-election bids and came to live in an effectively one-party state (since the Beetles were ideologically bound to the Scorpions), they could acquire well-paid jobs as translators and continue making money from the taxpayers of Tāmta.

Some Hardwoods decided that the best way to stay in power would be to do their jobs as honestly and efficiently as possible, proving their claim that they were in the right place, and then ask the young children to re-elect them instead of voting for one of the five child candidates. Most Hardwoods believed that they would still lose, but then planned to run for election again six months later, saying that they had done a better job at their post during the first three months than the children had done over the succeeding six months.

Views from the wider population

The Hardwoods soon realized that their best friends, apart from each other, were the children serving alongside them in the government, as the general Hardwood populace believed that the new government was a sham, and that any adults who agreed to obey children must have impure motives. Some said that the Hardwood officials were both lazy and corrupt, but that simply because they were adults they would perform their jobs better than the hard-working children struggling to get from place to place, and that because the children were naive, they would not realize this and would think that the Hardwoods were in fact excellent officials. Others said that both parties were about equally harmful, and that the children in the Scorpion party had just now reached the age where they, too, were capable of corrupt behavior.

Since the Hardwoods were being paid well and doing very little work, the general population was now not only disdainful but also jealous of them, and so the Hardwoods got little respect from the rest of their population. The Hardwoods knew that they could never join the children's parties, and knew that they were in danger of losing their own population's votes, and so they considered the possibility of a Top Rider victory for at least some seats, figuring that few Hardwoods would vote in the next election, but that if the Hardwoods in office performed well, the children might split their votes as well.

The children in Parliament had similar jobs, and therefore were also paid handsomely. They worked harder than the Hardwoods only because the jobs were more difficult for them due to their lack of experience and knowledge, even though they were very well educated for their age. To some extent, they were also obstructed in their work by the adult population's strident refusal to acknowledge that the new child-led government had legitimate authority, but these same people now also rejected the Hardwood officials. This drew the children and the Hardwoods closer together, and the Hardwoods again hoped for some way to break out of the system and remain in power.

Treaty with Players

The Scorpions then passed a symbolic treaty declaring the nation of Tāmta to be an exclave of the Play state of Tanaanu, located more than a thousand miles away. The Scorpions understood that the Players, including those living in Tanaanu, wanted nothing to do with Scorpion politics, and that if the Scorpions ever sought refuge in Tanaanu they would certainly be imprisoned if not killed. But Tanaanu had been known for rebellious politics in the past, and the Scorpions admired their willingness to stand up against the Players, who even at that time were overwhelmingly more powerful.

School system

The Scorpions then created a school system financed by the government, the only tax-supported education system in any of the children's nations. There were no adults in the school, neither as teachers nor as students, and therefore the Hardwoods could not attend. The Hardwoods had their own informal schools, but they did not have government funds because they had never seen this as within the scope of the government when they were on their own. Thus the Hardwoods had to pay for the Scorpions' schools but could not send their own children there. The Scorpions still considered themselves a closed-entry party and so the Hardwoods' children could not switch parties either.

Structure

The Scorpion adults were too busy running the party machine to take teaching positions, so the children taught each other and rotated the teaching role from one student to another depending on who among each class had the best knowledge of whichever subject was in the curriculum that day. The students who were serving in Parliament did not attend school either.

Hardwood party reform and new election cycle

Until this point, the Hardwood party had had no internal structure, as they had not needed one (or indeed needed a party at all) until the Scorpions came to rule over them. The Hardwoods now decided amongst themselves to create a formal internal party structure, whose elections would be synchronized with those of Tāmta. Hardwood internal party leaders need not be those serving in the Parliament, but they did allow persons to hold both offices simultaneously, as holding two offices simultaneously had been permissible in many governments of their shared cultures for a long time.

Since the Hardwood party existed for the benefit of the Scorpions, the Hardwoods allowed the Scorpions to vote in the internal Hardwood party elections. Thus the Hardwoods became the only party in the known world, apart from some slave parties, in which non-members could choose who would lead the members. But they said that the Scorpions' votes would count much less than the Hardwoods' own votes, suggesting a 10:1 ratio. This meant that the Hardwoods could outweigh the Scorpions' votes, but only if enough Hardwoods cared enough about the election to show up to vote. Since the Hardwoods in general still lacked enthusiasm for politics, the Hardwood leaders figured this was fair: if a candidate could not drum up enough support among their own population to gain a significant vote total, they deserved to have their leaders picked by children.

Results

Since these new elections were less important than the ones for the nation of Tāmta as a whole, the Hardwoods suggested that they be held less frequently, but the Scorpion-led parliament insisted that they be held at the same time and every time as the national elections. The Scorpions also voted themselves a 1/6 voting weight in the Hardwoods' elections, rather than 1/10 as the Hardwoods had proposed. At this time, only 379 adult citizens of Tāmta were enrolled in the Hardwood party, meaning that the Scorpions could pick every single position in the Hardwood party if they chose to do so, and even if every single Hardwood member showed up to vote, they would not outweigh the Scorpions.

The Hardwoods accepted this, but reminded the Scorpions that the Hardwoods still had some strong counterweights. There were other adults in the area who were still disinterested in politics and had not enrolled in any party (separate from the Hardwoods who had agreed to join but were mostly not voting), and more refugees could arrive from areas outside Tāmta. The Hardwoods also had their own child population, though much smaller than the Scorpions, which would be enrolling as they became adults. The Hardwoods also said that they might allow children to vote in the Hardwood party internal elections but not in Tāmta's.

They also reminded the Scorpions that even if they lost to the Scorpions on all of these points, they could simply revoke their original agreement to let the Scorpions vote in the Hardwood internal elections. The entire Hardwood party apparatus had been intended for the Scorpions' convenience and could be withdrawn at any time, and the Hardwoods could secede from their own party and form another if they felt that the Scorpions were gaining too much power.

Effects of new party system

Thus, the Scorpion party had split into three: the Scorpions, the Beetles, and the Top Riders (Vasuāvi). The intent of this was to make the parties more equal in size so that the amplified voting power given to the Hardwoods would no longer lead to such unfair results. Also, the Scorpions and Beetles had agreed to run two candidates for each post, always a boy and a girl, to see if their own voting population was being affected by an inherited cultural preference for male leaders. This meant that the Hardwood candidates were sometimes sharing a debate stage with five children whom they perceived as being far more closely tied to each other than any of them was to the Hardwood candidate. Some Hardwoods decided that the new political system was a parody and lost interest, but those who remained were the ones who took the system seriously, and the children's political parties respected and trusted the Hardwoods who continued to run against them.

November 4192 election

As the Play army slaughtered Lilypad children all over the countryside, the Scorpions reaffirmed their neutrality, and also stated that they considered themselves to be a rebellious faction within the Play nation, and not part of the Lilypad nation at all. Yet the Scorpions knew that the Play army was large enough that they could conceivably invade Moonshine's refugee state of Hōki, perhaps under the pretext that the supposedly pacifist Moonshines were harboring a political group who had openly declared their desire for war, and then launch a pointed attack against the Scorpions while sparing all of the other refugee groups.

By November, new elections were due in Tāmta, for the ten seats in Parliament that the Hardwoods had won. These candidates (eight men and two women) were each expected to stand for re-election against five children seeking the same office. These positions were intended for handling domestic issues such as taxation, but by this time, both the children and the adults were focused on the ongoing war to their south, and both parties agreed to put aside their differences on domestic issues to focus on the threat against their shared homeland.

Some people, especially among the Hardwoods, wanted to find any means possible to rescue Lilypad children before the Players could take full control. Many Hardwood men expressed interest in taking on the Players in direct combat, but others felt it would be futile to do so, as the Hardwoods did not have competent weaponry and the Players were far more numerous; most estimates put the Play army's total manpower at about a hundred times that of the Hardwoods; that is, roughly 100,000 to 1,000. There were actually less than 1,000 enrolled Hardwood men, but the Hardwood leaders attributed this to lack of interest in politics among the locals, some of whom had continued to live side by side with the enrolled Hardwoods, and therefore stated that their party's size was being underestimated. Nonetheless they knew they were greatly outnumbered and felt it would be best to join rescue missions instead. Some Scorpions were interested in these missions as well, but the Scorpion party determined its foreign relations by voting in party-internal elections, and therefore the election in Tāmta could not determine a new Scorpion foreign policy or start rescue missions.

Campaign begins

Thus, differences of opinion appeared, and as the Hardwood candidates realized that they were likely to lose their elections, they worried that the Scorpions might then order them to take to the front lines, as some Hardwoods had already committed to doing. Here, without adequate weapons, they would be doomed to die immediately on encountering the Play army without accomplishing their mission. Thus, the Hardwood candidates pushed ahead with their campaigns despite the shift in attention towards foreign policy.

Four-party debates

The four parties agreed to hold debates on current issues, and to take questions from the audience. Since there were ten offices up for election, there would be ten debates. Anyone was allowed to take time off from their duties to attend the debates, which were scheduled two weeks before the election, with five each day. But the candidates all agreed to set their expectations low and to expect only a hundred or perhaps even a few dozen citizens to show up to each debate, as anything much more would reduce the nation of Tāmta to a political machine with no economy whose only activity was electing its officials. The candidates left open the possibility of further debates in the last days before the election.

Speakers on stage

October 17, 4192

The candidates agreed to stand on a stage in the order of party formation, meaning that the two Scorpion candidates (a boy and a girl) would stand beside each other in either order, then the Hardwood candidate would stand to their right, and then the two Beetle candidates would stand further right, and lastly the Top Rider candidate would stand at the rightmost edge of the stage.

All four parties had agreed to this, as they all saw advantages in it. Since the speaking order was from left to right, the Scorpions felt that being first to speak would help them control the narrative on each question; the Hardwoods felt that standing near the center of the stage would draw attention to them and disrupt any attempts by the children to form a single group with identical opinions; the Beetles felt that speaking after the Hardwoods would help them get the better of the Hardwoods on each question; and the Top Rider candidates felt that going last would help them portray themselves as the better alternative to all of the others.

Additionally, they all agreed that the ordering would help the audience identify who belonged to each party. Because the Scorpions and Beetles were separated from each other by the visually distinct adult Hardwood candidate, they would not be mistaken for each other. Since everyone knew that the Scorpions were the original party, they knew to look for them on the left. Lastly, the Top Rider candidate would be on the end without a partner, as the Top Riders chose not to come to each election with a boy and a girl candidate.

Hardwoods prepare

In all ten of these elections, an adult Hardwood incumbent was facing a challenge from five children in the other three parties. Moreover the Hardwoods expected the audience at each debate to consist almost entirely of children, as the adult minority had by this time made it clear that they would either vote for a Hardwood candidate or not vote at all; most Hardwoods considered the idea of a nation run by children to be a sham, and for adults to participate in it to be even worse. Thus the Hardwoods could not count on their own people to vote for them, and had to win over the votes of the children in an election where all five of the competing candidates were children.

The Hardwoods knew that they faced a difficult challenge, but that if they were to skip the debate, they would be effectively forfeiting their election. They hoped, in fact, that it would be the other parties who would skip the debates and show themselves to be less interested in the welfare of Tāmta than the competing Hardwood candidates. They took heart in knowing that the children's parties had each separately agreed to the order of the candidates on the stage, meaning that the Hardwood candidate in each debate would be near the center. This meant that even if the children in the audience wanted to listen to only the younger candidates, they would need to walk past the Hardwood candidate even so, and would never be far away. Standing in the middle position also split the younger candidates into two groups so that they could not easily coalesce with each other and act as an anti-Hardwood bloc.

First day of debates

The five sets of candidates all gathered at the debate stage on the first day, as they all intended to watch the other candidates as well. The Hardwoods were surprised to find that a large number of Hardwood citizens had chosen to attend after all, and although there were still more children than adults in the audience, the Hardwoods realized that the adults would probably be the ones asking most of the questions and that those questions would be most likely intended to embarrass the Hardwood candidates.

The Hardwoods mentioned the ongoing Play-Lilypad war to test the children's opinions on what to do. The Hardwoods soon realized that the children were in denial, and had lost their sympathy for the Lilypads because to express sympathy would be to acknowledge that the war was real. This was an example of the Play concept of pitīpap kapuutu, the sympathy umbrella, where people who show sympathy for those in great pain show no sympathy for those in even greater pain because to acknowledge that such suffering can exist makes the sympathizer uncomfortable. This was an emotional reaction, not a logical one, and thus was separate from the Crystals' various statements of refusal of help to Crystals who were trapped in supposedly unwinnable wars (e.g. the Eggs who were invaded by men calling themselves Firestones).

The Hardwoods realized that the Scorpions had already stated at their founding meeting that they were neutral in the war and would not show sympathy for the weaker side purely because they were suffering more. Moreover, the Scorpion party constitution implied that boys and men both made good soldiers, implying that they did not see, or refused to admit, that any war in which adult male soldiers fought children would be grossly unfair to the children. But many Hardwoods believed that they could force the Scorpions' true emotions to the surface if they were gentle and subtle.

Final days of campaign

Orphans

In the final weeks of the campaign, diplomats from Moonshine expressed interest in adopting all of STW's remaining orphans without expecting compensation from STW. Most of these were children much younger than the Scorpions and other groups in Tāmta, with a great many of them being six years old. STW had been trying to find adoptive homes for them in Baeba Swamp, and stated that they would pay the adopting families, but that this money would be taken from the money that the Slimes owed STW for helping them find a home in Baeba in the first place. The Slimes denied the validity of this debt claim, saying that they owed nothing because STW's only wealth was that which had been taken from the forerunners of the Slimes. Therefore, any Slime family who adopted an orphan from STW was betraying the Slime party platform.

These orphans were now being called the Grass Walkers because many were barefoot, but they had not chosen that name and the Scorpions did not use that name either. The Scorpions called them instead paipa natuam, a term usually reserved for adolescents, implying that their hardships had so accelerated their childhood that they were grown adults as much as anyone else in Tāmta.

Moonshine's plan to adopt the orphans would take them through the refugee territory of Hōki where the Scorpions and Hardwoods lived. This was both because they felt the direct route over the ocean would be too dangerous for the children, and because a maritime journey would have only one endpoint, whereas a journey over land could see the children adopted into many different families along the way. But Moonshine worried that the Scorpions would be interested in adopting the children into Tāmta instead, as they knew that the Scorpions had a strong male surplus and that many of them would not be able to marry and raise children of their own.

Results of election

Although the ten seats up for election were those that had previously been allotted to the Hardwoods on the basis of proportional representation, the earlier children's protest had led to a compromise in which the repeat elections would be open-access, meaning that the Hardwoods were running against a slate of five children belonging to three parties, and the entire voting-eligible citizen population would be allowed to vote. Because 90% of the voting population consisted of children, the Hardwoods expected to lose all ten seats, and planned to stage a protest outside the Parliament building in which they would present the children with a list of demands, just like the protest that had taken place three months earlier. Some Hardwoods wanted to physically prevent the winning children from taking their seats, precisely because they knew the unfair physical manipulation tactic would send the children into a tantrum, perhaps even into tears, which would humiliate them so much that they might flee from the Parliament building and concede defeat.

Unexpectedly, however, two of the Hardwood candidates defeated all of the children running against them for their respective seats. They realized that to achieve victory in such a scenario, they must have gotten more votes from children than from adults, and therefore that perhaps their democracy was not such a sham after all. The two winning candidates, a man and a woman, belonged to separate committees and knew that they would rarely see each other as they served out their terms, but both said that they were honored to serve their nation and would not expect any special attention from being the only two adults among the 98 children in Parliament.

The Scorpions assigned the two highest-scoring children that had been defeated to comparable positions in the Scorpion party so that their talents would not be wasted. They pledged that from then on, all of their candidates would automatically win some position in every election, and moreover that even the losing candidates within their umbrella party (the Beetles and others) would get accessory positions where they would help the main losing candidate in their position despite belonging to a different political party.

Foreign policy platform

Many voters had expected the winning candidates to be those who had expressed vocally their support for action against the Players. Nonetheless, the eight children who defeated the sitting adult candidates were those who chose to maintain the promise of neutrality even as evidence mounted for ever greater abuses being committed by the Players against the Lilypads. Many Hardwoods returned to political apathy after this election, saying that they had been better off before the Scorpions arrived but still respected their status as legitimate refugees. Meanwhile, those Hardwoods who insisted that the new democracy was a success began to speak of themselves as sumaamna, literally meaning bodyguards but also used to indicate adults who play children's games sincerely and with no handicaps. These people believed that they would survive in the Scorpion-dominated government long enough to take part in whatever government replaced it in the future, should the Scorpion party collapse as so many other recently founded parties had.

Contact with the Players

By this time, the Players had endorsed intimidation as their primary diplomatic strategy, proudly announcing that they had watched the Raspara slaughter a thousand young Lilypad children while the Lilypads were rescuing the Raspara's child slaves, only to ride into the campsite after the fighting was over and put both the Lilypads and the rescued slaves back into slavery on the same labor camps. They also declared that the Lilypads' rescue mission was a war crime, because it had led to many deaths, and that the Lilypad rescuers deserved not praise but punishment. The Players promised that they would make the Lilypads' lives even more painful than they already were, allowing the Play commanders free rein to use cruel tactics against the children that the Play army would never use against adult soldiers.

The Players assigned the task of diplomacy with children to their military, meaning that unlike all other diplomatic meetings, the children would be meeting with Play military generals instead of traditional diplomats, and the Play military's only goal was to win more territory for the Players. The traditional Play diplomats had always been women and had strongly believed that they could make peace with their enemies by appealing to common interests. The Players stated that the children had proven that they did not deserve to be treated with fairness, and that with any territory the Players took from the children's nations, however much blood was shed was irrelevant because the Players were taking control for the interests of the greater good.

The Players also announced a new war against the Scorpion children who had just signed a treaty of submission to the Players, where the children declared the new Scorpion territory of Tāmta to be within the Play nation, as part of the Play district of Tanaanu. The Scorpions had earlier considered themselves neutral and had so far responded to all military threats by fleeing ever further from their enemies. They had recently decided to take a side, saying that they actually considered themselves to be part of the Play nation. The Players responded to this treaty of friendship by adding the Scorpions to the list of nations that the Players would soon conquer and stand on. The Players promised that this new war applied only to Scorpions living outside the refugee territory, because the Players still respected Moonshine's territorial integrity, meaning that they would not be actually invading Tāmta, but warned that the Players would soon be massing soldiers on the borders of this territory, and because the refugee territory could not survive without trade, the Players would soon wield control over even the refugees.

Outside reviews

To some outside diplomats, the lack of sympathy proved the children's claims: if the children were exaggerating, they would have at least one ally on their side looking to gain political capital from the children's accusations against the various adult powers around them, while knowing they would face no serious military resistance. But precisely because they were telling the truth, no allies had anything to gain by siding with them, and therefore they tried to deny the children's claims in order to escape responsibility for help.

Summer elections in Tāmta

By February 4193, the peak of summer on the common shared calendar, new elections for the entire Parliament were due in Tāmta, and this time the Hardwoods decided to field candidates for all 100 positions, including the two overseers. They still expected that they would lose most of their campaigns, but were encouraged by the fact that they had previously defeated children in a children's nation without cheating and without resorting to loopholes in the election laws.

Nonetheless, the children in the Scorpion-Beetle coalition were increasingly taking it for granted that they were smarter than the adults in the Hardwood party, and perhaps smarter than other groups of adults as well, but not smarter than the adults who still held a few reins of power in the Scorpion party.

The Hardwoods were of mixed backgrounds, and some were well-educated, but they had not grown up in a heavily political society. By now, the Hardwoods had conceded that the children were very smart and were not simply cheating their way into victory. But the Hardwoods who took the political system seriously held to the belief that if they obeyed the laws of their nation, they would be accepted as ordinary citizens eventually. Two men named Yàmu-Xʷētagʷa and Gaḳadànu ran for the two overseer positions. They also fielded a candidate for president but considered this race to be futile.

The Hardwood party announced that they preferred not to have their candidates stand on the debate stage in the middle of the row of child candidates, as they felt it embarrassing and awkward. They did not specifically forbid their candidates from doing so, but suggested that they could better reach their audience if they held separate events in which the candidates of the other parties would field questions to the Hardwood candidate, so he could address them all at once rather than pretending to be one of them.

Hardwood reform proposal

Now some Hardwoods proposed having two nations in one place, as was the case further west in Erala. The Hardwoods would revert to their own self-government where they did very little, and the children's parties could have all the government officials they wanted without adult interference. The two governments would meet up in binational diplomatic committees so that they would not be at cross purposes. This meant that there would be Hardwood officials after all. The Scorpions considered this idea, but felt that it would weaken their power overall, since the Hardwoods might claim that their smaller population size no longer mattered, as they were a fully independent nation.

As a compromise, the Scorpions agreed to set up two parallel governments: they would retain their existing Tāmta government with the Hardwoods, and the Hardwoods would also be allowed a nation of their own in the same place, whose laws and taxes would apply only to the Hardwoods (unless they were able to pull in more citizens from outside), with minimal Scorpion oversight only to ensure safety. Then, the Hardwoods would be required to participate only minimally in the Tāmta government instead of running candidates against the children's parties for every open position. This system, though complex, had precedent in that some parties such as the Soap Bubbles had traditionally governed themselves through their party, obeying party laws and courts in addition to those of the nation they lived in.

What the Hardwoods objected most to was the expectation that they should run political campaigns against children; while they agreed to the new system they said that they would prefer to isolate their candidates to positions in which few if any children were interested, while running unopposed in the elections of their own coextensive nation.

Next election cycle

In August 4193, Tāmta held democratic elections again.

Handover of power

After the election results, the Scorpions' remaining adult leaders resigned their positions, saying that the young Scorpions had so impressed the party founders that the founders had decided to hand over power four years earlier than they had promised to. This meant that not just the nation of Tāmta, but the Scorpion party itself, was entirely run by children, albeit with some of them now fifteen years old, having been Scorpions for nearly two years.

This handover of power was important because the Scorpions had always considered the well-being of their political party to be more important than what nation they lived in.

Many Scorpions believed that their duty was to eventually fight a war, although enthusiasm for battle had faltered after the Scorpions realized how many young children had died on the battlefield trying to protect themselves from the Players. Now, realizing that they would forever be few in number, the Scorpions debated openly whether their battle instincts should be nurtured or suppressed, but promised that they would not allow themselves to flee an invasion again.

The Scorpion leaders retained positions as advisers, but could not vote, and had no means to access the powers they had given up. Therefore, if the young Scorpions decided to go to war, the adults could no longer stop them, and moreover the adults knew they would likely be at the front lines of battle.

Crystals arrive in Tāmta

Late in 4193, the Crystals arrived at Tulip Lake, seeking to settle in the Scorpion kids' colony of Tāmta (still considered part of Hōki by the Crystals) and live side by side. The Crystals were led by women, and the migrants consisted of traditional families containing female leaders alongside their husbands and children.

The Crystals' migration continued a long Crystal tradition of settling in the nations of other groups and becoming an established minority. The Crystals had always considered themselves a transnational organization, and believed that they could recruit new members from the pre-existing traditional refugee populations along Tulip Lake, and perhaps even from the Scorpions.

They believed that the Scorpions shared a common interest but also understood that the Scorpions had purposefully isolated themselves from all other armies, even their supposed allies, and might not enjoy being colonized. The Crystals believed that they would nonetheless be capable of winning over the Scorpion leaders, saying that the Crystals would provide protection that the few Scorpion adults could not.

Linguistic differences

The Crystal diplomats, having learned to speak Play earlier in order to meet with earlier Play-speaking groups, had always felt the language was unfit for adults and of a different nature than their own language. Indeed, Play had so far contributed very few loanwords to the Crystals' languages, Middlesex and Leaper. Those few words that did exist were mostly terms for children's things, such as toys and candy, or were used ironically to imply the object being described was as out of place in Crystal society as the Play language as a whole would be.

Thus for example the Crystals sometimes used the Play loanword tiabataba for candy, even though they had two words of their own, and Play ŋaupupi did not mean "election", as in Play, but rather could mean either a sham election in which the result was pre-determined, or a more positive meaning indicating a group of children deciding amongst themselves how to play a game. Play words were almost never used for their literal meanings unless they referred to children's things. As in so many other cases, the various groups of Play-speaking children such as the Scorpions were unable to take offense at this situation because it was all they had ever known, and even Play-speaking adults typically cared little about how their language was viewed by outside groups, as native Play speakers took pride in their language's famously difficult grammar, saying that if Play was fit for children, the other languages must be fit for animals.

The Crystals also realized that Play lacked convenient terms of derision for children, apart from addressing children with terms for a different age group. Diminutives did not exist and the suffix -i was restricted to literal use. This suggested to the Crystals that the Players and their Play-speaking ancestors had been a child-focused culture for a very long time. Yet the most common word for adult, papapūapu, was derived from the word for wrinkle, while another common word (tatibumna) meant "out of control" and a third word simply meant "old".

Attempts to impress Crystal politics on the Scorpions

The Crystals supported an exclusively female power structure. Unlike most outside groups, they made little distinction between boys and men, calling both lĭkʷa. And they did not see the Scorpions as deserving of any special sympathy simply because of their young age. Since the Scorpions had a male surplus, most of their leaders were boys. All female Scorpions were voluntary members who obeyed the democratically elected leadership and did not seek power of their own. The Crystals respected this, but also wanted to meet with female diplomats whenever possible, and for the Scorpions to respect the Crystals' own strongly feminist politics.

The Crystals also planned to impress on the young girls in the Scorpion population that they were better leaders than the boys. Since the Crystals were primarily female, they worried that the Scorpions would pay them unwanted attention as they grew into men, and perhaps even as adolescents. They believed that the only way to prevent this was to encourage the Scorpion boys to look to women and girls as role models, and to promote female leaders among the Scorpions even if they only held unofficial advisory roles. The Crystals wanted to police the boys' behavior directly, but understood that the task would be difficult.

Scorpions' reply

The Scorpions sent a team of young boys and girls to reply to the Crystals, showing that they spoke with one voice and did not have separate ideologies based on gender. These children told the Crystals that they endorsed feminism, just as the Crystals did, because in their short lives they had been attacked and invaded many times over by adult men, and never once had they been physically attacked by women. But they had never been attacked by boys either, and even though the Crystals seemed to think all boys had the instincts of animals, the grouping of thousands of young Scorpion boys and girls together in close quarters had yet to result in any significant in-group violence. This went strongly against the Crystal belief that boys were as violent as men, if not more so, and that any closely packed population of young boys would quickly result in the boys attacking both each other and anyone around them who made easy victims.

Five-party rule

The Scorpions told the Crystals that they were welcome in Tāmta, but that they would need to give up all pretense of being in charge, whether because they were women or because they were adults, and admit that they were fellow refugees who could not expect other refugees to stand aside for them.

The Scorpions sent their youngest enrolled boys as diplomats to meet with Crystals, who reminded the Crystals that the Scorpions had won the approval of the other refugee groups present, and that Moonshine (despite considering itself still a branch of the Crystals) had done nothing to oppose the Scorpions' takeover.

The Scorpions offered to recognize the Crystals as a legal political party in Tāmta, even allowing the possibility that the Crystals would accumulate more members from the other refugee groups and outvote the Scorpions. Thus the Scorpions enrolled the Crystals as their nation's fifth political party, alongside the Scorpions, the Beetles, the Hardwoods, and the Top Riders. But they said that any attempt to push the Scorpions around using force would lead the Scorpions to abandon their long plan to take revenge on the Players and instead finish off the Crystals. Even though the Scorpions were claiming they were still children and therefore too young to fight, they believed that they could easily defeat the Crystals, and therefore that it was no crime to send their boys to battle in such a conflict.

To any Crystals who did not wish to cooperate, the Scorpions offered the prospect of leaving Tāmta and settling in any of the many other areas of Hōki still open for settlement.

Symbolic gestures

The Scorpions were isolated by over a thousand miles from the Clovers, and by a smaller but just as uncrossable barrier from the rest of the Cold Men and from the Players who were invading the Cold Men. There was no trade road, even over hostile territory, connecting the Scorpions' hideout in Moonshine to either of the other territories, and the Scorpions assumed that the hostile Leash army would abduct anyone moving through the wilderness if the Players did not get there first.

Therefore the Scorpions signed a symbolic peace treaty with the Players, saying that if they ever met face to face, the Scorpions would give the Players anything they wanted except entry into the Scorpions' private territory. This was a further step away from their inherited ideology. Earlier, they had declared themselves to be part of Tanaanu, a historically rebellious area within Play territory located more than a thousand miles away. This was treasonous in itself according to the Cold ideology that the Scorpions had been taught in school, but now they were allying with the Play party as a whole, and not a rebellious faction that had arisen within it. The new treaty was especially important because the Players were now only a few hundred miles from the Scorpions, and the land that lay in between them was nearly undefended because it was the refugee colony of Hōki.

The Scorpions also signed an adoption treaty with STW, saying that they would adopt all of STW's remaining Grass Walker orphans (paipa natuam) at no charge, provided that they accept Scorpion party membership. The Scorpions said that they would be allowed to remain Clovers if they chose to claim that identity, as the Scorpions did not consider the Clovers a political party. Because they knew STW would have a difficult time reaching the Scorpions' territory in Moonshine, they did not expect STW's merchants to arrive with any significant number of orphans, but they promised that they would hold to their promise even if it meant adopting so many orphans that they could no longer be an army.

Nest War

Diplomatic isolation

The Scorpions were interested in adopting the Grass Walker orphans as a good deed in itself which needed no explanation, although they conceded that because their population was primarily male, adoption was the only means by which a good many of them would be able to raise families of their own. Since the Crystals had come to Tāmta from the west and still owned wagons that could carry them over land, the Scorpions realized that the Crystals might be able to help bring the orphans to Tāmta. If this were to happen, the Scorpions figured that the two parties' opinions of each other would both improve, as the Crystals would prove themselves a valuable ally when a third party was in distress, and the Scorpions would prove to the Crystals that they were of kind hearts despite their outwardly aggressive ideology and heated political campaigns.

However, when the Scorpions approached the Crystals to see if they could help transport the orphans eastward into Tāmta, some Crystal diplomats accused the Scorpions of planning to abuse the younger Grass Walker children, saying that adoption was simply a cover for their plan. Hearing this, the Scorpion children announced that they would no longer come to the Crystals seeking help.

Rise of Saltspring

January 19, 4194

A 13-year-old boy named Saltspring (Play Tana Mayafama) took the lead in repelling the Crystals' political advances, creating a new office that was below the president (named the Knife) but also independent of him. He had fought in close combat against the illegal Tadpole intruders in the Lilypad nation two years earlier and claimed to have saved the lives of other young Lilypads by scaring the men away. Some said that the Tadpoles had simply attacked other children, and that Saltspring's strategy was futile, but even these people acknowledged that Saltspring was a hero for bravely taking on the Tadpole men knowing he could easily have been killed.

The Crystals were reluctant to accept that the Scorpions admired this new leader, as he seemed to stand in the way of feminine power. Quickly the Crystals recognized Saltspring as their primary diplomatic enemy, saying that the Knife had appointed Saltspring to do the job that the Knife could not do on his own.

Realizing that the Crystals were afraid of a thirteen-year-old boy, whom they kept referring to with terms usually retained for adult men, the bystanders in the Hardwood party and other unaffiliated groups began to turn against the Crystals.

Saltspring goes to war

To the surprise of the president, the boy declared himself a Sunspot, even though the Sunspots were based a thousand miles to the west. He then promptly declared war against the Crystals. Saltspring said that he would rouse a second Sunspot army inside the refugee camp, whose members would be mostly Scorpions who objected to the Crystals' presence and supported the Sunspots' war against the Crystals in Pavaitaapu.

Saltspring's Sunspot troop consisted of only about fifty soldiers, all boys, but stated that they would vastly overperform their numbers and their young age because the Crystals were so weak. This was because just months earlier, when the Crystals had been concentrated in the Clover kingdom of Pavaitaapu, they had agreed to surrender all of their weapons to their long-time ally, the Soap Bubbles, who then promptly betrayed them. Indeed, the Soap Bubbles who slaughtered the Crystals in Pavaitaapu were those who belonged to the very same Sunspot army that Saltspring and his followers had just joined.

The Sunspot boys still did not have armor, but they had acquired weapons by various means. The Crystals, including their adult male soldiers, had neither armor nor weapons because they had not had time to recover or manufacture new weapons since their defeat in Pavaitaapu.

The boys called themselves Spines (Play Vavata Pamiti) to distinguish themselves from the other Sunspots. The metaphor here was a reference to spiny animals such as porcupines; although Saltspring's soldiers were not the strongest in the world, anyone who touched them would get hurt. This name had been used as a political party's name in the past, and Saltspring said that he would be willing to start a new political party if the Sunspots expelled him and his followers, but said that he would remain loyal to the Scorpions unless rejected by them.

The Spines promised to avenge the Crystals' nonviolent political humiliation of them with extreme violence, saying it was the natural response for a free-standing army in their situation.

The Crystals did not know of this sudden development and continued to believe that they were sharing their territory only with the Scorpions.

Battle of Lanăra

Because the Crystals did not know of the new war, they had made no preparations for defense. In the Crystal settlement of Lanăra, the Sunspots easily found a group of about 400 unarmed Crystal women who were working clustered together with no men or children nearby. Even though they were greatly outnumbered, the boys had swords and the women did not, so they rushed at the women intending to cut them all up as quickly as possible, with no worries about the women's ability to fight back.

In this battle, the Sunspots killed 63 of those women, while the others outran them. Their performance was uneven: Saltspring killed seven women just by himself, but most of the boys were too slow to catch up with any of them. Nonetheless the Crystals did not fight back at all, and therefore the Sunspots returned from their battle unharmed.

Among the dead women were Vapāa, Ŋaišassipa, and Tuvāpata, all of whom had been advocates for Crystal politics who had opposed the original Sunspots in the west. (Their birth names were in Leaper.) Most of the other women killed were apolitical but belonged to the wider Crystal movement.

After the massacre, the Sunspots went into hiding so that the Crystals would not find them. The Spine War (Play Pamiti Vapias) had begun, and the boys came to think of themselves as the Spine battalion of the Sunspot army. (This was the Spines' name for the war, because they initiated it, but it later came to be known as the Nest War as the peak of the fighting moved westward.) They stated that the refugee territory was fair game for fighting a war, but that refugees were not fair targets. Thus, they were targeting the Crystals because they believed Crystals could not be true refugees.

Because the Crystals had never learned of the boys' split from the Scorpion party, the Spines assumed that the Crystals would blame the Scorpions for the attack, launch a counterattack, and then trigger many Scorpions to either join the Spines or escalate into a full-scale war against the Crystals.

Explanation of attack

While the Spines remained in the wilderness to escape detection, they nonetheless figured they would eventually be discovered, most likely by the Scorpions. Together they wrote a defense of their attack on the Crystals, hoping to convince the other Scorpions to join their side or to at least cooperate with them in driving out the Crystals.

The Spines claimed allegiance to the Sunspots in the belief that the Sunspot men were also being threatened by the Crystals, and had attacked Crystals in self-defense. They noted that the Sunspots had preferred to drive out the Crystals rather than to kill them, and preferred to kill them rather than to capture and torture them. This set them apart from other all-male armies such as the Matrixes, who were well-known for torturing their victims, including women and children.

Political motivations

The Spines considered themselves boys, in part because the Crystals kept insisting that boys were no different than men. The Scorpions then promised that like other boys, they would never attack soldiers their age or younger, but would only target adults. They said however that the women they killed were adults just as much as any men, and that they were not targeting the Crystals simply because they felt women made easy victims; rather, since women were clearly in charge of Crystal society and had attempted to put women in charge of the Scorpions as well, it was women who were the enemies of the Spines.

In fact, many of the victims who died that day were quite young, but because the Crystals considered them to be adults, the older women made no special effort to protect the girls from the angry boys, and the boys attacked them indiscriminately. Even so, the boys agreed after the battle that they had not deliberately targeted the youngest ones and would not do so in the future. They also realized that the Crystals could not complain specifically about the deaths of the teenage girls without admitting that the Spines and the Scorpions were even younger than this, and therefore that the Crystals had been wrong earlier to treat the Scorpions as if they were adults.

The Spines stated privately that they hoped their attack would start a wider war between the Scorpions and the Crystals, that the Scorpions would forget about their long-term plans to invade the Players, and that the Players would remain neutral in the new war. The Players had earlier promised never to invade Moonshine, and that they would consider the refugee camps to be part of Moonshine. Thus the Spines realized that the only safe place to fight a war was inside the refugee state of Hōki where both the Scorpions and the Crystals had moved.

Wider reaction

Crystals

The Crystals reported the massacre to their leaders, not daring to report it to the Scorpions. The Crystal leaders prepared to launch a war against the Scorpion children in retaliation for the attack, but also worried that if they had fared so poorly in their first battle, they might not be able to win a war. Even the men were afraid to face down the Sunspot boys because the men would need to attack from a distance, throwing rocks and other objects, or else expose themselves to the boys' swords and spears. The Crystals realized that they might need to flee the Scorpion colony and find somewhere else to live.

Leapers

When outside parties such as the Leapers in Baeba Swamp heard about the unexpected turn of events, they stated that the Scorpions were full of rage because they had been repeatedly pushed from one territory to another, always by adults, and had seen many of their members kidnapped and abused by adults, and therefore the Spines simply took the first opportunity they had to take out their frustrations on another group of adults, even though their victims were both very weak and innocent of any involvement in the Scorpions' past troubles. The Leapers noted that the Scorpion territory had a large male surplus population, and predicted that the relatively small attack against the Crystals was only the beginning of a much wider war in which the Scorpions would attack anyone who got in their way, even if their victims claimed to be allies of the Scorpions.

Moonshine

Moonshine's Parliament received word of the attack after the wider Crystal party made contacts with them. The Moonshines reaffirmed their commitment to absolute pacifism, and that pacifism required that the strongest army take control of any territory they lived in. Because the Spines were stronger than the Crystals, they deserved to rule, and therefore the Crystals deserved to be slaughtered. Thus the Moonshines avoided making a commitment to rescue the Crystals.

It was only through Moonshine that the Scorpions finally learned what the Spines had done. The Scorpion leaders denied involvement in the massacre, but stated that some of their members had been missing for several weeks and that they could not track them down. The Scorpions nonetheless agreed with Moonshine that the strong had every right to abuse the weak, and that the Crystals deserved to be killed for putting their women in such a vulnerable position with no protection. Thereby the Moonshines and Scorpions forged an informal alliance, and the Scorpions contemplated a future invasion of Moonshine.

Hardwoods

The Hardwoods were the last to learn what had happened to the Crystal women. They realized that they were just as vulnerable as the Crystals, because they also had no armor and little access to weapons, and were living spread out through the children's territory such that they could not easily group together for protection. Some Hardwood families decided to flee Tāmta and seek refuge in other areas of Hōki, even knowing that living conditions were much worse elsewhere. They believed that Tāmta would soon be overwhelmed by violent crime as the Scorpions' male surplus adopted Spine-like behaviors and attacked weak victims regardless of ideology. Others decided to remain for various reasons.

Grass Walkers

The Scorpions reaffirmed their promise to adopt the Grass Walker orphans, even knowing that there was little chance of cooperation any longer with the Crystals who were best suited to transport the orphans eastward. Before the massacre, there had been a minority among the Crystals who believed in the Scorpions' sincerity, arguing that since the Scorpions were almost all orphans and runaways, they would make ideal caretakers for younger orphans. The Crystals had long practiced nontraditional parenting themselves, such as raising children in groups. The Crystals did not allow single men to take guardianship of children, but the Scorpions hoped that if they promised to raise the children in groups, their female members would satisfy the Crystals' definition of a mother figure and that the Crystals would assume those girls would be trustworthy enough to stop the abuses the Crystals claimed the boys would otherwise be prone to inflict on the younger children.

The Scorpions figured that their massacre of the Crystal women had no bearing on their suitability as caretakers for younger children, and that therefore the Crystals' positions should be unchanged, but realized that even if some Crystals still supported their plan, they had likely ruined their chances of cooperation by allowing the Spines to emerge and carry out their attack against the Crystal women.

New election cycle

In the wake of the massacre, another new election took place in Tāmta in February 4194, the first time that the Crystals were allowed to vote.

When the Scorpions realized that the Crystals were seeking revenge for the earlier massacre by attempting to peacefully vote the Scorpions out of power, the freshly appointed Scorpion party leaders came to more closely identify themselves with the perpetrators of the massacre, saying that pacifists were unnatural and deserved to die painfully, like prey animals, so that the Scorpions could grow stronger by feeding upon them.

War in Pavaitaapu

In 4194, the Crystals declared war on the Clover children's bodyguards (the Sunspots) and sent their entire adult male population back into Pavaitaapu, from which they had only recently just fled, to fight the war. Men who refused to fight gave up their Crystal party membership and joined other refugee groups. This meant that the adult Crystal population in Hōki was now entirely female, and the Crystals became even more suspicious now of the Scorpions and of the Cold Men who were now trickling in to the Scorpion settlements along Tulip Lake and Hipside River. By contrast, the other groups became disproportionately male because ex-Crystal men, but few women, were joining them.

To the Crystals' dismay, Moonshine recognized the Scorpions' claim to be a children's nation, as they had when the Scorpions had arrived just months earlier, and therefore Moonshine had no expectation that the Scorpions, including the adult leaders, would move west with the Crystals to fight the Sunspots.

Without their adult male population, the Crystals became ever more wary of living among the Scorpions. At the same time, the Scorpions relaxed.

Migration of Crystals from interior states

The war declaration also applied to the wider Crystal population living outside the refugee territory. The Crystals were the majority population in many states to the south and west, and in these territories, there were few men able to defect from the Crystals, as the only party that would be safe to join was the Soap Bubbles, into which entry was very difficult. This new declaration of war therefore was about to make vast areas of countryside almost entirely free of adult males.

Even though the order to war applied to the entire adult male Crystal population, the Crystal military strategy did not call for all of the men to attack at the same time, so some Crystal men remained behind to guard the Crystal nation's borders. It also did not apply to Crystals living in Moonshine or Play territory, which the mainstream Crystal party could not enter. Nonetheless, the inland areas of Crystal territory east of Baeba and south of Moonshine were considered unnecessary to guard, and therefore really did become devoid of adult males.

In total, about 25,000 men left their homes and joined the war in Baeba Swamp, and 12,000 more remained near the edges of Crystal territory, ready to join the rest in Baeba when they were called to do so. This was much larger than the Sunspot population of just a few thousand men, but the Crystals knew that the Sunspots were better-armed and that they would have allies among the civilians in Baeba.

The Crystal parliament's mobilization order created an interior zone within the Crystal territory called the Nest (Leaper Wāntàti) in which no adult males were allowed; here lived about 50,000 Crystal women, their children, and a very small number of Soap Bubbles. When word of this reached neighboring nations, men from territories such as Olansele decided to move south to help repopulate the Nest. There was no Crystal border guard between Olansele and the Crystal women's territory because they were officially allies. Yet, because these men were not Crystals, they were not subject to the mobilization order, and they felt the Crystal police force would be unwilling or unable to arrest them.

When the men from Olansele and other territories realized that the Crystal men had left the Nest and that the Crystal women were now entirely unprotected, they declared themselves to be Sunspots, making what had been a legal (though unwelcome) migration into a declaration of war. These men in some cases abandoned their own wives to move in with the Crystals, but most of the earliest migrants were unmarried.

Crystals plead for peace

The movement of Sunspot men into the Crystal women's interior zones upset the Crystals' plans to defeat the Sunspots in Baeba Swamp. The global Crystal parliament had approved this war, meaning that the Eggs in Play territory and the Moonshines in Moonshine territory had cast their votes in support, but because they did not send any soldiers to fight, their territories were still protected by loyal Crystal men. Now, the Crystals in the Nest wanted to pull some of their soldiers back home to protect them from the Sunspot men and others they predicted would soon arrive, but the global Crystal parliament stated that the war in Baeba was much more important than the well-being of the Crystals in the Nest, and that they would be willing to lose control of the Nest if it meant that the members of the other Crystal factions could move to Baeba after the war was over.

The Crystals in the Nest felt that the other Crystal factions, particularly the Eggs, might be angry at the Nesters because thirty years earlier, the ancestors of those in the Nest had voted to abandon the Eggs in a similar situation in which the Eggs' all-female colony was invaded by a troop of men calling themselves the Firestones, and those women soon gave birth to babies fathered by the Firestones. But the Crystals in the Nest had never harmed the Moonshines in any way, and yet they realized that the Moonshines seemed to make life difficult for them at every opportunity. Moonshine's diplomats explained this by saying that the Nest was not important because the Crystals living there were poor and rural, and that the Nest mostly existed as a buffer to keep enemy soldiers out of Moonshine. Nonetheless, the Crystals in the Nest reaffirmed their alliance with Moonshine, believing it to be the world's most successful Crystal empire, and deputized their all-female police force to fight off the invading Sunspot men with no help from outside.

Other Cold Men arrive

The Players had earlier told the children who were encircled by Play battalions that the time to flee had passed and that they would be forced to join the Play party as they grew up, and would be held under supervision so that they could not sabotage the new states the Players were building in the captured territories. The Players had many reasons for this.

But they held to their promise that anyone to the north of the Play battalions would be allowed to forever retreat further north, into the core of Moonshine territory, and that the Players would not invade them there. In the meantime, these children lived in a wilderness territory claimed by neither Moonshine nor the Players, as they had always wanted to. But they no longer felt safe, and so nearly all of the children in the wild moved north into Moonshine.

New Cold census

The number of Cold troops who arrived at Tāmta was far less than the 141,000 who had been living in free territory at the time of the treaty and had resolved to make their way to safety in Tāmta. The Cold children were not emotionally prepared to answer the question of what had happened to the many tens of thousands of children who had not been able to complete the journey. They knew that before their migration began, the Players had already captured 30,000 children in battle, and understood that these had most likely been enslaved rather than killed. They knew that the Players had attacked them from behind as they were retreating northward, and hoped that the many missing children were living in safety, if not in freedom, under Play control. (Even though the children had surrendered, the Players attacked them anyway, stating that they had not met the conditions of surrender, as the Players had demanded a direct transfer of power to the Play military. The Players had been inconsistent on this because they did not have full control of their military leaders.)

The Cold children took comfort, nonetheless, in the knowledge that the arriving children were on average younger than the general population. Nearly half of the population who had successfully completed the journey consisted of the so-called Deer Paws (nanuu pūu), children under 12 who had been abandoned by their parents. This was because the older children had taken care of the younger ones, protecting them from danger at their own expense, and staying behind so that younger children could go first. Many of the youngest children had been bunched together in a territory called Lypelpyp when the migrations began. This was more firmly controlled by STW than were other areas along the trade road, and in fact had a shorter route to safety than the East Bath migration route in the east; however, it required the children to pass through a river in Erala, which was dangerous and poorly governed territory. The children believed that STW must have taken it upon themselves to deliver the youngest children to safety along this route, and many of the youngest who had arrived stated that they had been hidden in cargo shipments, perhaps to hide them from the people at the many stops along the way.

New colonies in Tāmta

The Cold Men built new settlements in Tāmta, which they then declared to be for Cold Men only, and also independent of each other, though they still pledged allegiance to Tāmta and said that the five colonies were all ruled by Cold Men and so would have a unified military run by the Cold Men's existing command structure. Thus, they said that their military was more important than their nations.

Tāmta had consisted of a single district since its foundation two years earlier, but now the Cold Men wanted to bring their traditional system of government with them, in which people could concentrate themselves according to political ideology and live among their own kind. The Cold Men stated that their political party was still important, but that they had disagreements even with each other, and believed that the best way to get along was to divide themselves along political lines into districts while still remaining bound by the pledge to support the Cold party overall and serve in the military.

Fipapanu

The Land of Tomorrow, this district had many other names, such as Ŋumatūnu, Panu and Rasalu. This had been anticipated to be the capital, but the settlers soon declared that they wanted to live a life as far removed from politics as possible.

Many of the settlers here believed that they could start a new nation along the lakeshore. They still considered themselves Cold Men because of their promise of military allegiance, but stated that they would not form coalitions with the other Cold Men. As such, they allowed their people to create new factions of the Cold party with any ideology, or to become nonpolitical.

This meant that the people of Fipapanu were no longer bound by their promise to abstain from starting new families in their new territory, and therefore the people of Fipapanu declared that their territory was open to any Cold Men with young children. They expected to outgrow the other districts by this measure. There were still at this time very few people over the age of fifteen, but young marriage was traditional in their culture.

Titapa

A compact territory for Cold Men who preferred urban life, Titapa resolved itself to be otherwise apolitical and to cooperate with all of the other districts. There were buildings in this area that had been constructed long ago by previous inhabitants, even before it had become a refugee territory, but these were largely in ruins and the Cold Men knew that they would need to work hard if they wanted their territory to resemble a traditional city.

Many people here formed a close relationship with the district of Fipapanu. Titapa's people stated that they had found their ideal place to live and would not move.

Papayau Šeke

A sparsely populated area with few natural resources. In one corner of this territory, it bordered the much smaller district of Titapa. The people of Papayau Šeke wanted to experiment with a non-democratic government within the democracy of Tāmta, and stated therefore that they would elect a toparch (nenua) who would have absolute power within their territory but no power outside it. Thus the residents of Papayau Šeke would not need to bother with any internal political affairs. They hoped that they would still be allowed to vote in the Cold party elections and in Tāmta's governmental elections, but acknowledged that they might be ejected from the union for being non-democratic.

Pusuaani

This is the place also known as Imama-Hamapaa in Late Andanese, where the thematic syllables /ma/ and /pa/ were chosen artificially. The ordinary Andanese name would have been Yaa-Haalaa.

Vauŋāmtu

NOTE: This seems to have been partially confused with the island of Šanataŋūs.

This was the Cold Men's name for all of the islands within Tulip Lake, a place they felt would remain safe even if all of the remaining territory was lost. The food supplies were reliable but the Cold Men knew that they could not feed the entire Cold nation, and so they resolved to keep the population of Vauŋāmtu very low.

Šanataŋūs

Note: if this is on an island, it could not have three border patrols. It seems to have been partially confused with Vauŋāmtu.

Though its primary name was Šanataŋūs, this district had an alternate Play name Mišabami and was known in a cipher as 2-47. Located on a small island in the lake, which was nonetheless iced over for much of the year and therefore accessible. This district was intended to be a safe place for the most vulnerable in society, including those who did not feel safe even around the rest of the Cold Men. These people referred to themselves as nina, a Play word which could mean a toddler, someone with far-reaching plans for the future, or someone who makes a great mess. They were known in a trade language as bèd and began saying that bèd was an exact translation of the Play word and encompassed its full range of senses.

Tamataa

Soon, subdistricts (neighborhoods) were founded, such as Tamataa, which was founded by two six-year-old boys. These neighborhoods had their own governments, but the governments had very little power. (Note that in the Play syllabary, this name was not seen as particularly similar to Tāmta, having only one glyph in common; thus, it was not a pun and not much remarked upon.)

Because the two six-year-old boys were in charge, anyone moving to Tamataa was required to obey them, and they attracted few settlers. Most settlers were six years old or even younger.

Timing of elections

Positions served here had a minimum term length of just one month, much shorter than the Scorpions' six-month terms that they had inherited from their positions in school classrooms. These one-month terms were a custom they had picked up during their brief time in Nama.

Early events

The doctor

One boy was much sicker than the rest and could not meet his daily needs on his own. Although he could walk, the living situation was so dire that children needed to be able to run at high speed. The other children in Tamataa felt sympathy, and understood that older children outside the neighborhood might be able to help, but told him it was not safe to leave the neighborhood because the people outside, even the other Cold Men, could be dangerous. But the boy continued to grow sicker and the other children were unable to help. Finally in desperation he left the colony at night and sought help in the wider district of Šanataŋūs. An older boy understood what was wrong but the boy needed to stay in Šanataŋūs for several days because they were fully reliant on Moonshine's traders for medical supplies. After several days the Cold kids were able to nurse the boy back to health, and he thanked them by showing them his home in Tamataa, but the other children in Tamataa yelled at him to stay out, as the older children were not welcome there and therefore neither was he. The other children had posted signs in the colony showing men kidnapping small children and stated that even though the people who had helped him were children, they were older and were part of the wider adult world and thus could not be trusted. Thus Tamataa's people came to be called Cupbearers, the people who rejected help from the only people who wanted to help them.

Expelled by the Cupbearers, the boy moved back to the wider colony of Šanataŋūs and began discussing the need for the Cold Men to re-enter Tamataa since he knew that there were almost certainly more children struggling as he had, who might die if they were forced to rely on other small children for advice and for help. The Cold Men were unsure how to handle a political conflict against children half their age, and wondered if they could hire adults to simulate an invasion of Tamataa that would drive the small children back into Šanataŋūs out of desperation.

Border patrols

The Cold Men in Šanataŋūs broke the law when they appointed adult male guards to patrol the borders, which they referred to as The Door (Play tuma, a word earlier used in the name of the Cupbearer party) and said that they would not let anyone in, again applying this rule even to the other Cold Men. The wider Cold Men could not understand why the children in Šanataŋūs wanted adults to patrol their borders, even knowing that they had been betrayed and attacked time and again by various groups of adults and never by children. Unable to convince the new settlers to get rid of the adult guards, the non-Šanataŋūs Cold Men sent a team of young children to patrol the external border and attempt to prevent the adult guards from wandering off base and entering the wider Cold territory.

The children in Šanataŋūs responded to this by sending another team of children to patrol the internal border, and said that the children would not let any children leave or enter without authorization. This meant that the adult guards would be surrounded by two groups of children and that the district of Šanataŋūs would have three border patrol agencies: welcome children, welcome adults, and unwelcome children whom they hoped would give up or at least cooperate with the other two. The children on the inside were assigned to control of the movement of other children, and the children on the outside (who did not officially live in Šanataŋūs) were to do the same, while the adults in the middle were in control of the movement of adults (but were pledged to always deny entry).

The children in control of Šanataŋūs said that they were not setting up a trap; children would be allowed to leave and re-enter, but would require prior authorization from the children patrolling the perimeter, and that anyone seeking such a journey would need to show how it would benefit the district as a whole. Most of these were diplomatic missions, but one girl was sent on a mission shortly after the founding of the district to acquire any books she could find that were written in Late Andanese so that the children could learn the wisdom and medical knowledge of the lost Andanese civilization.

Figuring that any conflict between the three border patrols would almost certainly involve the trusted adult patrolmen attacking the young children out of pure spite, they assumed any such event would trigger the other Cold Men to invade Šanataŋūs and attack the men, and therefore predicted that none of the adult patrolmen would betray their nation in such a way. Thus the children in Šanataŋūs claimed that they would be safe precisely because they were so vulnerable. Other Cold children found this logic unacceptable, saying that they were all but inviting the adult guards to attack them, but the residents said that their guards were from the Hardwood population and had so far proven trustworthy, albeit somewhat difficult to get along with.

Early population growth

To the dismay of the wider Cold population, Šanataŋūs soon proved to be the most popular of the new districts, with people pledging to move there or else pool their votes to increase the representation of Šanataŋūs and therefore increase its effective population. When Fipapanu refused to become the capital, many settlers in Šanataŋūs felt that Šanataŋūs would be the next best choice, and that their people would be willing to host diplomatic meetings and other political functions even if they primarily served the interests of the non-Šanataŋūs Cold Men. Indeed, the other Cold Men were friendly to this idea, but realized that the border patrols might object, because it would mean that their jobs would be nearly the opposite of what they had originally intended if they were forced to nearly always allow people through in both directions.

Tasataupu

Here pine trees grew, and the Cold Men said that they would hide inside the tree trunks from their enemies. Thus it was called Tasataupu. In fact this was metaphorical, as they realized they could not actually hollow out the trees. Many of the settlers who chose Tasataupu were among the best-educated children, and these had created an informal and non-political group within the Cold Men who felt that they might someday be in charge of the whole party, and had pledged to stick together rather than dividing into factions.

May 4194 census

New Cold refugees continued to leave the wilderness until May 4194, by which time the wilderness was nearly empty. They knew that it would likely take them months, perhaps more than a year, to reach the colony of Tāmta. This was because they did not have the advantage of traveling in a large group, as the Scorpions had done.

Cold-Scorpion conflicts

For the first time, the Scorpions faced a political enemy party comprised of children their age, instead of adults or children controlled by adults. They had said time and again that children would never attack other children, and claimed that their history proved their case, but now, their adult enemies had receded into the background and were greatly outnumbered by the young Cold refugees, who seemed likely to soon outnumber the Scorpions as well.

The young leaders of the two groups of children nonetheless affirmed that war and violence were crimes of adults, and that they would resolve their conflict peacefully through politics rather than on the battlefield. Some adults, overhearing this, hoped that they might still have one last chance of seizing power in Tāmta by threats of violence, but knew that they would have very little time left to rule before the children matured into adults themselves.

Problems in Šanataŋūs

Border guards

The children in Šanataŋūs soon found themselves facing what to many of them was a familiar problem: the adult guards who had been assigned to patrol the district's border were now trapped between two children's territories, neither of which would let them pass through in either direction. Earlier, the adult guards had been expecting to be allowed limited freedom of movement in the southern territory, just outside the border of Šanataŋūs, saying that any such movement would be necessary to make sure invaders were not approaching. But when a troop of children arrived and said that they had been assigned to keep the adults out of the other districts, the adults found themselves confined to a thin strip of land around the border. They could not move north either because they had earlier signed an agreement with the children denying the guards the ability to trespass within Šanataŋūs. The guards realized that they would be wholly dependent on the two groups of children for their food and basic needs, and some wanted to re-negotiate the founding pact to give the guards a colony within the children's inner territory so that they would be self-sufficient and the children would not need to tie themselves down delivering food and other supplies to the guards.

Debate about capital status

Many Cold Men in Tāmta now wanted Šanataŋūs to be the capital of the Cold territories, and to define the Cold territories as a discontinuous autonomous nation within Tāmta, which would itself be defined as a wholly sovereign nation within the Moonshines' refugee territory of Hōkī. Hōkī was in turn just a state within the Moonshine Empire, so the children were placing a nation within a nation within a state within an empire, and this innermost nation was divided into autonomous districts. The Cold Men claimed legal jurisdiction over the Moonshine Empire since they had inherited the claims of their parents, and like their parents they understood that this was a diplomatic technicality, but they used this to help prop up the authority they claimed to redraw borders within the refugee territory.

For the most part, the people of Šanataŋūs accepted this, because they felt it would help ensure their safety, even if it meant that many people would be constantly arriving and leaving their territory, which had originally been intended to wall itself off from the rest of Cold society. Most people in Šanataŋūs still trusted the adult border guards and were more concerned with the outer rim of children who had arrived to patrol the adult guards.

Children's missions

July 23, 4194

Samaupa's mission

The leaders of the state of Šanataŋūs assigned a young girl named Samaupa-Name to discover the secrets of the lost Andanese civilization, whose language had been handed down to just a few of the kids' parents, and was almost entirely unknown to the young and growing kids in the refugee colony. They believed that if they could discover the Andanese wisdom, they could build a new society as prosperous as their original homeland had ever been, and no longer need to return to a warmer climate.

Samaupa knew that the Andanese were now extinct in their original homeland, which was now controlled by the Play party. She knew that some Andanese speakers had fled to Xema and had used military bases in Xema to wage war against not just the Players, but the whole of the wider world, as they sought to turn nations against each other and then invade those weakened by wars. Samaupa knew that whether she chose to explore Play territory (Memnumu) or Xema, she would be unwelcome there, and therefore that this was a dangerous mission.

Both of the territories in which Samaupa felt she might find relics of Andanese culture were adjacent to territory claimed by Moonshine, but choosing Xema afforded her the advantage of crossing only through Moonshine territory. Therefore she decided to seek out a mission to Xema, beginning by crossing on her own into the Moonshine state of Safiz across the lake from the refugee campground.

Attempts to reach Xema

These kids were interested in Xema for other reasons. Xema was the home of the Unholy Alliance (UAO), an organization of twelve men leading thousands of slaves who themselves owned slaves, all claiming to be working in human trafficking particularly of children. Xema was also home to the Ring (ZDE), which had invaded and occupied much of Play territory eight years earlier at a time when the Players and Cold Men had briefly been allied to each other.

Both of these groups had always focused their efforts on invasions far outside their territory in Xema, and both had specialized in child abduction. But whereas the Unholy Alliance sought no alliances with other powers and admitted that they were evil, the Ring soldiers had attempted to impress their enemies by saying that their kidnappings were much better for the children they captured, who were largely orphans, than to leave them alone in the midst of such a deadly war. Almost nobody was convinced by the arguments of the Rings, and there were few adults who had been in contact with both groups. Thus the children in Tāmta were the first to propose a war against both the Ring and the Unholy Alliance.

The children believed that conquering Xema would be difficult, perhaps impossible, but that merely reaching Xema could bring the roving armies under control. Moreover they believed that no other outside army would oppose them, and that the various armies of Xema might not even defend each other, so even an army of children could win a war in Xema.

Other missions

Other young citizens at this time, such as Pūmfūmti, also went on missions to record and transcribe literature, mostly seeking Play literature that would be easy for them to understand but difficult to access. Anyone who completed such a mission was allowed to claim the work as their own, as they had no expectation of the Players voluntarily giving them access to hidden Play knowledge, but they were also expected to acknowledge that the knowledge they were transcribing was of traditional Play origin.

One Play state that the kids were interested in was Taŋaiva.

August 4194 elections

The Scorpions now held their first six-party elections, with the legal parties being the Scorpions, the Beetles, the Top Riders, the Hardwoods, the Crystals, and the Cold Men. The Scorpions had allowed the Beetles to continue as a separate party even though it no longer provided them any significant advantage in elections because they were facing so many other parties. Instead, they made the Beetles sign an agreement to be even more closely bound to the Scorpions, and allowing the Scorpions and Beetles to forfeit votes to each other, such that they competed effectively as a single party with four candidates in each election, two girls and two boys.

Cold Men's position

The Cold Men were much like the Scorpions, and declared that they would allow both boys and girls to vote in Tāmta, just as they always had in their internal party leadership elections. They had tended to elect mostly boys despite having a roughly even gender balance in their population, and saw no problem with this. They therefore said that they would field a single candidate for each election, not one boy and one girl for each seat.

Scorpions attempt to gain vote share

The ruling Scorpion party defined the Crystals as an all-female party with only adults allowed to vote. Recently, however, the Scorpions had suspended their traditional prohibition against other parties voting for them. They had created this rule because they did not want other parties to overwhelm the Scorpions and elect poor candidates on purpose in elections where a Scorpion victory was guaranteed. But now that there were so many other parties with viable candidates, the Scorpions realized they needed all the support they could get. The Scorpions still had full control of their internal party nomination process, and therefore believed that the possibility of poor candidates getting through buoyed by false support from hostile parties was no longer a realistic threat.

Likewise, the Scorpions identified the Hardwoods as adults, both male and female in about even proportions. Of the six parties in Tāmta, the Hardwoods were the only group that consisted primarily of traditional families with a husband, a wife, and children at home. The Scorpions claimed that Crystals' voting population must be entirely adult women because the Crystal party laws had sent their adult male population abroad to fight the war, and because they did not allow children to vote. Neither did the Hardwoods allow children to vote.

Plans to further extend voting rights

This meant that the child populations of both the Crystals and the Hardwoods could theoretically vote for one of the other four parties, because those other four parties consisted entirely of children, and now allowed children even of other parties to vote for them.

The Scorpions figured that if they passed a new law allowing all citizens age 5 and older to vote, it would not greatly affect their own campaigns, since the newly enfranchised young children would most likely vote nearly randomly. (The Deer Paws could not vote because they had not completed elementary education, and the Cold party required this for membership, irrespective of age. They had been promising to work out a way to admit the Deer Paws without formal schooling but so far most Deer Paws had been uninterested.) If they concentrated their votes into the Scorpion and allied parties, they could inflate the Scorpion vote totals and carry many Scorpions to victory; even if the children voted mostly for the weaker candidates in the pool, they would still help the Scorpions overall since the votes would be pooled.

Meanwhile, if the Hardwoods and Crystals decided to accept children's votes in order to keep up, the children would pollute the voter rolls of those two parties with their naive, uninformed worldviews, and force the adult parties to campaign on issues that meant nothing in the wider world or else risk losing the children's votes to the Scorpions.

To this end, the Scorpions wondered how best to attract the votes of children away from their parents, and whether it would be worth the effort.

Crystal men arrive in Clover territory

By January 4195, the male Crystal troop of about 25,000 soldiers was facing resistance in Baeba's northern district of Pavaitaapu, as they tried to take control of Clover territory to fight the police force called themselves Sunspots. The Crystal men had struggled to complete their journey; they no longer had control of the coast, and Moonshine denied them entry because they were not of the Moonshine faction of the Crystal party.

When they arrived in Pavaitaapu, they found that while the local police force was unpopular, most of the civilians wanted to have their territory run by Leapers, Matrixes, or some other local party, but not the Crystals.

Offer of Soap party status

The Soap Bubbles proposed admitting the male Crystal soldiers to their party all at once, telling them that they would be free from their obligations, and could choose whether to stay in Pavaitaapu or return home to the Nest. Many of these men were young and not actually married to Crystal women, so the Bubbles said that they might find new women in Clover territory if they chose to stay. Traditionally the Soap Bubbles had imposed very strict entry requirements, including a rigorous athletic test, but they stated firstly that the local faction of the Bubbles had not been doing this and secondly that, being soldiers, most of the Crystal men would likely pass the test if they chose to take it.

The Bubbles made it clear to the Crystal men that if they joined the Soap, they would need to immediately end all conflict with the Sunspots. The Sunspots were not a political party, and therefore the Soap Bubbles allowed their members to join the Sunspots without losing Soap party membership. Yet other Bubbles were not part of the Sunspots. This is why the Soap Bubbles and the Crystals still considered themselves allies despite the Sunspots and Crystals being at war. (In fact, the Soap Bubbles and Crystals were also at war, but only in Baeba Swamp, and the Soap (but not the Crystals) had said that any of their members who left Baeba would be free of their obligation to fight.)

Worries about Soap Bubble collapse

The Bubbles hoped that if the Crystals joined, they would retain their anti-Sunspot alignment, and free the Bubbles from dependency on the Sunspots, which had created an uncomfortable situation within the Soap Bubble military hierarchy. But the single troop of Crystals arriving in Baeba was vastly larger than the entire Soap Bubble army, which at the time had only 3269 soldiers, meaning that the expanded Soap army would be effectively run by the Crystal men. Thus they worried that the Crystals might free the Bubbles from dependency on the Sunspots, but then go further and require that the Bubbles expel their pro-Sunspot members or even declare war on the Sunspots. The Soap Bubble party leadership was not fully democratic, so the Crystals could not do these things by a simple vote, but since the ex-Crystals were so much more numerous, they would be able to threaten disobedience or civil war if they did not get their way. Still, the Soap Bubble soldiers were in much better shape, both physically and in terms of weapons and armor, than were the arriving Crystal men, who had lost many soldiers just trying to get to Baeba and seemed wholly unprepared to fight the war that they had actually been sent to fight.

Situation in the Nest

By this time the all-female police force in the Crystal's Nest home territory had banded into an army, stating that because their men were fighting a foreign war, the women would need to protect the homeland. They had already been invaded by thousands of men, who had declared allegiance to the Sunspots as they arrived, meaning that the army the Crystal men had expected to fight in Baeba Swamp had come after the Crystal women in their heartlands. The Crystal women outnumbered the men but were still losing most of their battles. Additionally, another army, the Matrixes, was talking about forcing their way into the Nest as well, but the Matrix military leadership still believed that there were better things to fight for in Baeba Swamp. The Soap military leaders did not know all of this, but told the Crystal men that Soap military planners were experts and that the proof of it was that they were living in the midst of a war and had not been defeated despite being outnumbered by several of the armies around them.

Last wave of migration

The new waves of Cold children migrated independently, and therefore at different speeds. New groups of Cold children continued to arrive into early 4195.

Cold-Scorpion treaty

Once in Hōki, these groups came to live as one, identify as Butterflies, and assert that they were also the only surviving Cold Men. They re-established the Blue Cocoon, which superseded the Scorpions' short-lived nation so that the Scorpions could continue on as a separate faction of the Cold party (they had earlier split from the Cold Men) and therefore vote in the elections of the wider Cold Men.

The Cold Men knew that by abolishing the Scorpions' nation of Tāmta they would trigger a conflict, but again promised that they would resolve the conflict without resorting to violence. Because they wanted their own states to remain legally distinct entities, the Cold Men allowed the Scorpions to also have their own states within the Blue Cocoon; previously the Scorpions had considered Tāmta to be a single entity with only one city and no subdivisions.

Cold Men propose reforms

New politics

The arriving Cold refugees were not happy with the Scorpions' decision to live side-by-side with the two groups of adult refugees, the Hardwoods and the Crystals. By this time the Cold Men outnumbered the Scorpions and warned that they would simply vote the entire adult population out of the nation if the Scorpions did not expel their own adults and then force the refugees living in traditional families to move to another refugee colony. This was illegal according to Moonshine law, as Moonshine did not give refugees the right to reject other refugees, but the young boys in the Cold population were growing stronger and braver every year and were now contemplating the feasibility of open rebellion against the very people who had kindly let them in.

The Cold Men understood that parents would certainly not abandon their children to the Cold-Scorpion coalition, and therefore that they would be able to take over the areas of the settlement where those families had lived. They hoped that most adult refugees would obey the demand to leave because they had previously cooperated with the Scorpions' short-lived multiparty democracy, but they also knew that they had never gotten along well with adults in the recent past.

Cold majority appears

The Cold Men outvoted the Scorpions as promised, but prepared for the frustration that they predicted would accompany a political victory they were too physically weak to enforce.

Resolution and new treaty

To the surprise of the Hardwoods and many others, the entire adult Scorpion population, including the women, agreed to leave the Cocoon and leave their children behind. They thus promised to join the wider society of Hōki, but ensured the young children that they would attempt to maintain intermittent contacts through the Cold Men's border patrols.

Then, the Cold Men declared that the Blue Cocoon was a sovereign nation owing nothing to Hōki or Moonshine, even as they assumed that they would be immediately invaded by yet another adult army seeking easy victims.

The Scorpion leaders assured their population that their previous stay in the wilderness had taught them survival skills that even adult veterans did not know, and that they would survive any imminent threat from outside. The Scorpions continued to insist that they had done the right thing by inviting the Cold Men to settle in the Cocoon and vote the Scorpions out of power democratically.

The Hardwoods and Crystals did not cooperate with the Cold Men's new order, and chose to remain in the children's territory. The Cold Men repeated that the Cocoon was off-limits for all adults, even those raising young children, and that they were required to leave so that there could once again be a refugee territory for children only. The Cold Men warned that they were planning to arrest adults for trespassing, and deputized their entire population to carry out these arrests so that there would not be a specific police force for the adults to target if they chose to escalate to violence. But the Cold Men knew that they were powerless without the Scorpions' cooperation, and that if they attempted to enforce their new law, the adults could attack or even kill young Cold police officers while driving the Scorpions into an alliance with those adults.

Scorpions attempt to retain control

Because the Cold Men had told the adult populations that they could never return, the Scorpions argued that the Cold Men's laws must apply to the areas where those adults now lived. This meant that the Cold Men were claiming jurisdiction over that territory, and by logical extension, that territory must still be part of the Blue Cocoon. Therefore the Scorpions considered the expelled adults to still be citizens. The Scorpions then annexed the territories the adult population had moved to, saying that they could continue to vote. Since they could not physically contact the adults to get their votes, the Scorpions decided to write in the adults' votes themselves.

Hardwoods' reaction

Many Hardwoods believed that the surprisingly low crime rate among the Scorpion population was due to potential Scorpion criminals being afraid of the adult male Hardwoods who shared the streets, despite their having repeated many times that they were not afraid of adults. The Hardwoods expected similar behavior from the Cold Men. Traditionally the Hardwoods had allowed limited violent behavior amongst their own children, seeing it as part of human nature, especially for boys; by adulthood, the Hardwoods expected their men to solve problems through discussion and compromise. The migrating Cold boys had thus surprised the Hardwoods by declaring violence to be an adult behavior that children should shun in favor of peaceful solutions, showing that their worldview was the precise opposite of the Hardwoods; the Hardwoods believed that violent boys grew into peaceful men, whereas the Cold children believed that children made peace and adults committed crimes and started wars. The Hardwoods understood that it would be very difficult to convince the Cold boys to change their minds, but believed strongly that doing so would make their nation stronger, as the Cold Men would inevitably become adults and, if they did not change their worldview, might be very violent adults and ones who would attack a very weak enemy.

Baeba model

They proposed a aystsem that required cooperation between the various parties who had split the territory, and especially so in cases where territorial claims overlapped. Thus, offices such as governor could not exist in the traditional sense; there could only be a person who had direct control over their own party's citizens and indirect control (through a cooperative effort) of the other party's citizens. The new Play word vapitāsīa "administrator" was used to describe these one-party governors whose stated goal was cooperation rather than competition. Each vapitāsīa was appointed based on their party's election procedures, and had authority over those people only. The Lilypads believed that, as so often in the past, their rival party's officials would get along perfectly well, perhaps even better so than did traditional governors in multi-party states; and that their main problem would be with the adults whom they were just now inviting to join their system.

First year in the Blue Cocoon

Most people in the Blue Cocoon believed that the primary political conflict would be the Cold Men's inability to physically remove the adult Hardwood and Crystal populations from their territory, and the Scorpions' unwillingness to help the democratically triumphant Cold police officers enforce their new law. Some Hardwoods worried that sooner or later, one of their own men would attack a child, and this incident would trigger both the Cold Men and the Scorpions to unite against the adults and push them out of the territory by pure force. But conflicts soon appeared that did not involve the two groups of adults, and the Hardwoods encouraged their people to remain uninvolved and let the children fight their battles nonviolently as they both had promised.

Economic conflicts

Considering themselves at peace, the Cold Men opened stores and offered their services in the traditional labor market, but found that the other groups, even the Scorpions, looked down on them and would only allow them to sell their products in special stores for merchandise made by the Cold Men. That is, instead of grocery stores, furniture stores, bookstores, and the like, there could only be "Cold stores" where everything was bunched together. One reason for this was that the Cold Men had refused to outlaw shoplifting. The average age in the Cold party was younger than the Scorpions' because the Cold Men had absorbed many thousands of young children whose parents had abandoned them, whereas the Scorpions had already seceded by this time. The Cold Men claimed that they were nearly self-sufficient, but that some among them still needed help to make ends meet. They believed that the best way to meet their needs was to steal from rival parties, including the Scorpions, rather than trying to set up a welfare system. The Cold Men argued that they had proven their good behavior and that each shoplifter knew precisely what they needed better than a middleman in welfare system could do. Thus, the Cold Men allowed their members to shoplift from stores owned by other groups, and stated that if they were physically harmed in the process, they would consider it to be assault. Lastly, the Cold Men believed that the other groups in the Cocoon were less needy and therefore did not allow the other groups to shoplift from the Cold stores.

Because of the layout of stores of the time, customer-facing merchandise was limited, so shoplifting of any but the most petty things required the customer to engage with a salesperson, and was much the same as robbery. It was much easier for a salesperson or distributor to steal from a store than for a customer. The Scorpions allowed their people to prohibit Cold kids from shopping at their stores, but believed it was unnecessary. Rather, by excluding the Cold Men from their distribution networks, the other groups could make a much greater difference in the amount of theft the Cold kids inflected on them.

Hygiene

The Cold Men insisted that all citizens of the Blue Cocoon obey strict hygiene laws, worried that the Scorpions' lifestyle of living close to nature would lead to a plague that would mostly hurt the Cold Men who were not accustomed to living in pestilential conditions. Both the Scorpions and the Cold Men considered humans to be a part of nature, but had different ideas about what this meant. The Scorpions' view on this issue was similar to that of the Players, saying that filth too was a part of nature, and could actually protect strong humans against disease while sickening the weak. By contrast the Cold Men believed that soap and bathing were a part of nature, and that humans needed to constantly clean their bodies in order to remain healthy; human anatomy was just such that humans were able to easily clean their entire bodies while bathing, unlike all other animals. The Cold Men said that to deny this was to deny human nature, and would make humans vulnerable to diseases that they were not meant to endure. The Cold Men's view on this was partly influenced by their alliance with the Soap Bubbles and the children in the Soap-influenced Clover dynasty, but also came from their having been attacked by the notoriously filthy Players.

Contact with the Clovers

By this time, the Clover children's nation of Pavaitaapu was overwhelmed by the war raging around them and no longer functioned as a sovereign territory. Some adults in the Clover nation wanted Baeba Swamp, still legally dominated by the Leapers, to annex Pavaitaapu and protect the Clover children by adopting the youngest ones into childless Leaper families and granting the older children control over neglected mountain areas that other armies would be unlikely to invade. By this time those few Clovers who had ever been armed had lost this, and the Clover nation was dominated by two groups of adults (the bodyguards and the police) who were fighting for control of the children. These two groups were not formally at war, but isolated incidents occurred in which members of each group attacked each other or attacked the children. The Cold Men had earlier established warm relations with the Clover king, the Golden Sun, but in March 4195 the Golden Sun's bodyguards fatally stabbed him and his younger brother during a party. The king of the Clovers was now a 13-year-old boy whose trade name was Silas.

Formation of the Slopes

There was a new renegade party called the Slopes which had also been founded by a boy; the Slopes held a celebration shortly after their founding, and adults who attended the party assaulted the young Slopes after nightfall. Many traumatized Slopes rejoined the Clovers after the assault, while others resolved to endure the abuse as they planned for a future in which they would make weapons and seize control of the unarmed and defenseless populations around them. Thus, the remaining Slopes were not merely criminals, but a minority among criminals who considered their drive for power so important that they would endure years of abuse from stronger criminals just to get access to weapons and power when they became adults.

The formation of the Slopes alarmed the adult populations of Pavaitaapu and news spread to those living far afield. The Slopes' party platform made clear that they expected they would be physically assaulted by adult men as part of everyday life, and that they neither expected nor welcomed any outside group's offer to protect them; they resolved to fight the adult criminals on their own despite their obvious physical disadvantages. This was because the Slopes had abolished the concept of crime, just like the Zenith party whom they so admired. The Slopes also leaked plans to help the Zeniths in the war involving the adult groups around them, expecting to win control of the land they fought for rather than allowing the Zeniths to push them onto the front lines and then steal control of the land after the war was over.

The Slopes in many ways resembled young Zeniths. Unlike the Zeniths, however, the Slopes sought to rapidly increase their population by natural reproduction and by adopting young children, particularly the young orphans in Mutanapana who had still not been rescued by the common people of Pavaitaapu or by any other outside party.

Slopes react

The Slopes were more communitarian than the Zeniths, meaning that individual members had relatively less freedom, and the Slopes as a whole had more power over each Slope party member. But whereas the Zeniths were mostly male and attracted people looking to live a life of self-reliance, many Slopes felt they had noplace else to go, and did not seek positions of leadership. This meant that individual Slopes seeking leadership positions could wield more power over their party than individual Zeniths did over theirs.

Soon, a young Slope leader named Sima-Kīsiba ("Window") declared war on the Crystal women without endorsing the Sunspots or any other group. Previously, Window had been a follower of a particular Zenith leader, but had quickly come to see himself as a leader in his own right and stated that he would pay no allegiance to the Zeniths either.

Another boy popular at this time was named Vamnape; his name was related to that of the Clovers' Tapupais police force which was just being assembled.

Breakdown of law

By this time, there was no single police force that had control over the Clover nation, and violent crimes against children increasingly went unpunished. The Clovers mostly accepted this, and stated that they would prefer to face unfair battles against traditional adult male armies rather than give up their sovereignty, but that they would not stop Clovers from fleeing to safety, and would even risk their own lives to help the youngest of the Clover orphans escape Pavaitaapu so long as they could trust that the children would be headed to a safe territory such as the Blue Cocoon rather than into the home of an abuser.

Scorpions and Crystals change

Eastern politics

It seemed to some that, while the traditional armies fought for control of Baeba Swamp, the various nations whose populations consisted entirely of teenagers and children might have the eastern rural hinterlands to themselves, as this land was much poorer and seemed untempting to the more powerful armies in the Swamp. Some young leaders in the east were open to diplomatic ties with the Slopes, who had promised to destroy all beautiful things, but not with the Zeniths or any other adult parties, even those who had never done them any harm. At the same time, they were openly critical of the Slopes. Thus, the young politicians seemed increasingly intent on building a new world run by their generation, and where the adults of the previous generation would become irrelevant.

Thus the leaders of parties like the Scorpions and Cold Men, who had always seen each other as allies, now became more brave about criticizing each other, and also spent less time criticizing the adults in parties such as the Hardwoods.

Likewise, the adult parties mostly ignored the children as they always had. The Crystals were one exception to this, but they had no adult male leaders in the region either, as their entire adult male population had decamped to Baeba.

The Slopes and Clovers were young but surrounded by adult armies. The leaders of the east were not sure whether the Slopes and Clovers would be interested in immigrating to the eastern wilderness if given the opportunity. For the Clovers, it would mean giving up vast amounts of wealth, but it seemed increasingly unlikely that the Clovers would ever inherit the wealth they were legally entitled to.

Commons protest incident

Many young Cold boys staged an anti-Scorpion protest at Vamīptau Tuaus, a public commons in the Scorpion village of Vasavavu, in the district of Pamtaipu, an area of Tāmta that had been recently created by the Cold Men to make the Scorpions' settlements politically similar to those of the Cold Men.

Because this protest was in Scorpion territory, the non-Scorpion Hardwood and Crystal populations were allowed in the commons as well. Some of them did not speak Play and did not understand what the children were so angry about, and merely stood and watched in amazement. Others did understand Play or asked others to translate for them. Near the center of the commons, nine boys carried protest signs while a tenth boy, Saummumi, stood in front of them and began yelling angry words.

After Saummumi started running towards the Scorpion boys, a Hardwood man attacked a different Cold boy who was standing in amidst the Scorpions; none of the boys were even addressing the man, but he mistook the situation for a threat and beat up the boy who was standing between him and Saummumi. Then he fled the scene.

Crystal reaction

The Crystals reacted to this by endorsing the Cold Men's plan to rid their territory of adult males, even though the Crystals were themselves illegal simply for being adult women and did not expect to be legally allowed back in. They only hoped that if they cooperated with the Cold plan, the Cold boys would recognize them as friendly, and even if they insisted the Crystals not be allowed citizenship they might allow the Crystals to remain physically present with a small autonomous territory of their own. The Crystals also stated that they were joining the alliance for their own protection, and not because they believed that the Hardwoods were invaders; the Hardwoods were the only group in the Blue Cocoon who consisted primarily of traditional families, and had been there before the others arrived; thus the Hardwoods described themselves as indigenous to the area while the children and the Crystal women were both sometimes described as refugees and sometimes as colonists (Play mašeta).

Scorpion reaction

Meanwhile, the Scorpions, who had previously been passive, now endorsed the original Cold plan to remove all adults by force, but stated that they would first target childless men, then childless women, and lastly men and women who had dependent children in their homes. This new plan ignored party membership, meaning that childless Hardwood women were considered equivalent to any childless women in the all-female Crystal party. Many Crystal women had children in their homes, but Crystal tradition had encouraged children, especially boys, to move out at even younger age than the Scorpions and Cold Men did, with boys traditionally moving out at age 10. The Scorpions counted these households as childless even if the boys had not actually moved out, and considered the boys to be prime targets for enrollment in the Scorpions or perhaps the Cold party.

The Scorpions were better armed than the Cold Men and thus better equipped to fight against adult men, but both the Cold Men and the Scorpions knew that the Hardwoods could quickly escalate the conflict into a war, and that in a war, there would be far more deaths among the Cold and Scorpion children than among the Hardwood adults. They also knew that the Crystals were not only unreliable allies, but very weak, as the Scorpion boys had actually attacked some Crystal women the previous year and the Crystals reacted by seeking outside protection instead of attempting to bring the boys to justice or even invading the boys to bring them under control.

Cold Men respond

The Cold Men were upset not just because one of their younger members had been beaten up by an adult, but because the man seemingly had no comprehension of what he was doing and was simply acting on instinct. And because this incident had occurred at a protest against the Scorpions, which the Scorpions had allowed and did not even involve the Hardwoods, the Cold Men wondered if it was no longer safe to protest, or even assemble, in their nation lest a rogue adult wander through the crowd and decide to attack children out of pure spite. Thus, the Cold Men compared the Hardwoods to wild animals, saying that they and the Scorpions were in danger just walking around their nation, always at risk of being attacked even without a trigger or background of hostility. They realized that if they were already in danger while officially at peace with the Hardwoods, they would be in much greater danger should the Hardwoods ever come up with a legitimately compelling reason to attack them.

The Cold Men knew that the Scorpions had been living with the Hardwoods and had not complained. Some Cold Men now suspected that the Hardwoods had been assaulting Scorpion children all along, but that the Scorpions were afraid to admit this because it would have made them look weak and ruined their public image. Now that the violence was undeniable, the Scorpions could no longer pretend that the Hardwoods were their friends, and so buckled quickly under pressure. But, noticing that it was not a Scorpion boy who was attacked, other Cold Men took it as a sign that the Scorpions were going out of their way to firm up their alliance with the Cold Men, even if they really did still believe deep down that the Hardwoods were mostly gentle towards the children around them.

Hardwoods speak out

The Hardwoods had little sympathy for the children, saying that the Hardwood police force (formerly the cover-all Tāmta police force) was too busy protecting the Hardwoods from the throngs of children around them to also protect those children from the Hardwood men. They claimed the Scorpions and Cold boys needed to start their own police forces if they felt they needed protection from the indigenous adult minority of their newly founded nation. They said that many Scorpions were now as tall and strong as some of the weaker Hardwood men, and although they admitted that this could not justify the attack on the much younger Cold boy who had posed no threat, they also stated that they no longer had any obligation to prosecute crimes against non-Hardwoods.

The Cold Men and Scorpions both insisted that there was no violent crime problem within their parties, and therefore Cold children as young as seven years old (the ones who had been abandoned by their parents) were allowed to live independently and walk around town without seeking protection from an older member of the party. The Cold Men insisted that they should not need to shelter these children because they would not be in any risk of danger were it not for the Hardwood criminals. They did not collect detailed crime statistics, but stated that Cold Men and Scorpions had committed only a negligible amount of violent crime and therefore proved that even the youngest children would be safe if they could only keep the Hardwoods out of their living areas.

The Cold Men insisting that they were not attacking each other found the men's other claim (that it was the Hardwoods who needed protection) even more frustrating to address. They asked the men to show them all the Hardwood victims of Cold and Scorpion criminals, and explain why they needed a police force for protection but the Cold and Scorpion children were able to live unprotected. The Hardwoods answered with familiar words: the Hardwoods were not attacking each other, and the only significant violent crime was between the rival parties, not within them. They refused to show the inquiring Cold Men the victims they had asked for, saying that the Cold Men would simply deny being the perpretrators since they had already refused to acknowledge that Cold Men could be violent.

Indeed, not only the Hardwoods refuse to apologize, but they also escalated their attacks against young Cold children, focusing on robbery of goods distributors. They said that they were only taking back what had been stolen from them, insisting that the Scorpions would be doing the same if they were only physically fit enough to outmuscle the Cold Men. The Hardwoods also began robbing Cold stores directly, physically forcing their way into the store's warehouse. The Cold Men had never specifically admitted to taking goods from the trading network that kept Tāmta supplied with goods, but had made clear that they would do so if they felt they needed to. Now that the Hardwood men were openly committing and promoting looting of Cold-owned goods and stores, the Cold Men felt pressure to retaliate by escalating their own thefts and specifically targeting Hardwood distributors. But in an internal vote, the Cold leadership decided they had had enough of being physically pushed around, and would do their best to eliminate the problem at its source.

Two-party stage

When the Cold Men realized that the Hardwoods had turned their peaceful children's society into a violent one by sheer physical force, they banned all adults from their territory and outlawed adult political parties. They stated that the only party with legitimate differences of opinion in their territory was the Scorpions, and therefore that all future political contests would involve only the Cold Men and Scorpions. The Crystals, who had brought no harm to either of the two children's parties, were ruled out of their nation just the same simply because they were adults. The Cold Men made no mention of the Slopes, and thus no endorsement of them, but did not outlaw the Slopes either.

Therefore the Scorpion and Cold children, agreeing to rule out all adults from their territory, created yet again a nation meant to be entirely without adults, whose leaders expected to face violent resistance from the adults who claimed they had as much right to live there as did the children.

New role for Šanataŋūs

Agreeing to enforce the new law, the Scorpion-Cold coalition abolished the adult male guards around the district of Šanataŋūs. They contemplated allowing the Crystals to take over the role, but reminded each other that the Crystals had admitted that protecting boys from men was not their priority, and that the Crystals were a transnational party whose interests superseded those of any nation they lived in. Therefore the children unprotected Šanataŋūs and said that the children living there would need to defend themselves. They also assured these children, however, that by removing adults there would no longer be a threat to them, and that when the Cold Men became adults themselves they would keep out of Šanataŋūs. Further, they recommended that the people of Šanataŋūs enforce this law against each other, meaning that they would all need to move out when they reached adulthood; this would make Šanataŋūs a perpetual territory for children only, always being refreshed by newly orphaned children or those who chose to run away from their families. As the young leaders hoped that both of these groups would dwindle in number as living conditions improved, they hoped that the population of Šanataŋūs would rapidly decline over time, but promised that it would remain open as a safe place for children who had no adults whom they could trust.

The Cold-Scorpion leaders knew, however, that there were still two obstacles in their way. First, the children of Šanataŋūs might draw the adult guards deeper into their territory, meaning that any attempt by the Cold police to remove them would lead to conflicts against the children; secondly, even if the children agreed to give up their guards, they were not obligated to obey the Cold boys' recommendation to apply the law to their own future adult selves, since the Cold government had specifically granted Šanataŋūs and other districts autonomy and the power to nullify laws such as these.

The assault in the commons had taken place just weeks after a policeman had kidnapped a young Clover boy for protesting against the police force; word of this did not reach the Blue Cocoon immediately, but when the Scorpions heard what had happened, even those who had been reluctant to follow the new strict policy mostly abandoned their remaining objections.

Birth of the Hipside Society

Hearing this, the Cold district of Fipapanu offered to absorb the adult refugees of both the Hardwoods and the Crystals, and recommended that they live together but insisted that they must live apart from the various groups of children in Fipapanu. Fipapanu's leaders were slightly older than the average in the Cocoon and promised that they would not fear or run from adults; they however insisted that because the potential entrants were not members of the Butterfly alliance and could not join it, they could not live together with the Cold Men.

Being older, Fipapanu's Cold Men had been more able to take care of the youngest children among them, and therefore Fipapanu's average age was about the same as the average for the Cocoon, but more spread out, with more older teenagers and more very young children than the other districts. They had also been the only ones to revoke their law against childbirth, and their plan was to remain in Fipapanu and reproduce to grow their population as quickly as possible regardless of the danger their children would be in due to the war around them. Reproducing made them legally adults, which made it illegal for them to leave Fipapanu even to visit other Cold territories, and therefore they hoped to also draw in other Cold couples looking to start new families.

But although they insisted they live apart from the Hardwoods and Crystals, they felt that once those groups entered Fipapanu, they would become loyal citizens of Fipapanu. They planned to further divide their district into neighborhoods, meaning that there would be sixth-order political divisions in their society: neighborhoods within a district within a nation within a nation within a refugee territory within an empire. The leaders of Fipapanu coined names in Leaper and Moonshine for their territories, and came to call Fipapanu Hipside after the trade name of the nearby Hipside River. Thus Moonshine diplomats referred to Fipapanu's Cold Men as Hipsiders, and they were the only group to have a trade name. (The Hipside River was actually on the other side of the Cocoon, but they named themselves after what had been for many of them their most important migration route).

Pacifism and policing

The Hipsides reaffirmed the inherited Cold doctrine that children were pacifists by nature, and that both war and violent crime were entirely the fault of adult men. They stated that war was not inherently bad, but violent crime was; they promised that their nation would never suffer from a crime wave because they would redirect their men's healthy urges towards warfare, most likely against the slave-seeking Matrix army in the west and any other armies that supported the Matrix soldiers. They also stated that even if the entire adult male population left Tāmta to fight a war and women were so tied down that children were left to roam free, they still would not suffer a violent crime wave because they knew that children were too gentle to do such a thing, and that children by nature always sought friendly relations with other children their age, even those caught on the opposite side of a war. Thus the Hipsides sought to adopt war orphans not only from the politically friendly Clover kingdom, but also from the groups who were fighting against the Clovers. They believed that they would prosper as a society if they were able to adopt tens of thousands of orphans into their homes, raising them alongside their own biological children, all while rejecting any offers of help from outside adult groups such as the Crystals. The Hipsides believed that a young nation was a healthy nation and that even an extremely young nation where adults were greatly outnumbered would remain prosperous so long as they were safe from outside invasion.

This belief went sharply against the beliefs of both the Crystals and the Hardwoods. The Crystals considered men and boys together, since to them childhood was a life stage and not an identity. They stated that war and violent crime were committed almost entirely by males, against both males and females, and that the age of the perpetrator made no difference to them. The Hipsides had little interest in the Crystals' opinions.

Hardwoods' view

Meanwhile the Hardwoods, along with many other groups of refugees in Hōki, believed that children were in fact far more violent than adults by nature, but were constrained by their even stronger fear of adult authority from actually committing the sorts of violent crimes that the Hipsides blamed on adults. The Hardwoods claimed that each of the societies in which the Hipsides claimed children had run a society entirely without adults were in fact inhabited by adults, whether helpful or harmful, and that both types of adults frightened the children so much that they were afraid to commit crimes for fear that their punishment would entail being handed over to the adult groups who would abuse them until they died of their injuries.

The Hardwoods believed that if the Hipsides were somehow able to rescue the orphans living in the Clover kingdom, Hipside territory would be immediately overcome by every known societal malady, from famine to plague to property theft, and that violent crime would include many incidents of children attacking younger children which the Hipsides would be unable to explain using their doctrine that young people were innocent by nature.

The Hardwoods also explained that while adults in general, including men, were gentle by nature and sought to protect the vulnerable children around them, the Hipsides had grown up in non-traditional societies where the adults they knew were mostly not their parents. The Hardwoods further stated that the sort of men who were most likely to seek to live in a children's nation were the very sort most likely to commit violent crimes, and that the Hipsides needed to realize that not all men were like the Tadpoles and other groups who had abused them in the past.

Hipside response

The Hipsides rejected these claims and again stated that they had proven their case by their mere existence; if a nation of children were destined to succumb to internal violence, the Hipsides would not have survived into adolescence. They explained that they had been attacked time and time again by adult males, both on the battlefield and in the streets, and that this proved that men, not boys or children, were responsible for both war and violent crime. They described the few incidents in which children had hit back, such as the Spines' recent attack on the Crystals, as being much like humans' attempts to communicate with wild animals, where what looked like a human attacking an animal actually did not hurt the animal in any way, and was simply the only way the animal would pay attention to the human.

Denial of military obligations

The Hipsides promised that they would create a strong police force but not an army. They accepted the Cold Men's insistence that all factions of the Cold Men must participate in a common military, and therefore that the Hipsides could not have their own private military outside the Cold Men's control. But they also stated that they would choose peace over party, and that if the Cold Men launched a war, the Hipsides would declare themselves an independent party with no obligation to join that war. The Hipsides also promised, nonetheless, that any among them who supported the war would be free to rejoin the Cold party and that the Hipsides would not stop them from joining the war, which they expected would take place in the west and pose little danger to the Hipside society.

Because the Hipsides were located in the western region of Hōki, and sought to expand their territory further, they knew that should the war turn around and the Matrixes begin an invasion of Hōki, their civilian population would be hit before the civilians of the Cold factions who had fought in the war. The Hipsides accepted this, and promised that their police force would protect the young children of the Hipside society against any invading army.

Usurpation of Moonshine authority

Four years had passed since the Cooks had taken their first steps towards emancipation from their parents; now the oldest Hipsiders were seventeen years old, though most were younger. The Hipside leaders believed that they had already waited too long to start raising families of their own, and that they needed to focus on reproduction to expand their population even if it meant that the first generation of children born in Hipside would be very poor. They also announced that they were the latest of several groups seeking to adopt the remaining STW orphans stranded in Clover territory, and would raise these children as Hipsides rather than allowing the adult populations around them to adopt and raise them into their own societies.

The Hipsiders stated that despite their youth, they were better educated than the adults around them, and deserved to be in control. They then stated that their authority extended to the other refugees in Hōkī as well, and that they would annex various adult territories around them, bringing them under their jurisdiction, so long as they judged it would be safe to do so and that most of the refugees they would be bringing in would either support the Hipsiders or be ambivalent. The Hipsiders nonetheless abolished voting rights for all other parties, saying democracy was incompatible with their form of government, because only the Hipsiders were bunaa, a Play word for teacher outside the context of a school, one who guides others and provides correct solutions to difficult problems.

The Hipsiders appointed diplomats to walk through the other areas of Hōkī, saying that the other refugee populations should support the Hipsiders instead of Moonshine, because while the Moonshines had provided the territory of Hōkī as a safe place for refugees of all nations, they had done little to protect the lives of people once they had arrived, whereas the Hipsiders would establish clear internal borders for their subpopulations and ensure their safety.

Thus the Hipsiders set themselves up as a rival refugee territory, on the same level as Hōkī, but promised they would continue to obey their military alliance with the Cold Men, and to respect the Cold Men's map which showed Hipside as a single much smaller district they called Fipapanu. Although the wider Cold party had inherited a deed to the land that the Hipsiders were now expanding into, they had not expected to wield authority over it, and so the Hipsiders believed that they could expand over this land without triggering a conflict against the other Cold Men.

Treaty of Lampanga

The Hipsides signed a pact with the landlocked refugee colony of Lampanġa to their south. This was a Leaper name, and most Lampanga people did not speak Play. The Lampanġa were primarily descendants of Yoy-speaking Andanic people from the southern territories on the edge of the tropics, thousands of miles away, that were now mostly controlled by the Egg party. They were genetically related to the Zeniths but had no political ties; the inhabitants had mostly stopped thinking about party politics, but after making contact with the Hipside kids the Lampanga leaders announced the revival of their ancient Square Tile party (Leaper Hamalōnta).

The Tiles had been driven out of their homeland much earlier by an unrelated conflict but were now largely anti-Egg, both because the Eggs were occupying their ancestral homeland and because the Lampanġa had originally been forced into hiding because they supported the Dreamers in a war which ended up giving the Dreamers control of much hostile territory. The Hipsides were politically opposed to the Tiles for this reason, and yet they still felt they could find friends in Lampanga and forge a stronger nation.

Promise of unpaid labor

The treaty stated that the Hipsides would work in Lampanga building roads and bridges for the people there, while teaching the Tiles to speak Play, and that they would do these things for free. In return, the Tiles would be encouraged to move to Hipside territory so that the population would be mixed in both territories. Nonetheless the Hipside kids reminded the Tiles that the Hipsides were a closed-entry party, and that the Tiles could achieve citizenship in the Hipside territory but would never be able to vote in the Hipsides' internal elections; since the Hipsides had set up a one-party government, these internal elections were the only elections that mattered.

The Hipside kids understood that most Tiles were not interested in politics and figured that they would not mind moving to a territory in which they could not vote because for all practical purposes they had not been able to vote in Lampanga either. Thus they emphasized that the treaty had two points, both favorable to the Tiles: the Hipsides would be working in Tile territory for free, and the Tiles would be able to live amongst the Hipsides. The treaty seemed so favorable taken at face value that the Hipsides were certain that the Tiles would accept it, as the only favor the Tiles were expected to do for the Hipsides was to move to the Hipside children's territory, which was on the lakeshore, and even this was optional. The Hipside leaders understood that they were cheating themselves in their new treaty, but explained that population growth was so important to them that they would seek to sign treaties that harmed their lifestyle and robbed them of their independence in order to achieve this goal.

The Hipsides insisted the Tiles live in compact neighborhoods with strictly delineated borders, and that this was due to party identification rather than age, so the segregation would continue even once most Hipsiders were adults, but the Hipside voting population worried that this was an empty promise and there would be no feasible means of enforcing it. By contrast, the Tiles believed in an integrated society and allowed the Hipsides to settle close to each other, but not to have an exclusive neighborhood to themselves.

North-south migration

The Hipsides established diplomatic settlements in the Tile towns of G̣ʷehanni and Lamàta-Gʷùṭa. Despite their promise to work in Lampanga doing unpaid heavy manual labor, the Hipsides sent mostly their younger members to start their outreach program, assigning them the task of finding Tiles who could speak Play, and finding Tiles who would be willing to move to the lakeshore, regardless of whether they spoke Play. They were saying that they needed to establish bilateral relations and find a common language before they could pursue further projects, and that they needed the stronger older boys to remain at home to build up their living quarters along the lake.

The Tiles sheltered the Hipside diplomats in or near their school buildings so that they would spend much of their time with other children, including younger ones, and perhaps in time help teach at least some of the children to speak Play. The Tiles promised to treat them delicately and ensure that their fresh new deal did not soon go sour. Even so, the Hipside travelers privately admitted that they felt uncomfortable and out of place in Lampanga, as they stood out sharply from the Tiles and could find almost none who spoke Play. The few Tiles who did speak Play listened the Hipsides' plans and mostly were supportive, and ensured the Hipsides that they would find many Tiles who would be willing to move to Hipside territory.

A small number of Scorpions also moved into Lampanga for various reasons; most agreed with the Hipsides in that building a stronger nation would help all parties.

Meanwhile, hundreds of Tile men accepted the Hipsides' invitation and moved north into the Hipside territory as expected, many stating that they wanted access to the lake so that they could establish a stable food supply for both the Hipsides and themselves. The earlier refugees such as the Hardwoods had not allowed them to do this; indeed, Moonshine had never officially allowed the refugees access to the lake, as it was part of Moonshine proper rather than the refugee colony, but had not aggressively policed the water in part because the previous non-refugee inhabitants of Hōki (when it had been called Hōmoya) had had access to the lake as a whole.

Relatively few of the Tiles were interested in non-physical jobs, and relatively few were women, children, or intact families. The Hipsides decided that it made sense for most Tiles to work with fishing and food preparation because they would be better able to handle the jobs than would the Hipsides, but the Tiles admitted that they did not have enough boats for their population and would have difficulty convincing other groups to sell or manufacture boats for them.

Crystals object

The Crystals had traditionally been enemies of the Tiles, even though the Tiles had mostly lived peaceably and had not identified with politics until the Hipside kids established friendly ties with them. This was because the Tiles were a male-led society, and because the Tiles had a land claim against the Eggs, a faction of the Crystals who were at the time occupying the Tiles' old homeland (though the Eggs had not been the ones to push out the Tiles). The Crystals claimed that the Hipsides were walking into a trap and that the Tiles had only agreed to the treaty because they felt they could exploit the Hipsides and perhaps even push them out of their refugee colony along the lake. The Crystals also claimed that the Tiles should not have access to the lake and that Moonshine's lack of objection was because the Tiles were hiding behind the guise of being part of a children's nation, against whom the Moonshines felt it would be cruel to enforce their trespassing laws.

The Crystals also realized, however, that the leaders of the Hipsides were well-educated in politics, and that perhaps the Hipsides felt that they could always count on the Crystals supporting them no matter what they did, knowing both that the Crystals had no other allies besides Moonshine and that the Crystals had already committed themselves to conflicts in the west.

The Crystals realized that if the Hipsides were motivated by genuine selflessness, believing that their duty was to stand aside and help other parties even if they got nothing back, their best means of achieving this goal would be to make an alliance with the Tiles, who would gladly accept the Hipsides' free gifts and build forts in Hipside territory from which they could launch attacks against the defenseless Crystal women. But the Crystals also realized that if the Hipsides had become very selfish, they would also stand to gain from an alliance with the Tiles, since the Tiles would almost certainly not attack the Hipsides, and also would not join the Hipsides' conflicts in the west, as the Tiles' only outstanding claim against another party was with the Crystals. Thus the strong men in the Tile army might help protect the Hipside homeland while the Hipsides sent their own army westward to fight the Matrix.

Plans for further expansion

Undeterred by objections, the Hipsides planned to expand even further, mostly to the west and south, by incorporating other refugee territories into their own, intending to follow the same plan of allowing unlimited migration of the other groups into Hipside territory so long as they promised to live in compact neighborhoods and accepted that they could not vote in Hipside elections. They also planned to write the next treaty on their own, without the Tiles' input, so that it would be two separate bilateral relations instead of a three-way alliance. They understood that the refugee groups had generally been able to get along in the past, without the Hipsides' support, but that they generally had not written formal treaties. Despite their desire to move west, the Hipsides then selected the eastern territory of Etatăni as their next target for a new treaty; here lived the descendants of the early rebel Mīžìpa and his supporters, who had slaughtered many Crystal women in the 3900s.

The people of Etatani belonged to a tribe called in Leaper Tahankʷ. They were strongly tribalistic and demanded better living conditions than other refugees. They had banned the Moonshines from visiting their colony even though Moonshine was supplying the refugees with food and basic needs; they survived by extracting tributes from the passing Moonshines, which they then used to buy supplies from the other groups. As they had turned against their early leader Mīžìpa, who had demanded a sober lifestyle, they had become rich by dominating the alcohol trade along the river and had fiercely defended their right to enjoy this wealth while still claiming refugee status. More politically savvy than other refugees, the Tahank suspected that the Hipsides were intending to start a war in the west, while the adult male populations of the Tahanks, the Tiles, and perhaps the Hardwoods would all be forced to fight while the Hipside men would stay home, either saying they were still too young to fight or that they needed to care for their young children at home and their pregnant wives.

The Tahanks thus demanded an even more unfair treaty than the one to which the Hipsides had earlier voluntarily written for the Tiles; the Tahanks wanted the right to come and go in Hipside territory as they pleased, so that they would not be bound to a war, and that they would never cross paths with the Tile party, to whom they were hostile even though they both had common enemies, and that Hipsides visiting Etatani territory would need to stay within certain areas and would not be treated as guests nor given free food or lodging. The Tahanks were also eager for war, but their preferred target was the Crystals, and they knew that a Hipside attack on the Crystals was unlikely because the Crystals were still supporting the Hipsides.

Treaty of Cooperation

The Cold Men and Scorpions signed a pact reinstating the Lilypad Association, a group including both parties along with the Clovers and any allies the Clovers had control of. They also declared that the Lilypads were now a political party, with the constituent parties being reduced to factions within it, and that the Lilypads would remain Lilypads as they became adults. The Lilypads excluded the Hipsides from their new party because the Hipsides had earlier chosen to secede from the party's common military, but the Hipsides promised to continue diplomacy and to allow their members to join the Lilypads even while remaining in Hipside territory.

This treaty also created a new party called the Sippers (Play Tappea) to rule the nation's capital territory, Šanataŋūs, and stated that Šanataŋūs would be a one-party state with no obligation to participate in the nationwide democracy so long as they remained pledged to the common military and allowed the entrance and exit of the Lilypads who had earlier chosen to place their capital city in Šanataŋūs. The Lilypads intended Šanataŋūs to be inhabited by children only, who would quickly move out as they reached the age of thirteen, but the Lilypads acknowledged that by awarding autonomy to Šanataŋūs they were specifically depriving themselves of the ability to enforce this, and that Šanataŋūs would in a few years likely become similar to Hipside as the adolescents would likely remain in Šanataŋūs and start raising families.

Lastly, the treaty abolished all restrictions on childbirth, meaning that Lilypads could begin raising children in their territories. They still worried that a war could reach them even in their refugee colonies, but stated that waiting any longer to begin reproducing would only harm their children, as the safest years they had ever known were upon them already and safer times were unlikely to follow.

Language policy

The new treaty continued the use of the Play and Late Andanese languages side by side, saying that Play was official and Andanese was secondary. By excluding the Hipsides, they did not need to learn or listen to the non-Play languages of the other refugees.

Previously, Late Andanese had been a military language valuable for secret communication. But in 4193, the Matrix army had begun to learn Late Andanese and some of the simpler Play ciphers, and also began writing their own. The Matrix ciphers were called Xap and were referred to with numbers. This name is a distortion of the name of Baeba Swamp.

Vowel-only cipher

The Matrixes created a vowel-only cipher, Xap 21, in which the thirty syllables of Andanese were represented by a sequence of two vowels; the first syllable had a seven-vowel inventory and the second had a four-vowel inventory; the remaining two syllables were represented by a silent vowel in each syllable. There were consonants in Xap 21, but they did not carry important semantic meanings, except in the rare cases where the Matrixes used the cipher two encode two messages of about the same length alongside each other.

The letter L

The Players and their forebearers had long considered the sound /l/ to be obscene, because it involved making one's tongue visible to the listener. Players were thus required to pronounce the /b/ sound instead even when speaking foreign languages. This policy did not apply to the Andanese people, who instead followed an opposite rule of replacing every b with an /l/ even when speaking Play or other languages with phonemic b. The Players had abolished the Andanese tribe in 4175 and took ownership of the Andanese language, claiming it was well-suited for their military. But they did not abolish the prohibition against /l/, nor did the other Play-speaking cultures, who agreed with the Players that the sound was obscene.

As the Lilypads and others had sat through many meetings with foreign diplomats, continuing to obey the traditional Play rule, they realized that the Leapers found their obedience alternately amusing and distressing, as they reliably obeyed a rule they had been taught in the nursery, even when no adults were around to enforce it, and even in the face of foreigners who openly defied and laughed at the rule.

For the first time, the Lilypad leaders now said that their people were free to pronounce the l sound whenever they wished, whether speaking Play, speaking Late Andanese, or just having fun with their tongues. They did not change the languages themselves, however, and expected Play speakers as a wider community would decide that both languages would continue on much as they were and that Play would not have an l sound in upcoming generations.

Entry into the western war

Mad Children

NOTE: This is a longstanding cultural trait, not something that only arose here.

The Crystals and Hardwoods gave Play its first and only derisive term for small children: kaunua, from a word meaning an insect larva. This word was also cognate to Play vanua "mess; dirty pile of filth". The people using this word believed that the newest crop of Lilypad kids were like insects, smaller but more aggressive than adults, hardier in some ways, and much more resistant to pain. They stated that they would retain these traits into adulthood, unlike other human populations, and therefore both children and adults were fair targets in a fight.

A similar concept was Play suma kaus, referring not to children specifically but to a population that reproduces very quickly, forever sending soldiers to the front lines, caring little for their fate, knowing that even with overwhelming body counts they would still outgrow their enemies.

Diplomatic contacts

The Zenith army had lost their legal standing in Baeba Swamp, but still held some land; this caused the Tinks to join their side, which meant that the Tinks were forced to formally declare war against the Lilypads and Hipsides in the Blue Cocoon, even though they knew that many Cocooners were their own biological children. The children believed that the Tinks would ignore their new war because they posed no threat and because the Tinks would likely not be interested in gaining territory in such a remote area. The Zeniths, likewise, did not want their new ally attacking children, both because they needed the Tinks for traditional warfare and because such an attack would almost certainly bring the children into the war as well. (The Zeniths did not specifically claim that a war of adults against children was immoral because they left moral judgments up to their own members.)

The Cold Men and other parties were still concerned about of the fate of the orphans living in the Clover territories, whom they still expected to number about 20,000. The Matrixes claimed these children belonged to them, and to the other groups, the Matrixes seemed less motivated by compassion than by the desire to wield absolute power over a large but highly vulnerable population. The Matrixes were just one of many groups who wanted to adopt the entire orphan population; the young Slopes were also seeking control, as were the Hipsides and the other young populations in Tāmta. As the Slopes were teenagers who had promised to dedicate their lives to crime, they were seen as the worst possible parents by most of the outside groups, but the Hipsides recognized the Slopes as close kin, and believed that the Slopes' own traumatic childhoods were precisely the reason why they would make good parents; they would never let their children suffer as they themselves had. Even so, the Hipsides preferred to adopt the entire orphan population rather than make a deal with the Slopes.

Hipsides move west

The Hipsides began spilling out of the refugee territory as they began their plans to reach the Clovers. This was not a migration so much as an expansion; they were planning to take new territories along the coast, and keep control of them as they grew to the west.

International contacts

A Clover girl named Lifeline (Play Ŋamatapai Mamnuaatata or Mamnuaa), who had served in the Clover government since she was eleven years old, now hoped to pull the Slope leaders such as Window back into the Clover party, and to forge closer ties between the Clovers and the children living further east. As the Hipsides moved westward along the coast, Lifeline dreamed of a single Lilypad nation containing the territories of the Clovers, the Hipsides, the Cold Men, the Scorpions, and any parties of their generation who were accepted by the founding parties.

New nation

The Hipsides declared the formation of the new nation of Titas-Mammep, also known as Mana and the Lifeline. They named their nation partly after the girl, although the word was not the same; they were also using the same womb metaphor that they had heard from the Matrix army earlier, saying that their homeland in the refugee colony of Tāmta, particularly the district of Titapa, was the Womb, and that they were stretching their umbilical cord (seeba) all the way to the Matrix homeland of Tata, from which they would liberate the Matrix strongholds in Baeba.

Hipside-Crystal meetings

The Hipsides also occupied the border between the Crystal state of Olansele and the refugee territory of Hōki. They stated that this was for the protection of the refugees, and not a means to prevent Crystal women from fleeing abuse. But the Crystal women understood that their war had begun when the Crystals accused the Lilypad boys of planning to abduct orphans, and that the Crystals had never mended relations with any of the children's parties in the meantime. The sight of the young Hipside border guards made the Crystal women reflect on what they had done to bring their own party into this state, and though they did not blame themselves for the invasions they were now suffering, the Crystal women realized that if they fled into the refugee territory their husbands (if any survived) would have no families to come home to.

The Hipsides repeated prior words that rescuing the Crystal women, who had been abandoned by their party leadership, was not the obligation of the Hipsides, of the Lilypads, or of any other nation consisting of children or teenagers. But they stated that they would not prohibit Crystal women from using the 15-mile stretch of border that they were occupying, and that they would prevent Slopes from entering the refugee territory. Put another way, they said that the Crystals were invisible to them now as their world was focused on the conflicts of the various parties descended from Play-speaking children.

Hipside political imagery

The Hipsides knew that the Matrixes were planning an invasion as well, but figured that the Matrixes would not give up Baeba. Despite their plans for war, they considered themselves more appealing than the Matrixes; indeed, the slaveholding Matrix soldiers openly promoted their plans to sexually assault the female population of Moonshine, and they called Moonshine the Womb because it was female, passive, and easy to enter. Thus the Matrixes and the Hipsides were both connected to Moonshine's feminine power: the Matrixes through rape, and the Hipsides through love. The Hipsides promised that they would create a peaceful homeland along the coast for themselves, for the previous inhabitants, and for anyone who chose to immigrate there.

Medley art style

The Hipsides also introduced a controversial new art style called Rider Medley (Play vāvipiti) in their campaign literature, aimed at both their own party members and curious outsiders. In this new style, the Hipside artists depicted their people as physically small, very similar in appearance, and associated with soft and round things, while their allies in the traditional nations were much larger, more differentiated, and often drawn with sharp corners.

The new art style was not rigidly structured; sometimes male and female figures were identical in appearance, sometimes they were distinguished by shape, and sometimes they were distinguished by other characteristics. Sometimes faces were simply circles, but other times hair and basic facial features were included. The Hipsides often drew their tongues visible, as a sign of their commitment to the new policy of allowing their speakers to show their tongue in public and to pronounce the previously illegal l sound.

This was derived largely from the Dreamer political art style that had emerged a few decades earlier in Dreamland. The name implied a mix between the Dolphin Riders' style and that of the Lilypads, for which they chose the Top Rider faction to stand. Dreamland was an early enemy of the Play party that was culturally ancestral to all of the Lilypads. The Dreamers' artwork had depicted the Players as unnaturally small, but often riding animals or in some way connected to something large and strong, often a natural object. By contrast, the Dreamers drew themselves as much taller, but also thin, soft-bodied, and often trapped between objects that were much larger than both types of humans.

Thus the Dreamers had drawn themselves as large but soft, and the Players as small but strong. The Hipsides united the two art styles and stated that they were going to draw themselves as small and soft, and the people of the nations around them as large and strong. They left it open to interpretation whether the Hipsides considered themselves to combine the two weakness of the Dreamers and Players, or the two strengths.

Inherited culture

The Hipsides identified themselves as soft people (Play fūta, Andanese kaaha), and felt that the strongest nation was one in which soft and hard people worked together, each doing what they did best while relying on the opposite partner to cover their weak spots. This was similar to the forerunners of the Players, who defined Play speakers as soft and Andanese speakers as hard; this led to Andanese becoming a military language and outliving the Andanese tribe.

The Hipsides did not believe in equality; they said that, as soft people, they were meant to bend without breaking; thus the hard people they planned to invite into their nation would shape the Hipsides as they saw fit, and the Hipsides would take roles in society that the newcomers were unable or unwilling to do.

Feminine identity

They also described their nation as a feminine power comparable to Moonshine, but stated that unlike Moonshine, they would thrive on the masculine energy of the colonists moving into their territory, and help the newcomers fill roles in Hipside society where they made a good fit.

The Hipsides stated that the world needed more feminine powers, and that feminine power was based on love and peace rather than military might. Instead of fighting the armies around them, the Hipsides invited those men to move to Hipside country and start new lives among the Hipsides. The Hipside boys refused to take on the aggressively masculine identities of the Matrixes and some other nations around them, saying that masculine power was by nature attracted to feminine power, and that since the Hipsides wanted to attract more masculine power into their nation, they needed to make themselves more feminine.

Criticism of Matrixes

The Hipside boys ridiculed the Matrixes' world view, which depended on Matrixes seeing themselves as more masculine than other men. The Hipsides assured the Matrixes that they accepted the need for male-dominated powers in their world. But the Hipsides claimed that their philosophy of balance proved that a male-only party could not function as an independent nation, and would only be able to survive if they conquered and enslaved a feminine power, as they were indeed planning to do to the Crystals. Likewise, the Hipsides sought strong men to live with them in order to bring their own feminine nature into balance.

The Hipsides felt that they would make ideal slaves for a masculine dominant power, as they were soft and flexible, willing to work hard, and capable of absorbing painful punishments for the slightest misdeeds. But while the Hipsides considered themselves good slaves, they claimed that the Matrixes made very poor masters, as they had no long-term interest but their own survival, and no distinction between military and civilian roles in society. The Hipsides challenged the Matrixes to prove their right to rule on the battlefield, whether they chose to attack the Hipsides, the Crystals, or the defenseless Lilypad children living further east. The Hipsides claimed that the Matrixes were just as soft as the people they intended to rule over, and therefore it was the destiny of the Matrixes to themselves become slaves.

The Hipsides claimed that the Matrixes were in fact quite soft, and challenged the Matrixes to explain why, despite many threats to abuse and enslave the Crystals, they had yet to attempt any invasion of the all-female Crystal homeland, which had no army to protect itself, while the Hipsides themselves were not only moving into Crystal territory, but in fact moving into the few parts of it that were not entirely female, where they expected to find resistance. The Hipsides knew that the Matrixes had in fact won impressive military battles in the recent past, but that since these battles had been mostly won by the fathers of the currently ruling Matrixes, it would only embarrass the Matrix rulers even more to remind them of their party's prior victories. The Hipsides reassured other nations that they were still intent on defeating the Matrixes in a conventional war, and that they would fight on their own rather than expecting male immigrants of so-called hard populations to fight for them. They stated that there was a difference between feminine power and masochism, and that masochism was the military strategy of the Crystals who had sent poorly armed male soldiers to battle in Baeba and then abandoned the unarmed female population to various groups of invading men who mostly had ill intents.

Formation of Ĕrala

Much of this will be moved off the page.

In 4177, Baeba's Leaper party had created Ĕrala as the successor state to the western half of the Anchor Empire, with the Tinks' Anzan containing the eastern half and a few outlying claims.

Erala was a multiparty democracy with a very weak federal government, intended to allow the many parties within Erala to govern themselves according to their own internal rules so long as they committed no violence against the other parties in Erala. Thus, in many ways, Erala was an alliance of several nations all sharing the same territory. However, the taxation systems were unified, so everyone with citizenship had to pay taxes to Erala's federal government.

Naming

Ĕrala was a Leaper name, because it was officially run by the Leapers and Leaper was the main language of diplomacy. The Leapers used a cognate name, Rapala, from a trade language in some contexts, such as describing citizenship, to better include non-Leaper speakers. The Leapers also coined the Play name Tava-Šammam, incorporating a cognate and what they believed to be a good Play translation. The unusual stress of the Leaper name (its expected cognate would have been Erăla) was due to a transmission error, as the Leapers were reviving a name that had not been used in the modern state of the language.

Exclusion of Baeba

Erala excluded all the territory of Baeba, and the Leaper-written constitution stated that they would abandon claims against any territory that they could not control. Because the Leapers had no army outside Baeba, by control they meant that the will of the people of Erala would keep the nation together. The constitution also made no attempts to prevent parties represented in the government of Erala from fighting wars outside Erala, including wars against each other.

Erala actually included a small area of Baeba where the two nations overlapped; this was the district of Timâra, which despite being located at the extreme western extremity of Erala was the capital of Erala. Thus the capital of Ĕrala was a small territory located at the edge of Baeba Swamp, at the very westernmost extremity of Erala's land claims. This was because because Baeba's ruling Leaper party insisted on having a hand in governing Erala despite not living anywhere within Erala's main territory. As Baeba was much richer than Erala, the various parties in Erala had agreed to this, and Baeba threatened to cut off tax revenue from any party who refused to obey Baeban proclamations. This was the Leapers' way of showing that the vast territory of Erala was just an accessory of Baeba Swamp to them.

Surrender of old land claims

By excluding territory the people of Erala could not control, they also excluded Play territory, and also said that they could not draw a southern border because the Play army was still constantly on the move.

Rejection of youth parties

Erala's Leaper party rejected all of the youth parties such as the Cold Men, Scorpions, Slopes, Clovers, and Hipsides, and disclaimed any territory that they dominated, and bundled their territory into a new nation called Tapiana in Play. This name meant nothing obvious in Play (though tapia na could mean "nectar land"); but upon hearing the name, many children recognized its similarity to Late Andanese tupiana "clover" and understood the intended meaning. The Leapers said any new land gained by the children's armies would go to Tapiana as well, even if the Leapers felt that they could easily take control back. Thus the Leapers implied that if the children invaded Erala, the Leapers would stay out of the conflict, meaning that they would neither support the children nor their enemies.

Most of Tapiana was in Tāmta, part of Moonshine's refugee colony of Hōki/Hupedikas, which the Leapers had excluded out of hand. However, a few children had spilled out of the refugee territory and into what the Leapers were now calling Erala proper, and the Leapers expected a vast out-migration was soon to come.

The Leapers said that the children had no obligation to accept the existence of Tapiana as a nation, since they already had their own nations, and that Tapiana's borders would be wherever the children's own national borders were. Nonetheless, for permission to interact diplomatically in Leaper-hosted meetings, the Leapers required all members of youth parties to come as one and to identify themselves as delegates from Tapiana rather than identifying with their smaller independent nations. This was not a measure of disrespect; the Leapers accepted that the children's nations were rising and falling on a much faster timescale than adult diplomats were used to, and that if they used the children's names and borders they might never meet with the same nation twice.

Attempts to draw Tapiana's borders

The Lilypad leaders in the east considered the Clovers to be fellow Lilypads, and therefore, according to the Leapers' reading of the children's political charter, the Clover territory in Baeba, Pavaitaapu, must also be part of the children's nation of Tapiana, despite its great distance from the rest. The Leapers worried this could present a political problem.

AlphaLeap had gotten its name from its geography: it was a discontiguous nation, a leap (most languages used the same word for hill and leap, so the term was translated rather than borrowed; Play's word was paīp). For example, though currently ruling from Baeba Swamp, AlphaLeap's home territory was far to the south, in the tropics. The Leapers had thousands of years of experience with such nations and knew that they could easily make the children's territory into a leap nation as well. However, they felt that if they did this, the children would expect to be able to travel from one territory to the other, but the Leapers were now claiming all of the vast land in between to be part of Erala, meaning the children would either need to go all the way around Erala or ask the Leapers to let them in. The Leapers had no problem with letting children enter Erala, but could not guarantee their safety, and worried that children merely trying to get to the other side of what they considered one nation would be easy prey for human traffickers living in Erala who would soon learn which routes the children preferred to take.

The Leapers pondered that it would be more politically favorable for them to split Erala in half and allow the children a corridor to pass through, but they realized this would be unpopular with the rest of the people of Erala, who would wonder why a children's nation was given priority over their own, and might decide that Erala was merely a means to contain the people until the children were old enough to take over and rule them all. Moreover, if the children had only a single route through which to pass, this would be an extremely vulnerable route, and they would be even less safe than they would be passing through Erala. The Leapers pondered having the children police the corridor themselves, figuring they could blame the children for their own abductions and say that if the children cried for help it was merely proof that they were not in fact capable of running a nation. Nonetheless the Leapers were against this idea as they felt it would make them unpopular with both adults and children.

The only way to construct a single contiguous Tapiana without splitting Erala would be to stretch Tapiana along the north coast, and encourage them to use sea travel both for speed and for safety. But this would mean giving the children sovereignty over the entire coastline between Tāmta and Baeba, a distance of over a thousand miles. Moreover, unless the Leapers chose a very inconvenient route, the children would have to go all the way to the border of Tata and then turn back east, only to turn west again to reach the Swamp.

Lastly, the Leapers considered a combination of solutions, whereby the children would be encouraged to use sea travel, but would not have a contiguous nation. In this situation, there were still some stretches of coastline which the Leapers knew for sure would need to actually be under the children's control, since they were not militarily defensible on their own. Likewise, the children would either need to somehow conquer western Tata on their own, or call in the Leapers to do so; the Leapers knew they could not do this.

Therefore, the Leapers excluded the Clover territory from the children's nation and declared it to be part of Baeba, and not part of either Erala or Tapiana. (The Clover territory had originally been part of southern Tata, but was joined to Baeba when the Clovers took power.) The Leapers promised that the Clovers could interact diplomatically and could consider themselves to be part of Tapiana, but they worried that the exclusion of Clover territory from Tapiana's borders would lead the children to reject the existence of Tapiana altogether and lose respect for the Leapers.

Nonetheless, the Leapers sometimes referred to Tapiana as "East Tapiana" and the Clover territory as "West Tapiana", stating that perhaps a children's map of the world might reject some nations that adults had created, and therefore the two realities could coincide.

Rejection of other parties

Tinks

The Tinks still claimed much of Erala's land lay within the Little Country; their country's name had been chosen because while they had a lot of land, they focused their attention on their capital city and were thus still small at heart. Essentially, the Tinks had only one nation, whose borders overlapped those of Baeba and Erala. The Leapers had assigned this nation to Baeba, and given them autonomy, meaning that they accepted the Tinks' claims to control a nation and that this did not violate Baeba's territorial integrity so long as they obeyed the laws of Baeba. The Leapers however stated that since all Tinks were citizens of Baeba, they could not also be citizens of Erala. This meant that those Tinks living in Eralan territory (who had not been counted in either Baeba's or Erala's census) were unrecognized by the Leapers. The Leapers stated that to solve this problem, they could simply move to Baeba.

Promises to youth leaders

The Leapers wanted to encourage children to leave their nations and move to Erala to live amongst the traditional societies, though they acknowledged the children had formed very close bonds and would likely prefer to stick together. They promised children could move to Erala if they felt safe. They said children in Erala who belonged to one of the youth parties could consider themselves citizens of Erala, and they would not be required to pay any taxes, but they also could not vote in any way, because their parties did not exist in Erala.

The Leapers felt the best way to deal with rising youth power was to have them join and take over the existing adult parties in the region, who they felt would be much more powerful in war and thus would outlast the weak, vulnerable youth movements.

The Leapers also figured that the youth parties agreed with each other on most issues, and saw each other as rivals rather than enemies. Thus they felt it possible that just one of the established parties would rebrand itself as the one and only youth party, and grow massively at the expense of the others.

Critics said that the Leapers disavowing children just as they were reaching adolescence only proved the earlier claim that the Leapers had been the ones propping up child leaders all along, that none of the children had never actually been in control of their nations, and that if the Leapers could not find new children to push around they might decide to provoke a war between the various groups that they had lost control of.

Outlying states

However, Erala claimed the Moonshine territory of Xema, which was Moonshine's easternmost state and thus the furthest from Baeba. The Leapers asserted that Moonshine did not actually control this land, that its population was composed of several groups of mostly sea-going nomads who had agreed to share the land, and that none of these groups was actually loyal to Moonshine. The Leapers called Xema Hukuku and also revived an old trade name, Sopato. Hukuku was actually a land claim made by the Crystals a few decades earlier, but the Leapers applied it to the vastly larger territory of Xema, which extended more than a thousand miles north and east of the original Hukuku.

Because the Leapers had no reliable means by which to take a census of Hukuku, let alone collect taxes from the people there, they awarded Hukuku no seats in the Parliament. But they said that Erala's citizens were free to move there, and if a reliable trade route could be established, they could enjoy the full benefits of citizenship even if they were thousands of miles from the capital.

Demographics

The Leapers ran the government but had only a token population within Erala's borders, all of whom were living near Erala's border with Baeba in the extreme west.

The majority party was the Crystals, as they were the only ones not to have fled or suffered mass casualties in recent wars. But the only legal adult Crystal citizens were women, because they had sent their entire adult male population to Baeba to fight the war. This had led some male Crystals to defect to rival parties, none of whom had gone so far as to mobilize their entire adult male population.

Economy

Thus, the Zeniths, Matrixes, Crystals, and a small faction of the Soap Bubbles were all paying taxes into a common pool, which was redistributed to the various populations, who then directed the revenue into the armies who were fighting each other in Baeba Swamp. All of the parties represented in Erala's government had agreed that this was a reasonable solution allowing them to keep the fighting out of Erala, but this meant different things for each party, since some were much more militaristic than the others and therefore the tax revenue for the less militaristic parties was given primarily to defense, such as the Soap Bubbles, who were not expecting to win control of any significant amount of new territory in Baeba and therefore spent their money to protect their civilian population from the soldiers of the other armies.

Police and court system

The Leapers deputized a small police force to be made up of Leaper men and women, saying that none of the four major parties would trust a police officer from any of the other three, and that a police force staffed by a fifth party such as the Tinks would quickly turn into an army. The four major parties in Erala agreed this was fair. The Leaper police warned that their duty was to protect the safety of the society as a whole, and not the individual people within it. That is, they would ensure that stores could conduct business, shipments were reaching their destinations, and so on, but would not prosecute murderers or protect children from abusive parents. The individual parties were left to handle these matters on their own, and again all four parties agreed to this, even though all four parties knew that the Zeniths did not believe in the concept of crime and therefore would not prosecute any of their own kind who committed crimes against non-Zeniths nor assist in their arrest.

The Leapers allowed the four parties to create their own police forces and court systems. The Leapers stated that in cases of treason, they might want to try a criminal in Baeba Swamp, but that almost all other crimes, even the most severe, would be left up to the parties to try in their own court systems, if they chose to create any. The Leapers also stated that a criminal could face multiple trials if, for example, committing assault against both a Matrix and a Crystal citizen, as they would have broken two different laws in so doing. Lastly the Leapers allowed the individual parties to criminalize attacks against unenrolled people such as children, and that a criminal who attacks a child might also face multiple trials, as for example if both the Soap Bubbles and the Crystals declared their actions to be a crime, even if the victim did not belong to either party. The Leapers felt this system was ideal, as the most outrageous crimes would be the ones that would provoke multiple parties to demand the accused stand trial.

Zeniths

The Zeniths, as above, did not acknowledge the existence of crimes, and therefore created neither a court system nor an internal police force. Not only were outsiders allowed to attack Zeniths without legal consequence, but Zeniths were allowed to attack each other without legal consequence. Since most Zeniths were adult males and were heavily armed, the Zeniths had been able to follow this system of self-government for thousands of years without dying out; they had always relied on continuous recruitment for survival.

Matrixes

The all-male Matrix party stated that they would prosecute crimes only against other Matrixes, and not against Crystals, Zeniths, or unenrolled people. Moreover, they did not believe in courts, so there was no Matrix court system to process crimes against the Matrixes. However, they stated that a crime might exist if the Matrix party as a whole were harmed, even if none were harmed individually; since they had no court system, this declaration empowered Matrixes to take revenge on their own against other citizens, even for things that had not harmed them.

Crystals

The all-female Crystal party had a well-developed court system, and prosecuted crimes against both their own people and against others. They had been typically much more successful in controlling their own members' behavior than had the Matrixes or Zeniths, and they seldom committed violent crimes. The Crystals had traditionally had a moderately small police force, but when their male population was sent to war, the Crystal women were the only adults who remained in Erala, and they began seeking more weapons for their own protection. They considered enrolling the entire adult female population into the police force, as the Players had once done.

Soap Bubbles

The small Soap Bubble party was known for having the strictest behavior requirements of the four parties. They did not plan to build any physical courts in Erala because they traditionally handled crimes against their members internally through the party leadership. The Soap Bubbles saw little evidence of good will in the members of the other parties, even their traditional allies the Crystals, and therefore saw little purpose in bringing non-Bubbles to stand trial. They decided that they would see all such criminals as enemy soldiers, though acknowledging that they could not simply kill a non-member for committing a minor crime without risking a rapidly escalating revenge attack that would wipe out the Soap Bubble population.

Representation of small parties

The Raspara were still living in Erala, but had been nearly destroyed a few years earlier and had never recovered.

New parties

The Leapers registered two new movements, paana (popró) and Bèd. Both were based on a worldview in which humans were on par with other animals, not above them.

Popró said that humans were the world's most delicate creatures, and that the most human among human beings were those who were even more delicate. By depriving the most physically strong humans of political power, and empowering the weakest, popró supporters believed that they could amplify humans' moral and intellectual strengths and therefore build a society free from pollution by animal instincts.

The Bèd movement was led by a woman and supported a government based on the denial of human needs, saying that humans were by nature meant to feel pain and that through inflicting greater pain on her followers she could build the world's most powerful society.

Position of the Crystals

The Crystals outnumbered the other parties but were weak in many ways.

Views on racial discrimination and slavery

Adding to the Crystals' troubles was that many of them belonged to a faction that endorsed a type of racial discrimination known in Leaper as gāllana (and in a trade language as anata), even though many Crystals were at the bottom of the racial hierarchy they were setting up and had no hand in defining the policies. The Crystals were a transnational party, with members in many nations, but no longer held a majority vote in either Baeba or Erala. (The Leaper government assigned extra voting power to minority parties; therefore, even though the Crystals were more than half of Erala's population, they could not outvote the other parties on their own.) Therefore, they could not write new laws, but only choose which laws they supported. The reasons why many Crystals supported racial discrimination laws that mostly worked against them were complex.

Most of the enemy parties in the area were against racial discrimination, saying it was immoral, but the Crystals said this was an excuse to defend their slavery programs; if there was no racial hierarchy, all peoples could be enslaved. These Crystals saw no plausible political philosophy that rejected both slavery and racial discrimination, so the anti-racism faction, the Phoenixes, declared that they supported the continued practice of slavery, and the anti-slavery faction, the Shields, was forced to declare support for racial discrimination.

The Crystals' inability to reject both racial discrimination and slavery was in large part because the Crystals were an open-entry party, meaning that if they accepted all applicants and promised not to discriminate, they could easily be outvoted by insincere people whose only reason for joining was to destroy the Crystal leadership. The Crystals pointed out that most of the parties publicly opposing racial discrimination, including the Moonshine faction of the Crystal party itself, were closed-entry. Thus the Moonshines criticized the Crystals for their plans to institute a racial hierarchy, while the Moonshines themselves not only discriminated, but put to death anyone not of the Moonshine party who was found trespassing anywhere in Moonshine-held territory (they had two states that were exempt from this, but enforced it in their core territory).

Thus the Crystals supported racial discrimination as being preferable to slavery. Yet, because they did not actually control the government of Erala or any other nation, they could not rewrite the discrimination laws to put themselves at the top; the right to be on top was earned by demonstration of military superiority.

However, the parties who supported racial discrimination seemed unlikely to be good allies. These included the Tinks and the Leash; both were aggressively militaristic and led by male military leaders, although the Leash soldiers had so far only mobilized their army once, to invade a group of children named the Scorpions.

Phoenix plans for slave captures

The Phoenixes announced their plans to ignore the war in Baeba, and instead invade the territory of the northern Crystal faction, hoping to enrich their slave army by capturing non-Crystals living in Erala, including children. Since the northern Crystals were women, the Phoenixes hoped that as they attacked enemy soldiers in Erala, those soldiers would focus their counterattacks on the northern Crystal women, leaving the Phoenixes free to launch more attacks. They hoped that by the time the enemy soldiers had defeated all of the northern Crystal women the Phoenixes would have control of the territory and could enslave all of their enemies and perhaps even the surviving Crystal women.

Dual party membership

Yet another problem for the Crystals was that they were one of only a few parties who allowed dual party membership: some Crystals were also members of the Play party, belonging to the Egg faction, and lived in territory to which the rest of the Crystals were denied access. Three years earlier, the Eggs had voted for a new war which forced the northern Crystals (by now called the Shields) to send their entire adult male population into Baeba Swamp, while the Eggs sent none of their own men to battle. Almost immediately, the northern Crystals were invaded by men who had previously been no threat, but had chosen to declare allegiance to the Crystals' main enemy as soon as the Crystal male population was out of the way. The Eggs soon confirmed that they understood what was happening to the northern Crystals, and told them it was for the good of the party even though not all factions would benefit equally from the new war. Yet the Crystals still funded the Egg and Moonshine factions, just as they funded the Phoenixes and all other Crystals.

Final boundaries

The Leapers canceled an earlier plan to subdivide the Nest states, leaving Erala with 12 states and therefore also 12 districts. They gave the new states Play names. They announced a census expected to be completed by early 4197.

Tāmta

The easternmost state, home to the Lilypads and many refugees. The only state that was within the nation of Moonshine.

The Leapers chose not to split Tāmta, even though it was by far the most populous state. The Leapers said that its many constituent districts such as Fipapanu and Šanataŋūs were only recognized by children and many of them had no meaningful internal governments.

Bear Trap (Māppipunu)

The Crystals' Mikagu, the only state wholly unoccupied by a tatea army, though even here the Squares controlled both rivers feeding into it. The Leapers stated that it would be the only state whose Parliament would seat only adults, and that these would only be of the Crystal and XIG parties, which were almost equivalent to women and men. The Leapers had already begun referring to the Crystals as the Female Party (a name used by one offshoot briefly), and to the other parties as male parties although there was not just one of them.

(Yispwilina)

The Square.

(Twadu)

The Slopes' homeland, though their borders did not coincide well with the preexisting borders, whiuch had been drawn in peacier times.

Capital territory

The capital territory of Timâra was disenfranchised because it was also part of Baeba and its citizens could thus vote in Baeba's elections. Such overlapping territories were not always disenfranchised, however.

Pavaitaapu

The Clovers were represented both in Baeba's Parliament and in Erala's, even though the Leapers had denied this to the Tinks.

Puba, Feyusi, Padisil, Bupufa, Olansele

Now controlled mostly by the Hipsides.

Xema

No votes were expected from Xema.

Hipside migration begins

In fall 4196, the oldest Hipsides migrated westward, abandoning the refugee territory for the adjacent state of Olansele along the coast. They avoided a much shorter and more convenient route to the coast that would have taken them directly through the Moonshine state of Safiz. The border between Safiz and the refugee territory in this area was just a few miles from the coast, but the Moonshines had chosen to keep the coastal strip within the territory of Safiz as they felt that the refugees did not need a coastline. The refugee territory was so close to the coast that it was within the jurisdiction of the Moonshine navy rather than its army. Thus, despite the lack of a serious border guard, the Hipsides avoided trespassing in Safiz for fear of being abducted by the Moonshine sailors.

The Hipsides were also rejecting a route that would have taken them through Crystal territory. The Crystals were all women, and poorly armed, and so would be unlikely to resist the Hipside migration. But their territory had been quickly invaded by men from outside parties, and the Hipsides felt that these men posed a greater danger to them than did the men living in traditional societies such as Olansele; further, they realized that Olansele's own men were the first to have invaded the Crystals.

Cultural contacts

Olansele's population was largely pro-Matrix, but were not actually party members, nor had they shared the spoils of any of the Matrix's recent military victories. Previously, the inland areas of Olansele had been mostly Crystals, but the male population of these areas was forced to flee, briefly making the interior an all-female territory (among adults). The pro-Matrix citizens along the coast responded to this by moving en masse into the women's section of the nation, knowing that the women were so weak that any man could wander around the women's zone unarrested. The Hipsides knew this, and figured that they would probably be safer building colonies in the women's zones than in the pro-Matrix territory along the northern coast. But the Hipsides also believed felt that the coastal inhabitants were hardly any stronger than the Crystal women, and would not be able to call in the Matrixes to repel the Hipside settlers. Moreover they hoped that the Crystals and other outside powers would recognize that the Hipsides were the bravest army in the conflict and had proven themselves by directly invading an enemy nation and holding their territory without help from any outside power. Even so, the Hipsides were poorly armed.

Like the Tahank tribe in the refugee territory, Olansele's northern population (XIG) profited from the distribution of alcohol even though the local climate was too cold to produce it onsite. Traditionally, Olansele had aligned themselves with parties in other nations who supported alcohol prohibition locally but not worldwide; because Olansele's shipping guild controlled the alcohol trade, they helped deliver alcohol products to areas where it was desired while keeping it away from areas where the party in power disapproved of alcohol consumption. This included the early Players. But the early Cold Men (when they were still led by adults) dedicated themselves to opposing alcohol consumption even outside their borders, and therefore Olansele had turned against the Cold Men and looked for other allies. They had not allied with STW because, although STW's economy-first ideology was compatible with Olansele's, STW was a corporation and therefore a competing interest by definition. This left Olansele without firm allies. They had already moved towards allying themselves with the Matrix, but for a reason unrelated to the alcohol trade.

Hipside-XIG diplomacy

The Hipsides occupied areas along the coast as they had planned. The local adult population was now largely female, because young men had left their homes, and in some cases even abandoned their marriages, in order to start new lives in the interior. Originally these men had hoped to woo young Crystal women who had not yet married or whose husbands were busy fighting in the war to the west, having left the women to raise their children alone. But the Crystal women had been unwilling partners, so within weeks, the migrating XIGs declared war and claimed that anything they did to the women was retribution for the women sending their men to fight the Clovers' bodyguards in Baeba Swamp.

Because the migrating Hipsides were also intent on war, three fourths of them were male, and some thought that they too could find women to marry in Olansele, be they Crystals, XIG members, or of some other group. The Hipside strategic command agreed to allow this, stating that keeping their soldiers happy was good for its own sake, and also that if they forged close ties with the locals, the locals might help them in their future war against the Matrix even if many of them had been originally pro-Matrix before the Hipside migration. The commanders nonetheless warned that the Hipsides were all within a very narrow age range, and that there would not be enough women for all of them unless they could find women willing to marry husbands much younger than themselves. The male Hipside migrants were already frustrated at being addressed as boys by both the Crystals and the XIGs. This was for several reasons: the XIGs had a higher cultural age of maturation than the Hipsides and other Play speakers were used to; the Crystals believed in early maturation yet often refused to distinguish between boys and men, especially for those who were unmarried. A third factor was the Hipsides' recent embrace of the Medley art style, in which they drew their people much smaller than the Crystals, XIGs, and the populations of other traditional nations. The Crystals were somewhat familiar with the Dreamers' similar art style, and knew that physical size was not intended to compart childishness, but wondered if the Hipsides themselves understood that.

Because the XIGs controlled the alcohol trade, some wanted to addict the Hipsides to alcohol, figuring that they could moot the Hipside military offensive and at the same time trigger a rebellion within the troop as the drunken boys would commit acts of violence against the girls whom they outnumbered three to one. But many XIGs were sympathetic to the Hipsides and considered switching to any party that would let them in without tying them to the war in the west. Hearing this, the Hipsides declared themselves a closed-entry party and reaffirmed their alliance to the Cold Men and Scorpions whom they had left behind in the refugee territory.

Hupodas treaty

The Hipsides signed a treaty with Moonshine, forming what was known in a trade language as the Hupodas alliance. This was the same word translated as fīs "filth" in Play. This treaty also renamed Moonshine's refugee territory of Hōki to Hupedikas and assigned it the Play name Fīsaye.

Filth fairy battalions

A female filth fairy was declared to be the leader of their army, and the migrating Hipside troop, now renamed Pamapauyafu ("bringing the fear of pain"), was deputized to spread plagues into any nation that was hostile to Moonshine.

Earlier, the Hipsides had complained that other parties saw their male leaders as mere boys, and had been unable to stop this. Now embracing their identity, the soldiers renamed themselves fītaā, "filth boys", not because they were claiming to be children again, but because they were promising to be obedient. (The gender-neutral Play word taā "child" is here glossed as "boy" to suggest a wider age range despite the troop being about one-fourth female.) By spreading plagues and having a mixed-gender military, the Hipsides admitted that they were behaving as children would be expected to, and therefore would most impress their enemies by focusing on what made them different from other armies, including their allies. However the Lilypads were now also referring to themselves as kids.

Plans for westward expansion

The Hipsides' ultimate goal was to reach Baeba Swamp and attack the Matrix there, but they planned to move slowly and peacefully westward along the coast so that they would have a safe territory to retreat into rather than being trapped a thousand miles from their original home in the refugee colony.

There was also the city of Hayāga-Xàma ("Top City"), which the Hipsides planned to rename Tašaba.

Lastly, just outside the border of Tata, in the state of Lumpaga, was the city of Lahakʷ-Mìti (a Leaper name; known in a trade language as Nieipi), which they planned to make their new capital city. The Hipsides heard the Leaper word mìti as the Play word miti "commons, park, public area" and therefore thought of their future capital as a city of great parklands. They thus proposed to rename it to Vaanā Miti, "Summer Park", when they conquered it, because they knew the climate on the west coast was much warmer than the climate of their old homeland in the interior, even in summer.

Leapers' reactions

The Leapers cheered the Hipside migrations, as it was exactly what the Leapers had earlier wanted to wish into being: a nation of children stretching along the coast, responsible for itself, and therefore with nobody to blame if anything went wrong. They were also glad to see that the locals were leaving their homes to move in with Crystal women in the Nest, and so there was no great opposition to the new sprawling Hipside nation either. The Leapers wished that the Hipsides would hurry up, but understood that the Hipside military planners knew what they were doing and that they were putting their own interests first, not those of the Leapers or even of the Clovers.

The Leapers noticed that the Hipside nation, the Lifeline, was not part of the Lilypad nation, and therefore that the connecting path between the two Lilypad territories would not itself be a Lilypad territory. This meant that there would still be no single contiguous Lilypad nation; the Leapers figured that this alone would not bother the Lilypads, as they had been functioning well in their current state, but that it was possible the Hipsides were trying to procure for themselves a role in diplomacy that no other power, not even the Leapers, would be able to rival.

Leapers investigate Hipside propaganda

Some Leaper strategists believed that the Hipsides were more clever than the other children's nations, and were well on their way to outsmarting the traditional powers around them. The recently adopted Medley art style, used by the Hipsides to communicate with foreign powers, seemed precisely tailored to depict the Hipsides as innocent and incapable of harm, without going too far. The Hipsides left their art style open to interpretation: though they drew themselves as small, they made clear the distinction between children and adults, both of whom were drawn much smaller than the children and adults of other peoples; many drawings showed the Hipside people with flowerlike bodies, whereas those of other people were drawn with broad chests and angular features. This suggested that the Hipsides would remain delicate and harmless even as adults. Because this same art style was familiar from the Dreamers, the Hipsides could explain that they were simply finding their place within an existing cultural trend rather than posing as bait to draw outsiders into a trap. The Leapers came to refer to the frail, flowerlike body forms the Hipsides chose for themselves as dolls (Play fūba).

The Leapers did not trust the Hipside internal census, but figured that there were too few of them to occupy the stretch of territory between the two Lilypad zones. This explained why they wanted the locals in their territory to remain and why they were trying to attract immigrants in addition. Since the Hipsides were intent on fighting a war against the Matrixes and knew that the locals in their Lifeline territory had historically been sympathetic to the Matrix, the Hipsides could dilute the pro-Matrix sentiment by inviting immigrants, particularly adult males, from nearby territories which were almost unanimously anti-Matrix. These men would not necessarily be expected to fight, but the combination of the two adult male populations in the same territory could lead both of them to refrain from getting involved, leading the Hipsides to fight the war on their own. This assumed that the pro- and anti-Matrix men would focus on each other and leave the Hipsides alone; recent happenings suggested that the Hipsides were taking a big risk here, but that even if the migrating men decided to put aside politics and dedicate themselves to disrupting the Hipside society, the Hipsides would still be saving other children's nations the trouble of dealing with those same men. Further, the Leapers suspected some men would in fact join the Hipside troop and fight the Matrix once the opportunity arose, while enough of the others would stay behind to stall any anti-Hipside uprising.

Political conflicts in Erala

Zenith secession

The government of Erala was supported by taxes paid by all of the represented parties. Since the childrens' parties were not given any representation, they did not have to pay taxes either. The Leapers believed that this system was ideal. The tax money, once collected, was dispursed back to the parties according to their population size; this excluded members outside Erala, so the Crystals were not entitled to extra payments for being a transnational party. The Leapers understood that most of the parties in Erala were interested in winning wars, and so would put the money into their military, but the parties also put some of their money into basic social services.

Lastly, the Leapers themselves ran a basic welfare program in Erala that was open to members of all parties, and was funded by tax money collected from the adult parties but not returned to them. This was intended to entirely eliminate poverty, the Leapers saying that the only truly poor people in Erala would be those who could not physically reach the welfare distribution centers in the cities and who would thus be capable of refusing to pay taxes as well.

Children could collect these welfare payments despite not paying taxes. The Leapers said that they would even be willing to provide benefits to children living in Moonshine's refugee colony, now known as Hupedikas, but admitted that this was an unrealistic ideal, as to get tangible goods into Hupedikas would require Leapers or other trusted volunteers to enter territory where they would likely be attacked by the various groups of adult refugees who lived closer to the border.

Refusal of taxes

At this point, the Zenith party chose to stop paying taxes, saying that they would no longer expect to receive the money collected from taxes, but that they would still expect to make use of the nation's social services, since those were available to children who did not pay taxes either.

New currency

They also declared a new currency for Zeniths only, patterned after STW's asala coin. Because this currency could not be used by non-Zeniths, Zeniths could not buy anything with it in the national economy, and therefore the Zeniths declared themselves infinitely poor and stated they needed the most supremely generous welfare payments.

Plans to further cut ties

The Zeniths announced that if needed, they would formally secede from Erala, saying they wanted the same status as the children's parties, who seemed to consider themselves sovereign nations and yet were able to participate in Erala's welfare programs. The Zeniths admitted that they wanted welfare so they could devote their entire wealth to their military, and threatened immediate violence if they were refused social benefits.

Zeniths knew that if they formally seceded, they would no longer be bound by Erala's laws, and could even start a legal war inside Erala, saying that it was a traditional territorial conflict, all while continuing to benefit from Erala's well-developed social service programs because they were open to all people. The Zeniths also signed an alliance with the Tink party, hoping to draw the Tinks out of Baeba Swamp and into Erala so they could help the Zeniths massacre other Eralan citizens. The Zenith declared that their primary enemy was not the Leapers but rather the Matrix; both parties were very small but well-armed and politically powerful. Since the Matrixes were a men's party, the Zeniths knew that they would be difficult to beat in war.

Zenith leaders

At this point, the Zenith leaders Kʷonkʷa and Gūntàlani had accumulated much power. They still looked down on the Slopes and did not mind that Kīsiba now considered himself an independent personality. (Kīsiba was a teenage Slope boy who had risen to power by praising Kʷonkʷa.)

Leaper reaction

The Leapers knew that there was little they could do to stop the Zeniths from taking the tangible welfare benefits provided to all parties, since the Leapers had no manpower to enforce their laws in Erala and that Erala's stability rested on the cooperation of the various parties within it. These other parties could combine their forces and outmuscle the Zeniths, but the Leapers figured that these people would rather tolerate the Zeniths at home so they could focus on traditional warfare in Baeba and if necessary also at home. This meant that other parties could also stop paying taxes, and that Erala might soon collapse into anarchy.

The Leapers considered a plan to have small children drive the wagons delivering the tangible welfare benefits into Erala, figuring that the Zeniths would easily overpower them and get what they wanted, but would not kill the children because they would be of unknown party identification.

The Leapers voted to cut their taxes and also cut their benefits, leaving the Zeniths with less of an advantage over the law-abiding parties. Thus the Leapers hoped to convince the other groups to keep paying and to stave off anarchy. But the Leapers knew that if they cut too much, the other parties might decide that they were better off rejecting the Leapers anyway and the result would be the same. The Leapers tried to focus on strengthening their ties with the Crystal and Matrix parties, while hoping to connect with the youth parties who were rapidly gaining strength in the wilderness and in the far north.

New Slope platform

The Slopes declared themselves to be at once a party, an army, and a criminal organization. Like many other parties, they rejected the very concept of courts and criminal trials; they handled Slopes who committed serious crimes against fellow Slopes by expulsion from the party. This was unlike the Zeniths, who allowed even this, but similar to the Matrix, for whom the only acts seen as crimes were those against fellow Matrix members.

Protection clauses

The Slopes also dedicated their party to the protection of children's safety and to the concept of sulalaka (Play nuiŋee), the practice of working at home whenever possible for the sake of safety. This was relevant particularly in the poorer areas of Baeba Swamp where predatory animals lived side-by-side with humans whose dwellings were delicately constructed. Their dedication to sulalaka stood apart from the common belief that a large city, even in a tropical climate, provided a safe haven for humans to move about free from the fear of predatory animals, and that it was fellow humans who were the greatest threat to physical safety.

The name sulalaka, from a trade language, meant "children of Su", a legendary military leader who protected her followers and thought of them as children. The Play name nuiŋee, on the other hand, meant "home underwear", where the second morpheme was metonymic for ŋeeŋīp "work done willingly", implying that it could be done with little protective clothing on. Thus nuiŋee was work that could be done safely, willingly, and comfortably at home.

Indeed, the Slopes were very concerned about protecting their members from predatory animals. This was because they lived mostly in the poorer areas of Baeba, which though formally part of the city, consisted largely of swampland where some predators actually outnumbered humans. The Slopes explained that they were fighting for their lives, and that if they were able to drive the predators into the urban core in order to protect themselves, they would make no apologies to those who ended up facing the predators in turn.

The new Slope platform also specifically forbade their members to assault children, not because they felt it particularly cruel to do so, but because they saw all children as potential Slopes, and the Slope leaders' goal of rapidly expanding their party membership depended on both protecting and adopting as many young children as possible.

Personal fitness

Some Slopes believed in self-reliance and personal fitness, with a focus on intelligence rather than physical strength and endurance. These were individualists and a minority among Slopes; therefore this belief was not written into the Slope party platform, which allowed members to practice self-reliance but not to neglect basic duties to the community.

Nonetheless, even though these people were few, the Slopes began work on an intelligence test, saying it would be a prerequisite for future applicants to the Slope party, but would not apply to the children of existing members nor to children the Slopes rescued from outside parties. The Slopes planned to write the test in such a way that children of any age would have an equal chance of passing the test, as it would rely on thinking ability rather than accumulated knowledge. This was somewhat like the Soap Bubbles' athletics test, required for admission, which tested endurance, balance, and resistance to bleeding, rather than muscular strength.

Support for slavery

The Slopes declared their support for slavery, and stated that weak, defenseless people made the best slaves. Because they considered childhood a lifestage rather than an identity, this belief did not contradict their support of protecting children's rights, but neither did their support for children's rights forbid the Slopes from keeping children as slaves. The Slope boys nonetheless said that they would be capturing adults, not children, and that any child slaves the Slopes had would be the offspring of those captured adults. The Slopes chose to preferentially target the all-female Crystals, saying that they made the weakest targets and that recent events had proven that their male population would not come to their defense.

Criticism of unpopular parties

The Slopes also criticized the Matrix and Dreamer parties.

Against the Matrix

The Slopes claimed that, by invading the Crystals, they were already doing what the Matrixes only wished they could do, as the Matrixes kept making threats of invading Moonshine from their territory in Baeba, yet had so far failed to make any significant eastward advances. The Slopes pointed out as well that the Matrixes seemed fixated on sexual imagery, saying that they would sexually assault the Crystal and Moonshine women and that that was their primary goal. By contrast the Slopes allowed their members to sexually assault the Crystals but did not make this their overarching goal, and the Slopes included female leaders in their movement whereas the Matrixes did not allow female members at all; thus they could only pass on Matrix party membership through contact with an enemy party's women.

Against Dreamland

The Slope leaders argued that Dreamland was moving away from politics and towards a struggle between corporations, whose employees were not allowed to have political opinions, and that because there was no way for the Dreamers to pursue their interests except economically, the Slopes would have an easy time exploiting the Dreamers just as they were exploiting the Crystals.

The largest corporation in Dreamland was known as Teenprop.

Another Dreamer corporation was called Gatotōl (a Leaper name, not a Dreamer or Play name, because they considered themselves transnational). Gatotōl stated that its leaders had no political opinions, and that their only duty was to return profit to their members. Unlike STW, Gatotōl had members who were not also employees, and to do this, Gatotōl registered in Dreamland as a political party. But because they specifically promised not to engage in politics, every share of power that Gatotōl gained in the Dreamer parliament took away the right of others to express political opinions. However, Gatotōl's power was already waning as Teenprop grew.

Against UAO

The Slopes also declared war against the Unholy Alliance (UAO), a group of outlaws living on the icecap of Xema, who had recently announced their intent to participate in child trafficking. Some members of outside parties had expected the Slopes to openly endorse child trafficking simply to frighten their enemies, but the Slopes promised they would always oppose UAO and child abuse in general.

New Slope leaders emerge

The Slopes used a network of roads called Maišipa, the Handspan, to communicate with the Lilypads and others. The name was a reference to the early name of the children's colony, the Blue Cocoon.

Weaponers gain

An alliance of four boys manufactured weapons and distributed them to other boys that they trusted to lead rebellions against the Crystals and others around them. This was part of the Slopes' practice of sulalaka, the doctrine of protecting one's home and remaining at home to do work whenever possible. Thus, the Slopes planned to create zones of open defiance, within which they were both self-sufficient and safe, and into which non-Slopes could not trespass. The Slopes promised never to wall off their zones from other Slopes, but said that allies of the Slopes such as Zeniths would not be guaranteed the right of entry, and that the Slopes would remain a closed-entry party.

These discreetly made weapons were called yešiba.

Two opposition movements

Some opponents of sulalaka had threatened to burn the Slopes' homes, saying that even if their own homes also burned, they were only losing a luxury, whereas the Slopes would be losing their very safety. These people were largely homeless, nomadic Raspara men who had lost their territory, slaves, and wealth in the battle against the children of the Lilypad army several years prior. Others were locals who had joined the group for political reasons. These people, Raspara or otherwise, were known as Vatiaya in Play, which was their name for one of the Raspara tribes, and this was a native Play word describing someone who refused to work indoors.

Another opposition to sulalaka was focused on the idea that it would make women more vulnerable.

Thus, the first group said that sulalaka was wrong because it was so weak to rely on the stability of a house when houses could be so easily destroyed. They thus said sulalaka was bad because it would not succeed. The second group said that sulalaka was wrong because it made women more vulnerable. Thus they said sulalaka was bad because it would likely succeed.

Followers

The weaponers each had their own dedicated followings:

1. Pikīutūutā: Known as Slimeboy, from western Play territory, near where Stargazer had lived.
2. Pis: This was a team of two boys. (The Pis in their team name is the same word as the initial /pi/ in Slimeboy's name but they were not affiliated with him.)
   1. Pisatu-Yuyau: Associated with tree nuts.
   2. Pisāptua: Known as the Dog.
3. Ŋais-Vīmmūs: Claimed to be more powerful than all others, but despite being known as a liar he had many supporters because he was faithful to the Slope party cause. The only military leader often seen with a girlfriend.

The boys being armed were mostly Slopes, but the weaponers also accepted some teenagers who claimed no party affiliation, and knew that some of them were even anti-Slopes. There were very few girls accepted by the weaponers as trusted military leaders, but they knew that girls would end up carrying the weapons eventually.

The boys, calling themselves Salamanders (Play Piupa), founded the Leap Metal Corporation (Play Paīpiva Manaba Vappisatu) dedicated to the capture of raw materials and the manufacture and distribution of weapons. Here, (vap)pisatu was the Play word for corporation, and was cognate to the leader Pisatu-Yuyau's name, but the company was not directly named after him (nor was the boy named for a company). The Play word paīp, here translated as "leap", signified any discontinous empire, not specifically one run by the Leapers, but because their territory was still officially run by the Leapers they taunted the Leapers by pretending to take control of the corporation away from them.

Weapons delivery

The Leap Metal boys chose to distribute weapons in large amounts to very few people. They chose boys that they trusted, and said that these boys as the second step in the chain would choose who among the rest of the population would receive a fraction of what they had been given. Thus, the Leap Metal boys had a very small social circle.

Some of the boys who received weapons were:

1. Kīsiba: formerly a close follower of the Zenith leader Kʷonkʷa, but became independent and gained followers of his own.
2. Vamnape.
3. Tāmpe-Vīu: known for associating with enemies of the Slopes, planning to build his own movement, Tāmpe. He cooperated with trusted friends, but not with the Slopes as a whole.
4. Kanāmme: very aggressive, planning an attack on the Crystal women whether others would back him up or not.

Thus there was a stark division between the boys producing weapons and the boys receiving them, but they both cooperated, and because the Slopes now had territory within Erala into which no other armies (not even Zeniths) could enter, they were ready to fight a war within the territory of Erala.

The boys who produced weapons and those who received them came from wealthy families, but much of the weaponers' wealth was itself derived from weapons manufacture, so they were simply carrying on the family tradition. None of the boys in either group came from their societies' lower classes.

Leapers reject children

Hearing that the Slope boys were arming themselves in preparation for a war in Erala, the Leaper parliament of Erala used its reserve powers to pass a law denying children the right to claim social benefits in Erala, and allowing the other parties to arrest them at will, stating that any children in Erala who moved about at their own will were violating Erala's territorial integrity even if they were orphans. This was a non-democratic action and thus did not require approval from the other parties.

The Leapers conceded that their new law would change little, since the Slopes had clearly dedicated themselves to a campaign of violence and were no longer pretending to be helpless young children. But before the new law, the Slopes had always been able to pose as members of other children's parties and therefore the welfare distribution centers could not deny them food or other benefits. In fact, few Slopes had attempted this, as the Slope leaders were quick to point out in their own media and diplomatic communications with the Leapers.

The Leapers nonetheless promised to continue diplomacy with the Slopes outside the context of Erala, and said that because they would not be meeting with them as Eralans, they could continue to meet with the Leapers even while at war, so long as they did not extend the war to Baeba, which was the Leapers' home base.

Lilypads' reaction

The Lilypads were also excluded from Erala's citizen pool by this new law. Though the Lilypads considered themselves allies of the Crystals, they strongly disapproved of the Crystals' military policies, saying that they seemed to make the worst possible decision in every situation and that any new male converts would likely be sent to the front lines in Baeba with no protective armor and possibly even no weapons. The Lilypads confirmed that their primary enemy was still the Matrix, and although they now added the Slopes to their list of enemies, they did not declare war against the Slopes and made clear that they would not send their young soldiers to protect the Crystal women who were now being invaded by not just the Slopes but by various small groups of adult men as well. Lastly, the Lilypads stated that any among them who decided to fight for the Crystals' territory despite their leaders' discouraging words would be allowed to claim areas of land in Erala for themselves without giving up membership in the Lilypad umbrella party.

The Lilypads decision to declare war against the Matrixes but not the Slopes, despite the Slopes being much closer to them geographically and greater in number, again led outside parties to believe that the various children's parties had decided to ignore their vast political differences so they could split control of the adult world between them.

Other new youth leaders

Some other young leaders emerged from the Slopes and from other parties. They were all nearly the same age, and outsiders wondered if the young leaders were about to draw together despite their wide ideological differences and form a unified movement that would oppose all the traditional adult armies at once.

Minor Slope leaders

Three new minor Slope leaders appeared at this point:

1. Mīvapūpa (Rage): A girl who supported a masculine power structure even within the Slope party, and was looking for a male leader to associate with.
2. Vāpatam (TC): A weak, unpopular boy who saw no future outside the Slope party and, acknowledging conflict from other Slopes, reaffirmed he would build a small army and protect his followers from both the enemies of the Slopes and the other Slopes.
3. Maanuama: An aggressive boy who feuded with Vāpatam and talked publicly about taking Vāpatam's followers away by defeating him in combat. The Slopes did not have any such provision in their party constitution, but some of Vāpatam's followers stated that they would agree to follow Maanuama if Vāpatam could not defend himself in a fair fight.

These leaders were independent and were passed over by the weaponers, meaning that they could not raise strong armies on their own and were forced to manufacture their own weapons using the materials they could find. Additionally, they had no strong ties to each other, as TC and DD demonstrated by publically feuding with each other over basic matters of policy such as who their enemies were. TC was blamed by the other leaders for this, and told that he was not only unfit to be a leader, but unfit to be a follower as well.

Wiper and Red Desert

Some Slope leaders met with a boy and a girl named Numāše ("Wiper") and Tavaa ("Red Desert"), who were not committed to the Slopes but agreed to cooperate with them. They had received weapons despite not being Slopes. They teamed up and announced their desire to fight in traditional combat roles despite their youth, and that they would be facing all-male armies rather than the Crystals. They actually wanted to find the all-male Crystal troop which had been sent to Clover territory but wondered if the Crystal men had been such poor soldiers that they had already been entirely eliminated. They said that if they could not find Crystal men to attack they would attack the Soap Bubbles, and that if they could not find Soap Bubbles they would claim a piece of land near Baeba and attack anyone who resisted their rule.

TPBM

Two Slope boys, Yašaimata ("TP") and Pāuvačī ("BM"), were seen as a pair because they both admitted to bodily hygiene problems typically associated with much younger children and did not seem ashamed of them. But they did not live near each other and did not coordinate their attacks on the Crystal society.

The Slope leaders rarely mentioned these boys except when praising members who had done great things, mostly feats of intelligence. Because both boys were intelligent and mostly self-educated, they had the qualities the Slopes valued most.

Tupaau

Another Slope leader was Tupaau, a rich boy who made fun of those living in poorer conditions, including other Slopes. He was descended from lower-class parents who were ancestrally from Thaoa, a nation with a poor reputation. In previous generations it was common to believe that anyone from Thaoa who ever accumulated wealth would soon spend it foolishly, and that it was better for Thaoans to never become wealthy in the first place. Tupaau's new Slope identity helped him transcend the inherited bias against Thaoa, as ancestry was rarely noticed or recognized among the party's most fervent believers.

Yīuvas-Pīsa

A boy named Yīuvas-Pīsa declared himself a Crystal, saying that he was not of the Habit faction and therefore was not obliged to fight for the Crystals in Baeba. He supported the Crystals' program of racial discrimination and stated that his own faction, the Slopes, belonged at the top because the Slopes were the most powerful army in the world relative to their population size. The Slope faction of the Crystals held as it primary mission the infliction of extreme pain on the Habit faction.

Pīsa challenged the Crystals to work around his re-definition of the Slope party as a Crystal faction, knowing that the Leapers had done something similar several hundred years earlier and only abandoned it when it became a political liability to be a Crystal. Pīsa said that even this would not stop him, because if the Crystals voted him into a war or forced him to admit other factions into his territory, he would simply resign his party membership and become an ordinary Slope again. Likewise, Pīsa did not expect the Slopes to join him in pretending to be Crystals, nor did he need them to; his plan was merely a way to harass the Crystals, whose internal party structure had recently been shown to be deeply flawed.

The Crystals were obligated to send the boy money now that he had his own faction of Crystals, and he stated that he had 100,000 followers and would need a great deal of money to feed and arm them all. He promised to pay his fair share of taxes, but stated that all of his followers were extremely poor and could not afford to pay more than a tiny of sum of money, which they would deduct once they had received their dispursements from the wider Crystal tax pool.

The boy's intelligent maneuver led other leaders to think of the Crystals as inert, meaning that they could not act, they could only react; whatever the Crystals had done in the past was now available for their enemies to exploit.

Vuupīte

One of the few female Slope leaders was Vuupīte. Her name contained the Play verb pīte "to bite while apologizing", more commonly seen in the fuller form šapīte "to sin while apologizing", showing that she would never feel true remorse for the pain she caused.

Napama

Another Slope girl was named Napama; she was very wealthy.

Nīpimayava

A 16-year-old boy named Nīpimayava claimed to be very intelligent and said that he would sell his services as a military strategist to the Slope leaders rather than take a conventional military role; if they would not pay him, he promised to still remain a Slope and use his brain rather than engage in combat.

Obligations

The Slopes selected the Crystals as their ideal victims. Some Slopes admitted they wanted to sexually assault the women, and to set up a society which would in most ways be an ordinary nation except that rape would be legal and the Crystal women would simply have to accept this as they went about their lives. The Slopes felt that a society set up like this would be more fun for them than one in which the women were enslaved, because they would enjoy seeing the women struggle to fight back.

Other Slopes said that this was not enough, and that they were planning to set up a slave operation in which the Slopes would abuse the Crystals in every possible way for generations to come. These two visions were compatible because the Slopes who kept Crystals physically confined would allow others to let Crystals roam free so long as the Crystals were incapable of meaningful self-defense.

In general, the Slopes' plans to abuse the Crystals harmed their image in the wider world. The Slopes reminded their enemies that at their very founding meeting they had declared war on all beautiful things, and that meant to them the female body. The Slopes' own female population had been aware of this from the beginning and generally did not feel threatened, as the Slopes were a very close-knit group who had been through troubled times together, and the general status of girls in the Slope party was much higher than in the similarly criminal-minded Zenith or Matrix parties (indeed the Matrixes did not even allow women to join). One other reason the Slope girls did not object to the boys' plans to abuse the Crystal women was that the Slope girls planned to also take part in it.

Exploitation statement

The Slopes announced that they were going to exploit (fumu) the Crystals. By this they meant that not only would the Crystals fail to oppose them, but that the Crystals would be made to assist the Slopes in every way of life, every work in Crystal society being made into a power source for the Slopes and a source of pain for the Crystals. They said that only a population so passive and inert (nunapupi) could be so easily exploited by parasites such as the Slopes. The Slopes said that they would take unexplained and unpredictable breaks during their war in which they would live peacefully among the Crystals, observing that the Crystals would celebrate these relief periods and still would not try to push the Slopes out of Crystal territory.

The Slopes wanted to create a society in which, by outward appearances, the Slopes and Crystals were living in peace, with both groups working side by side in the economy. Slavery would be allowed but most Crystals would be free. The Slopes promised, however, to allow their members to assault the Crystal women, including sexually, and to arrest any Crystals who attempted assaults against Slopes, whether the Crystals were attacking the perpetrators or not.

The Slopes' ideal society put themselves at top, with the Crystals doing most of the necessary work, but the Slopes were large enough in population that they knew they could not all be commanders, and therefore the Slopes promised that they too would do work, including dangerous tasks, but that they would be safe while doing so due to sulalaka, which they would not extend to the Crystals.

Further plans

The Play word fumu was also used to describe cheating in sports or politics. The Slopes, rather than putting the Crystals in outright slavery, felt they could best thrive if the Crystal women were made to struggle to feed and clothe themselves, from which the Slopes would take whatever they wished. They believed this economy was much superior to slavery because slavery was too wasteful, providing some slaveowners with far more than they needed and others with nothing. Thus, the Slopes' dislike of slavery was not due to ethical concerns for the enslaved, and they promised to allow slavery to exist alongside the fumu economy so that those who believed slavery was more efficient would be allowed to prosper.

Likewise, the Slopes soon began talking about setting up a Gold-style democracy in the Nest, with the Crystals and Slopes as the only legal parties, and voting rights assigned to individuals who were enrolled in either party. This would mean that the Slopes and Crystals could choose their own lower age limits for voting rights. The Slopes knew that the Crystals greatly outnumbered them, and in any fair democracy (even a Gold-style one where minority parties' votes were amplified) could simply vote themselves into power and then vote to expel or even enslave the Slopes. The Slopes' plan was to hold a democratic election, let the Crystals win handily, and then stage a coup to put the Slopes into power even more securely than before, just to humiliate the Crystals by showing how naive they were to think that the Slopes had ever considered them to be equals.

Pimayava statement

The Slope leaders produced the Pimayava document (Pimayava Pupa, the Book of the Source of Pleasure), authored by a group of Slopes including a boy named Nīpimayava.

The book declared that the Slopes were the most intelligent people in the world, far smarter than the adult powers around them, and even smarter than the young children in the Lilypad nations. The Slopes announced they had discovered an economic and lifestyle-related plan that would bring about world peace, provide safety and a comfortable living standard for all human beings, and allow each individual human being the ability to feel happiness even without material comforts. The Slopes announced that they would reveal the secrets of Pimayava precisely when it became too late for them to be put into practice, showing that they could have at any time ended their enemies' suffering, but had chosen to prolong it out of spite.

Reaction of outside parties

From the Zeniths

The Zeniths reading the new Slope platform believed it proved that the Slopes, despite their promise to shock the world with their crimes against innocents around them, still saw themselves as a children's party, forever in need of protection from the outside world, and that they were too emotionally and even physically fragile to commit the crimes they promised would soon terrify the populations around them.

The Zeniths knew from close contact with the Slopes that the Slopes governed their compact hideouts with strict discipline; all Slopes were instructed to be in bed at an early hour and to sleep long hours staying by the youngest children. This excluded the guards, who were awake at night to protect the forts, but these guards also slept long hours during the day.

The Zeniths were overwhelmingly male, and relied on the constant influx of criminals from outside parties to sustain their numbers. By contrast the Slopes, though also having a slight majority of male members, planned to rely on traditional reproduction and aggressive adoption and nursing programs to acquire and keep hold of additional young members from outside the party.

From the Crystals

The Crystals took the Slopes' party platform more seriously, believing that they had already proven themselves to be hardened criminals, and that their lack of weapons and armor was the main obstacle holding them back from launching an unchecked crime spree. They believed that the Slopes' adoptions of orphans and other small children would in fact be abductions, and that their dedication to protecting humans' right to safety by working at home was actually a means for them to build compact communities where all of the Slopes would be heavily armed and non-Slopes needing to pass through would need to pay a tribute or risk being enslaved.

From Moonshine

Some men in Moonshine were alarmed at the rise of male power in the west, and petitioned their female leaders to prepare for war; these men believed that they needed to invade proactively in order to protect Moonshine's female government. But the women would not allow them to speak, and reaffirmed that Moonshine's role in the war was to send unarmed humanitarian workers into the conflict zones so they could help wounded soldiers and civilians from all sides.

From the Lilypads

Ŋamaimmi

Ŋamaimmi was a Lilypad girl who supported sulalaka even though she agreed it would lower the social status of women.

Reformists

A few Lilypads, mostly girls, instead created a Slope-like movement within the Lilypad nation aimed at pursuing a lifestyle similar to the Slopes, but politically bound to the Lilypads and to feminine power. These people were called navāpi. They wanted to feminize sulalaka so that it would put men and boys at the feet of women without significantly weakening the nation's overall power.

There were many boys in the navāpi movement; these boys wanted to be ruled by women, believing their society would be safe from spree crimes; this was the typical Moonshine male position. But they were nationalists, meaning that they rejected Moonshine's support of a transnational alliance of feminine nations, and fearing that Moonshine would send them to war without weapons against the Slopes. Therefore the navāpi boys supported the Lilypads, and were leaning towards supporting the Slopes.

New allies for Slopes

Many boys (and some men) supported the Slopes' plans to exploit the Crystal women, and hoped to join in themselves, but knew that the Slopes would keep themselves in power and were a closed-entry party, unlike their allies, the Zenith. Very few females were interested in joining or fighting for the Slopes, but the Slopes' own female population had so far remained loyal, with the few defectors having left the Slopes early on and primarily because they felt the Slopes were too weak, not because of the Slopes' plans to abuse women. The strong female support suggested to outsiders that the Slopes were not a landless criminal gang seeking to make and break alliances at their pleasure, but a close-knit group well on their way to becoming a traditional nation with borders and an economy based on exploitation of the local Crystal population, whose wider party had abandoned them.

Thus, the Slopes had a healthy balance of boys and girls in their population, though with a noticeable surplus of boys. But their supporters outside the party were nearly all male.

Sunspot allies

Many of these aspiring rapists joined the Sunspots, whose base was in Clover territory. The Sunspots were bodyguards for the children in the Clover dynasty, but they had so far refused to reject supporters such as those Scorpions and XIGs who had seemingly declared allegiance to the Sunspots solely to assault the Crystals.

Clover rebel boys

There were three boys from the Clover territory who were cut off from the happenings in the east but were eager to join in the coming war against the Crystals:

1. Paai-Pīpa, an older boy of Tink ancestry whose parents had invaded the Swamp several years earlier. When the Soap Bubbles later ruled the Tinks out of the Swamp, he fled his household and lived by himself in the wilderness before soon joining other boys who had done the same. (The expulsion was quickly proven unenforceable, but many boys remained and formed an unofficial army.)
2. Tavaisi, a follower of Pīpa.
3. Mapaimta, who stood alone.

These boys popularized a mushroom-like helmet and mushroom imagery in general as a symbol of masculinity. They also used a flower that had a long projection from the center of the flower, and was considered to look masculine. They believed in the extension of male power over women, and that violence against women was necessary to bring them in line. Mapaimta in particular stated that he did not believe women could be victims of crimes, and that any violence against women would instead be a crime against the man who had legal power over her. In his view, therefore, women were slaves.

Because they had been educated by STW, they had basic carpentry skills, which many other children also had, but which the now held as a talent they could use to protect themselves, both by building homes and by building weapons and armor. The weapons being traded in the east were made of metal, and thus much stronger, but were not an easily renewable resource. These boys hoped that although they were weak, they would never run out of trees from which to build weapons and armor.

These boys considered themselves Clovers but stated if expelled by the Clovers they would rebrand as Carpenters (Play Nāša Vayu) rather than seek entry into the Slopes, the Sunspots, or any other party. They did not trust the Slopes for various reasons, and believed that the Slopes understood these reasons as well, and would prefer to have the Carpenters as allies rather than as members. They also did not trust the Sunspots, and their reasons for this were completely different. They worried that they might be attacked by the Sunspots if they could not get out of Baeba and into Crystal territory quickly, but believed that the Slopes would see them as members of the same generation and not attack.

Shields as weapons

A Slope girl named Samaupa-Vunuami refined the art of kapaŋuapi, the practice of using a shield as a weapon, so she could inflict injury even while disarmed, and in a hypothetical future battle where the supply of swords and other armor-piercing weapons had run out.

Anti-Slope coalition forms in the east

The Queen

Far to the east, out of reach of the Slopes, a 16-year-old girl calling herself Pausa seceded from the Cold party and declared herself a weapons supplier like the Slope boys in the west. She had no easy access to manufacturing materials, and therefore her supplies were actually captured weapons from all around. Since there was no armed opposition in her area, she was able to convince her followers that she was strong and that they would be safe if they obeyed her. Many young children supported Pausa and others were delivered to her by sympathetic adults. Her interpretation of sulalaka stated that young children could be best protected by female leaders.

Thus, sulalaka was not an ideology, but a lifestyle.

Driver and others

Another girl who was closely tied to Pausa was Vušasi. A third pro-sulalaka girl was Tušamau, "the Bottle", whose name was an anagram of the Play word for a bottle of milk. She was originally from Play territory, near where Pikīutūutā had been born, but had migrated to the east; Vušasi connected her with Pausa. Thus a female-run weapons network existed, counterbalancing the Slopes' male-dominated network in the west. But these girls did not consider it their duty to protect the all-female Crystals from the Slopes, or to mobilize for war at all, considering it all they could do to protect their own society from invasion, and to encourage converts to join them.

An adult woman named the Driver (Play Nunuamifa) declared herself the leader of the anti-UAO program and stated that UAO was likely to invade Tāmta (in Moonshine's refugee territory of Hōki (Hupedikas)), where many vulnerable young orphans lived, so they could target young children.

The Driver was also at the front of the sulalaka movement. Many women and girls were skeptical of sulalaka, even though it was based on the desire to keep women and children safe, because they felt that in the home, men would be powerful at the expense of women and children by nature (among the Slopes, women were often the taller sex, but men were still considered more violent and pro-active, since it was in their nature to be expendable; thus male domination of the Slopes' paramilitary organizations was not reliant on their physical domination of women). The Slopes felt that this might spare them attacks from the Crystals, whose male army was currently struggling in Baeba Swamp but had won major wars in the past.

The teenagers accepted the Driver's guidance, and stated that they would now begin seeking advice from adult leaders rather than relying entirely on their own minds, but that they still would not accept adults as members of their movement, let alone as leaders. Thus did not award her any formal position of authority and stated that if they ever went to war they would not expect any help from Driver or other adults allied with Moonshine.

Stargazer, still alive and living in safety in the northern wilderness, now also joined the anti-Slope coalition and became a strong supporter of feminist sulalaka, but continued to focus on her brain power and not on gathering weapons.

The fruit market

The OHB fruit market and trading guild (Play Vabapu Šasi Memnivap) joined the weapons trade as well, saying that because they had reliable transportation, they could not be shut out if they lost territory in Erala. OHB founded a company called Nūuni separate from the guild (but its trade name remained OHB) and supported the Cupbearers. OHB seemingly had nothing to gain by joining the war, but their leaders believed that the Slopes would soon take over much of the world if they were not stopped young fighting for the Slope-exclusive territory to raise an army in.

The founders of OHB had been Players of a previous generation, but because their trading network extended into the refugee territory (and traditionally also to Moonshine proper), they had hired many employees who were not members of the Play party. In recent years, some of these had been teenage girls from the refugee territories, who had been born into the Cold party, and thus were one of the Players' historical enemies. But the Players saw these girls as allies against the rising male-oriented powers of the west.

OHB called itself Pāmnata "Heart Stoppers", at once a humorous name meant to make them sound greedy (a pun on Play pamnata "spend money") and a reminder that they were selling fruit to raise money for war. They said that if they ever needed to form a political party separate from both their guild and their corporation, they would use the Heart Stopper name, because of their three names, this was the only one that they used to include their supporters and not just their employees.

Moonshines' reaction

OHB appealed to the female weapons trading network in the east, which had already decided not to fight for the Crystals in the west, saying that they deserved to die simply for having proven inept at warfare. As the Crystal casualties piled up, Moonshine again criticized the Crystals for supporting racial discrimination, and reminded the Crystals that they could not seek shelter in Moonshine because Moonshine citizenship was strictly hereditary. Moonshine decided to support OHB, saying it was a defensive alliance and that they would not be sending soldiers, male or female, to fight the Slopes in the west, or even to protect the refugees in Hupedikas.

Moonshine also created a new argument that they themselves did not believe in, but which they stated could defeat the Crystals' argument. They stated that if the Crystals believed in a racial hierarchy based on military strength, the Moonshines surely outranked the Crystals, as the Moonshines were so far competently defending their borders whereas the Crystals were not. Therefore, by the Crystals' own logic, they should not expect to be welcomed in Moonshine territory. But in reality, the Moonshine position was complex: they supported allowing tribes who had won on the battlefield the right to rule over their enemies, and claimed that this was pacifism, and also stated that Moonshine was a closed-entry party and therefore foreigners could not join or even enter Moonshine territory without Moonshine chaperones, but they opposed racial discrimination outside their territory.

Skilled diplomats understood that while Moonshine was a single-party empire, internal disputes existed, and not all Moonshines were so cold and cruel to the Crystals. Moonshine was still funding humanitarian operations aiming to protect the Crystals from harm, even though these humanitarian workers were officially neutral and would also help the enemies of the Crystals. Likewise, even those Moonshines who most strongly opposed the Crystal women were talking about adopting the children of the Crystals, saying that by making them all childless they would rapidly accelerate the destruction of the Crystal nation, and that the adopted children would grow up thankful for the Moonshines' rescuing of them.

Variable migrations

The Heart Stoppers were traders, and therefore did not have homes; therefore they did not have a territory to call their own. Importantly, though, because they were authorized by the Players to trade with Erala, they had access to all of the trade roads along their way, including those within Play territory. This led the female military leaders such as the Driver to leave their refugee camp and enter the Play Empire, secure in the knowledge that the Players considered them useful allies against the youth leaders of the west and would not force them into unrelated conflicts.

Slopes attack again

In late 4196,Kanāmme led a troop of ten boys into a Crystal women's campsite and attacked the women indiscriminately. With the aid of their weapons, they subdued about forty Crystal women and made them into slaves. Later, a larger troop of Crystal women freed the captives and then put the Slope boys into a Crystal prison reserved for male criminals, mostly adults (the Crystals refused to distinguish between men and boys even in their criminal justice system). The Crystals promised that they would not kill the boys, but warned that if the Crystals were attacked by the Matrix, they would turn the boys over to the Matrix and that in Matrix captivity their lives would be much worse. The Crystals hoped that by being soft they might actually convince the boys to fight for the Crystals.

When the Slope leaders realized that they had lost Kanāmme, some wanted to escalate the conflict by attacking the Crystals again, but others said that Kanāmme had been a fool to attack with so small an army and that he should have at the very least relied on his friends Vamnape and Tāmpevīu, whose armies were larger.

Fig day

A Lilypad boy named Tutunutavup ("Taxman") met with his former classmate, Paaāsa ("Baby Goat"), who had joined the Slopes, to discuss politics and the possibility of forming a symbolic alliance against Dreamland. The Lilypads were not at war with the Slopes, but the two groups of teenagers were on opposite sides of the conflict in Baeba. Dreamland had fought no wars during the boys' short lives, but had invaded the Players early in Play history, and all Play-speaking cultures were descended from the survivors of this war.

The Crystals worried that the two boys might be forming a tribal alliance in which all ideology would be discarded, sidelining the Crystals just when they were at their weakest, and also closing enrollment into any remaining open-entry parties of Play speakers. Even worse, they contemplated that the new alliance might be based on nothing other than having gone to the same school, in which case they believed the boys were rejecting politics altogether and would not be listening to arguments based on reason. They worried that the boys would resolve their conflicts, align their nations' foreign policies, and hand over all of the Crystals' remaining territories to the Slopes (since the Cold boys had promised not to fight for it).

The boys met in Crystal territory. The initial meeting was friendly but a fight erupted quickly as both boys had aggressive temperaments and had unresolved grudges from their days in school together.

The two boys could not come to an agreement, and Taxman considered starting a traditional war against the Slopes. But he was not the head of the Lilypad military and if he were to send his own soldiers against the Slopes he risked being expelled from the party and even being expelled from the Lilypad nation (although by attacking he would need to leave anyway or else be accused of treason).

Involvement of Dreamland

However, some unexpected political realignments came from this meeting. Taxman decided, claiming authority to speak for the whole Lilypad nation, that any territory the Slopes controlled would be considered part of Dreamland rather than Erala, and that the Lilypads had no land claims in Dreamland and would not fight to protect their own party members there. He did not have the authority to do this, but seeing him not making any other claims he could not enforce, the Crystals understood that the Lilypads might choose to obey Taxman and thus surrender all of Erala to the Slopes.

There was no land border between Dreamland and Erala because Tata and Baeba were in the way. Taxman figured it was unlikely, but hoped that if word of the new treaty spread to the Dreamers, the Dreamers would declare themselves allies of the Slopes and then fight their way through Tata to form a single contiguous Slope-Dreamer nation. If this happened, Taxman hoped that the Dreamers would take control and push the Slopes into an inferior position, which could then trigger a war between the two mostly male-led powers.

Battle of Hahénara

A Lilypad boy named Yakūsa invaded Crystal territory to attack the Slope leader Kīsiba's rebel hideout, but Kīsiba's army captured Yakūsa and his soldiers. The Slopes decided to spare the boys' lives, saying that the Crystals deserved to die but that Lilypads could still be their friends.

Slopes regroup

Prowlers

The Slopes strictly adhered to sulalaka, meaning that they would stay inside their homes for protection and not claim large amounts of land. They would rule from their forts by intimidation rather than walking the streets as Zeniths did. They referred to the Zeniths as prowlers (Play panapaa "dog-people"), saying that while the Zeniths were indeed very strong, they terrified the populations they ruled over by being "out" whereas the Slopes would stay "in". Thus a Slope-Zenith cooperative nation was possible, and the Slopes said that they would be willing to share territory with Zeniths so long as the Zeniths and Slopes never came into conflict. But because the Zeniths had such loose rules, the Slopes figured that some Zeniths would attack the Slope forts anyway, and not be punished by other Zeniths even if an alliance existed. Thus the Slopes knew they needed to be very powerful for their own protection.

Cradlers

The Slopes hiding out at a fort they called Nečinutī Vaivās, who called themselves the Cradlers, posted signs in various areas of the western part of Erala, saying that they would soon be attacking the Crystals in a coordinated attack, using much greater force than they had done before. They were warning the Zeniths and others to get out of their territory, not aiming their literature at the Crystals. The Slopes believed the Crystals were now incapable of resistance, even with warnings well in advance, and that announcing the attack to the Crystals well ahead of time would only humiliate them as they would spend the next few months trembling in fear waiting for the Slopes to finally attack.

The Cradlers promised to kill, enslave, or drive out about 10,000 Crystals from their territory, and then adopt all of their children. They considered adopting children the ultimate display of power, laughing at the Zeniths and Matrixes, who believed that raising someone else's children was the ultimate display of submission. The Slopes challenged the Zeniths and Matrixes to explain how their parties would grow if they could not reproduce. The Zeniths did have some natural families, but their membership was mostly adult males and therefore they grew primarily by attracting other adult males; the Matrixes were a closed-entry party which restricted membership to adult males by definition.

The Zeniths were a very old party who had long kept their population stable by continued recruitment of surrounding parties, focusing on adult male criminals. The Slopes claimed that they would cut off the Zeniths' recruitment stream by enrolling these people while they were still too young to be Zeniths, and therefore starve out the Zeniths' presence in Erala and perhaps in Baeba Swamp. The Slopes also claimed that the Matrix party, which had only been founded in 4177, was already past its peak and had survived only through child abductions; the Slopes stated that their practice of adopting children and treating them well would quickly prove more beneficial to party growth than the Matrixes' strategy based on abduction and abuse. The Slopes said that this was not a claim to moral superiority, but that it was simple fact that the young children they were raising would grow up to be loyal Slopes and that the abused children captured by the Matrixes would almost certainly defect from the Matrix party.

The Slopes said that they would double their population in a year, and that the adopted children would grow up more loyally bound to the Slopes than any converts ever were to the Zeniths or Matrixes. Moreover they believed that they would starve the other two parties of their converts, as even though the Slopes were closed-entry, they were still signing up new members every month and believed that they were much more attractive to outsiders than were the other two parties.

Hedonism

The Slopes split on the issue of hedonism. Because they arose from the Clovers, at the far western extreme of STW's trade road, they were out of reach of the Cold culture which prohibited alcohol for both children and adults. Thus they had grown up with alcohol. But the Sunspots had begun claiming that they had defeated the Clovers by addicting them to alcohol, as they had slain the young king at a drinking party when he and his friends were mostly asleep from drinking too much of the sweet candy-like palm wine that the Sunspots had taken control of from STW. The "Shoe" faction of Slopes endorsed the sober evil (taka vamapūm buni) and said that they would get greater pleasure from avoiding alcohol and recreational substances because they would be much stronger. Further, some said that true rage would only come from a life of sobriety, and they could therefore inflict far greater pain on the Crystals if their desires were not muted by alcohol consumption. Because they claimed their dedication to sobriety was actually evil, not good, they were Shoes (Play piaipa pāupaus) to the others.

The Shoes also extended this to sexual intercourse, saying they would not form any romantic attachments to the Crystal women or any others, and would not pursue rape as an end in itself, but only something the Crystals would need to live in fear of, since it would go unpunished. The Shoes said that they would continue to abuse the Crystals even if the Shoes no longer derived pleasure from it, since the infliction of pain was a goal in and of itself. The Shoes resolved to live in harmony with the hedonistic Slopes, because they believed they would grow quickly stronger, and therefore no conflict was needed.

A faction within the Shoes however argued that the Slopes were becoming addicted to abusing the Crystals, and therefore needed to kill all of the Crystals in order to free themselves of their addiction.

Meanwhile those who wanted to pair with the Crystals were called vafašaumīp, a word for a boy who seeks girls at an unusually young age, while their classmates are still pursuing childish pleasures.

Unwilling supporters

There were some teenagers who became Slopes because they supported the Lilypads (and Moonshine) ideologically, but opposed them because of their inaction and their unwillingness to prevent the Slopes from abusing the Crystals. They thus embraced their enemies, the Slopes, so they could tether themselves to the strongest power, even as they expected they would get no love from the Slopes. These people were called JIBs (Play Tutapa Vana) and the Slopes said that they would be the ideal prey when the Slopes became strong enough to turn against them and abuse their own supporters.

Youth wing

As the Slopes were led by teenagers, they created a separate group for younger children who wanted to help the party, and potentially participate in combat, but felt uneasy joining the ever-shifting power struggles between the older teenage boys who had accumulated most of the weapons and political power. These children were called North Slopes (Play Šavāuna), because they were in the shadow of the other Slopes.

Slopes build cities

The Slope boys had encountered great unexpected difficulties getting their Crystal slaves to build them castles and roads, and had mostly decided to accept that the Crystal women were not skilled architects. They nevertheless were able to get the Crystals to put up defensive fortifications that the Crystals themselves could not enter without the Slopes' permission, and the Slopes referred to these as forts, and sometimes even considered them castles after all, since they felt they could live in harsher conditions than their enemies and still be comfortable.

The Slopes also took over ruined cities with empty buildings whenever possible. They founded the city of Vasās, in the district of Mayutasue, and intended to make it their capital city with a population of 50,000 people, though they stated that the upcoming war would go best if there were enough room for this many Slopes but that the Slopes would not all live there at once, because they would be easy to attack if they were all in one place. Thus 50,000 was an intended peacetime maximum population. The Slopes' total population at this time was only about 20,000, but they were growing and expected to adopt and reproduce rapidly.

Settlement of Vasās

The Slopes moved into Vasās quickly because the ruined buildings meant they did not need to construct anything new, and they were hardy enough to make use of what remained. Some said that a ruined city was fit for a group like the Slopes who thrived in chaos. The city would be difficult to siege as well. The Slopes also compared Vasās to the mythical city of Ŋapata Ŋūa, a city without work, believed by some to exist in southern Play territory.

Move to the south

Našatua

Further east at the fringe of Slope territory they built another city called Pasasu (Pasašanu), in the new province of Našatua, again in the ruins of a previously existing city. Unlike all other Slope settlements, Pasasu was in historically Soap territory and faced the southern desert and had no outlet to the sea.

The Soap Bubbles, traditionally fair-skinned and often with blond hair and blue eyes, ruled the desert, including the dark-skinned tribes who had lived there for hundreds of years. Neither claimed to be aboriginal, but the Soap Bubbles were in charge for various reasons. One reason was that they used an admission test and thus were difficult to join, and this test required immunity to sunburn and the Soap Bubbles were suspicious of blushing; because the dark-skinned tribes could not visibly blush or be sunburned, the Soap Bubbles considered them deceptive rather than assuming that they would all pass the test. The Soap Bubbles officially had no racial barrier to entry and they often married the dark-skinned people, but the children of these marriages, like other Bubble children, still had to pass the admission test as adolescents and therefore anyone marrying outside the tribe often shed their own tribal allegiance and therefore these people were not Soap Bubbles. The dark-skinned tribespeople had (many of them) been Crystals but they had shed this as well because the Crystals near Baeba had gone to war and these people largely did not support that war. Thus the Soap Bubbles were in control.

It had been sometimes claimed that the Soap Bubbles were not capable of racial discrimination or racism, for various reasons. One reason was that because of their admission test, many of the people they were discriminating against were their own children, and they seemed to have no favor towards these people as compared to the aboriginals. Another was that they readily married with the aboriginals, even though the children of these marriages and often the parents usually ended up leaving the Soap party. Thirdly, the Soap Bubbles were considered to be of high moral stature broadly stated, in part due to their admission test, even though the admission test was based on physical stamina. Also, because Bubble society had been so calm, outsiders assumed that there must not be any great conflicts, even nonviolent ones such as racial discrimination programs. Therefore the Slopes moving into Soap territory accepted that they would be the ones blamed for anything the Soap Bubbles did against the aboriginals.

The new laws

The Slopes' constitution at this time resembled those of the traditional nations to the west, but still incorporated youthful concepts such as nipa ŋem, similar culturally to a monster lurking under the bed, and reminded members that they would rule tāipam "on the playground" as well as on their plantations. These playgrounds were the areas outside their forts but before the slave plantations. This is because unlike some other parties, the Slopes considered the children they had adopted and given birth to to already be Slopes, not just Slopes-in-waiting or members of a different group altogether. Likewise they set rules for Crystal children who wished to visit the playhouses the Slopes had built for their children. But this last new law also showed that the Slopes differentiated the teenage leaders from the younger children they had adopted and given birth to.

Slopes still had no court system and did not want one. The ability to expel members helped tamp down the desire to punish those who attacked other Slopes. The Slopes considered these people criminals but until now had simply allowed other Slopes to take vengeance on them, but these Slopes could themselves be punished by other Slopes. Now, the worst of them were expelled instead, cast outside the Slope tribe and therefore having no guarantees of protection.

At this time the Slopes increasingly described their members as panūtās, belonging to the panūpi, the Play word for a gang existing for its own benefit and which was closed to new entrants.

Marriage and related issues

Despite their male surplus, many of the boys in the Slope army were so young they simply weren't interested in abusing the female captives, and so there were enough women to go around and the girls in the Tāmpe armies did not worry that they would be abused as well.

The Slope leaders stated that marriage was not an expectation in their society, and discouraged marriages with the captive Crystal women, and that if anyone did marry, the children of the marriage would not be admitted as Slopes. The oldest boys in the army were in their mid-teen years and these were the ones most likely to be interested in a formal marriage, as they were already above the usual marriage age for the ancestral Play society (but not of some other societies).

Lilypads investigate politics

The Lilypad leaders argued that the Crystal party apparatus was fundamentally flawed: a majority vote from the wider party was needed to start a war, but the factions voting in favor of the war did not need to send their own soldiers, since war plans were based on the advice of women who had risen in the ranks of the military and were not controlled by politics. Thus the Phoenixes, the Moonshines, and the Eggs had voted to start a new war against the Sunspots, but the men sent to battle were almost all taken from the Shield faction which was geographically closest. This left the Shields with no adult male population to protect them. (A similar situation had occurred in Dreamland when the Baywatch states was left alone fighting a war against the Players after all of Dreamland's other states had voted themselves out of the war; Baywatch was the easternmost Dreamer state and thus the one which suffered most from the Play invasion.)

Questions about feminism

The Lilypad kids also considered themselves feminists, but were wary of the strict speech laws in the Moonshine Empire: in Moonshine, it was a crime for a man to simply suggest that men and women should have equal rights, and in some social situations it was also a crime for men to address any woman without first being spoken to. The Players had even tighter restrictions; Play men were required to obey any command given to them by a Play woman in any situation, and neither men nor women were allowed to criticize the Play party constitution.

Some Lilypad boys worried that they were being shut out of the OHB weapons distribution network, which had ties to the Play party, and that the girls in the Lilypad party would be setting up a heavily armed all-female police force much like that of the Play and Moonshine parties, while forcing boys to join the military with insufficient weapons and armor. Taxman had already been passed over for weapons distribution after the meeting with Baby Goat left the girls wondering whose side he was really on. Other Lilypad boys strongly supported feminism, however, and stated that an oppressive female police force would protect their nation from violent crime when the boys matured into men. That is, these boys feared other boys more than they feared girls, even if the girls were actually more powerful as a whole. This sentiment was common in feminist nations like Moonshine and the Play Empire, whose men believed they were better off under the yoke of feminism than they would be in a nation where men could roam freely.

Agreeing with this sentiment, Lilypad girls who had received supplies of weapons were reluctant to hand them over to male followers, saying that boys would by nature be tempted to attack other boys they saw nearby, seeing them as competition, irrespective of politics. By contrast, they pointed to the circular power structure in nations such as Moonshine as proof that women and girls would make good team players.

Leadership roles

Some Lilypads began to recite a saying: Tata fatusup manita, pi tama bīyatu. It meant "girls make the laws, and boys obey them". This was a derivative of a saying that some Lilypads had learned about from a few generations earlier, when the Tinks were saying "men make the rules, and boys obey them".

Internal conflicts

The boys noticed that their female leadership often broke up into factions over temporary disputes, whereupon they would attack both each other and innocent boys who had no way of defending themselves, and then mend their ties without apologizing to the boys. It often came about that the boys suffered physical injuries while the girls only suffered property damage, but even when girls did physically attack each other, they tended to pick fair fights and restrain their impulses. Sometimes after the fight was over a girl from the losing side would attack a defenseless boy with no armor, even if he had been on her side.

Abduction of Nayušipapa

A team of three Lilypad girls abducted a young male supporter named Nayušipapa and confiscated his weapons. Their names were Nimenave, Ŋūmueīsa, and Taŋamauma. They were known as QNO in trade.

Meanwhile the Slopes also formed a team of three girls, Yaptimāe, Masaba, and Yenīŋuvīm, known as ALR in trade. By this time, the Slope boys were telling each other to reject romantic attraction towards female Crystals, saying that women should be abused, not loved. Yet they still held to the promise they made on their founding day that they would neither attack each other nor allow others to attack them, and so the Slope girls rising to power did not object to the boys' plans.

Independent Crystals

A young girl named Vasayaya declared herself to be a Crystal, but stated that it was not safe for her to join the fighting. She felt however that she could not trust OHB because they had not committed themselves to defending the Crystals nor to attacking the Slopes. She stated that it was no longer safe to be a Crystal but would claim that party identity just to get the wider Crystal party to come after her to enforce their laws.

Pāpaa gets angry

A Lilypad boy named Pāpaa threatened to either defect to the Sunspots or to found a new party for boys if the Lilypad girls did not stop abducting their own supporters and shutting them out of the weapons distribution network just because they were boys. He claimed it was unrealistic to expect boys to fight for girls if the girls were the better-armed and stronger of the two sexes. But he could not prove, and his fellow Lilypads did not believe, that the girls actually had more weapons than did the boys.

Details about assignments

OHB agreed to arm a 9-year-old girl, Yeŋita, but not her older brother. Some Lilypad boys began to wonder if OHB, like the Crystals, was exploitable in the sense that they followed strict rules and would be unable to respond effectively if their enemies "exploited" them (Play fumu) by turning their very protections into weapons against OHB. That is, the boys wondered if Yeŋita was really in control, or if her older brother, aged 13, was actually the one who would be controlling the weapons, giving orders through his much younger sister because she was a girl and therefore considered more trustworthy by OHB.

But the Lilypad boys did not want to exploit the Lilypad girls, as they believed the inherent conflict would tear their nation apart. They wanted the boys and girls together to exploit the works of other nations instead.

Now many Lilypad boys, and some girls, wanted to break free from the weapons distribution network. They supported feminism and were comfortable living in a society where girls told boys what to do, just as women would tell men what to do once they grew up. But they felt that OHB's system was designed to turn boys against girls within their own society, because the only way the boys would be safe is if they exploited the girls. They said that to truly be strong the girls and boys needed to resolve all such conflicts, and develop a Play-like system where males were freely armed but were moved around physically within their territory so that they could not fight each other.

Strong supporters of a close alliance between boys and girls were young girls such as Yeŋita, who felt uncomfortable wielding power on their own, and those who had been just as young at the time, such as Žavapūvīu who had been put into power as a diplomat four years earlier when she was nine years old.

Pepitava's revolt

A twelve-year-old girl calling herself Pepitava then started a rebellion against any Lilypads who collaborated with the Slopes, saying she would kill boys who attempted to defect or even complain about the Lilypad feminist leadership's program. But she did not have weapons and the Lilypads ruled her out of OHB, saying that she did not understand feminism and merely wanted an excuse to beat up defenseless young boys.

Girls' private plans

Many of the OHB girls were confident they would never see combat. As a defensive alliance, their only objective was to keep the Slopes and other armies out of their territory, and they had no pretense of being able to rescue the Crystals or other groups of women and children whom they believed were being abused by various groups of roving men. They expected that these armies were unlikely to invade an armed feminist nation, since there were much easier targets available. They figured that if they were invaded even so, they would hand off their weapons to male soldiers and remain behind the front lines tending children and doing other noncombatant jobs.

However, none of the children's parties had yet passed any sort of law differentiating gender roles in their military; all of their armed forces so far had been mixed-gender, though most had male majorities, and this had yet to be challenged because these forces were all voluntary. The OHB girls thus worried that girls would be sent to the front lines alongside the boys and that their enemies would preferentially target girls knowing that they were the ones needed to carry their nations forward.

The leading OHB girls publicly promised that they themselves would indeed serve in combat if needed, since they were skilled with weapons and had decided to dedicate themselves to military training for the foreseeable future, but they encouraged their supporters to stick to conventional gender roles because women would be needed as mothers to raise children in order to expand their populations. Because OHB was still not a party of its own, this was an open message aimed at anyone willing to listen, including boys. With this statement, the OHB girls admitted that even in their private army, there would likely be more boys than girls carrying weapons, and that the Play and Moonshine parties might question what made them different from their enemies, the Slopes.

The Pool

Since they had a finite supply of weapons, OHB's female leaders argued that distributing weapons to boys would weaken girls and not increase the total military power of the group in any way. They believed that if they could control the weapons supply in their strongholds, they did not need male members at all, since even if the entire male population turned against them they would all be unarmed and thus very weak.

However, they stated that they would best be able to control boys if they separated them into two groups, one forced to support girls and one allowed to oppose them, with the girls withholding power from both while making them enemies of each other. OHB's male members would be the group that was required to support female power, and they would be told that their enemies, the only ones they were allowed to criticize, were local boys and men who were not members of OHB.

Further, the girls knew that if they ever came to war, they would need boys on the front lines so the girls could focus on protecting each other and the younger children, and that if they had no male supporters at all, they would have nobody to send but each other. Therefore OHB knew that they were stronger with boys than without, even if the boys had no access to weapons.

Then OHB passed a resolution saying that boys were welcome as supporters, but that girls would be able to kill these boys with or without explanation and not face a penalty. They said this was the proof that they were loyal feminists, and anything less would corrupt their power structure. They abducted all of the boys who they believed were holding weapons using the name of a sister or other female relative, saying that boys exploiting loopholes in the laws only meant that the boys were misreading the laws, since girls were not using those same loopholes.

Dolphin Rider treaty

Now the Lilypads wrote a symbolic treaty declaring themselves allies of the Dolphin Riders, the one party that every other army, even those mutually hostile to each other, refused to defend, as they were the descendants of the Dreamers who had invaded them all. They presented this treaty to the Leapers, as only the Leapers would be able to deliver it to the Dolphin Riders (the Riders were illegal even in Baeba, but the Leapers had been meeting with them intermittently). The Leapers told the children that if they wished to live like Riders, they would be rejecting both male and female leaders and would be trapped in their habitats by wild animals, as this was the origin of the Dolphin Riders' name and their claimed source of military security. The Leapers agreed to deliver the peace treaty to the Riders, but wondered if the Lilypads were serious about establishing relations, or if this was merely a test to see whether the Leapers took the Lilypads seriously as a nation.

Even as they praised the Dolphin Riders, the Lilypads insisted they were stronger and could reject the Riders at any point. Rumors spread that the adult male Dolphin Rider soldiers obeyed strict hygiene laws that governed where and when they could urinate, and carried out their patrols constantly hiding from nature, aware that their very environment could injure them. Meanwhile the young Lilypads roamed the wilderness invincibly, always traveling in crowds for their protection, but never fearing wild animals let alone sharp thorny plants, and had been doing so since they were very young.

OHB treaty

At this point the Players signed a treaty with their enemy, the Leapers, authorizing the Players to invade and control any nation both groups identified as a children's nation, even the Slopes. The Leapers promised to stay out of any such conflict, and also promised that if the Players managed to reach all the way to Slope territory, the Leapers would hand over control of the whole of Erala to the Play army as well. With this treaty the Leapers planned to write off the existence of children's nations altogether, saying that they were just districts of the Play nation, Memnumu, and that Memnumu had a non-traditional demographic profile. This underscored a recent proclamation made by the Leapers in which children had been denied the right to collect welfare benefits in Erala, even if they were orphans, but adults were allowed to collect benefits with no need to prove their need.

The Leapers also promised to allow the Players to send the traders of the OHB corporation, which delivered Play fruits and other crops into colder climates, to pass through any areas of Erala in which they felt safe, and even to sell to groups such as the Zeniths and Slopes who were trying to destroy Erala. The Leapers allowed the OHB soldiers to enter Erala heavily armed, but did not promise their safety, because the Leapers stated that Erala was now run largely by rebels who were also heavily armed. It was understood by both parties that while OHB would continue to be a fruit trading corporation, they were also providing weapons manufactured by the Players to young rebel leaders, mostly girls, whom the Players supported and expected would soon be fighting a war.

Thus both points of the treaty favored the Players, and the Leapers did not expect anything in return. The Leapers hoped that they would not lose too much, however, and saw potential bright points in the future for them. For example, OHB was a corporation, and had recently dedicated itself to arming young female leaders such as Pausa, who were anti-Slope and thus indirectly pro-Erala and pro-Leaper. They also hoped that the Players might be underrated as an economic power, and could bring prosperity to the now rapidly depreciating economy of Erala even though they were still much poorer than Erala.

Play-Moonshine diplomatic relations

The Players were still officially in a state of war with Moonshine for various reasons, but the two sides had never met on the battlefield. They had no common border, and so the likeliest conflict zones would be inhabited by people who might oppose both sides. The only actual combat in this war had been between the Players and the Counters, with the Players coming to a quick and easy victory. Once the Counters surrendered, however, Moonshine maintained its declaration of war, stating that they had joined the war to stop the rapid expansion of the Play nation and that the Players had not yet defeated Moonshine.

Many diplomats on both sides were looking to not only end the war, but form a strong alliance between the two feminist powers. The Moonshines, seeing the Players sign an economic treaty with a power which had always been hostile to them, wondered if an economic treaty might be the way to mend relations with the Players and bring an end to their war. But it was economics that had sparked the war in the first place; Play and Moonshine relations had been friendly for most of their shared history, but the Players had been offended by Moonshine's humiliating plans for reform of the Play economy, which had made it clear that the Moonshines saw themselves as a natural upper class who would be better able to control the Play nation than could the Players themselves.

Thus, despite the OHB treaty providing arms to the teenagers living in Moonshine's refugee state of Hōki, Moonshine was not invited to help write or to sign the new treaty.

Moonshine had continued trading with the Players indirectly during the new war, since Moonshine was the supplier of goods and services to the refugee territory of Hōki, and Hōki carried on limited trade with the Players. But this was much less trade than they had previously relied on; when they had been at peace, the vast majority of trade between Moonshine and the Players had gone through a river which was much more conveniently located than OHB's trade route. The Moonshines believed that the economies of both the Play and Moonshine nations were being harmed by this change, though privately they admitted that it was Moonshine who was being hurt the most, since the Players had shown the world that they would never have trouble finding trading partners.

Shared opposition to Dreamland

The Moonshines felt they might have a chance of reconcile with the Players based on their shared and longstanding hatred of Dreamland. Dreamland had invaded the Players unprovoked in 4132, and all of the derivative Play-speaking parties, even those that had long been enemies of the Players, had retained their strong opposition to Dreamland. Often, a Play-speaking nation declaring war would add Dreamland to the list of nations they wished to defeat, with no intent to carry this through. Likewise, verbal attacks against Dreamland had long been common in political speeches about seemingly unrelated topics. Just months earlier, a female political leader named the Driver had gleefully denounced Dreamland in a speech where she predicted that an outlaw army calling itself the Unholy Alliance was planning an attack on Tāmta in order to kidnap and abuse young orphans. The only connection between Dreamland and the Unholy Alliance was that they both had entirely masculine power structures.

Dreamland was also a stated enemy of parties such as the Crystals and Soap Bubbles who had no Play ancestry and had not been greatly affected by recent events. The only major party of the east who had briefly formed an alliance with Dreamland was the Matrix, a slaveholding power who was also hated by nearly every other party; even after Dreamland and the Matrix soon became hostile again, the enemies of the Matrix considered themselves enemies of Dreamland as well.

Part of the reason for the widespread hatred of Dreamland even by powers who were quick to make amends with other enemies was economic. Depending on analysis, either Dreamland or Baeba Swamp was the richest nation in the world, and other powers did not even come close. Moreover Dreamland emerged as the clear winner when looking at the easternmost areas of Dreamland only, which were the ones that interacted most with the nations to the east. Yet, despite their vast wealth, Dreamers suffered from basic material problems for various reasons, among which was that they seemed to take little notice of such things. For example, while nearly every other nation placed their primary settlements near food sources, Dreamland's cities seemed to be located wherever the weather and scenery was best, with great distances between settlements and little regard for the cost of shipping food to locations which had been chosen for their beauty but had few natural resources.

Thus opposition to Dreamland by itself would not unite two quarreling powers. The Moonshines felt they might have a better chance if they based their opposition on feminism: Dreamland was the world's most masculine power, the only nation in which men were dominant in all spheres of life and had a secure grip on this power because the Dreamers were composed of tribes in which men were reliably the taller sex. Many nations to the east, such as Moonshine and the Players, were securely feminine in the very same way: Moonshine women were much taller than their men and their men dared not even speak an impolite word in the presence of a woman since every woman was deputized to punish a man, whether a stranger or an acquaintance, and she could only be brought to heel by another woman (usually the man's wife). The Players were biologically more variable but yet women had just as strong a grip on power in the Play nation. Meanwhile, though progress was slow, the other nations of the east seemed to be slowly turning from masculine powers into feminine ones, whereas there was no nation that was turning from feminine into masculine. The Dreamers had so far been almost entirely unaffected by this, and had become increasingly accepting of violence against women, even in their own nation, whereas previously the Dreamers had defended their male power structure by saying only a strict male power structure could protect women from other men.

Moonshine women join OHB

Unable to rework national-scale politics on their own, some Moonshine women left their nation to join OHB. One of these women was from Kagaḳal. Moonshine's laws typically emancipated their girls at age 13, so younger girls were also able to join, but they tended to be less interested in the politics of the teenage Lilypads than were the Moonshine adult women.

Players join OHB

There were also some women from the highlands of Nama and from Tarwas, both of which were now within Play territory, but which had long histories of independence.

Some Players themselves also joined, mostly from mountain districts near Nama and Tarwas. One girl named Pasanīp set out on her own to join the trading network, thus giving up her Play citizenship.

Immediate effects of new shipments

The core of the OHB fruit traders were married Play men, and their shipments were under the purview of the Play military command, meaning that the women in the Play capital of Pūpepas chose the objectives of each mission, but the men in charge of the soldiers chose the strategy. Many of these men had recent combat experience winning battles against small children; they knew that they could not hide this, and that no apology for these combat missions would be big enough to win back the children's trust. Therefore the Players knew that the only way to make a deal with the children was to respect their sovereignty, explaining that the Players had fought wars against children only as a last resort, and only because they saw those children as equal partners, not as hapless victims. Therefore, despite the Leapers having awarded the Players sovereignty over all of the children's nations, the Players continued their tradition of party-based diplomacy, ignoring the question of where the borders lay to focus on the extant political conflicts and the new alliance that could come from resolving them.

The Players agreed that arming the Lilypad teenagers was in the best interests of the Play nation, though many felt that it was a minor issue, since the much larger adult Play army could fight much better than the teenagers if only Moonshine allowed the Players to breach the borders of the Moonshine refugee territory into which the teenagers had been given permission to flee in case of emergency.

The Players were dismayed when they realized that the OHB girls were writing messages of love to the Play men they worked alongside, thanking them for helping them start the Orange War (Play Tamapu Vapias), naming their battalions after fruits, and adopting the Rider Medley art style which had come to them from Dreamland. Though Dreamland was not a participant in this war, nor a stop on the long road that the traders took to reach the northern forests, the Players had long suspected that Dreamland was looking for ways to weaken resistance among the many peoples of the interior who opposed them, and that since the Dreamers could not win a war on the battlefield, they were now trying to soften up the military leaders of the youngest generation by subtly spreading their decadent lifestyle and getting them to associate war with soft, playful things.

The Players worried that these were signs of female submission and that Dreamer men were planning a takeover of the feminist OHB network. They were unable to express their suspicions in words because they were worried about offending the OHB girls, who they knew had adopted the new art style from the Hipsides, fellow teenagers living further west, and might not know that the Hipsides had in turn gotten it from the hated Dreamers.

More changes within OHB

A boy named Yaminās-Tatām ("the Beast") defected to the Slopes, saying the feminist weapons network was hopeless and that male power would soon rule all of Erala and Ŋāse. In the Leaper language he called himself Kēxʷi. A team of girls captured and imprisoned him when he attempted to attack a nearby girls' station. Thus they proved that they could handle rebels from within. This caused the girls to become even more suspicious of boys than they had been before, just as they were considering moderating their approach and allowing boys to become leaders. Yaminās-Tatām offered a compromise: when the girls released him from prison he would dedicate his life to fighting girls and women, but would only attack those whom the OHB girls deemed to be enemies.

The Jokers

At this point, some girls called themselves Jokers (Play Kanaa), reviving the name of a party which had branched off from the Players around sixty years earlier. These people conceded that they were likely to end up in a male-dominated society simply because war was imminent and men (and boys) could take power in war regardless of what laws a peacetime government placed on men's behavior.

This was historically important because of a minor Play tradition of women referring to men as "jokes" in Play and other languages Players spoke. This was because Play women found their men a reliable source of amusement, always ready to be brought out when the time was right, and easily put away when serious matters came to discussion. However, this metaphor was not fixed to a single word, and the most common word was not kana but tīpa, which was more commonly used as a verb meaning to tell a joke, rather than to be a joke.

The Jokers believed, therefore, that transnational feminism was a futile prospect, since it could lead to women siding with the losing side in a war just because they were feminists. They stated that even Moonshine knew this, because Moonshine was trying to make an alliance with the Players supposedly in the name of feminism, while rejecting the Crystals, who were also feminists but were much weaker.

The Jokers stated that it was better to be the weaker sex on the winning side of a war than to die in a position of power. They knew that even if OHB distributed weapons only to females, the receivers of these weapons could not physically maintain possession of them during battle, and OHB agreed that it should be boys who do most of the fighting. Therefore at some point before or during battle, the male sex would hold the majority of weapons, and so-called physical feminism (women holding power by force) would break down, even if there were an all-female police force alongside the army. And there was no common police force in Lilypad territory, as the girls had experienced no crime wave while living with the boys.

The Jokers did not state outright that females needed to accept a lower status, but that it was human nature for men to take power during war, even in feminist societies. They said that any girls pretending that they could rule over boys using weapons would be denied weapons, while those admitting that they would be of low status and would rely largely on male followers would be granted the right to own and distribute weapons.

Thus, the Jokers were much like the Slope girls, but supported OHB. They considered themselves a transnational movement, not a party, but at the date of their foundation, all Jokers were girls who belonged to the Lilypad party.

Tāmpe army

Now Tāmpe-Vīu broke away from the Slopes, saying he had refined the Slopes' war strategy and realized that it had no connection to the Slope ideology. Thus, non-Slopes could use Slope strategies. He affirmed that the army he was building was still an ally of the Slopes, because they were both targeting the Crystal women in Erala, and that because they both shared sulalaka they could share territory, but insisted that the new Tāmpe boys were not Slopes and would not share weapons with them.

The Tāmpe leaders were all teenage boys, and stated that they would not allow female leaders. Their goal was to assault the Crystal women, cooperating with the Slopes who were doing the same, and through their raw strength impress enough girls to join them so they could carry on their population growth. Thus, Tāmpe saw itself as a natural overclass, and they were not intending to reproduce with the Crystal women.

Because Tāmpe had no ideology, they felt they could tempt boys from the feminist OHB network to defect, and also appeal to the Lilypad boys more broadly. They realized that there was little difference between Tāmpe and the hated Matrix party except for identity. They accepted that they were very similar to Matrixes but belonged to a narrow age group, the Lilypad generation, which would refuse all alliances with adults, even if they seemed likely to gain from them, and at best only carefully consider alliances with adolescents or with younger children's groups.

They coined the new term Tatevas for their territory to dissociate themselves from the Lilypads while also including the Lilypads. Citizens were called tatea if adolescents and tateā if children. They stated that a tatea (or tateā if they chose that name) was anyone from their generation, born between 4178 and 4191, who was living independently without adult care or had been doing so until abducted by an adult army. This included those tatea adolescents who had married and given birth to children of their own, and also included those who had adopted children of their own. But any biological children born were considered to belong to the next generation, not to be tatea. There were some households in which older adolescent tatea lived with young tatea children they had adopted and yet considered them to be of the same generation; this was in each case because these young children had made at least some independent decisions on their own, even if they were very young. The youngest of the tatea were five years old, and the oldest were eighteen.

Thus tatea could be children or adults, and the Tāmpe knew that they would not outgrow their tatea status.

Still the Tāmpe boys reserved Tāmpe membership for males alone, and stated that they might individually give up Tāmpe membership when they married since it would not be good for young children to have their fathers' main daily activity be the slaughter and abuse of Crystal women.

Related movements

Firebreath

Also at this time some Lilypads and others of the tatea generation joined the Firebreath party of Xema; most of these were boys. They considered themselves neutral on many other issues such as sulalaka. OHB opposed the Firebreaths, and many other groups such as the Slopes considered the Firebreaths irrelevant, saying that any party who considered the Firebreath a threat proved that they were very weak. The Firebreaths were primarily known for supporting tribalism, and therefore were a closed-entry party. Their power base was in Xema, and the kids claiming to be joining the group could not actually prove their membership, but they claimed that their generation was coming to power and would become the new face (and arms) of the Firebreath party.

One boy who joined the Firebreaths was Pasamā, but he soon began repeating Slope ideology, showing listeners that he may have wanted to join the Slopes but been unable because of lack of Slope allies in the area, and so instead chosen a group who could not enforce their ideology on him. Pasamā was one of several who endorsed tāmpe and claimed to be targeting only female victims, for reasons that were unclear even to the Slopes.

Some doubters said that the Firebreaths had been defeated in a recent war, perhaps in 4180, when their homeland was invaded by the Raspara. To these people, claims of Firebreath membership meant merely that the claimant was politically independent and wished to identify with a political party that had a reputation for violence.

Yīuvas-Pīsa, who had earlier declared himself a Crystal in order to harass the Crystal party leadership by demanding funding, now declared himself an ally of Pasamā, but did not specifically mention the Firebreath party or say that he was leaving the Crystals.

A tall girl named Sūasava also joined the Firebreath movement, showing that the appeal was not limited to boys.

Leashes

Yet the Firebreaths lacked allies, and some considered declaring themselves Leashes instead, or that the Firebreaths and Leashes would be brought together by the new generation. On the other hand, the Leashes were unpopular because they had invaded the children's nation of Tāmta just a few years earlier. Thus, whereas the Firebreaths were now weak but had been notorious for winning battles in the past, the Leashes were strong but had only demonstrated their power by invading a nation run by children.

To join the Leashes, or even to claim Leash membership, therefore would be more shocking to others and also disadvantageous, as the Leashes still had adult male soldiers in the wilderness who could claim that the new recruits must obey them. Therefore the Firebreath connection was stronger for the kids precisely because it was so weak; the Firebreath kids could claim to be in control since no Firebreaths would emerge from Xema to discipline them. Thus the Firebreaths became more popular among the adolescent boys who rejected all of the other groups and also did not want to obey women in OHB.

Spines

A new party for boys, the Spines (Play Vavata Pamiti) appeared in the far west, mostly from Tink defectors born in Baeba Swamp who now wanted territory of their own. This party name had been used before, and the new Spines created an alternate name of Šaanau to distinguish themselves. They supported violence against the Crystal women, saying that they were not even interested in slavery. They merely were targeting the Crystals because they were the weakest army in the known world, and therefore battles against Crystals could win the boys sovereign territory.

The Spines' motto was very simple: bes "hurt". Their logo was a red sun because they claimed they were continuing the program of the Red Sun, a Clover boy who was slain by his best friend who objected to his order to kill Crystal women in Pavaitaapu.

Summary of new movements

The Leashes and Firebreaths both endorsed racial discrimination, which the Cooks, the first children's party, had abolished almost immediately upon their formation. The Cooks promised to make allies of their enemies, saying that children by nature would seek to befriend other children, and that war and violence were problems created by the adults around them. The prohibition on racial discrimination had remained in the various parties that had branched off from the Cooks, but some of their allies, particularly the Crystals, did support racial discrimination, and the Clovers were ambivalent, as they were a children's party of a different origin and had had so much trouble meeting their basic needs that they had been unable to form firm opinions on such issues. Nonetheless, the conservative Lilypads who considered themselves protectors of the weak announced that they still opposed racial discrimination and saw no reason to ever change their minds.

Treaty with Hipsides

Background

The Tāmpe boys' predatory lifestyle normalized sexual assault against women, and implied that men who did not make it their life to assault and abuse women were not fully men.

Formal treaty

The Hipside boys signed a treaty with Tāmpe now, saying that they considered the Tāmpe boys to be full allies and would cooperate with them. The Hipsides stated that they would submit to Tāmpe rule, allow the Tāmpe boys to come and go in Hipside territory as they wished, and take things that did not belong to them without compensation.

The Hipsides recognized the Tāmpe as a superior class and stated that they wished the Tāmpe boys to write a set of laws that punished the Hipsides for not assaulting women, and spread propaganda reminding the Hipsides of their inferior status even in their own territory. The Hipside boys reaffirmed that they were not tempted, and would rather suffer punishments than to break their code by assaulting innocent women.

The Hipsides' only asking price for all of this was that the Tāmpe boys not be allowed to assault, abuse, or traffic Hipside girls in any way, so that the Hipsides could continue their mission of slow peaceful reproduction and family formation in a mixed nation.

First claimed territory

Tāmpe's army grew quickly. The Tāmpe boys knew that their explosive growth threatened the Slopes, who were bound by ideology and could not attract so broad a coalition. They believed that the Slopes only attacked weak people, and therefore that the best way to protect their members from attacks by Slopes was to launch attacks of their own, but not against the Slopes, as they still wanted the Slopes to be their allies. Instead, Tāmpe led a troop of 4,606 boys deep into Crystal territory to launch a coordinated attack against the Crystal women, put them into slavery, and create a new Tāmpe nation with defined borders.

The Tāmpe boys invaded the Crystal district of Tēmpato-Wăno with four armies, arriving at the same time and trapping the women on all sides so they could not flee. The Crystal women quickly surrendered. The boys were disappointed at the quick surrender, saying that they had been expecting a sporting fight, and so they would punish the Crystals for their easy submission by escalating the punishments they had been planning to inflict on them.

Tāmpe named their new nation the Square (Play Nuaumma), and the soldiers came to be known as Squares instead of simply by the name of their leader, Tāmpe-Vīu. Promising the Crystals were so weak they could be conquered by nonviolent means, the Square soldiers said they would mix traditional and nontraditional warfare, as they had few weapons but considered themselves much hardier soldiers than the Crystals and some other tribes such as the XIGs who had only used traditional combat. Their war strategy embraced našači, the use of weapons that could harm those who used them, meaning that they were out of humans' control. By the use of such weapons they could outfight traditional armies who used only those weapons that they could control. By this, the Squares meant that they might introduce plagues to the Crystal territory; some Squares were former Hipsides who had already been spreading plagues through Hipside territory.

Leapers react

The Leapers considered the Squares a greater threat to the stability of Erala than they did the Slopes. They made it their goal to assassinate Tāmpe-Vīu, the seventeen-year-old founder and military leader of the Square army, saying that if they were successful, no similar leader would arise to replace him because they would afraid that they too would be assassinated. But the Squares had taken control of territory well to the east of the Slopes, and the Leapers could not easily reach the Square nation without going through Slope or Hipside territory. The Hipsides had a river valley east of Tata that they themselves had promised not to defend, essentially inviting an invasion, but the Leapers knew that if they sent Leapers into the area, the other groups would know a war was coming and would make it even harder for the Leapers to trespass through than if they had gone through the Slopes' lands.

More organized attacks

Navaas attacks in the woods

An OHB boy named Navaas, claiming allegiance to the Firebreaths, started a fire in the woods where many kids were living and said that he would fight to the death, killing boys and girls of any age, until he himself was killed. The girls quickly captured him without suffering injury, as they had done with other rebels, and classified the incident as a crime rather than a small war. Rather than kill him, they imprisoned him. The girls noted that unlike the boys in the west, he was not motivated by gender issues but rather wanted to attack the open society that the various children's parties had created and revert to a system based on a strict racial hierarchy with the Firebreaths and their kin at the top and the Raspara and their allies at the bottom.

Navaas had destroyed much property, but failed to even injure the girls. This was in part because he had chosen at the last moment to attack strong targets instead of deliberately seeking out weak young children, but also because by this time the OHB girls had much better weapons and armor than did the boys, and they had matured enough that their armor was fit to their body shape and could not be easily worn by the boys. The failed attack encouraged OHB to go even further, saying that they had proven their strategy of protecting women but not men was precisely what they needed in order to keep their society safe. They passed a new law stating that law-abiding OHB boys were responsible for the behavior of criminal OHB boys, and that since they had yet to record a single instance of unprovoked violence from girls against boys (though there were abductions in which the boys attempted to resist), the girls were innocent, and did not need to police each other.

Views on gender roles

The Slopes at this time had coined an offensive term for a girl or women who cheered on abuse of Crystal women but did not herself participate. They said that these girls could still be Slopes, but would not be trusted to wield power. They accused the Lilypad girls and even the Moonshine women of this behavior as well, saying that they were clearly not objecting to the Slopes' abuse of the Crystals and therefore approved of it, but felt it was impossible for them to commit violence. The Slopes said that the best among them were the girls who directly participated in and even led the attacks against the Crystal women, allowing their true nature to show through rather than acceding to the Lilypad-Moonshine feminist belief that wanton violence was a male-pattern behavior.

Other people

A boy named Fūsuās rose to power in the Lilypad party; he had hygiene problems like those of BM and TP but not as severe. The Lilypads felt bad for these boys and for Yeŋita's older brother, who had similar problems.

Unrest in eastern Tāmta

December 15, 4196

At this point, various indigenous groups in Tāmta called for the children's groups to leave, saying that they now could safely move into the territory of the Slopes and therefore they were no longer refugees. They threatened violence against the children if they refused to leave. These groups were not closely allied to each other and did not represent any unified group in Tāmta; the children could not clamp down on movements outside their districts and therefore could not stop these groups from carrying out their threats except by preemptive invasion.

The children had believed the Leapers' earlier estimate that nearly 100,000 refugees in adult-led parties lived in Tāmta, but they had only personally met a far smaller number than this. There were at this time about 70,000 children belonging to the Cold Men, the Deer Walkers, or the Scorpions living in Tāmta.

Battle of Žipati

A group of men invaded the Cold settlement of Žipati, in an area west of the lakeshore where the children's territory was only a few miles thick. On the north side of Žipati was a river, and Žipati was connected to Moonshine territory just by a single bridge. Only about 400 kids lived here, though Žipati had once been a large city of about 10,000 in a past era. Many of the older inhabitants' stone structures still stood, such as this bridge. This meant that there were many places to hide in the city and nobody was homeless, although most structures had fallen into disrepair.

The men wanted to split the kids' nation in half, knowing that it would end their ability to communicate with the numerous kids' groups to their west.

Because the Cold Men had no internal military guards, the men had direct access to the civilian population, including the newer members of the party who were under thirteen years old (a separate group from the Deer Walkers who were physically isolated from neighboring territories).

The men abducted 22 young Cold children from a Moonshine-built playground and brutally tortured them, and then disappeared into the woods to the south. These children were from a group around ten years old, not the more numerous younger children. The Cold Men realized that the men had stopped because their hands were full; had the younger children been playing at the time, the men might have been able to abduct the entire population of that age group by carrying them one in each hand instead.

Then another group of men moved north to occupy Žipati. The Cold Men had no way to chase the kidnappers down without surrendering full control of Žipati to the second group of men and thus making the remaining children in Žipati vulnerable to the same abuses, so the Cold leaders promised instead to focus on keeping Žipati safe (despite the occupation, the soldiers did not have control of the streets) and preventing further attacks. They believed that the kidnapped children were still alive in the wider territory of Hōki and that the men would be seeking to sign a treaty with the Cold Men in which the kidnapping victims would only be returned if the Cold Men evacuated Tāmta or a large part of it.

In an internal vote, the Cold Men trapped just outside Žipati decided that they would not submit to such a treaty, as it would lead to far more than 22 deaths among their people and might also signal to their allies that they were no longer reliable. This was not a party-wide vote but the Cold Men had earlier stated that in an emergency, small local councils of party members had the authority to make decisions like this. Thus the Cold Men accepted that they would probably not see the 22 abductees again. The Cold Men were also deputized to take military action, but held off.

Soon, the Cold Men further east of Žipati urged those waiting outside Žipati to seek a diplomatic solution, saying that if they started a war against the adults, far more Cold Men would be hurt and possibly killed, and therefore that even if the Cold Men looked weak and vulnerable for choosing a nonviolent solution to a violent provocation, it was better for the Cold Men in the long run not to seek revenge. They thus organized a diplomatic meeting with the kidnappers and several other groups who inhabited territory to the south of Tāmta's narrow western extension.

Diplomatic standoff

When the Slope diplomats living in Cold territory heard what had happened, they stated that the Slopes would almost certainly start a war against the refugees: not out of sympathy, but for their own benefit, since they relied on the east-west trade route through Cold territory in order to sustain their nation. The invading men were now occupying just a few square miles of territory, but it was here that the Cold nation was at its narrowest point, and the Cold Men did not have permission to trespass through neighboring Moonshine. Thus the Cold Men realized that they would also need to declare war or else show themselves to be cowards by relying on the distant Slopes to fight their wars.

Because the men guarding Žipati refused to move, the Cold Men and others held their diplomatic meeting at the entrance to the city. They stated that the men should give up because the adult refugee populations were dependent on the children for their livelihoods, as the children controlled the trade with Moonshine. The Cold Men pretended they did not know that the men had abducted 22 children from the playground, and pretended not to believe the men when the men brought it up. This meant that the men could not demand that the Cold Men do anything to get them back. Thus the diplomatic meeting produced no concessions from either side, and the Cold Men vowed that they would soon force their way in. The men accepted this and did not try to abduct the kids at the meeting.

Cold Men respond

Thus the Cold Men sent a troop of teenage boys into Žipati, even though they knew that the men guarding the city borders could respond by moving into the city center and massacring defenseless young children. The Cold Men believed that even greater violence would soon follow if they did not act immediately. Thus the Battle of Žipati continued.

The boys rushed at the soldiers guarding the city. These boys were not the oldest ones, because the oldest boys had become fathers and given their weapons to those around 15 years old. They also had very little armor and were thus vulnerable to enemies' weapon attacks. However, none of the various refugee groups had a proper army either, as they were not legally separate nations and because weapons production had long been suppressed in the territory by mutual agreement. Thus the soldiers guarding the city fled from the boys rather than taking them head on, and the boys realized that this might mean that the many younger children in the city center would die before the boys could catch up to them.

The children in the city dispersed in all directions, taking advantage of the many places to hide among the heavy stone structures. The Cold Men knew that the bridge connecting the settlement to Moonshine was almost certainly closed, as the Moonshines did not want the Cold Men to enter Moonshine territory even though they claimed to be an ally of the kids.

Plans for a unified government

The Squares contemplated making their new nation, Nuaumma, just a state within a wider empire they called Tatevas, defined as all nations run by the adolescents and children of the tatea generation. This was essentially the same as the Leapers' Tapiana nation, but the Squares wanted to create at least a weak central government, whereas Tapiana had no over-arching structure and existed only for diplomatic purposes.

Because the Square party ruled by force, they would be able to participate in democratic elections without the threat of military consequences. The idea was that democratic elections would draw in voters from the Lilypad heartlands and even further abroad, people who might secretly support the Squares but be afraid to voice their opinions due to the heavy weight of the strict feminist governments controlling the Lilypad boys' opinions. If they could produce evidence that the Lilypad boys were divided against the Lilypad girls, they might be able to attract converts from both the boys and girls because they knew that the Lilypads closely guarded their identity and would not want to be split along sex lines.

The Squares planned to model their nation after the Leapers' Erala project, meaning that although it would indeed be democratic, the Squares would retain special privileges as the founding party that would allow them to overrule some but not other acts of the government in which they would have otherwise been outnumbered.

Leapers' plans for administration

To their surprise, the Leapers approved the creation of Tatevas immediately, but said that the Squares could not afford themselves special privileges. The Leapers told the Squares they must accept the Slopes and other parties as equal partners if they wanted to claim that they controlled the territory of those parties. As the Slopes by themselves were larger than the Squares, the Leapers felt that this would keep the Squares from dominating the elections, though they knew that the Squares were growing so rapidly that they could conceivably outvote the Slopes within a short period of time.

Nonetheless, because the Slope-controlled territories were mostly located in between the Squares' and Leapers' controlled territories (the Leapers being at the extreme west, in just one district), the Leapers hoped putting the Slopes in power might lead them to protect the Leapers from being overwhelmed by the apolitical Square armies. (These areas were those under the military control of each party, and were much smaller than the claimed areas of each party.)

The Leapers abandoned their Tapiana project here, stating any childrens' groups who chose to identify with the Tapiana project could still meet with the Leapers under the Tapiana banner, but that Tatevas was now for all practical purposes replacing and expanding on Tapiana. The Leapers felt it was reasonable to grant Tatevas sovereignty over all its claimed territory, and that it would not conflict with Erala even though nearly all of Erala was within Tatevas.

Census of 4197

The Squares approved the Leaper plan and agreed to take a census of their population. They also agreed to send boys into territories far afield to take censuses of children's territories within Hōki that they did not expect to control directly, but which they considered part of Tatevas because they did not see them as enemies.

Ignoring the Crystals entirely, the Squares declared their territory (but not the whole of Tatevas) to have no indigenous adult population. They planned to restrict voting rights to fellow tatea adolescents and children, and to allow other tatea populations to put further restrictions on voting rights, such as requiring a minimum age, but not to allow votes from adults or from non-residents. (Thus, for example, Slopes living in Baeba Swamp could not vote, because the Squares were not planning to claim any territory in Baeba.)

By excluding adults but also agreeing to recognize the Leapers' nation of Tatevas, the Squares admitted that they were leaving open the possibility of other children's parties deciding to enroll the adult Crystals and other adults, which could lead them to lose their power, but they felt that their physical domination of their territory would prevent this from being a problem.

NOTE: The census actually began a few months earlier and concluded in January 4197.

Slopes' input

However the Slopes reacted to this by declaring their own new nation, Simusa-Māsa (SMS), saying that SMS had the same borders as Tatevas and could even coexist with Tatevas but that SMS would also assign citizenship to the indigenous adult populations and not just the tatea children's parties. That is, their SMS nation included all of the citizens of Tatevas, all of the citizens of Erala, and potentially some groups left out such as the Tinks who were not recognized by the Leapers and some children living with their parents whom the Slopes felt might be tempted to become politically active and independent rather than obeying their parents.

Thus there were three different nations (Tatevas, SMS, and Erala) sharing the same territory, and parts of this territory were also shared with various additional nations (Tapiana, Baeba, Pavaitaapu, and the Little Country), making some areas part of four nations at once. The citizens of these nations needed to pay taxes to the central governments of all of them. The Slopes admitted that it was coming about that a nation was not a geographical entity so much as a measure of the area throughout which a given political party could exert influence. The Slopes promised that SMS and Tatevas would be military allies, and reminded the Squares that because the Squares did not include adults as citizens of Tatevas, all of the Slopes' (and the Squares') attacks on adults were legal in the Square nation.

The Slopes' extension of citizenship rights to the Crystals meant that, for the first time, the Crystals could ask the Slopes who attacked them to stand trial for assault. The Slopes reaffirmed that, although the Crystals were indeed becoming citizens of the Slopes' nation, the Slopes' assaults would continue and would remain legal, because Slope society was built upon the exploitation (fumu) of the indigenous Crystal population, and that without this, the Slope society would crumble. The Slopes affirmed that their new nation was a democracy, and invited the Crystals to try voting against the much more numerous Lilypads and other groups to see if they could overturn the exploitation system.

Nonetheless, the Slopes decided to allow the Crystals' party-based court system, which had until now operated only in the nation of Erala, to also operate in SMS, since SMS and Erala had the same territory. But the Slopes set up no national court system and therefore made no promises that Crystals' convictions of Slopes would be respected.

Leapers' proposal for simplification

The Slopes' decision to make SMS a separate nation left Tatevas largely under Square control, dealing another blow to the Leapers who had wished to control the children's parties by setting them up against each other.

The Leapers asked the Squares running Tatevas to consider making their nation mostly an arm of the government of SMS rather than a nation in its own right. They pointed out that children who were citizens of both nations would pay higher taxes than adults, who could only be citizens of SMS (though adults could be citizens of Erala). They felt that Tatevas' additional layer of government would accomplish little that SMS would not already provide. Because Tatevas was run by the Squares, they said that Tatevas might scale down its other operations to just the Square territory or perhaps the Squares and the Clovers. The Leapers were fond of an idea in which the expanded SMS nation would have two parliamentary houses, where Tatevas' house would be just for children while SMS' house would debate their bills with adults. They promised to help ensure the Slopes directed tax money to Tatevas if both the Slopes and the Squares accepted the Leaper proposal.

Constitutional referendum

The Slopes requested the Leapers' permission to follow the Square census-takers, and to ask the members of each party to vote on a proposed constitution for the Slope nation of Simusa-Māsa, saying that it would be binding on all citizens of SMS, and therefore on all citizens of Tatevas and Erala, but that they still were not seeking to dismantle Tatevas or Erala. The Leapers agreed, as the Slopes controlled the Leapers' access to the territories in question and therefore wielded much power.

This constitutional referendum had been pre-written and did not demand that the children vote on the Leapers' proposal to merge SMS with Tatevas. The Slopes and Squares promised the Leapers that they would ask this question in addition, but that the respondents' votes would not be binding because the Slopes and Squares were the only parties who they felt should be allowed to decide that matter.

End of census journey

This will need to be split.

Thus, by late January 4197, the Squares and Slopes were finishing collecting the census data from their own population, from the Slopes, and from various other parties in order to gauge the total population balance of the nation of Tatevas.

The Leapers told the Square boys to also take census data for Erala, saying that the Leapers would award them a small share of power in Baeba Swamp, making them the only children's party represented in Baeba, if they cooperated and returned with believable figures. This was because the Erala census would benefit the Leapers in Baeba rather than the citizens of Erala, who for the most part relied on their parties and were not interested in a census. The Leapers felt they could not safely do this task on their own. The Squares agreed, and promised to cooperate with Erala rather than ignore it, and that the two nations could coexist in the same place, with both being sovereign and yet not coming into conflict.

Demographics of Tatevas

The census showed two groups of children inhabiting Tatevas, an older group and a younger group. The combined population of these two groups was about 127,000.

Adolescents

The older group was made up of about 90,000 children and adolescents, split across five major parties (the Slopes, the Squares, the Scorpions, the Cold Men, and the Hipsides) plus some minor parties, all of which were part of the Lilypad network. The median age for these parties was 14, except for the Cold Men, whose median age was 15. Of these, the Cold Men were the largest party, but the Squares and Slopes had far more soldiers than did the Cold Men. All five major parties had a surplus of boys, with the population ranging from 55% male among the Cold Men to 74% male among the Squares.

The largest of the small parties was the boys-only Spine party, claiming about 5600 members, also with a median age of 14.

The median age of these parties was only about two to three years higher than it had been in August 4191 when the first children's party, the Cooks, had been founded. This was because as the founding party grew and split, they enrolled many children who had been too young to join at first, and also adopted children even younger than that, all while forbidding the enrollment of adults. (The Scorpions had at first allowed adults, but these had voluntarily left the party.) Moreover a small number of teenagers had reproduced and were now raising very young children of their own.

Nonetheless, the rising age of the parties worried the Leapers, who realized that a median age of 14 was actually higher than that of the Players. The Play army, the largest in the world, was estimated at about 100,000 men, and the Leapers realized that if the children's parties forged an alliance and put both boys and girls into their military, they might actually outnumber the Players. They noted also that the six largest of the so-called children's parties all had a significant male surplus, which they felt made it almost certain that they were about to start a major war.

Smaller children

The younger group comprised about 37,000 younger children in the Clover and Deer Walker parties; the unadopted STW orphans had been assigned to the Clovers by this time, making them much younger than they had been earlier. The Clovers had adopted these children into the party largely against their will, and for several different reasons, one being that they felt it was the only way to carry on the existence of the Clover party, as their territory was ruled by two rival police forces who saw nothing wrong with attacking teenagers, but even these police seemed to understand the need to prioritize the lives of the much younger orphans who had been sent to them by STW. Thus the young orphans became Clovers.

The median age for both of these parties was 7 years old, and by happenstance both parties were 46% boys. They were demographically similar because both groups of children had been orphaned at about the same time. Nonetheless they lived thousands of miles apart from each other and could not contact each other. Both the Clovers and the Deer Walkers were living independently despite their young age and many needs; both were located in isolated habitats surrounded by children from the older groups, who kept enemies away, but because these older children had so many problems of their own, they could not actually adopt all of the younger children.

Cold Men's indirect reports

The Cold Men had adopted most of the Deer Walker orphans (also known as Deer Paws), but because the orphans had not been able to attend school, the Cold Men refused to admit them into the Cold party, for which education had always been a requisite for entrance. But they believed that they had the children's best interests at heart, and that the Deer Walkers would be best off if they were able to live and grow as independently as possible, meaning that the Cold Men granted them their own territory, Šanataŋūs, and also allowed them to live outside that territory. Rather than bother the young Deer Walker children with a census form, the Cold Men told the Squares that they already knew the exact population total because they had been the ones to help the Deer Walkers find safety, and had kept close watch on them since then.

The Cold Men's close connection to the Deer Walkers meant that, although the enrolled Cold Men had a slightly higher median age (15) than the other major parties (all 14), they were functionally the youngest of the major parties because they were responsible for the safety and well-being of these tens of thousands of younger children. The other parties had also adopted some young children, but almost all of them had been directly enrolled into the party, meaning that their median ages were a more accurate reflection of their true population whereas the Cold Men's was higher than one might expect. The Squares estimated that if the Deer Walkers were counted as Cold Men, the Cold Men's median age would be about 12, much the same as it had been at the party's foundation date. Thus, despite their party name, they were both the youngest and the least male-dominated of the major parties.

Separate government

The Cold Men had chosen to exclude the Deer Walkers from their party due to their lack of education and the Cold Men's inability to educate them. The Cold Men had never discriminated by age, but all of the original members of the party had been classmates of one of two major school systems, and they based much of their governing methodology on what they had learned in school. They had originally wanted to teach their knowledge to the younger children, but now knew that their time was used up just meeting daily needs.

Thus, in the state of Šanataŋūs, the Cold Men had created yet another sovereign nation, Pipatānu, for the Deer Walker children. Here, the young children could all vote on their own issues without the fear of being outvoted by adults or even by older children. Preexisting districts such as Tamataa which had been founded by very young children were then assigned to Pipatānu rather than Šanataŋūs. But Pipatānu was fully enclosed by a faction of Cold Men called the Sippers, who patrolled the internal borders (including the shoreline) and therefore Pipatānu had no foreign policy. Yet, because Šanataŋūs was now the capital territory of Tāmta, and Pipatānu made of much of Šanataŋūs, the small children in Pipatānu met with adults and with foreigners after all.

The Cold Men claimed that the Deer Walkers were self-sufficient, living not only without adults but also without the care of the older children. The Cold Men also claimed, however, that their survival was only possible because the Cold Men were keeping intruders and other enemies at bay, and that their concept of living independently did not imply that the children had their own army or any other state organs that would be needed to defend against hostile intruders. They also stated that the Deer Paws had no police force and did not need one because, being small children, they were peaceful by nature and that all violent crime was committed by adults. Neither did they have a school system or a cash economy.

The Cold Men also stated that the children spent much of their time playing while foraging for food, having turned even basic daily living tasks into games, and that they would be best off if they were left to this lifestyle, even knowing it meant that they would reach adulthood without an education and be oblivious to the world around them. Moreover they said that Šanataŋūs had been like this for two years already. These claims were similar to the lifestyle of the mythical city of Ŋapata Ŋūa, a city without work believed to exist in Play territory.

Leaper skepticism

Most of the Square census takers stated that the Cold Men's claims that the young Deer Walker children were living independently were accurate. But when the Squares provided the data to the Leapers, the Leapers expressed strong skepticism that such a state, even with indirect support from outside, could exist.

Some Leapers suggested that the Squares knew the Cold Men were trying to cover up a disaster, but that to tell the Leapers the truth would weaken the Cold Men and harm the Deer Walkers, and that very few people would be motivated to mount a rescue mission into Cold territory to help the Deer Walkers. Other Leapers felt the Squares were still young and idealistic enough to believe a nation so young could in fact exist and prosper without help from adults or even from older children. And some Leapers believed that the Squares and Cold Men were in fact telling the truth; they believed that the young children in Šanataŋūs were living in safety and harmony, with enough food but likely very poor hygiene, because no outside enemy could reach them and because there was in fact a small but regular presence of older people due to its function as the capital of the Lilypad nation.

Yet another position was that the Cold Men were telling the truth; the Deer Walkers were indeed living independently and were safe from harm, but that the Cold Men were also hiding the fact that simply due to the lack of adult care, living conditions in Šanataŋūs were so bad that the Cold Men had trapped the children in their territory so they could not escape and seek to move into an adult nation where they would expect to be cared for but would only be abused.

The Leapers thanked the Squares for their hard work running the census, and appreciated that they had faithfully reported the information that the Cold Men had given them.

Demographics of Erala

The population of Erala was dominated by four armies, the Crystals, the Matrixes, the Soap Bubbles, and the Zeniths. The Crystals were an all-female nation living in homes scattered throughout the whole territory, while the other three parties consisted primarily of free-roaming adult men who moved from place to place and mostly traveled in packs. The 28,000 Crystal women by themselves outnumbered the three men's parties, and the overall female surplus had attracted the men of other parties such as XIG to also settle in Erala.

Thanking the Squares for their work, the Leapers entered them as the second children's party in Baeba's Parliament, and awarded them four seats alongside the Clovers' ten seats. (Seats were assigned by party, so the two groups of children were not competing for seats, and neither of them could be voted out). Nonetheless the Squares realized that they would at most make a tiny difference since they were outnumbered by the adult parties and because the Leapers derived additional power from various undemocratic elements in the government.

Unenrolled children

The census estimated that there were about 100,000 children and adolescents living in this territory who did not belong to any of the children's parties; these kids were living in parented households headed by members of various other parties, such as the Crystals, Tinks (only in Pavaitaapu), and the indigenous tribes. These kids were therefore considered citizens of Erala, not Tatevas, even though the territories of the two empires overlapped heavily. More than half of these children belonged to the Tink party in Pavaitaapu.

None of these parties allowed children to vote, so the Slopes and others had been recruiting new members from these families, but had thus far avoided a large-scale attempt at conversion, saying that they could rule democratically without achieving a majority if they could intimidate the other groups by dominating the trade and manufacture of weapons.

Demographics of Baeba

Tinks

There were about 77,500 Tinks in Baeba Swamp. Only about 20,000 of these were adults. Most lived in the district of Pavaitaapu, the only part of Baeba that was also part of Tatevas. (Pavaitaapu also bordered Dreamland and Tata.)

A few others lived in the district of Timâra in the extreme east, which was the only part of Baeba that was also part of Erala. Both of these overlaps were legal according to the Leaper government of Baeba. The Square party did not seek to incorporate Timâra into Tatevas because none of the children's parties were resident there, and so these Tinks were not included in the census.

The Tinks still referred to their nation as the Empire, the Little Country, and Anzan. Their claimed borders enwrapped all of Erala but they stated they had chosen to live compactly.

Excluded territories

The census did not count the indigenous minorities living in the refugee territory of Hōki, such as the Hardwoods, who lived in traditional families headed by adults and mostly shunned participation in wider governments whenever possible. This was legally Moonshine territory, and Moonshine allowed the refugees to self-govern. Moonshine's control was so lax that they had had no reaction when the various groups of children declared independence, though partly this was because those children considered themselves allies of Moonshine whereas some refugee groups, though dependent on Moonshine for their very survival, had brought anti-Moonshine opinions with them from conflicts in the wider world.

The Leapers estimated that there may have been 100,000 uncounted people living in Hōki alone (the same territory the children had originally called Tāmta but now with different borders).

Wealth and income census

The Leapers also had had the kids take a wealth and income survey of all of the citizens not already known to the Leapers, so the Leapers would know how much the citizens would pay the Leapers for the privilege of being able to pay taxes to the Leapers. They understood this information would also help the other parties organize their payment of taxes to each other.

Background

The Leapers used an artificial currency, symbolized Ξ and sometimes referred to as a meal token. It was defined such that the minimum price of a healthy meal was Ξ4 and therefore the minimum possible income for a healthy person, even if they were homeless, was Ξ5,000 per year. This applied as well to farmers, hunters, and those who received their food for free (such as most children), as the Leaper method of reckoning stated that acquiring their food still required them to do at least Ξ4 of work for each meal.

The Leapers excluded this income from the taxable income, saying both that it would be cruel to take away one's access to food, and that in many cases it would require citizens to pay the food itself as the tax, since so many were living cashless lives. The Leapers had been exempting children from the taxes only because they had not been citizens; now, they wanted to mix children and adults into the same tax pool, figuring the children would support this because they would be net recipients.

Instead, the Leapers instituted three separate income taxes, calculated based on how much each party made from Erala's three intertwined economic systems: market economics (capitalism and communism), slavery, and piracy.

Basic rules for taxation

The Leapers assessed tax liability at the party level, not by individuals. Thus a wealthy member of a poor party would pay no taxes, but a poor member of a wealthy party would. The Leapers understood that in an ideal system, these people would be so close to other party members that they would be either paying taxes to the party or living in such a way that their lifestyle was much like that of other party members.

The Leapers stated that parties living close to the Leaper headquarters at Baeba would be taxed at higher rates because it was easier for the Leapers to collect the money. The Leapers hoped that outlying parties would be encouraged to move to Baeba so they could better contribute to their nation.

The Leapers also stated that all of the kids' parties, even those who owned adult Crystal slaves, were too poor to qualify to pay any taxes, and that the Leaper tax calculators in fact determined that the government owed them money, though the slave-owning parties deserved the least of this. The Leaper tax system used a child's age as a multiplier to determine the amount of taxable income, meaning that they were assessed at much lower rates than adults. Since these taxes were assessed at the party level, the Leapers simply used the median ages from the census to determine the multipliers. (The counter stopped increasing at 25, so all adult parties were assessed as aged 25, even if they had more child members than adults.)

The Leapers stated also that in theory, slaves could be taxed, but that they had found no slaves whose living conditions were so desirable that they owed more than they were due. There was also one party, the Soap Bubbles, which was both adult and free, and yet so poor that they too were determined to be exempt from all taxes.

The Cold Men had put a limit on total wealth about 600,000 tokens, but no limit on income. They did not use STW's tokens.

Results of wealth and income census

Zeniths

With an estimated average income of about Ξ100,000 per year, most of it from piracy, the Zeniths were deemed liable for a heavy tax burden. But the Zeniths had earlier refused to pay taxes into the system, and the Leapers were unwilling to risk their lives to collect them. Therefore the Leapers shifted the Zenith's tax debt onto their closer and less violent ally, the Tinks.

Tinks

The Tinks were one of the poorer adult parties, and were also the largest adult party, so a naive Leaper system would have forced the other adult parties to pay a massive subsidy to the Tinks. Their annual per capita income was around Ξ140,000 per year.

But the Leapers refused this, saying that the Tink-Zenith alliance made the Tinks look good while the Zeniths took all the hits in battle, when in reality both parties were equally culpable. Therefore the Leapers assigned the entire Zenith tax burden to the Tinks, demanding that they pay Ξ5.5 million per year into the tax pool. This was actually quite a small sum for such a large party, amounting to only about 71 tokens per person per year; this is because there were so many more Tinks than Zeniths that even the Zenith's huge debt was small to the Tinks.

The Tinks were one of the few groups with a well-defined welfare system, meaning that Tinks with no income could still maintain a standard of living much better than the slaves. This was separate from the Leapers' welfare system which mostly did not apply to the Tinks because the Tinks were based in Baeba rather than Erala.

Lenian slaves in Baeba

The Leaper census estimated there were about 70,000 Lenian slaves working for the Tinks in Baeba Swamp. This was a much lower figure than the Tinks' estimate of 360,000, but the Tinks themselves admitted that they had most likely overestimated their slave population by a vast margin for various political reasons, among which was that the Tinks' land claims extended far outside the territory that they controlled, and therefore they considered the free people living in these territories to be legally slaves even though they were doing no work for the Tinks and some of them even supported the Tinks' slavery programs.

The Leapers were not that interested in an accurate count, knowing that the number of slaves could change every month, and also that while they felt the slaves deserved a large amount of money as compensation for their pain, the Leapers had no way to get money to the Tinks' slaves without it being intercepted by the Tinks.

Leapers

The Leapers' annual income of Ξ1,000,000 per year placed them securely on top of the income hierarchy, and they were second only to the rival Matrix party in average per capita wealth. The Leapers thus would be expected naively to pay a large sum of money into the tax pool. They withheld their tax debt, however, saying that because they were the party of government, they had expenditures that the other groups did not. Originally, the Leapers had planned to pay a token sum, but figured that this would actually be more unpopular then removing themselves from the system entirely. Thus the Leapers paid no taxes.

Earlier, the Leapers had explained the concept of banking to the child diplomats, and forced them to agree with the Leapers' statement that the three richest nations on the planet — Dreamland, Baeba, and Tata — all had well-developed banking systems run at the national level rather than by a political party. By contrast, the only banks in the vast nations to the east had been run by the STW corporation or by political parties. In both cases, the only customers of those banks were members of the parties (STW considered itself a party in some contexts). The Leapers had also forced the children to agree to ask this same question to their constituents, such that the Leapers would challenge them on it when they met the next group of diplomats, but the Leapers realized now that their argument was very weak, as anyone could claim that it was not Baeba that was rich, but only its ruling party, the Leapers.

Both the Leapers and the Matrix relied on trained animals for protection, meaning their cost of living was far higher than their human population size would suggest. But whereas the Matrix consisted entirely of adult male soldiers, the only humans in the Leapers' army were the animal trainers; all combat was intended to be fought by animals. The Leapers gave these animals Leaper party membership although they lacked most basic privileges; the point of this was to allow the Leapers to say that the animals outranked all non-Leaper humans in terms of how much the Leapers would do to take care of them.

Slopes

Despite their violence the Leapers also awarded the Slopes a stipend of about Ξ6.2 million.

Hipsides

The Hipsides had forcibly taken over much of the wealthy territory along Erala's northwest coast, where parties such as XIG had built cities with self-sustaining economies. But the Hipsides did not seek to attain this wealth, much of which was intangible, and so under Hipside control the local economies collapsed, making fishing the main source of livelihood for both the Hipsides and the aboriginal adult inhabitants. With an assessed per capita income of Ξ13,500 but almost no wealth apart from their boats and their weapons and armor, the Leapers considered the Hipsides to be the poorest of the major children's parties, and therefore deserving of a large subsidy, Ξ4.2 million, about Ξ420 per year per person, as their population was just slightly above 10,000.

Cold Men

With an average annual taxable income of about Ξ6,000, the Cold Men were below average even for a children's party. They had stated that they were hardy and did not need a luxurious lifestyle. The Leapers assessed them as moderately wealthy because they had more land per capita than did most of the other children's parties, but their wealth tax on children was a mere fraction of a percent. These things excused the Cold Men from the tax system entirely.

Additionally, the Leapers rewarded the Cold Men with an annual subsidy of Ξ20 million, about Ξ600 per member per year. The Leapers praised the children's good behavior, particularly their willingness to adopt and take care of smaller children, and to take risks in meeting with known hostile groups, including adults. This annual subsidy was the largest per capita subsidy to emerge in the new tax system (though the slave debt owed to the Lenians was slightly higher in total value).

Other information gathered

Territorial overlap

Because Tatevas overlapped heavily with the Leapers' nation of Erala, the Squares understood that the adult armies, such as the Matrix, might see the new nation as a provocation, and that they could find themselves at war with adult armies loyal to Erala, who might choose to focus only on the Squares since the Slopes had announced no plans to rule a wider empire. The Squares believed, nonetheless, that because the Leapers had deprived them of Eralan citizenship, that the two nations of Erala and Tatevas could coexist in the same place, since no citizen of one could legally be a citizen of the other.

Comparison to Dreamland

Against this, Dreamland's Dolphin Rider party claimed a total population of about 1.95 million for Dreamland, almost all of whom were Dolphin Riders. The Dolphin Riders did not track age on the census, but did say that their fertility rate was about 3.23, meaning that they expected their population to grow, but not as fast as that of the Players.

Comparison to Memnumu

Meanwhile, the Players in Memnumu (earlier known as Creamland) had a total enrolled population of about 1.29 million, not including those under Play occupation. The Play median age was 11 years old, lower than even the children's parties, and therefore most of the Play population consisted of children, with only about 145,000 adult males, nearly all of whom were serving in the military, with the only exceptions being those who were disabled. The Play fertility rate was about 6.3, because even during war the men were able to meet with their wives as they were rotated from one campaign to another, and because many Play women were sharing a husband in polygamous marriages due to the lack of men.

Constitutional referendum

Along with the Squares' census, the Slopes had travelled with them to sponsor a constitutional referendum for their new nation enwrapping Tatevas, which they called Simusa-Māsa (SMS). They produced two written constitutions. Their preferred version favored masculine power, lax enforcement of laws, and mostly open borders. The other version devolved most of the power to the feminist Lilypads of the east, stated that SMS would always be an ally of Moonshine, and centralized many government functions. Both constitutions nonetheless upheld the legality of the Slopes' and others' exploitation of the native Crystal population, even though they had earlier offered citizenship to the Crystals, because both constitutions allowed local majorities to overrule certain national laws. The Moonshine-allied proposal allowed the other groups greater power to limit what the Slopes could do to them. The Slopes invited the Crystals to vote in the referendum, figuring that they would almost all vote for the Moonshine version even though Moonshine had so far shown them no sympathy.

Because they had the census data, the Slopes knew the total population size of each party, and did not require that every member of every party come to vote. They stated that whoever voted, their votes would be amplified according to party size, meaning that even if only a few people from each party chose to vote, those votes would still count the same as if everyone had voted. This type of census-based plebiscite voting was called a poll and was in use in many other territories.

Lilypads' views

The Lilypads, knowing that the Slopes considered themselves an outlaw party, figured that the Slopes had called for a referendum in order to find out the other parties' positions on the issues, and in particular how many boys wanted to live under a feminist power structure instead of the rising masculine powers of the western states. They noted that the voters were required to identify themselves not just by party but also by age and by gender.

The Lilypads also considered that the Slopes were planning to lose the election on purpose, just to give them a system to violate, so that they could continue to claim to be outlaws, a claim which gave them power. The Slopes had already talked publicly about holding an election in which the Crystals would outvote them, and then humiliating the Crystals by showing that their votes meant nothing in the face of the Slopes' raw military power. But now the Lilypads felt that the Slopes might be planning a similar demonstration of power to embarrass their allies as well.

Generation gap

The children voted to devolve SMS's power towards the east, weakening the Slopes, largely because the youngest children in the census had voted almost unanimously to empower the eastern Lilypads; indeed they supported the Lilypad-based power structure more than the Lilypads themselves did.

It soon came to light that the Deer Paws, who were mostly under ten years old, had voted for the second plan because they believed that the Drums to their south were abducting them, and that every time one of the young children disappeared they fled for fear that the Drums were cruising the shoreline looking for more.

The Slopes realized that assigning small children the same voting power as adults and adolescents meant that elections could swing based on issues that older voters might not even think of, and that might not even be real. The Cold Men assured the Slopes that there were no adults abducting small children from their territory, but found the subject extremely irritating to bring up, as the older children realized that any child trafficking operation within Tāmta, whether involving the Drums or not, would need the complicity of Moonshine, which was officially their protector and distributed the supplies to keep the refugees safe and nourished.

Cold Men's fears

The Cold Men realized that if other parties believed the abduction claims, they might vote to invade the Cold Men's refugee territory and take away the Cold Men's status as the protectors of the smaller children. The Cold Men were the ones who had rescued the Deer Paws a few years earlier, and made the journey to Tāmta on their own, without any outside help. Now they were worried that their bravery would mean nothing simply because they were not adults and would be deemed incapable of protecting the children they had worked so hard to rescue.

The Cold Men still refused to explain why of the estimated 140,000 children living in the wilderness at the time of the Play invasion, only about 60,000 had successfully made it to Tāmta's refugee colonies to settle. There were two main reasons for this. First, they were so traumatized by the experience that many threw fits when asked to describe what had happened to them. Also, they knew that they would be blamed for their own abductions and failures, because to some outside powers it was better to submit to the hostile Play army than to risk lives trying to reach freedom. This was despite that it was widely known that the Players were actually killing children and not just taking control of them. The Cold Men had pointed out that nearly half of the children who had completed the journey were Deer Paws, mostly under ten years old, and who had been just a small portion of the known child population in the wilderness. That is, about 63% of the Deer Paws had survived the journey whereas only about 36% of the Cold Men had. These figures supported the Cold kids' claims that they had sacrificed their own young lives by preferentially boarding the smallest children onto the boats headed northwards, but knew that no matter what they claimed they would always be blamed for starting the migration at all since any deaths of any children (their own or the Deer Paws) would be blamed on the Cold kids who had refused to submit to Play rule.

Many people believed that the Players could not possibly be so cruel and blamed the Cold Men for fleeing the safety of Play rule for the freedom of independent life. Yet other adults such as the Hardwoods believed the claims that the Play army was massacring tens of thousands of children, and blamed the Cold Men for their apparent indifference to this by their refusal to head back to the south and take on the adult soldiers in combat now that the Cold Men were almost as tall as adults. Thus the Cold Men preferred to avoid the subject altogether and considered themselves pioneers of a new nation untethered to their past.

For the most part, other parties respected this, but now that a new claim of frailty had spread, the Cold Men worried that they would be blamed for the Deer Paws being abducted and that they would again be blamed for bringing the younger kids to Tāmta in the first place rather than submitting to the Players. Further, the Deer Paws had voted for a proposal that brought the Lilypads closer to Moonshine control, because the Deer Paws believed Moonshine would protect them, but the wiser Cold and Slope kids understood from looking at a map that the only plausible route for abduction would be by a river that flowed through solidly Moonshine-held territory (not the chaotic refugee colony) and therefore that it was Moonshine, not the Drums, who must then be abducting the children.

Communication gap

Thus, a communication gap had appeared between the Slopes and the Deer Paws, even though they both referred to themselves as children's parties because the Slopes were teenagers and also had many younger adopted children. The Cold Men also realized this, and now the Slopes and Cold Men realized they might be competing with each other and with outside powers including adults for the votes of the young Deer Paw children.

The Slopes figured that it was natural for children under 10 to support safe streets and to prioritize issues that adolescents would scarcely think of. The new referendum did not apply to Tatevas, which was still a legally independent nation, though the Squares had been moving towards ceding control to the Slopes as the Leapers had suggested. They felt that a compromise could be worked out in which the Slopes would have greater control in those areas of the government dominated by Tatevas, which might be involved in the military, while juxtaposing the Lilypads with adults and with very young children so that the Lilypads could become more like a traditional law-and-order society.

Plans for multiparty democracy

The Leapers then planned to set up a multiparty democracy in their new empire, with all of the parties mixed together, rather than having the parties vote internally and then send representatives to Parliament. The Leapers said that this new government would exist side-by-side with their existing governments and would pertain only to the laws of Erala.

The Leapers had tried to push this idea earlier, but found that the four major parties were unwilling to vote for anyone outside their party, and that the Zeniths had little interest in voting at all. The Zeniths had even invaded the Leapers home territory in Baeba just a year earlier, yet the Leapers allowed them to remain a legal party in Erala (but not Baeba), hoping to get the Zeniths to support their experiment in democracy.

The Leapers had once believed that it would make sense to further subdivide the eight Crystal states (the Nest) into districts and perhaps to divide Tāmta as well. (The Crystals' definition of the Nest had typically only included the three states where Crystals were clear majorities, however.) But they did not this.

Size of parliament

The Leapers assigned seats to each party on a basis of one representative for every thousand citizens of that party in each state, rounding down the resulting fractional numbers. The Leapers bundled some of the smallest parties' votes into a single state so that they could have a single representative rather than scoring 0 across several states. They did not do this favor for large parties, however; thus the 20000 Slopes with about 14000 members in Twadu and another 3500 in the Square got 17 seats, because although they had a few thousand more members, no other single state had more than 1000 Slopes in it. The highly spread Hipsides also lost seats from this policy, getting only 8 seats across five states despite having just over 10000 members.

The Tinks were entirely excluded. Children of parties which did not allow young children to vote were also excluded; the Leapers encouraged the other children's parties to enroll these people while they were still young. This and the subtractions due to parties spreading out led to a total parliament size of 185, whereas a number around 220 would have been expected from the total population size.

Several parties were unhappy with the apportionment process. The Crystals were represented in seven states, and were a minority in all seven, leading them to wonder if their role in the democracy was to choose which other party to ally with. This was due to their spread-out lifestyle, as compared to parties such as the Slopes, Squares, and Cold Men, who preferred to collect their population in a single compact area and spread out only minimally. Throughout history, the Crystals had at times belonged to nations in which their population was treated as a whole, and therefore they were able to concentrate their voting power around their capital (or most powerful state) at the expense of losing power in the outlying areas where they were already weak.

The Hipsides, by contrast, said that they supported the new system, as it put them in their natural place at the bottom of the power structure.

Unitary government

The Leapers' new system existed only at the federal level; they promised they would never usurp the parties' rights to run their local territories how they wished. Thus Erala could be called a federation; however, it was a federation of parties, not of states; the states were just lines on a map where the parties agreed to cooperate to focus the power of the federal government close to home. The Leapers also reserved powers at the federal level that the member states could not override, either through Parliament or through their parties. For example, only the Leapers could eject a party from Erala.

Erala had no army, and therefore no obligation to bail out a member state who was attacked. The only interparty police force was the Leaper police force, and they were very weak; their stated goal was to keep the nation of Erala together rather than to protect its citizens. The citizens were expected to have their own police forces at the party level; not all of them did.

The whole parliament voted at once on each bill, with a few exceptions. This meant that the parties which constituted the majority in each state (of those states that had majorities) could not simply outvote the minorities on every single bill and turn their states into tyrannies; the Leapers expected any attempts to do this would be killed off by representatives from the other states. It also meant that the Slopes, who had fallen one vote short of a majority in the census, would not have been significantly better placed if they had gotten that vote.

But some bills in Erala's parliament could have drastic effects locally. The sole exception to the policy of having the entire Parliament vote on each bill were bills concerning interaction between the Leaper administrators and the citizens of a single state. This was the only type of bill in which the Slopes would benefit from getting the support of non-party members in their state.

Voting margins

The bills were not yes-no votes, but rather a choice between several versions of the same proposal, each authored by the Leapers with the intention of catering to the preferably non-partisan alliances within each state that they hoped would form. Thus the Leapers were free to discriminate against parties who had lost their favor by, for example, giving the Slopes a choice between four versions of the same bill which all disadvantaged the Slopes and benefited some minority party. However the Leapers promised they would not do this, claiming they had proven their commitment to democracy in their other nation (Baeba), and that since the Leapers had no army in Erala they knew that any attempt to abuse their power could result in armed secession in which even those parties the Leapers had tried to favor might side with the party that the Leapers had slighted.

Voting at-large

The voting was done at-large, but the Leapers promised they would pay party representatives to draw maps so they could do the next year's elections using a district system like that of Baeba. Under this system, each state would have one district for each thousand people, and each party's districts would fill the map of that state. The Leapers insisted on this one-year delay in part to give representatives time to draw maps, but mostly because they believed their district system was so confusing, particularly to people accustomed to Play-influenced districting systems, that people would misunderstand it and waste time campaigning against their own allies as was the custom in Play territory and many other nations.

The Play word translated "district" here is vapitās, because each party had its districts on a map and they had meaning only for that party. This was distinct from the mitāsiūu found in Play-influenced nations; these were subdivisions of states in which each party (or faction) would compete to elect a representative. Despite the different words, the Leapers worried that people would confuse the two concepts because both systems assigned their lowest-order districts a single representative in parliament, and many nations using mitāsiūu were single-party.

The key difference, as the Leapers explained, was the intent of campaigns.

Play system

In the Play system, multiple candidates would stand for the same seat in a district, each trying to outscore the others and win the right to the seat, even if by a tiny margin. This person would thus have full power in that district. In a multi-party system, a party that wins by a narrow margin nationwide will have full control of the parliament. An election thus involves parties competing to place candidates in seats.

The Play nation, Memnumu, had used a single-party system for decades, but had begun as a multiparty democracy and the multiparty system was also used in other nations. In such a nation, it was common for people to switch parties every few years, sometimes even more often, and to create new parties. Since party membership usually gave a citizen some input in their party's nomination process, there was a strong incentive for people to join the winning party, and sometimes the winning party declared its enrollment process closed to prevent ideological enemies from joining and outvoting the original members.

This is the system the Cold Men inherited and explained why they were able to take a name implying they were adults when they had almost no members over the age of 13.

Leaper system

In the Leaper system, each party has the right to a certain number of seats in Parliament determined by the most recent census. It does not guarantee that those seats will be filled by members of that party; it is left up to each party to put forth competent candidates for each of those seats rather than allow a rival party to win more support from the party members than the party's own candidate has.

The districts are shared between parties, and thus no elected representative has full control of any district; they share their territory with the representatives elected by the other parties. But these candidates are officially nonpartisan. So an election involves candidates competing for parties' endorsements, and the intent of a person's campaign depends on their role. If they are running in their own party's district, they are retainers who want hold their own party's voters, which they would hope to be easy. The others are reachers who want to win over enough of a rival party's voters to win that party's seat in that district.

It was legal for a party to abstain from nominating a candidate even in their own district, the understanding being that there were often more parties than points of view, and a weak party might rather ally with a strong party that is ideologically similar than split the vote and potentially let a party of moderate strength take the seat.

The Leapers gave an example of how a strong party might overperform by peeling away voters from a weak party, sometimes more than one, in the simultaneous elections. Suppose the Fish party has the support of 70% of Fish, while the other Fish are divided in support between three ideologically similar parties called the Apples, Oranges, and Coconuts, each with the support of 10% of Fish. The Fish candidate would thus win their home election easily and could afford to nominate a weak candidate and still win. Then they would put forth stronger candidates to run in the simultaneous elections of the three fruit parties. Because the three fruit parties are ideologically similar, their candidates are likely to interfere with each other, and thus for example the Apple candidate might win a mere 30% of their own voters, with 20% going to the Oranges and 15% to the Coconuts. A very strong Fish candidate, being ideologically unique, could take the remaining 35% of the votes, and therefore the Fish would win both their own seat and the Apples'. If the Fish campaigns were strong enough they might win all four seats with the same strategy. The Leapers explained that situations like these would be rare, and that their system was meant to specifically prevent lopsided takeovers as were common in Play-like systems, but that when they were well earned, they would happen. They also encouraged weak parties to ally with stronger parties to prevent interference; they explained that had the three fruit parties united around a single candidate, even in their weakness they might have won 65% of the vote, almost as much as the Fish won of their own voters.

(For logistical reasons, systems such as ranked-choice voting and runoff elections were effectively confined to intra-party nominations, as there was no feasible way to run two elections in short succession, and the bloc voting common among parties could lead to difficulties with ranked-choice voting.)

Enrollment of children

The Leapers awarded citizenship to the children in the children's parties, saying that they had been de facto citizens all along because they obeyed the laws better than most adults did, and were poor enough that the Leapers felt they deserved welfare without paying taxes.

Dual citizenship

The Clovers were awarded 32 seats for their state of Pavaitaapu, with no seats for any minority parties. The Clovers also had seats in Baeba's parliament; the two nations of Erala and Baeba overlapped in this region and the Leapers considered the Clovers to be citizens of both nations. But this caused controversy, because the Leapers had denied the Tink party representation in Erala's parliament even though they also lived in an area where Baeba and Erala overlapped and the Leapers considered them citizens of both nations.

The Crystals were also represented in both nations' parliaments, as were a few other parties, but these were not cases of dual citizenship because the Leapers counted only those members of each party that lived in each of the two nations in apportioning the seats. That is, these were simply transnational parties. Thus the Clovers' representation was unique and some other parties, even allies of the Clovers, felt that it was because the Leapers knew how to exploit the votes of small children to their advantage, and that by giving the Clovers a power no other group had, the Clovers would become more pro-Leaper and therefore this extra power would simply return back to the Leapers who had granted it.

Election procedure

The Leapers compromised between the traditional feminist opposition to single executive figures (preferring a circular power structure) and the established tradition of concentrating power in the hands of as few people as possible.

These power-sharing agreements meant that an executive's offices were elected separately, so only an extremely popular candidate would win all of them, and in most cases there would be one governor from each party in each state. This was different from the vapitāsia system however because these governors had power over all the citizens.

For example, if an executive office such as governor had twelve specific duties, each candidate would be expected to run for all twelve of them, but perhaps win only six while the other six would go to other candidates. Therefore a single head of state could exist, but only if that candidate was extremely popular outside their party. Also, the Leapers allowed candidates seeking office to disclaim interest in certain duties, but discouraged this, since they did not allow more than one candidate per party to seek the same office. Thus a party could not nominate one candidate for each of the twelve offices and expect to win based on the idea of dedication to a single task.

Each party was allowed to decide the method of delivery of its votes, and even to decide to essentially ignore the new system and deliver a bloc vote for the entire party if they chose.

Slopes' vote system

The Slopes voted at the castle level, meaning for example that if 200 people lived in a castle, they would all vote the same and their votes would be counted as 200. The Slope party constitution stated that they could count the votes of their slaves towards this total, but the Leapers had chosen not to allow this. This meant that the Slopes had the power to ruin the democracy by withholding the votes of the Crystals they held as slaves, saying that only the Slopes could know the true intentions of those voters. The Leapers could simply survey the free Crystals and amplify their votes to match the total Crystal population, but the Slopes claimed that the free Crystals and the enslaved Crystals had different interests and would not vote alike. The Slopes thus asked the Leapers for a concession if they wanted to hear the true votes of the Crystals. The Leapers declined to offer any concessions and also stated that they would simply ignore the slave population and only count free Crystals as being eligible to vote.

Erala party structure

Erala's government was very different from the Leapers' government in Baeba, where citizens could only vote for their own party, and representation was determined by the Leapers' judgment of their merit.

Instead in Erala representation was determined through the census. The census counts included children of all ages, even when the party in question did not accept children as party members (e.g. the Soap Bubbles). This was handled in various ways. In Baeba, there was no point in running a cross-party campaign. However in Erala, the Leapers tried to encourage parties to nominate candidates for office that would draw in votes from other parties, saying that all of the elections would be officially nonpartisan and that each election would hinge on the candidates' positions on a small number of issues to be drawn up at election time. There would be one election per year.

Representation

The Leapers said the democracy would be based simultaneously on population size and on geography, meaning that the children would be a majority in most districts, and that they would be voting on issues rather than for parties, as though the nation were a very large parliament. This was a novel concept, unlike the Leapers' own democracy in Baeba Swamp in many ways. It also differed from the inherited Cold-style democracies in many ways.

In Baeba, a district (Play vapitās) was drawn by a party, and the party's citizens appointed their representative for that district. That party's number of seats was pre-determined and therefore their representatives campaigned only internally, against other party members seeking to be representatives, rather than campaigning against other parties. The Leapers believed this system worked well but that their new system would also work well because Baeba and Erala had different needs. The Leapers proposed the creation of districts called mitāsiūu that would be drawn and defined by the Leaper administrators, in which the parties would compete for control. These were essentially miniature nations with their own parliaments.

The children's parties of the east requested that their existing vote-counting rules from their own democracies be carried over, such as the right of soldiers to transfer their votes to a trusted family member or friend, so that if they were to die in battle, the total voting population would remain the same.

Colors

To discourage citizens from voting along party lines, the Leapers introduced colors (Play pimup) for each candidate to ally with, which were meant to be different for each election and for each issue. For example, the Leapers would describe a problem in society and offer several possible solutions, each with a different color. Yes-no votes were forbidden; all bills sent through parliaments were required to pass.

Parties were limited to one candidate per office, but candidates could share colors. Indeed, the Leapers hoped to see victories in which several candidates would share duties but all would be the same color. The intent was that voters were choosing both a policy and a person, where the latter might be selected for competence or perceived honesty.

Color associations

The Leapers mixed color associations from the constituent parties. For example Moonshine was associated with blue because of its cold weather, and this blue was in turn expected to be associated with feminism, even though most cultures in Erala considered pink and magenta to be the most feminine colors. But yellow was associated with pacifism, in line with the Players and against Moonshine's choice of yellow to represent the sun and masculinity. Green was assigned to positions expected to favor the Lilypads and children's interests overall. This corresponded to no cultural association and was simply derived from the Lilypads' party name. The Leapers still insisted that the colors were not intended to be parties in disguise, and pointed out that there was more than one children's party.

The Leapers also drew a color spectrum from the blue Moonshines in the east, through the green children's nations westward into sandy yellow highlands and then into the orange empire of Dreamland in the far west. Red was reserved for other things, but the Leapers also accepted that purple or black might represent politics seen as favorable towards Xema, the only nation colder than Moonshine, and which was also further east.

The Leapers assigned the color YELLOW to a position they called liberalism, finding a middle point between the two color associations above, and a cultural perception that people with blond hair tended to be more generous with their time and money than those with darker colors.

Reactions

The children disliked the new system, even though it seemed clearly built to favor them. They were accustomed to one-party states and did not accept the idea that five political parties within a state could come together and find a common interest for that state's residents when the parties' true loyalties were to each party's members living in the other states.

Cooperation of parties

Erala's government was complicated by the fact that many residents were citizens of more than one nation. For example, the Slopes were part of the Lilypad umbrella party because they were citizens of Tatevas, but they also had their own nation, Simusa-Māsa (SMS), in which the Lilypad organization had not established itself and thus did not exist; the Slopes in SMS recognized the Lilypads as a foreign ally restricted to its own territory, that being the territory outside Slope control. Yet the Lilypads had no similar exclusionary nation, so they accepted the Slopes as citizens, and indeed almost all Slope territory was in that region where Tatevas and SMS overlapped. This meant that individual Slopes were simultaneously Lilypads and non-Lilypads. Only the name tatea covered the wider definition of the Lilypads.

Split in Tāmta

The only all-minority state was Tāmta, where the Cold Men were able to elect just 31 of the 72 representatives of their state in Erala's parliament. Even so, they had won the trust of the very young Deer Walker orphans by rescuing them from the wilderness when they had been even younger. The Leapers considered the Deer Walkers full citizens with ordinary voting rights, and since they were almost as numerous as the Cold Men, the Deer Walkers were allowed to appoint 25 of Erala's 72 representatives. The Cold Men hoped that the orphans would vote nearly in lockstep with the Cold Men and thus that the Cold Men had an effective 56-seat majority in their Parliament. The Cold Men said that this was the way the Leaper system had been intended to work: by doing good deeds for others, the Cold Men had won the support of citizens outside their party and therefore would be comfortably over-represented in their parliament despite being a minority in their own territory.

Still, the Cold Men understood that they had no guarantee of this cooperation. They already knew from the earlier census that the Deer Walkers disagreed with the Cold Men on the issue of welfare, with the Deer Walkers supporting it and the Cold Men mostly opposed. They knew that this would be an issue in the first parliamentary elections, and therefore that the Deer Walkers might be at odds with them after all.

The Deer Walkers' median age was just 8 years old (they had aged slightly in the past few months since the census), which the Cold Men felt was far too young to participate in democracy. Thus, though they were citizens, the Deer Walkers could not actually vote in the parliament of their own nation, Tatevas, whose territory was nearly coterminous with Erala. (The Cold Men had created yet another nation, Šanataŋūs, to allow them to express their instinct to vote, but this nation was entirely controlled by the Cold Men.) Yet the Cold Men knew that to an eight-year-old, even the Cold Men who were in their early teens might seem intimidating and hardly different than an adult. Thus the Cold Men being against welfare might seem like poor parenting skills to the Deer Walkers, despite the Cold Men having saved their lives.

The Cold Men were frustrated by the Leapers' decision to weight the votes of the young children equally, as though the adults in the Leaper party saw no difference between young children and adolescents. They believed that the Leapers had made this decision in bad faith, because they had earned a reputation for using young children as pawns in politics, filling their empty heads with false promises. Now the Cold Men worried that the Leapers would hire candidates to run in Tāmta on a platform catered to the Deer Walkers' immediate interests, for example granting them proper independence, or even making unrealistic promises such as emptying the national treasury to buy candy and toys for all of the young children.

The Cold Men knew they could solve this problem by drafting the orphans into the Cold party and yet restricting voting rights to those above a certain age, perhaps 13, hoping that the Leapers would award the expanded Cold Men all 56 votes but allow them to vote only through their older members. But they had earlier decided in an unrelated situation that such a drastic decision was unwise as the Deer Walkers would be nearly half of the Cold party membership and the founding Cold Men had no means by which to expel them later if they changed their minds.

Nonetheless the Cold Men understood that their predicament was a strength of the Leapers' democracy, not a weakness: if the Cold Men wanted the extra representation in parliament that the Walkers could give them, they would need to earn it, rather than simply telling the Walkers what to do.

Lastly, the Cold Men expected that the Scorpions with their 7 seats would mostly vote in tandem with them. The remaining 9 seats were assigned to adult residents of Tāmta, such as the Hardwoods, whose parties were not recognized by the Leapers. The Leapers left them to handle their own voting procedures, even knowing that it was likely that just a small part of this population would speak for the rest and therefore that it would not be democratic.

First campaign

The Leapers announced the first election would turn on two issues: whether to establish a welfare system in Erala, meaning that all citizens would have a minimum wealth and a minimum income; and where the capital of the new nation should be.

Background information

The Leapers had at first expected the children's parties to favor strong welfare policies, creating the nurturing parental figures they had been deprived of. The Leapers were against this, and figured they would be siding with the adults (who were supportive of Leaper economics even if anti-Leaper politically) against the children. The Leapers would fund the welfare from their personal wealth. The Leapers made it clear that they were deliberately making an offer of a policy that would make life more difficult for the Leapers, but that these welfare funds would come ultimately from higher taxes, and therefore would inconvenience tax-paying parties like the Matrix and the Tinks much more than they would the Leapers. Since the Tinks had no votes, this meant that the welfare programs actually transferred wealth from the Tinks in Baeba through the Leapers to the parties in Erala, and that they would increase the total wealth of Erala overall. The Leapers figured that their idea would enjoy wide approval.

However the Leapers were surprised to learn during the census results that the children's parties mostly opposed welfare benefits, largely continuing to believe that they were hardier than adults and did not need adults' help. But the youngest of the children did support welfare benefits, so the Leapers figured that the explanation was that the older children did not see themselves in a parentlike role for the younger ones, whereas true adults did.

Questions and party positions

Welfare

Because the first issue was only a yes/no question, there were only two positions. The first position was to accept the Leapers' offer to expand and reform the nation's welfare system, to be funded mostly by taxes but with a significant positive return (the people would get more than they paid) because some of the money was from outside Erala. The opposing position was to shut off welfare altogether. The Leapers did not allow a middle position to keep the existing welfare system because it was haphazard and had led to welfare distributors being robbed as they tried to circulate goods while those who needed it most were far out of reach of the distribution networks.

The Leapers were surprised and somewhat disconcerted at realizing that the welfare proposal was likely to fail, because the children in their stubbornness had been living without welfare when they were even younger and saw no reason to introduce it when the nation's economy was doing well. Only the youngest children and a few adults supported welfare; the Leapers felt that the adults might be those who had been extorting goods and money from the distributors.

Welfare issues

The Cold children and most other children's parties still opposed welfare, saying they had been living without subsidies in the wilderness even when they were younger and that nobody needed such things. The Leapers made it clear to the children that they were effectively immune from taxation and would always be net receivers of this money, but that they needed to earn it through good behavior, and therefore that it could be revoked. But the Leapers did not afford themselves the specific authority to demand that the Cold kids use the money for welfare; the Leapers could only choose to deliver or not to deliver the stipends.

These were considered "RIE/Lab" issues. (This is a near-anagram of "liberal" just by chance.) There were children who did support welfare, though. A name for these children was the GAP; this represents two Play words, and a Play epithet žamambaa as well (hence ZMB). The Leapers noted that the GAP's wanted physical protection too and not just welfare money; they were the stereotypical children who carried knives with them at all times in case they were pounced on by a predator. They had created warning systems for each other too to alert each other to danger. The Leapers wondered if this close cooperation and constant fear explained why internal crime among the children's parties was so low. The "lightning" children, the anti-GAP's, still said that they did not need these things because they had already lived through the worst dangers without them.

The Leapers made clear that they actually opposed welfare themselves and were giving it to the children because the Leapers felt those children were the few who really needed it, and that the children were not obligated to become net payors when they grew up because there would ideally be no new group of even younger children who would depend on it. The Cold children still lined up on anti-welfare platform even after the Leapers made it clear to them that they would never pay into the system and that much of the money would come from Baeba's Tink party and therefore even their rival parties in Erala could be net beneficiaries.

The Leapers soon found the Cold children's uncooperativeness worse than the younger children's desire for welfare money and branded the Cold children runaways (using a Leaper word, but also baptukua in Play). They no longer referred to them as Cold Men or with adult terms in general. The Cold Men tentatively accepted the name "Drum" for themselves, after the Drum party, which the Deer Walkers had accused of kidnapping them (but which the Cold Men did not accept because Moonshine was in the way).

Proposal to move the capital

The Leapers wanted the gov't capital to be in HTP (Šanataŋūs) but the Cold Men refused to allow so many outsiders into their capital, particularly as this was the home of the very young Deer Walker orphans. The Leapers wanted this because they wanted the children's parties to send representatives and for them not to have to travel over unsafe adult territories. This is why they did not simply propose building the Parliament in the existing capital of Erala.

4197 election

As per the Leaper system, each party's candidates were running based on their views on the two issues of the referendum, and the winning candidates would each serve a year in Parliament where they would be free to vote untethered from the will of the voters who had elected them.

Tāmta

The Cold Men disliked the Leaper election system, and most other Lilypads did as well. They had come to an internal agreement to reject welfare and to retain the capital in the west, meaning that all intra-Lilypad contests would be self-defeating. The Lilypads agreed not to run candidates in each other's districts, effectively guaranteeing them all victories.

This left only the 25 Deer Walker districts and the 9 unaffiliated adult districts (which they often still called Hardwoods), which the Cold Men planned to compete in. The Cold Men had already warned the Hardwoods that there would be harsh consequences if they dared run a candidate in any district not their own, and the Deer Walkers had earlier voluntarily agreed to abstain, figuring they stood no chance.

Cold Men explain

The Walkers nominated 25 retainer candidates on a pro-welfare platform, most of whom wanted to move the capital to HTP; thus they were effectively pro-Leaper candidates, and the Leapers assigned them the color yellow. The Cold Men challenged these children with 25 reacher candidates, but rather than sticking with the anti-welfare platform, they chose a pro-welfare platform almost identical to the Walker retainers, and decided to appeal to the Walkers based on their expertise rather than their ideology. The Cold Men believed that they could thus win many of the Walkers' seats in Parliament and let the Walker children tend to their own lives.

Thus, rather than talk about ideology, the Cold Men reachers spent their entire campaign warning the young Deer Walker children that the Leapers would never take them seriously in Parliament, and what they really had was a choice between teenagers who were agreeing to compromise on ideology and adults who wanted to use them to amplify their own votes. Some Clovers had visited the Cold Men recently, and had told them about Baeba's parliament where the Leaper administrators sat next to the Clovers and would send nonverbal warnings during Parliament anytime a Clover representative gave a vote that was out of step with what the Leapers demanded. Thus the independence was not real.

Scorpions run in the north

For the nine Hardwood seats, however, the Cold Men nominated very weak candidates, and allowed the Scorpions to dominate the campaigns, hoping that the Scorpions would also be overrepresented as a result and draw closer to the Cold Men as a gesture of gratitude.

If the Cold-Scorpion strategy worked, the two parties would win all of Tāmta's 72 seats, giving them 39% of the voting power in the national 185-seat parliament.

Zeniths

The Zeniths were at war (see higher on the page).

Election results

To their surprise, the Cold Men's 25 reacher candidates won enough Deer Walker votes in all 25 districts to give them complete control, and the Cold Men told the younger children that they had made the right decision, since they would be allowed to stay at home instead of moving to Baeba. (The Cold Men were hoping that their vote to keep the capital in Baeba would also succeed.)

The Scorpions won all 7 of their seats and an additional 7 of the 9 seats assigned to the people they were calling Hardwoods. When the Hardwoods saw the results, their two winning candidates both abdicated, saying that they did not want to sit in a Parliament where they would be the only two adults surrounded by 70 children, particularly as they had heard that the Cold Men were planning on abdicating their own seats in favor of younger children simply to get the older, more competent candidates to stay home in Tāmta which they considered more important than Erala. (The Leapers later decided not to allow this.)

Leaper resolutions

Resolutions

The Leapers decided to go ahead with their welfare program, saying that they would do it extralegally since the money was mostly coming from outside Erala. They would do their best to ensure that the anti-welfare children would not refuse the money and also to make sure that it would get to any pro-welfare people living within anti-welfare territories.

The Cold children wanted the capital in the west, but the Leapers said that they needed to obey Leaper laws if they wanted any money coming from the Leaper government. As a compromise, the Leapers put it in rural Cold territory, saying that if the children were unsafe even here it was their own fault.

The children's representatives asked the Leapers what the point of a democracy was if the children were going to win every election and then be overruled by the Leapers anyway. Because these representatives were in place for the entire year, the Cold Men knew that they might lose their way on future bills as well.

Because the children paid no taxes but received welfare benefits, the Lilypad children realized that the Leapers could treat them unfairly in many ways and get away with it.

Other issues

The Cold Men had been expecting to hear a resolution about their supposed failure to protect the Deer Walker children from kidnappers in their colony, but eventually realized that the Leapers and other adults cared not a whit what happened to the children in the east, and so had decided to leave the Cold Men alone.

Arrest of Cold deputies

After the Cold-Scorpion alliance won all 72 of the available seats in Tāmta, most of the winning candidates opted to stay home and send deputies (Play žisuma) in their place. This is because they felt the winning candidates had such rare talent that they could best put it to use in running Tāmta's local government, whereas the deputies, who were younger and less experienced, were better suited for the federal government where they would have less power.

These younger deputies were mostly 13 and 14 years old, meaning that they were older than the original Cold Men had been at the founding of their party, and thus old enough to competently serve in Parliament, but lacking in experience. The Cold Men believed that the Leapers would not know that they had replaced their representatives, but when the Leapers arrived to take the children to Parliament, they recognized immediately that the children awaiting transportation could not possibly have been the ones who had won the elections in Tāmta. This is because the Leapers had in fact collected information on the names and ages of the candidates for Parliament, which the Cold Men had forgotten about.

The Leapers announced that the punishment would be one year in prison for the younger children in Baeba (the duration of their term), and the winning candidates would be required to show themselves immediately or else forfeit their seats in Parliament. Thus the younger children were tasked with finding the older ones, and the Leapers would not let them out of sight for fear they would attempt to escape back into safety in Tāmta. The Leapers stated that the older children actually deserved a greater punishment than the younger ones, but that their duty to serve as representatives was more important than assigning a just punishment. They also affirmed that the younger children were old enough to have understood that they were committing a crime, and therefore deserved a year in prison, and could not claim to have simply misunderstood the laws. But in fact, both groups of children claimed that what they had done was legal because the Leapers had never expressly prohibited substitution of deputies for winning candidates; they knew the Leapers would be disappointed, but said that they would never have done this if they'd known it was illegal. The children suspected the Leapers had even done it themselves at some point but could not prove this.

The young children decided to cooperate with the Leapers, feeling that the well-being of their nation was more important than what happened to them in the Leaper prison. They therefore located the genuine winning candidates quickly and agreed that all of them should continue on to Baeba. As a reward for their cooperation, the Leapers decided that the younger children could serve their sentences as cupbearers in Parliament, rather than being confined to an unproductive life in prison, as Baeba did not have children's prisons and therefore they would need to be closely guarded for their own safety in any prison.

Intimidation in Parliament

In the officially nonpartisan parliament of Erala, the Slopes were allowed to elect only 14 of the 28 representatives for their state, Twadu, since their state was more diverse than most others. These elections were officially nonpartisan because the appointees were meant to represent the interests of each state rather than of the parties spread across those states, and the Leapers took efforts to base the annual elections on issues that might split parties and form cross-party alliances. Nionetheless the Leapers knew that the Slopes would be stubbornly loyal to their party and might force members to pledge to vote together in the elections even if they disagreed with the party's position on an issue.

The Crystals had three seats in Twadu, enough to give the Slopes a majority, although as above, this majority was politically meaningful only on those bills which dealt with interactions between the Leapers and the state of Twadu.

The Slopes announced that if they were to lose any votes in Parliament due to the Crystals who shared their state (but had only three seats) refusing to vote in lockstep with the Slopes, they would assault the Crystal diplomats who deviated, including sexually, and reminded them that this was legal and that even the Leapers had earlier guaranteed that they would not intervene in the Slopes' physical abuse of the Crystal slaves or even the free Crystals.

The Slopes' behavior worried the Leapers, as they seemed very different from the Cold Men and other parties in the east. Indeed it seemed that the behavior of the adolescents' parties got worse on an east-west axis, with the eastern groups being too kind for their own good and the worst behaving groups being those closest to the Leapers in Baeba. Some Leapers believed that this was explained at least partially by more aggressive boys in the eastern groups moving west, leaving the shy, submissive types behind, and that their violent tendencies were aggravated by the fact that the Slopes had a male surplus already, but the Slopes seemed to have been violent from their very earliest days.

Rehabilitation of ZMB

Some months after the election, the Cold Men decided it would be politically favorable for them to create a faction that would adopt most of the Deer Walker ideology, to participate in Erala only, while remaining doctrinaire Cold Men in Tāmta. Essentially they were playing politics for pure political gain and did not even believe in their own adopted ideology. Yet they conceded that perhaps their own ideology did have some faults, and that they had opposed welfare out of pride, trying to prove they were tougher and more hardy than adults, when they could have accepted the Leapers' gifts humbly as the younger Deer Walkers did.

The Cold Men took a survey and created a clearer picture of what the Deer Walkers believed in aside from their known position on welfare. They called this new ideology ZMB (žamambaa) and said that the Deer Walkers had asked for welfare because they needed it, not because they wanted it.

ZMB ideology takes shape

ZMB had many traits of the Play and Cold ideologies, but also had organic beliefs that the Cold Men figured the children must have come up with on their own. It was similar in some ways to the Spines' ideology but without the violent masculine desires.

ZMB prioritized things that to even the adolescents in the Cold party seemed unbecoming of a political ideology, and the Cold Men began to say that ZMB was something only a young child could truly believe in, and that they would grow out of it by the time they reached the age of thirteen if not sooner. The Cold Men's earlier joke that one could appeal to the Deer Walker children by promising them candy and toys came true, as this was one of the Walkers' strongest and as yet unmet demands. The Cold Men affirmed that they would follow through on this, despite knowing it would weaken the economy, and promised that they would purchase more candy and toys to deliver to the Deer Walker children.

Some ideas resembled Cold ideals, but with a much simpler world-view. The ZMB's stated, for example, that they were against violence, as if unable to grasp the concept of self-defense, or perhaps believing that all violence could be simply wished away.

One of the few areas where the ZMB's disagreed amongst each other was in their attitudes towards school; this was because most of them had never been to school, having been born during a war and orphaned (or in many cases, simply abandoned by their parents) when they were very young.

Creation of foil ideology

The Cold Men also decided it would be politically favorable to create another ideology which opposed all of the things that the Cold Men and ZMB agreed on, so that they could present this ideology as a common enemy of the Cold-ZMB coalition and base their 4198 as much as possible on opposition to it (though they knew that the Leapers would still be choosing the questions to vote on). This ideology came to be called RIE although the Cold Men did not have a convenient Play name on hand because the ideology did not actually exist and they felt that they would need to tie it to some historical movement first.

They said that the RIE people also supported welfare, but that this was not a point of agreement with ZMB, because where ZMB supported welfare because they needed it, the enemy ideology supported welfare because they wanted it.

The Cold Men needed a party to assign the RIE ideology to rather than leaving it free-floating. A popular target was the Dreamers, but the Cold Men felt it might be more frightening if they placed it closer to home. They considered assigning it to the largely unknown parties now under Hipside rule, saying that they could claim the Hipsides were better than this but had been influenced by it. This was the concept of a "nobodyland".

The Play word for the broader ideology to which RIE/Lab belonged was žitua, which can simply be translated "liberal", but it was also a common word for being naked. Thus their decoy ideology was tipi žitua, where tipiba was a Play word for a type of sharp spike trap fastened around a person's neck, which would be much more painful if the person were naked.

Plumes

Some Cold Men remembered learning about the Plume ideology which had been dominant in areas near their current homeland a few hundred years earlier (mostly to the west however). They hoped that if they could at least tie their decoy ideology to a real one the young children in the Deer Walker/ZMB party might believe that the enemy was real.

Warm Men

The Cold Men also proposed attributing the RIE/Lab ideology to "the Warm Men", an epithet that their parents had briefly used for the Players. At this time, many of the younger children had believed that the Warm Men were biologically unable to survive in cold weather. They now understood that this was not true, but figured younger children might be gullible. By confining their enemy to a climate rather than a geographic place or even a party, the Cold Men figured that they could teach the younger children to worry about the growth of their enemies but also explain why they never saw these enemies up close. However, even this plan proposed locating the Warm Men in the west, near or perhaps even within Dreamland, rather than associating them with the Players whose ideology was too well-known even to the youngest children to be confused with RIE/Lab.

Urban news service

In cities only, the Lilypads set up a cooperative news service, Peenima Fūutavi Piausape, also called Piausape (PTG), the Play word for a message written on the back of one's hand, because some people wrote short notes on their hands with objects found in nature such as wooden twigs. In PTG, those who could contribute would write news and information in Play and distribute it by all means possible. Reusable writing material was in short supply so the plan was to post large signs in the city center and posters for people to read. There would also be reporters on hand to answer questions.

The Lilypads understood cooperation was necessary between the rival parties because otherwise the result would be not only biased, but wasteful. They wanted to present themselves as a fair news service who reported the news for the its own sake rather than to support a political message. They said that they had nothing to gain by lying because they were their own customers and would only be misleading their people. Indeed, the peenima fūutavi part of their name made firm their claim to neutrality, as it described someone who interprets the news for friends who would be otherwise unable to understand it. They said also that people would know their stories were true because of who wrote them.

Still, they effectively ruled out adult participation by insisting that anyone wishing to contribute a report must be a fluent speaker of Play; there were diplomats and some highly educated people from the other parties who would theoretically qualify, but the Lilypads figured they would be unlikely to bother fighting to have their voice heard when the audience consisted almost entirely of children who would be most interested in listening to people like them.

Role of PTG

Piausape was more than a traditional news service; it was also a committee of the Lilypads' Parliament, and therefore PTG's reporters could create new party policies. Anything the news reporters chose to endorse would be added to the Lilypad party platform unless the wider Parliament voted to cancel the committee's vote. PTG could not undo any wider Parliament votes nor could they undo existing laws; they could only create new ones.

Leapers' reaction

Hearing this, the largely multilingual Leapers admitted that the news service was nothing new to them. The children in Tatevas seemed to believe their society would be flawless if only they could be left to themselves; as children, they were simply above partisan conflict and selfishness; even if only a few adults joined the news organization, they would irrevocably corrupt it and bring nothing good of their own that the children did not already have. The Leapers, whose party-owned news service educated all of Baeba Swamp, had earned the trust of their citizens without their even needing to claim that they were unbiased. The Leapers believed that they could do much better than the Lilypads at reporting the news, but understood that there were few Leapers in Tatevas and their presence was merely tolerated, not welcomed.

The Leapers noted that the children's ideas resembled those used in Dreamland and that the idea may have come to them from Dreamland with the Hipsides as an intermediary. They also conceded that the Lilypad news service might have one advantage: poorly educated and inexperienced, the children at PTG simply didn't how to lie, and therefore the news service might in fact be unbiased.

Plans for sponsorship

The children lacked both raw materials and convenient transportation. Furthermore, they were so busy meeting their basic needs that the Leapers felt they would be reluctant to make copies of their reports. Indeed they were already reduced to sticking signs on poles in the city centers.

The Leapers hoped they could provide the children access to tree bark paper so that they could more easily carry copied signs, and transportation so that they could get their news into Baeba. The Leapers could not do these things directly; they would need to provide money and let intermediaries deliver the goods from Baeba and carry the finished papers back to Baeba.

Thus, the Leapers wanted to sponsor the news service, knowing it could help their own news service by association. If the children's parties' news service was unbiased, people might come to believe that the Leaper party's news service was also unbiased, a claim which the Leapers themselves mostly did not make. They might also might understand that an adult-run organization might be more accurate than one run by children. This could help the Leapers gain power in Tatevas where they were currently restricted mostly to Baeba.

But the Leapers worried about several things. They knew that if they openly sponsored the news service, other groups in Erala might think that their tax money was being diverted to the children's parties, because even if the Leapers proved the money was coming directly from the Leaper party assets, the other groups knew that the Leapers could simply raise taxes to make up the difference. The Leapers also knew that if they sponsored any children's organization that organization might be viewed as an arm of the Leaper party, even if they had been accepted as unbiased before. Lastly they felt that if they claimed the Leaper news organization was unbiased, other parties could create obviously biased news organizations of their own and claim a similar status.

On the other hand, the Leapers felt that sponsoring a children's project from their own budget, if they could at least make clear that they were not secretly taking it out of taxes on the other parties, could help improve the Leapers' image in Tatevas (and thus Erala).

Additionally, some Leaper party leaders wanted to sponsor the children's project for its own sake even if it did not turn out a net benefit for the Leapers.

Leapers sponsor news service

At this point, the Leapers decided to sponsor the Lilypads' news service openly, saying it would help the public image of both the Leapers and the Lilypads. They claimed the news service was and would remain unbiased, and that they were sponsoring it for that reason. They welcomed other parties to have their own, biased news services, saying that propaganda had its place because no party would want a traitor in their midst. And the Leapers had already admitted that their own separate news service was biased towards them.

Shortly after this change introduced wider circulation, outside parties began to suspect that ciphered messages were being transmitted in the news stories. Though the entire news bulletin was written in Play, much of the content seemed irrelevant and, given the cost of production, impractical to reproduce unless a hidden message was contained within.

The cost of the newspapers was very high, but limited copies were distributed for free among the employees. Even the employees had to share, though. This was common for news presses of the day.

Calmdown movement

OHB declared the Squares to be a provocation, more dangerous than the Slopes despite being less evil (since they had no ideology), and responded by further tightening their control over their male population, which they sought to extend to all Lilypads who had not yet joined one of the boys' movements. OHB stated that the Sunspots, the Slopes, Tāmpe, and the smaller groups were mere criminal gangs, and that OHB might also be considered a gang, but that they were enforcing the law.

The quick submission of the feminist Hipsides to the rising male power greatly worried the feminist OHB network, who felt their strength was not their feminine power structure but their geographical location, based far away from the invading male armies. This implied that female power and domination of the weapons trade was not a sound military strategy after all, and that if the Slopes, Tāmpe, or other male powers ever invaded them, they might collapse and suffer pain even if they surrendered immediately.

Geographic spread

Increasingly the boys' groups came to dominate in the western areas of Erala, which the feminists of the east referred to as Vampaisu Paīp. Pikīutūutā, one of the earliest Slope weaponers, who had helped found the Leap Metal Corporation, took a leading role in Vampaisu but did not call himself president because he was not ready to create a nation defined by exclusion. That is, Vampaisu's borders were being defined by the people who opposed it, while those within Vampaisu still considered their nation to extend throughout all of Tatevas.

A stereotype emerged that the areas furthest west, closest to Dreamland, were awash with masculine energy, and that they would fight each other to death or unite and take out all their aggression on defenseless women. Furthest east, closest to Moonshine, were the territories ruled by women and girls, which had already formed a defensive alliance and seemed safe from any threat of internal violent conflict, even though the Play army, itself feminist, still had not fully mended its ties with Moonshine.

Rumors about Dreamer influence

Rumors soon spread that the Squares were allied with Dreamland, because Dreamland had a similar male power structure and had been rapidly moving towards capitalism and a non-ideological type of politics in which parties rewarded their members with money and other benefits after winning elections, taking what they could from the property held by supporters of the losing parties. Thus the key to success in Dreamland was not to have a winning ideology but simply to be part of the largest party, and, for those at the bottom of the social ladder, also to prove themselves indispensable to the party so that they would not be the first to have their property surrendered if the party suffered a defeat in the polls.

The people who believed these rumors were fellow teenagers, however, who preferred a version of the story which claimed that it was Dreamland who had submitted to the Squares, and that the proof of this was that the Squares had risen to power rapidly whereas Dreamland had seemingly not won a battle in decades.

Comparison with the Slopes

Since the Slopes relied on slavery and exploitation, they had abolished capitalism in their territory. And yet at the same time, they supported capitalism overseas, saying it was the perfect system to keep Dreamland's population too weak to check the power of the Slopes.

Entry of UAO

The largely female Lilypad leadership reacted with alarm when they realized that their strict adherence to feminism, denying boys the right to carry weapons and walling them off from the boys' groups such as the Slopes and Squares, was now leading angry Lilypad boys to claim allegiance to the Unholy Alliance (Play Tami Ŋatūpa) instead, an adult army based in Xema rumored to be abducting slaves from surrounding lands, especially children, and which had been one of the few groups condemned by all of the other groups, including the Slopes and Squares who had legalized assaults against the indigenous Crystal women who were trapped in their territories.

Unlike the boys' parties such as the Slopes and Scorpions, UAO had no unifying ideology, nor did they insist on a lack of ideology as did the Squares. UAO was simply an alliance of criminals who agreed to cooperate with each other by raising an army of slaves who themselves owned slaves, putting the twelve original UAO founders in power for life. This meant that the Lilypad boys joining UAO were required to become slaves for the party founders, and could only work their way up the power structure by abducting other people to become second-order slaves.

The Lilypads considered surrender on the issue of feminism, saying that the safety of children was more important than the relative position of women over men, or of girls over boys, in their society, and that they would be willing to break with Moonshine on this issue if the Moonshines declared it treasonous to sign a treaty with the boys in the west.

The Lilypads felt that they could preserve their feminine power structure if they provided the boys physical transport towards the Slope and Square territories, telling them that the power they sought from UAO was unattainable there but attainable in the Slope and Square parties. Like other feminist powers, they stated they did not mind losing a large fraction of their male population, because they would expand their population through polygamy and through adoption while the male-majority populations stagnated due to the scarcity of child-bearing women. And because the boys who remained would therefore be able to marry multiple women, they would be less likely to envy the boys who moved west to join the boys' parties.

The Slopes and Squares still had not attacked the Lilypads or any other party run by adolescents of the tatea generation.

Dreamland appeals to the east

The Dolphin Riders, the largest party in Dreamland, now invited any women and children from the Lilypad territories to move to Dreamland. They stated that they would be safe in Dreamland because Dreamland's male power structure policed male behavior much better than any female power structure ever could. While some Moonshine women claimed the all-male Dreamer police force tolerated and even encouraged men to assault women, the Dreamers said that a female police force was no police force at all, since adult male criminals could simply push the officers aside or even target them for spree crimes. The Dreamers admitted that this might not be true in Moonshine where women by nature were much taller than men, but because the Lilypads were a mixed population, they had some very tall males and many of their girls were small and weak.

Since many Lilypads and especially OHB members believed that the new Square boys' army were allied with Dreamland, this new open appeal led the Lilypads to believe that the Dreamers were trying to appeal to both sides of the gender divide at the same time, getting them to both help Dreamland while working against those of both genders who remained loyal.

Dreamland launched another separate appeal to the girls, saying that they could defeat the rising masculine energy in the boys' parties without moving to Dreamland. Instead, they would move to the seacoast within their own territories and invite dolphins to move into the ocean, dolphins who would keep humans of both sexes in line by restricting their movement. This was the origin of the Dolphin Riders' name; they claimed that in the ideal human society, humans would not be the strongest species, and therefore human aggression would be very rare.

Spread of internal organized crime

March 10, 4197

While the Slopes escalated their attacks against the defenseless Crystals living in their territory, the eastern Lilypads found themselves victimized by their own indigenous population.

The Rain Men

By this time there was an informal alliance of men outside the Lilypad association, the Rain Men (Play Pimtepūmpa), who hoped to woo the young Lilypad girls once they felt themselves old enough to marry. Some Rain Men said they were so dedicated to the Lilypads' cause that they would willingly abandon their own wives and children for a chance to marry. The Rain Men understood that this would be difficult, since the Lilypads had a clear male surplus, though dwindling due to the increasing conflicts in the west. The age of marriage was commonly thirteen or even younger in some cultures, but only when marrying a partner of similar age. The Rain Men understood this, and hoped that they could convince the Lilypads that, since they were forming a new culture, they could break with the traditions their parents had taught them about. Importantly, the Rain Men were hoping to marry into the Lilypads, rather than bring the Lilypads into their own group.

Child trafficking

Child traffickers revealed themselves openly in early March 4197, saying that any nation refusing protection freely granted to them by an outside power deserved an attack, even if it was a nation without adults. Most of these traffickers still claimed allegiance to one of various outside organizations who claimed to be working for the children's benefit; that is, they were abducting children from a dangerous nation and bringing them to a nation where they would be enslaved but safe. These organizations all disavowed the traffickers, but their claim seemed to give themselves an aura of legitimacy that allowed them to carry out their operations without being attacked by the other groups such as the Rain Men who claimed to at least be obeying the laws of Hōki (if not of Tāmta).

Vaipapaa operations

Also, men calling themselves vaipapaa trafficked children into occupied buildings within the cities rather than into wilderness hideouts, saying that their continued survival proved both that the children's state was a sham as they could not protect themselves, and that the adult populations around them were not willing to protect the children either.

Access to these buildings was controlled by armed men. They abducted children from the streets, originally taking the youngest ones, saying that they were protecting the children from the violence around them. Outsiders could get access to the children in the building for a small fee, and could take one child home for the night by paying a larger fee, but they had to leave an additional and still vastly larger sum of money as collateral, which the buildings' owners would keep if the customer did not return the child to the building. An expensive tangible item could be substituted for this with the guards' approval.

The guards claimed they were selling the children as slave labor to the citizens around them, and that because the other Cold children were not attacking the buildings, they had every legal right to do so. They furthermore claimed that the children owed the guards they money they collected for their labor since the guards were sheltering and feeding them. Yet the guards were constantly on alert to prevent the captive children from escaping and the Cold children from freeing them. The guards told the society around them that they thus had to attack both groups of children just to keep their operations in business, and that this too should be accepted as legal since it was ultimately for the safety of the colony's child population. There was no unified adult police force and the Cold children's police force was too weak to stop them.

Because the guards were seeking money rather than the abuse of children as an end in itself, they allowed the Lilypad children to buy freedom for the captured children. Officially, these children were simply ordinary customers who neglected to return their child slave to the building, and therefore would never get their collateral payment back. The guards thus allowed the children to be rescued, rather than capturing the children attempting to buy them back, so long as they got large amounts of money. They knew that if they got too greedy and actually abducted the rescuers, no more rescuers would come. And even after releasing a child to the rescuers, the guards could go out to simply capture more children.

Cold Men's reaction

The Cold Men thus realized that once again, attacks on children had been legitimized in the eyes of the wider population around them, and that more would surely follow. The Cold Men thus annexed the entire state of Hōki, saying that Moonshine should continue to provide them free assistance but that they would no longer recognize Moonshine's authority to govern the territory even indirectly. The Cold Men stated that if Moonshine stopped the delivery of basic goods, the Cold Men might simply invade Moonshine.

Resolution on western war

For the time being, the Lilypads did nothing about the two groups of child traffickers abusing their people, nor did they act against the Rain Men. The Lilypad leaders assured their listeners that they would do their best to rescue kidnapped children, but that they could not stand up to the armed adults who had occupied so many buildings, or to the ones who lived in boats and took children with them offshore.

Instead, the Lilypads focused on winning the war in the west, which they came to call the Našapamnīmba War.

Release

On March 13, 4197, the Lilypads and OHB signed a proclamation deputizing all boys to fight as soldiers in any league they wished, knowing that most would ally with the Squares and would begin immediately slaughtering or abusing Crystal women. The Lilypads also stated that they considered all of the so-called children's leagues, whether now dominated by teenagers or still by small children (as were the Clovers and the Deer Walkers), to be part of the Lilypad Association unless they specifically chose to reject this identity. The remaining and increasingly female Lilypads then took on the Heart Stopper identity for themselves, but still referred to themselves as Lilypads to help retain diplomatic control of the various boys' leagues in the west. By tying their identity to the war-making boys' armies and then sending their own boys to fight under those armies' banners, the Lilypads were able to directly attack the Crystals, a war they knew they would win, while officially remaining allies of the Crystals and refusing to acknowledge any war.

Bubabem document

The Lilypads also signed Bubabem Māapupa, a document about obscene words. Here for the first time they affirmed their people's right to pronounce the phoneme /l/, and to say certain words either with /l/ or with its traditional replacement /b/ according to the speaker's wishes. They nevertheless stated that, for non-obscene words, the expected pronunciation of the sound was still /b/. The word bubabe "obscene word" was not itself obscene, and therefore retained the traditional pronunciation.

This document also used the Rider art style, now called ŋeeŋīpubabe in Play, and linked it with the new obscene practices, which signaled to the Moonshines that they were no longer feminists and would potentially disrupt any further efforts for the Moonshines to make amends with the Play women.

Those using the art style formed into a social club, the Sliders (KSS). The Play name ŋeeŋīpubabe described the Rider art style, but is here represented as Sliders (not a translation of the Play) because of the rhyme with the original Riders. The Sliders abolished many legal distinctions between men and women, saying that their new rules were voluntary and could not override the laws of the nations and states the Sliders lived in, but that someone seeking outside legal help could be expelled from the Sliders. Thus the Sliders enwrapped OHB's feminists and the all-male parties like the Spines together under the same banner and stated that they had no conflicting goals.

Thoughts about the future

Moonshine's diplomats pondered the idea that the feminist Lilypad government might be unstable. They realized that while both groups of Lilypads were mostly orphans, those in the west had grown up in orphanages and had rarely if ever met their parents, while those in the east had mostly lived with parents, or at least with their mothers, until the age of 10. The Moonshines thought that this might explain why the eastern Lilypads were fond of female authority figures while those in the west seemed to reject authority altogether.

Tapaīmma

There was also a girl named Tapaīmma, who was trying to stop the Clovers from endorsing or joining the Slopes. One of her bynames was "Green Mountain".

Tribalism

Some eastern Lilypads formed the Pūmanu association, saying that they considered tatea to be a tribe, no longer a cross-tribal group united by their birth years, or that they considered the concepts equivalent and that this meant that their tribe had no ancestors. (NOTE: this may be a mistake for Pūmana.)

Pulling away from Moonshine, these leaders saw no reliable allies outside their tribe and stated that they would draw ever closer to their fellow tribe members such as the Slopes at the expense of any remaining ideological alliances.

As a reaction to this, the Tupaaya, mostly Cold Men, reaffirmed their commitment to ideological politics and therefore stood against tribalism, although they said they would only seek ideological alliances and not actually admit these allies into their party. Thus to many outsiders there was little difference between the tribalists in Pūmanu and the ideologists of Tupaaya.

Although the Cold Men had abolished racial discrimination on their first week in power, there were very few Cold Men from the dark-skinned nayata tribes both because these people had been nearly all pro-Play and because they had not allowed their children to participate in politics. Indeed the very name nayata was a recent Cook coinage cognate to Play nayaasa "to behave inappropriately", though they insisted that this was not meant as an insult to the people themselves but to the toleration of their presence in hostile territory.

Squares dissolve

At this point the Squares surrendered control of Tatevas, saying that it should either cease to exist or become an eastern Lilypad subdivision of SMS.

Relations with Moonshine society

The Lilypads were increasingly critical of Moonshine, whose violent feminism was making the Lilypads look cruel merely by association. Because the Lilypads relied on Moonshine for both safety and survival, because Moonshine delivered basic goods to the refugee colony they lived in, the Lilypads knew that they could not afford to make an enemy of the Moonshines, but because the young Lilypads controlled much of the coast, the refugees living inland were in turn dependent on them, and therefore the Lilypads felt they could force Moonshine to continue delivering goods while at the same time asserting themselves as an independent force outside Moonshine's control. Nonetheless, the Lilypads mostly kept their criticisms private.

It was well known, and Moonshine's diplomats proudly admitted, that women in Moonshine could assault a man at any time for no reason, and the man was not allowed to fight back or even to flee; he was required by law to attempt to calm her down with soft words and promises of obedience. Some women simply did not listen, and such an assault could only be stopped by the orders of another woman. Also, a Moonshine woman could call on a police officer (all of whom were women) to arrest any man she did not feel comfortable physically attacking, again with no requirement to give a reason. Moonshine's defenders, including men, stated that these laws actually increased public safety for both men and women, because the women did not simply beat up men for sport, but only as a last resort to prevent further violence or to stop a crime.

Spread of rumors

Moonshine's extreme feminism reminded the Lilypads of the Slopes' exploitative lifestyle in the west, leaving the Crystals free to roam but often robbing or assaulting them without any clear motivation. The Lilypads were not allowed into Moonshine territory, and therefore could only choose to believe or reject what they heard from diplomats, from traders, and from some adult refugees living in Tāmta.

One more extreme rumor was that the beating of men was indeed a sport, and that women of the lower social classes in Moonshine would seek out strange men to assault simply for the fun of it. For example, a woman or group of women could block off a street corner or a narrow path near the city center, such that there was no convenitent way around them. They would allow women to pass by freely but a man passing by would have to choose between taking an extremely long detour or walking up to the women hoping that he would not be their chosen victim for the night. These women enjoyed watching the men struggle with the decision of whether to risk passing by, knowing that if attacked, he would not know until the beating was over whether he would live to see the sun rise the next morning. These murders were considered property crimes because men were the property of women.

Criticism of the Rider art style

Moonshine had also roundly criticized the rapidly spreading Rider art style, which the Lilypads at first took to simply be a cultural preference, but which they now understood to reflect the Moonshines' fear that the simple Rider drawings were a threat to feminism, and that Moonshine's feminism must therefore be extremely fragile.

Recent adaptations

In the Rider art style, different groups of humans were drawn with reliably characteristic visual cues to set them apart from other groups. For example, taking the term nuiŋee literally, the Slopes drew themselves in their underwear, regardless of their surroundings. Since they lived in a warm climate this was no great exaggeration. But the Lilypads extended this to themselves, even in winter, making themselves look forever underdressed in their artwork while the people around them were in full winter clothes. This did not apply to very young children, but the reason for this was not censorship but because the youngest children were not Lilypads.

Height differences were drawn from the head down, and since the people's heads were drawn much larger than a realistic size, someone a foot taller than another could have their waist at the other person's neck. Apart from this, people were drawn true to height, unlike the Hipsides' adaptation of the style in which they drew themselves the size of children. The Lilypads decided that they would respect fellow tatea adaptations of the style, and therefore also drew the Hipsides as children but themselves as adult height or just slightly shorter (with no firm rule).

Moonshine's frustration

Moonshine diplomats found it difficult to explain why they so objected to the young Lilypads' increasing use of the Rider art style.

Lilypad diplomats often brought young children to international meetings for several reasons. Some were very young Lilypads, children who had by one means or another received enough education to understand world politics and thus stood on level with the teenagers; some were young Deer Walker orphans who were brought along so that they might learn about the world around them (as the Lilypads did not have time to run schools); others, the youngest of all, were the offspring of the teenage Lilypads, brought along so that they could remain by their parents as often as possible.

The Lilypads considered their ability to bring children with them a sign of maturity, showing that they had either become parents or taken on a parentlike role for the young children among them. But to the Moonshines, who had trouble distinguishing between the three groups of children, it showed that the Lilypad kids had not matured, and in fact were getting even younger, even as the Moonshines admitted it was plain that the young children they saw were not the same ones they had met in previous years.

The presence of the children made Moonshine diplomats uncomfortable, as they felt that there were many things they could not say when children were listening. The Moonshines considered the Rider art style obscene, even pornographic, and felt that it was corrupting the minds of the young Lilypads and even the teenagers, turning them towards a sexually hedonistic lifestyle that would cause them to submit to the rising male power in the west, which the Moonshines felt might be collaborating with Dreamland. But the Moonshines could not find words to express this without confusing the young children, and also understood that using very simple, childlike terms would offend the teenage Lilypads. So too would the implication that the Lilypads' minds were so malleable that exposure to the Riders' line drawings could pervert them into irredeemable slaves to the male-led Dreamer way of life.

Comments about the Dreamer language

Dreamland's ruling Dolphin Rider party was learning the Leaper language, with which Moonshine was intelligible, and planning to steer the entirety of Dreamland towards speaking Leaper as soon as possible, believing Leaper to be a much more efficient language.

Moonshine approved of this, but said that even if the Riders pressed further on to learn the Moonshine dialect, they could still never claim that they actually spoke Moonshine, as the Moonshine language was for Moonshine citizens only.

Criticism from Moonshine

Moonshine criticized the Dreamer language, noting for example that the Dreamers' root word for a pregnant womb, sese, also meant to allow or permit, because a woman's womb is that which allows a man to control her body by impregnating her. The root word for the tip of the penis was peropu and this word also meant to take action on or achieve control over another. Dreamlandic had a sort of three-gender system: males, females, and pregnant females. This was because masculinity was so powerful that a woman impregnated by a man was no longer in control of her body and thus no longer fully female.

Some feminists among the Lilypads believed that the Dreamer language by its very nature bound women to submit to men, that the Moonshine language did the precise opposite, and that the Play language was neutral. Moonshine's feminists agreed with some of this but said that men submitting to women was the ideal human society, rather than one in which men and women shared power. Asked why the Dreamers were learning to speak Leaper, abandoning their own language, if they were so intent on preserving a male power structure, the Moonshines said that the Leaper language was also neutral and that the Dreamers might be intent on creating a masculist dialect of it just as Moonshine had once been a feminist dialect.

The Moonshines had the support of other groups including some Lilypads in claiming that Dreamlandic was vulgar in general.

Hearing all this, the Lilypads wondered if Stargazer would have been imprisoned in Moonshine for her love of the sound of the Dreamlandic language.

Establishment of new Hipside cities

Battle of Pāpuname

The Hipside boys settled a coastal city in their new Lifeline territory, and decided to call it Pāpuname since it provided them a good fishing spot and a place to dock ships (Play pāpuna "wharf" + me "goal, investment"). They told the locals that they wanted to live side-by-side in the city, but that they must allow the Hipsides to access all areas of the city, because they needed it as a temporary capital and operations base.

The Hipsides wanted to build a small navy so that they could move more quickly at sea, but knew that even though their main enemy had no navy and would be vulnerable to an attack by sea, they would need to abandon these ships because they could not invade by sea because they would need to circle around Dreamland and invade friendly Baebans to reach the hostile territory of the Matrixes within Baeba. Therefore they sought the help of the locals, figuring that they could buy ships for short-term use from them and then sell them back when they no longer needed them.

Renaming Dreamland

They also came up with new names for cities in Dreamland that had been briefly under Play control a few generations earlier. They were not intending a military occupation, but stated that they could just as well rename the cities as the Players had, because they were going to be independently powerful and capable of influencing Dreamland with their diplomacy. These new names were different from the translations that other Play speakers had come up with.

Slopes reform

The Slopes by this time had firmly established the organs of government of their new nation, Simusa-Māsa, replacing Tatevas which had been created just months earlier. It had the same territory as Tatevas but was open to including adult populations such as the Tinks and Zeniths. Thus the Slopes said that they were no longer restricting alliances to armies of their exact generation only, and that they would look to form ties with groups both older and younger than themselves. They allowed Tatevas to continue existing, to contain those parties who preferred the earlier system, which meant that there were three nations (Erala, Tatevas, and Simusa-Māsa) sharing the same territory.

Tapšīma

The centralized Tapšīma weapons distribution network (YCE) now took over for the Slopes' previously disorganized weapons distribution networks. The Slopes said that they would now treat Slopes who chose to independently manufacture and distribute weapons as criminals, but promised that even these people would be treated far better than military enemies such as the Matrix and the Crystals. Tapšīma was not part of the government, but the government supported it, and therefore some people referred to the government as Tapšīma rather than its official name of Simusa-Māsa.

Identification

The meaning of the name was unclear due Play's grammar allowing the creation of ambiguous compound words; it contained the Play word šīm "panties; women's underwear" and was thus a reference to the Slopes' practice of living their lives wearing only underwear (though this was much exaggerated by the Slopes themselves for its shock value), but since Play did not allow a morpheme of just -a, there were several different ways of parsing the compound; an alternative reading of the name pointed out the appearance of šī "wine", suggesting that the Slopes may have decided to embrace hedonism to heal the divide in their party over that issue. (Neither of these Play words could appear as a bare root; they both required classifier suffixes.)

Since YCE was not a party, the Slopes welcomed other teenagers to join YCE and trade weapons with the Slopes. They suggested it could become something like OHB, growing beyond just the weapons trade, and perhaps in the future could even merge with OHB, though they understood this was unlikely.

The Pūmanu kids joined the Slopes' YCE weapons network. When word spread of this, a separate group calling itself žapata vayaus supported Pūmanu without joining YCE.

YCE membership

Besides openly carrying weapons, YCE members were allowed to identify themselves with distinctive clothing, if they wished. This was accomplished by restricting the clothing choices of the non-YCE members.

Slope-Zenith relations

The Slope leaders admitted for the first time that, for their entire existence as a party, Zenith men had been sexually assaulting teenage Slope girls, and that their alliance with the Zenith was so important that they had decided they needed to simply shoulder this abuse and consider it the price they paid for living independently. Both the boys and girls leading the Slope party had agreed on this, and stated that any Slopes who disagreed with this plan could leave the Slope party and remain forever exempt from future Slope attacks.

Although the Slopes had at times retaliated for the rapes by killing Zenith men, their resistance had always been limited to immediate reprisals, and the Slopes had never proactively attacked the Zenith head-on. They had typically not attempted to keep Zeniths from approaching the Slope fortresses. The Slopes were most comfortable staying in fortresses where they were safe even if their enemies were just outside the walls, but were in danger from the moment they stepped outside.

The Slope girls received very little sympathy from outside parties because the Slope boys had been committing the very same types of assault against the helpless Crystal women who shared their land area. The Crystals had sometimes detained the Slope perpetrators for periods of time, but could not actually put them on trial because at the time the Slopes were citizens of Tatevas whereas the Crystals were citizens of Erala, and the Crystal court system could not prosecute foreign citizens. To cause them harm would be considered an act of war, and the wider Crystal party had refused to declare war against the Slopes. Thus, when the Crystals did hold the Slopes responsible for their attacks, all they really did was strain their own resources feeding and sheltering them.

The Zeniths had also been citizens of Erala, and had then given up that as well (for unrelated reasons) to become nomadic. Although the central court system of Tatevas actually did allow the prosecution of foreigners, the internal courts were run by the parties, and the Slopes had chosen not to create a court system of their own. Thus the Slopes could not try criminals of any origin, and the Slopes' response to any crime from an outside party was irregular reprisal attacks against that party, whether they targeted the perpetrator or not.

Even during the time when the Crystals and Zeniths had both been citizens of Erala, the Crystals had not used their court system to prosecute the Zeniths who assaulted Slopes. This was despite the Crystals having earlier said that they intended their court system to prosecute all types of crime, not just those that affected the Crystals. The Crystals simply could not bear to use their court system to protect Slope rape victims when they could not use it to protect their own women from being raped by the Slopes.

The Zeniths stated that the Slope girls deserved the unsympathetic reaction they got, as the Slopes identified with their party first and not their gender. Thus, Slope girls had little if any sympathy for the Crystal women, and the Crystals therefore had little sympathy for them. The Zeniths also stated that their assaults on the Slope girls were taken from the Slopes' own promise to exploit (fumu) the Crystals. That is, the Zeniths stated they could just as easily launch an all-out war against the Slopes, but chose to allow the Slopes to exist and prosper since the Slopes' victories also helped the Zenith; the Zenith benefited from this indirect help and enjoyed watching the Slope girls go fearfully around the perimeter of their compact living quarters, not knowing which of them would be sexually assaulted that day.

Resolution

The Slopes, speaking through both male and female leaders, were embarrassed to announce to their party leaders that their resolution to this injustice was not a war against the Zenith, but a formal invitation for the Zenith to join the new Slope nation as a major power. The only concession the Zeniths made in this treaty was that they would focus on attaining power in Baeba Swamp, leaving the Slopes to mostly control the much larger territory of Simusa-Māsa. But just as the Slopes had never promised to stay out of Baeba Swamp, the Zeniths made no promises to stay out of Simusa-Māsa.

Indeed the Slope leaders believed that the Zeniths' assaults would continue for so long as the Slopes insisted on living in Simusa-Māsa as settled families with a stable population of women and children, unlike the Matrix, Zenith, and some smaller parties who consisted primarily or even entirely of adult male soldiers who could not be attacked in such a way. They believed, nonetheless, that the Slopes' rapid population growth, both natural and through recruitment, would lead them to achieve absolute power within a few years and that the Zenith men would actually help the Slopes as they were forced into combat against armies who would otherwise have been able to harm the Slopes.

The Zeniths at this point reacted by making outreach to the Slopes and the other so-called children's parties. They said that they understood that the Slopes might not respect them as true allies because of recent events, but that the Zeniths wished to cooperate with the Slopes in fighting their common enemies. The Zeniths stated that they were interested in taking power in Baeba Swamp, not in the much larger territory of Erala, but that they were making no promises about staying out of Erala in the future.

Relations among other parties

Moonshine, the founder of the Feminist Compact, had betrayed the feminist Crystals, broken a long alliance with the Players, and was now rapidly losing the young Lilypads to the promises of the boys' parties in the west. The Moonshines and the Leapers, ruling from opposite sides, agreed it was most likely that the Slopes would be the dominant power in Erala (and Simusa-Māsa) very soon, as they had acquired many allies, and had intimidated potential enemies into neutrality.

The Zeniths had mostly agreed to move west, to Baeba Swamp, where they fought the Matrix and STW armies, which were also enemies of the Slopes. Thus the Zeniths were not only helping the Slopes, but also allowing the Slopes to direct their battle plans and send them to face the strongest opponents. Meanwhile the Slopes' own enemies, the all-female Crystal police force, had scarcely fought back at all and were now working for the Slopes, helping to feed them while facing abuse from both the Slopes and other troops of migrant men while the Slopes huddled in their forts when outside attacks came.

The Squares, another Slope ally, had grown explosively early on but had quickly slowed down due to lack of a cohesive goal and little interest in family growth; nonetheless, the Squares still existed, and were considering merging into the Tinks who shared much of their lifestyle, such as slavery, and had a more traditional family-based demographic structure.

The Slopes had so far convinced all of the other Lilypad parties, the ones who belonged to their generation, to maintain neutrality or even support for the Slopes, and therefore faced no imminent threats from them either.

The only party who seemed likely to pose an armed threat to Slope dominance was the Matrix, but the Matrix had yet to make any significant headway into Slope territory and was now bogged down fighting the Zenith-Tink coalition in Baeba Swamp.

Whirlpool War

The Zeniths attacked the STW-Matrix coalition again in 4197. They had by now formally seceded from Erala, saying that they would fight battles within Erala as well, so that the Matrixes could not simply retreat eastward to safety. This made them illegal and the Zeniths stated that they had been planning this war all along and would be well prepared for it.

This was the beginning of what the Lilypads soon came to call the Whirlpool War (Play Pama Vapias).

Twist of fate

By spring 4197 the Zeniths had increased their territory, creating many Zenith-only areas within Erala. But the land they had won in Erala was mostly useless to them, mostly due to expanding into weakly defended wilderness areas along with cities and offshore islands controlled by weak armies, and they lost further territory in Baeba Swamp.

Slope contributions

The Slopes had participated in this war, the only youth army to participate in front-line combat. The Slopes supported the Zenith but without joining them side by side in each battalion.

Whereas the Zeniths fought mostly against the Matrix and STW armies, the Slopes focused on moving eastward into Crystal territory. They wanted to live in less dangerous territory, even if they would be much poorer than the Zeniths and other armies.

The Slopes won exclusive control of some small areas of land in Erala, though far less than the Zeniths, despite the fact that the Slopes had fought very hard. The Slopes were not discouraged, though; their primary aim in the war was not to win large areas of land but to establish a power base in Erala so that they would not be so vulnerable to attack by the many armies fighting for control of Baeba Swamp.

Repercussions

The Slopes' military gains embarrassed the Leapers; even though the Leapers had tacitly given the Slopes free reign to attack Crystals, their participation in a formal military campaign meant that they were at war with Erala while simultaneously voting in its democratic government. The Leapers had the legal right to ban the Slope party, but knew that if they did so, the Slopes would shut off their communication with the parties of the east, and Erala would effectively cease to exist. Therefore the Leapers were forced to acknowledge that even parties who committed treason could still hold their seats in Parliament.

Meanwhile, despite the Zeniths' much greater offenses, they had not broken any Leaper laws. The Leapers had expressly allowed armies within Erala to fight wars against each other so long as they fought within Baeba or other nations; that is, Erala was meant to be a safe place for everyone, while those who sought war could fight it out anywhere else. The Zeniths had not overthrown the Leapers when they took control of Baeba, so therefore the Leapers had a justification for keeping the Zenith party legal in Erala. Nonetheless, the Zeniths had earlier made it clear that they were not interested. Thus the Zeniths' seats were taken out of Erala's Parliament.

Zenith rule

March 29, 4197

The Zenith army indeed took over Baeba Swamp at one point in early 4197, and to the dismay of the Matrix, the recently freed Crystal and Soap slaves did not participate in this battle. The Matrixes had recently freed their slaves and even supplied arms to them, hoping they would help the Matrixes against the Zenith, but most actually fled the city. choosing to help neither side, as the Zeniths had abused them too.

Escalation of Slope attacks

At this point, the Slopes for the first time began attacking defenseless Crystal children, who normally were kept close to their parents but sometimes had to leave their campgrounds to run errands. Even so, the Slopes usually released the children unharmed and the captures were for nonviolent pranks to show that the Slopes could easily have done something much worse. Typically the Slopes would vote on what to do to each captive once they were taken, and any Slope who told another to stop the torment would overrule the others.

For example, a teenage Slope boy named Pipavūpe abducted a six-year-old Crystal boy and brought him to a Slope castle, where he was tied to the wall while the Slopes made fun of his helplessness. The boy was returned unharmed, as the Slopes were more interested in proving their invincibility than in inflicting harm. This is why Pipavūpe had targeted a boy so young: everyone knew that the Slopes were capable of abducting both adults and children, but had assumed that their children were safe so long as they performed the slave labor the Slopes had assigned them.

Further attacks in Hoki

By early April, the Lilypads were criticizing Moonshine for their failure to intervene against the child trafficking operations which had taken root in their territory. These outlaws seemed to prey only on the Lilypads, and had not set up operations in the west where the Slopes and other groups were in charge, even though the Slopes and other groups were just as young as the Lilypads.

The Lilypads wondered if feminism was the problem after all, and felt that Moonshine showed no compassion for them simply because they were not Moonshines. Some said that the Moonshines might even be participating in the child trafficking operations.

Some of the traffickers had dropped all pretense at having outside support, which some Lilypads claimed was actually good evidence that they did have outside support, and were willing to take the blame on themselves by being unpopular if it would help deflect blame from the Moonshines who were providing economic and perhaps even military support to the traffickers. But the Lilypads could not prove this.

The Lilypads also noted that the traffickers were now abducting teenagers alongside the younger children, even though this was more difficult for them, perhaps attempting to bring down the protectors of the children to solidify their operations while also presenting to the outside world an argument that attacking teenagers was a fair battle.

Rain Men invade

April 14, 4197

At this point, not just the Rain Men but also other groups in Hōki invaded the Lilypads, saying that the time for compassion had passed and that a war of adults against adolescents was more than fair. These groups included the two groups of child traffickers, meaning that the Rain Men's alliance already had troops working for them inside the city. Now, instead of abducting children, these vaipapaa men were able to simply slaughter children indiscriminately and take any belongings they were able to loot.

The Rain Men had stated that their goal was to expel the Lilypads into the western territories of Erala now that they had a safe place to go, and indeed were helping their allies fight a war in that area. Yet it was clear that the Rain Men were intent on avoiding the older Lilypads in order to abduct the youngest ones and bring them to the inland districts of Hōki.

The Rain Men and other groups said that the children who had been complaining about being trafficked had seen nothing yet, and would soon fall to much greater enemies.

The Rain Men had earlier hoped that the Lilypads would let them in to their territory voluntarily, whereupon they would seek to marry teenage Lilypad girls, but when this did not happen, the Rain Men began saying that the boys among the Lilypads were oppressing the girls, even though the boys were extremely feministic, and therefore that the Rain Men would need to force their way in. Weary of euphemisms, the Lilypads simply referred to these men as kidnappers (pāpemnavea) and tamakusu, a Play word for someone who could never feel so much pain as what they had caused, and therefore were due to be killed rather than punished in court.

As the invasion got underway, two other groups appeared. One was comprised of Hardwoods and other descendants of refugees who had originally consigned themselves to live inland while the Lilypads controlled much of the coast and therefore also the trade with Moonshine. These men now had turned militant and wanted to join the Rain invasion without committing to an alliance with the Rain Men, whom they suspected were merely kidnappers seeking small children to abuse. Then, another group also mostly comprised of refugees' descendants offered to move into Lilypad territory as protectors, and even to pay the Lilypads with tangible products so long as they turned their minds away from war and towards peaceful physical labor. The Hardwood-aligned group said that this group was no better than the kidnappers, as they too were seeking to abuse children, and merely looked better because they had more wealth in their possession to offer the children as payment.

It soon became clear that, as in the past, Moonshine would not participate in any conflicts within their refugee territory, and therefore that the Lilypads would need to fight off the invading armies on their own. As four of the five armies openly admitted they were abusing children or seeking to do so, the remaining army (Hardwoods) felt they could cast themselves as morally superior despite their wanting to violently push out the children. But the Lilypads referred to all five armies as Tadpoles and promised to fight them all at once, even if the five groups of men were also fighting each other.

Leapers react

The Leapers' only immediate reaction to this was to formally assign the Hardwoods' seats, already held by Scorpions, to the Lilypads, meaning that Scorpions and Cold Men could compete for them. They stated that they would normally have removed the Hardwoods' seats altogether, but felt that the Scorpions had won the seats fairly and that the Cold Men had had a hand in this, so they both deserved access. Thus the seats were not assigned according to population. Tāmta thus remained with 72 seats in Erala's shrinking Parliament.

This reassignment of seats was, theoretically, a temporary measure, and one they had done before in Baeba. It was common to temporarily suspend the representation of one party after that party had committed some form of treason, and somewhat common to then assign the missing seats to a party that was wronged by the treasoner. The seats would then revert to the original party once they had made up for their crime. However the Leapers told the children to expect the seats to never revert, as they expected the Hardwoods would not be interested in re-entering the democracy.

Eastern war

The Lilypads fought the five armies for several months without a resolution to the war. These armies carried through on their threat to escalate from abuse to outright slaughter, and the Lilypad kids were poorly equipped to defend themselves. The Lilypads refused the offer of the Hardwood group to surrender, even though they trusted that the Hardwoods would be less violent than the other four armies.

Nonetheless, despite the opposing coalition's clear superiority in battle, the Lilypads realized they were facing an enemy that was few in number, and refused to surrender. Initially thinking there were more than 100,000 enemies in Hōki (counting men, women, and adolescents), they came to think there might not be much more than a few thousand. The Lilypads had about 60,000 adolescents and children to resist the invasions, and had the secure alliance of the Slopes and other parties to the west, although these parties had not yet made any promise to send their troops eastward to bail out the Lilypads because they were already fighting their own war against adult soldiers.

To get weapons, the Lilypads had so far been relying on Moonshine's mining operations, based mainly in the southern extreme of Moonshine territory, on the fringe of the tropics. The Moonshines were in danger of losing this territory and therefore prioritized the distribution of weapons to themselves.

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, but still declared themselves neutral in all wars involving the Slopes. They referred to their new government as Taīmpama, 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.

Their creation of this nation replaced Tatevas, which they had set up cooperatively with the Slopes, but it did not replace Simusa-Māsa (SMS), which the Slopes had set up for them, nor did it take the Lilypads out of Erala. Thus the Lilypads remained simultaneous citizens of three nations: the Worldpool, SMS, and Erala.

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.

Lilypads prepare for 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

September 10, 4197

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.

Many outsiders had expected the Slopes to turn over their surplus weapons to the Zeniths or even to their Crystal slaves. These people were surprised when the Slopes gave them to the Lilypads instead, knowing that the Lilypads were both ideologically opposed to the Slopes and outside the Slopes' control. The Slopes' decision thus reaffirmed a pattern that some other outsiders had already noticed: that the Slopes and Lilypads saw themselves as kin because they were of the same generation, and this overcame all of their differences.

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 had 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.

Slopes' answer

The Lilypad cipher leadership (still just two boys and two girls) realized that the treaty they'd signed with the Slopes did not require them to also teach the new ciphers to the Slopes, but decided in a gesture of goodwill to offer the Slopes this new code as well. The Slopes thanked the Lilypads for their offer, but in their own gesture of goodwill, decided to use their existing ciphers only, saying that the Lilypads ought to have a language of their own to set them apart. The Slopes said that instead of learning the Lilypad code language, they might make their own. Thus the Lilypad Trade Language and the Slope Trade Language were born.

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.

Attention turns to Tata

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. This was because the aboriginal tribes had been more diverse than in other areas, and because the tribes who moved in later had also been diverse and had a greater population density than usual. All of these things were due to Tata's having more plentiful natural resources than most areas nearby (all but Baeba), and a milder climate. Tata's climate in fact resembled that of the Play lowlands, far to the east and almost 10 degrees further south in latitude.

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 such as metal weapons 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.

Zeniths attempt to befriend Matrixes

NOTE: The date in the next paragraph is too precise, as it was not a single decision made unanimously by all the Zeniths, but rather a gradual change of opinion. Also, it may refer to events that happened earlier.

In December 4197, the Zeniths decided that their only hope lay in breaking the fragile bond between the Crystals and the Matrix.

The Matrixes were able to make allies of the Crystals they abused for several reasons. Partly this was due to the Matrixes' success in propaganda. Partly it was due to their shared cultural connections with the Crystals (both being mostly Leaper speakers, not Play speakers). Partly it was because the Crystals were being abused in much greater numbers by the Slopes, who considered the Matrix their foremost enemy. And partly it was due to the Crystals' own party structure, which for a long time had encouraged stronger Crystal factions to abandon weaker factions at precisely the time when the weaker factions most needed help. Thus outside enemies were able to attack just one faction of Crystals and expect that the other factions would not only stay out of the war, but possibly even help the attackers. This meant that Erala's Crystals could not expect help from either their own party or from their party's traditional allies.

An additional factor keeping the Matrix-Crystal alliance alive was that the Matrix had earlier sincerely agreed, to the surprise of all, to release all Crystals and Soap Bubbles from their slave pools, to teach their weapon manufacturing procedures to the Crystals and Bubbles, and even to hand over a small amount of finished weapons to these parties. At the time the Matrixes had been more afraid of the Tinks than of the Crystals and Bubbles. Fearing defeat, the Matrixes had felt they would be better off by far in a world run by the Crystals than a world run by the Tinks.

Helped by the Matrix, the Crystals had soon become almost as strong as the Matrix, and had maintained their strength through December 4197. The Crystals were thus in 2nd place in terms of military strength. (These were the free Crystals in Matrix territory, not the free Crystals in Slope territory, who were indirectly helped by the Matrixes' actions but not reliably in contact with the Crystals in Matrix territory.)

The Zenith at this time was 4th, and they hoped that if they could ally themselves with the greatest power (Matrix), they would be able to secure a position like that enjoyed by the Crystals, while the Crystals, as their true enemies, would be reduced once again to the helplessness that they had just recently escaped. The Bubbles, meanwhile, would be killed altogether by the combined Matrix-Zenith. The Zenith realized its plan was unlikely to happen, but figured they would all lose anyway if they didn't act, so they put their plan into effect.

Zeniths stage violent protests

The first thing they did was to protest against the Crystals. They knew that any sincere protest was expected to be followed up by military action, so the Zenith announced that they were going to attack the Crystals (not the Matrix), and try to kill as many of them as possible before they themselves were defeated. They stated that they knew they couldn't do it, and they pretended to collapse early on and sent out an apparently sincere peace treaty to the Matrixes, asking them to reject the Crystals and instead fight them.

Matrixes invade Zeniths

The Matrixes refused this peace treaty, and invaded the Zenith strongholds in Baeba Swamp. Because of the Leapers' earlier treaty declaring Erala as a refuge of peace, the Matrixes were allowed to fight a war against the Zeniths in the Leapers' own homeland of Baeba while remaining a legal party in Erala, so long as they did not take the fight to the Zeniths in Erala.

Slopes plan for the future

NOTE: The date of this section might be earlier than Dec 4197.

Creation of middle class

The Slopes now drew up plans for a legally defined middle class in their SMS society. They called these people Dolls, the same as the Matrixes' slave class, and said that any of the Matrixes' slaves could flee into Slope territory and join the new middle class. But they also said that these people were Dolls because the Slope ruling class was free to toy with them and discard them once they were broken. (Although they had taken this metaphor from the Matrixes as well.) Though the Dolls would have more rights than slaves, their lives might be more dangerous than those of the slaves. They felt that the existing free Crystal population, whose villages the Slopes often raided, might be offered Doll membership, as they felt this would be more economically efficient than their current system, and those who refused would be enslaved.

The Slopes took many of their ideas from the Cooks, a party of children aged 10–13 who had drawn up rules intended to help them keep their nation's rogue adult population under control. (The Cooks had had a small adult police force, and indeed these men were mostly their own fathers, but they soon proved disobedient and the Cooks were left on their own.) Other ideas were taken from the Scorpions. The Slopes said that the Dolls would be a legal political party in SMS and could vote, but that the governing party of SMS would always be the Slopes. This was similar to the Leapers' administration of Baeba Swamp, whereby the Leapers allowed rival parties to outvote the Leapers and force the Leapers to enact laws that they disagreed with, but none of these rival parties could change the structure of the government itself, because the sole authority for this rested with the Leaper administrators.

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 provide 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.

Relations between the classes

The Slopes reiterated that they had no plans to abolish slavery, and would maintain a large middle class of Dolls, separate from the slaves, who had many legal rights and could hire slaves as laborers but could not actually own slaves. They hoped that this might drive divisions between the two lower-status groups, who were largely both Crystals, and therefore prevent them from uniting against the Slopes.

Reform of Slope legal system

The Slopes still refused to set up a police force or a court system. But they decided that it would be politically advantageous to define their armed members as soldiers, saying that they deserved honor for protecting the unarmed citizens, including non-Slopes, from enemies such as the Matrix. They said that non-Slopes could not join the military because of the risk of treason, and therefore their prohibition of weapons to non-Slopes could be described as necessary for the safety of the nation. Previously they had made no attempt at a moral justification for their policy.

This meant that it was no longer just the Dolls who were legally prohibited from accessing weapons, and that the Zeniths were all criminals now. But since the Zeniths had defined themselves as a criminal organization all along, this changed nothing, and the Slopes promised the Zeniths that they would make no attempts to disarm Zeniths within Slope territory.

Plans about population growth

In February 4198, the Slope leaders began talking about adopting yet another group of small children, this time the children of the Tink party living in Baeba Swamp. The Tinks were an ally of the Zenith, just as the Slopes were, but the Slopes and Tinks had no formal relations because many Tinks were the fathers of young Slope leaders, having abandoned them when they were much younger in order to move to Baeba. Though many Slopes were not among this group, the knowledge of their recent history had kept the two parties from forging close ties. Now the Slopes felt that this situation might help the Slopes peel young children away from the Tink men who had already abandoned the children they had sired with the women of the Cold party in their original homeland.

Later history

See Tamta/later history.