AlphaLeap

In 4108, Paba lost its war against the Gold Empire. Paba and Subumpam, along with a few outlying territories such as Sulasali, were taken over and assigned to the Naman nation of AlphaLeap (native name Nisundusa). AlphaLeap renamed their new colonies Halasala and focused especially on Paba, both because it was the easternmost and thus closest to AlhaLeap, and because Paba had for 3000 years had a reputation of being easily exploited.

Background

From the period of roughly 2057 to 4108, the gigantic empire of Nama contracted from half the world to a few weak, impoverished coastal settlements. They had always been weak; they just merely were never challenged directly in their earlier history because the climate was too cold to make Nama an enticing target for an invasion. Nama simply could not protect itself, and even though the armies invading them were very small and often militarily incompetent, Nama simply had no way to defend an empire of 7 million square miles with a population of less than 7 million.

Enemy nations such as FILTER set up huge military zones in the rolling plains of central Nama, denying Namans even the right to visit, or to cross through in order to reach the remaining free territories on the other side. Sometimes the Naman army accidentally stumbled upon an enemy encampment and quietly slipped away, warning any Namans living nearby that they would soon need to flee their homes. When Nama was invaded by a small army, they often did not react at all, preferring to focus instead on the much larger armies that were coursing through their wealthy northern lowlands.

When Nama declined so far that they could no longer protect Paba, Paba also became equally helpless. One difference between Nama and Paba is that Paba had, since the 1600s AD, considered itself a pacifist empire, and went to great lengths to prevent its army from ever having to fight a war. During one war against the Star Empire, Paba invaded Subumpam because Nama forced them to, but their soldiers did not fight and the Pabap Army even invited enemy soldiers to move to Paba in the hopes that they would calm down and marry Pabap women.

By contrast, Nama had never considered itself pacifist; they were merely a very large empire with a relatively small population due to their historically very cold climate. When Paba invited Star soldiers to move into Paba, Nama was very upset. Nama and Paba were both on the same side in this war, and this war was one example where Nama was actually winning handily, as the Star Empire had occupied an enemy territory, Subumpam, relying almost entirely on the Star navy, and had no feasible way to defend the occupation on land. Nama was rescuing Subumpam since even the relatively weak Naman army was superior to the spread-out police force that the Star Empire relied on. But just as it seemed like Nama was going to completely destroy the Stars, Paba took pity on them and decided to rescue the Stars by offering them new homes in eastern Paba. Nama was frustrated as they realized that the Stars would indeed get along well with Pabaps and thus could continue to harass Nama for thousands of years more.

But as Nama lost war after war, the few Naman nations that were not quite so pathetically weak tended to survive, and thus the more Nama shrank, the more it became able to defend its territory. However, for the most part, the unity of Nama had been destroyed because its territory was no longer contiguous. The strongest nation was named AlphaLeap, and it was on the east coast, thousands of miles away from Nama's original center of power. For most of its history, AlphaLeap had been very poor because its east coast was entirely icebound. But a warming climate allowed them to prosper while the mountains on their western border largely kept potential invaders out.

First years under the Leapers

AlphaLeap saw that Paba's people had become the world leaders in education for over a thousand years and had lots of knowledge to share with the world. AlphaLeap promised to erase that record, and immediately converted all of Paba's schools into detention centers. They said that under the Leaper government, Pabap children would be given no education at all. Anyone, child or adult, caught reading a book not written or approved by the Leapers would be killed immediately.

The Leapers handled their slaves badly. Despite the high birth rate, so many people died each day that the population actually fell during some months. Many Halasalans became convinced that the Leapers were guilty, for various reasons, of abuse of their powerful position, as they had been killing far more Halasalans than they needed to accomplish their goals. Most of the time the Pabaps who saw others around them being killed repented in fear and tried their hardest to obey their orders, but when they saw even the most Leaperistic of people tortured and killed for mistakes that weren't their fault, there began to rise, among some of the better educated Halasalans, people who, out of pure anger, publicly and fearlessly objected to this often blatantly sadistic misleadership. So in the late 4110's, a few of the Halasalans who were given positions of authority by the Leapers began to make independent decisions that went against the will of the Leapers. The Leapers did their best to frustrate these rebels, even to the point of kidnapping and torturing them. The rest of the Halasalans took this as a sign that the Leapers did not respect Halasala, pointing out that many Leapers seemed to actually enjoy watching the unexplainable accidents that seemed so frequently to take the lives of Halasala's children.

The Leapers had conquered more than just Paba. In fact, they had created a wht they called the Four Quarters Empire, since it was the union of the Crystal Empire, the Thunder Empire, the Pabap Empire, and Subumpam. They chose Paba to be the capital, as they figured that the Pabaps would be far more submissive than the other three groups, abd because Paba was closer to AlphaLEAP than the other three empires.

Revolt of 4123

In 4123, some Subumpamese slaves set fire to the plantations in the far western area of Halasala. Thousands of Leapers died trying to stop the fire from spreading, even though thousands of Subumpamese also died. One third of the Leaper governors moved to the center of the fire to stop it from spreading, and one female slave decided to close the gap and entrap them entirely in fire. When AlphaLeap found out what had happened, they disowned the Leaper government of Halasala and let Halasala become independent. Thus almost the entire Leaper population was dead and the Halasalans were free from oppression after only fifteen years of torture.

However, AlphaLeap also declared that "an unfinished Leaper government could mean disaster in the future", and decided to kill all of the people living in Halasala. They thus declared war on Halasala, including all of the states of Subumpam, Paba, and the Andanese diaspora. They sent about 40000 AlphaLeap soldiers into Halasala to massacre the unarmed civilians. Even though Halasala's population was much larger than AlphaLeap's, AlphaLeap expected an easy victory because their soldiers had dangerous weapons and thick metal armor and the Pabaps and Subumpamese were pantless and armed with cookware and vegetable knives. However, the Leapers running Halasala stopped firefighting so they could fight instead the invading AlphaLeap army. Thus Leapers fought Leapers, and some of the Leaper governors of AlphaLeap fled into a new breakaway nation called Puap, which had broken away from Halasala early on when it was revealed that AlphaLeap believed it needed to torture Subumpamese children in order to cement its power.

Puap actually also enslaved Subumpamese people, but in Puap, the ruling Leapers adored and exalted the Subumpamese people as fulfilling the ideal role that the ruling Leapers could only wish they could achieve. Leapers who did work, they said, were lazy and inefficient, whereas the Subumpamese held in place by whips and chains worked five times harder and never complained. Another important difference was t hat there was no ethnic division between master and slave in Puap; Subumpamese could be masters, and Leapers could be slaves (though this occurred only for criminals). Thus the Leapers fled into Puap, figuting the Puapians would welcomer them in.

War against AlphaLeap

Although AlphaLeap had denounced the Leaper government's abuses of its slaves in Halasala, it was common in this era to believe that the best way to end slavery was to kill all of the slaves. Thus the bleeding slaves and their abusive masters fought on the same side, against AlphaLeap, and together they eliminated AlphaLeap's soldiers one by one.

In 4127, the chaos of the war reached such a level that animals began preying on humans for the first time in 1400 years. The slaves sided with the animals, and told them to kill AlphaLeap's soldiers because AlphaLeap was invading them. The simple minded animals mostly obeyed, and many AlphaLeap soldiers were bitten and bled to death through their body armor. AlphaLeap was defeated and this caused the Halasalans to mostly turn against their Leaper governors. A few Halasalans who were loyal to the Leaper governors moved into forts with them, expecting to face the 15000 soldiers of Halasala's army soon. But Halasala had sworn off direct violence, and preferred to use forest fires and animals with sharp teeth for proteection instead of spears and swords.

AlphaLeap responded by making an alliance wiht the firebirds, specifically a species of firebirds that was much larger than average. These were called "20-ton rocs".

Dreamland-Halasala relations

In early 4132, Dreamland decided that AlphaLEAP was too weak to control its enormous empire, and launched an invasion. Their main problem was that the Leaper government was based in Paba, near the southeastern corner of the Empire, and Dreamland's only border with Halasala was in the extreme northwest. They thus knew that their invasion would be bloody and painfully slow.

The general of the Dreamer army threatened Halasala with invasion in the hopes that fear might motivate them to surrender and therefore prevent the war. Halasala, now run by ex-slaves who considered themselves Pabaps, refused to surrender to an army that had not yet even begun its war. The Pabaps knew that the Dreamers would not attempt to invade Paba by sea; they would literally march halfway across the continent, slashing through settlements scattered like pillows while the Pabaps prepared their army for the final fight.

Paba actually asked for AlphaLEAP to invade them again, if only because they wanted to see a war between Dreamland and AlphaLeap rather than a war between Dreamland and the still poorly weaponed Pabaps. But AlphaLeap refused to intervene. Other nations also rejected any alliance with Paba unless Paba agreed to allow a complete takeover of the government with no rights for Pabaps. Realizing that this would be even worse than what the Dreamers wanted to do to them, the Pabaps rejected all of these potential alliances as well. (They were willing to let AlphaLeap abuse them, but not the other groups, because they figured only AlphaLeap would have an interest in fighting a total war against Dreamland.)

Some people did move from the other parts of the Four Quarters Empire into Paba, but they were not there to help the Pabaps. Instead, they were fleeing the invading Dreamer army, figuring that they were safer in Paba than anywhere else because Paba was at the extreme opposite end of the empire from where Dreamland had entered. Paba had no soldiers at all in the northwestern part of Halasala; they had been expecting the locals (in this case, mostly Thunderers) to do the fighting for them.

The Four Quarters War

Since the Dreamers had invaded the Thunder part of the Empire first, it was mostly Thunderers that had fled into Paba. The Pabaps welcomed these people, even though the Thunderers felt that the Pabaps had betrayed them. They nevertheless signed a treaty of mutual assistance, in which they promised to fight the war in Paba only, allowing Dreamland to consume as much as 85% of the land area of Halasala before even beginning to fight back. These were the approximate borders of Pabap settlement, meaning that they were willing to surrender all of the Subumpamese, all of the Thunder, and all of the Crystal settlements to the Dreamers. They were not abandoning these people, but merely felt that with the government and most of the land army concentrated in Paba, staging a defense of the wider territory was unrealistic. To compensate the Thunderers for their loss of territory, the Thunderers were given more power in the government than their population would normally have deserved. On the other hand, they had to work harder than most Pabaps since they brought no possessions with them.

However, there were some settlements not within Pabap territory that were considered worthy of sending the Pabap army to fight. One was Blop, a Thunder city at the mouth of a very important river. Moreover, although there were no official land armies under the command of the Crystals or Thunderers since AlphaLEAP had centralized everything to Paba, they expected that the local people would at least not simply surrender immediately to the Dreamers, as both the Crystals and the Thunderers had been blood enemies of the Dreamers for hundreds of years. Meanwhile, Subumpam was small and the Pabaps considered it an unlikely target for the Dreamer invasion.

Halasala renamed itself Vaamū now, a Pabappa name. (Also spelled Wāmū, Wamu, etc.)

Pabaps living in Vaamū realized that they were being invaded by Dreamland because they were the seat of power of an empire that also included the homelands of the Thunderers and the Dreamers. Thus, they felt, if they simply threw away all of the Thunder and Crystal lands, they could perhaps prevent the war. But the Pabap military planners were no longer publicly promoting pacifism, and felt that it was their duty to at least hang on to parts of the Thunder lands even if they allowed an invasion of the bulk of their empire. Moreover, they realized that if the Dreamers did take over the Thunder and Crystal lands, they would have nothing stopping them from moving just a short distance further south in order to greatly increase their total coastline.

The Pabap generals were surprised when they saw the maps of the early conquests of the Dreamer army in northern and western Vaamū. It seemed that Paba really was their main target after all, even though they were making a journey several thousand miles long to get there. They considered that the Dreamer armies were probably expecting to be able to live off the land as they roamed, since a supply line coming from their home country would be an easy target for attack. Townspeople living in what had been the Thunder Empire (it was now known, in Pabappa, as Pupompom) were sending reports of Dreamer armies roaming through their countryside, but not committing violence against the locals. However, the Dreamers did force the Thunderers to supply them with food and clothing taken from the upper class of the Thunderers. The soldiers in the Dreamer army were thus happy and healthy, but their progress was extremely slow.

Paba was curious why the Dreamers didn't seem to be interested in conquering the territories held by their traditional enemies, the Crystals and the Thunderers, but had decided instead to attack the Pabaps who had never hurt them at all. However, the newer generations of Pabaps were more battle-ready than they had been for several thousand years, and no longer felt they needed to rely on ethnic minorities to fill their armies. In part this was because Paba had been invaded so many times that its people were in many ways no longer Pabaps; they were still very small people on average, but had a lot more variety amongst them. In this way they resembled the Dreamers, who were descended from Labans who had married Thunderers and then invaded the Crystals.

Even though the Thunderers were happy to see that they were free of violence, many of them still figured they would be better off in Paba, even if they had no possessions to take with them. Others moved to Paba simply to help out the war effort, as they felt they could defeat Dreamland by getting to Paba ahead of them and then starting an offensive. Some of the Thunderers moving to Paba poisoned the earth as they retreated, even though they knew that this would make life impossible for those Thunderers who had chosen to remain in their towns. When it became clear that Dreamland was apparently not interested in a large-scale occupation of Thunder territory, the Thunderers were urged to stop polluting their environment, although it was difficult for the Pabaps to communicate their message to an area in which they did not have soldiers. However, Dreamland's invasion was moving very slowly, and even the Dreamer generals seemed to expect that it would take them a full two years (autumn 4134) to reach Paba. Paba's generals realized that this slowness was Dreamland's main weakness in the war, and that the Pabap Army could surprise the Dreamers with an aggressive push northward and fight them in the towns they were occupying. But for the sake of their alliance with the Thunderers, the Pabaps agreed to let the Dreamers move through Thunder territory and fight the war in Paba, not Pupompom.

After two years, there had been no attacks on the Pabaps. Communications from townspeople in Pupompom had mostly stopped, and the Pabaps figured that the Dreamers might have given up on their war either because they realized it was unwinnable or because they had split apart and attacked each other.

By the time the first Dreamer battallions reached Paba in autumn 4135, their strength had collapsed so much that Paba's new, much larger army easily crushed them while taking few casualties of their own. Many towns near Paba's capital had been preemptively evacuated, as the Pabaps had a long south coast they could retreat to and therefore were not in great danger of starvation if they left their vegetable farms in the interior. Where those towns had been, Paba now had a bubble of soldiers ready to defend their capital city from a distance well outside it. The Dreamer armies had planned to trickle in along different paths and then surround Paba on at least two fronts (north and west). They achieved this, but they did not all meet Paba's Bubble Army (called Latiki, not related to the political party known as the Soap Bubbles) at the same time, so when the Bubble Army defeated each invading army, they prevented that army from communicating with the others that they were vastly outmanned.

Thus, Paba survived in a state of war until mid-4138 without any Dreamer soldiers ever actually reaching Paba. Furthermore, the number of invasions was slowing down, as it seemed that the Dreamers either were running out of men or were rethinking their war efforts. After six years of war, no soldiers had made it to Paba and then back to Dreamland in order to communicate with their homeland, so the Dreamers realized that they were probably losing the war. When Dreamer soldiers stopped trying to pop their Bubble, in late 4138, the Pabaps decided it was time to go on the offensive.

When Paba launched an invasion of Dreamland, they coursed back northward through Thunder territory and found little resistance. The Dreamer soldiers were completely gone. However, they did have a few uprisings in Subumpam, which they had not expected. In particular, the nation of Puap had decided to side with the Dreamers, and launched an invasion of Paba. This invasion soon turned north into Thunder country, however, in order to attack the Pabap Army from the rear.

Previously Pabaps had considered themselves one people, and had no concept of political parties. Their empire had been a monarchy for around 3200 years and a chaotic ungovernable mess with power changing hands every few years once the monarchy collapsed. But now the Pabaps in the government began to speak of themselves as the Latiki Party (an Andanese name, not a Pabappa one; Pabappa is Patwem) in order to distinguish themselves from the rebels. It was thus no longer the Pabap Army, but the Latiki Army, that was invading Dreamland, and the Latiki were willing to kill Pabaps who opposed the war.

The Pabaps had always been known for strong population growth. Although Paba had been a largely feministic society, particularly in its later years, Pabap women had largely exceeded the birthrates of other feministic societies such as Subumpam for most of their history. In the last six years, the population of Paba's core territories had more than doubled, partly in response to Thunderers moving in but largely also because Pabap women had given birth to so many babies. The very name Paba meant "maternity ward" in Pabappa, as they thought of their homeland as a place where babies the most important natural resource.