Camia

This page refers to the conworld I had when I was young. I started fantasizing when I was about three years old, and even from that very young age, I was interested in outer space and large planets. From the age of 3 until my early 20s, all of my writing went into this one futuristic science fiction scenario. On top of all of their technology, some of the people also had magic powers.

I've since switched it all to a single-planet, low-tech, no-magic world where the human population is in the low millions and technology progresses so slowly that from one end of the timeline to the other things just really mostly stay the same and not even the greatest military powers can do something as destructive as what small teams of reneagde soldiers did in the rayguns-and-spaceships world. I am very nostaligc for my childhood fantasy world, though, and I've decided it deserves at least a page of its own. Moreover, a lot of the events in the two worlds are linked, for reasons that will be explained below. Essentially, the childhood world, which I'll call Camia, is still "true"; it's just that the details have changed immensely since I've moved everything from an extremely high-tech to an extremely low-tech environment.

Sources

As above, most of what I'm writing here is taken from stories I wrote when I was a teenager. The very oldest ideas were from when I was 3 years old, and the most recent ones were from when I was in my early 20s. I've still been writing "new" things since then, but they are almost all "fine details" stories involving small numbers of people and thus wouldn't fit in very well with the history-book type of writing I had done when I was younger. (Although I did attempt a novel and a few short stories even then; those also do not appear here.)

Some exceptions to the rule of not writing ideas that I've come up with more recently include dreams I've had about my conworld, particularly when I have trouble sleeping due to pain and start fantasizing to try to make myself feel better. Some of these are more likely daydreams (at night!) than true dreams. However, the vast majority of these ideas are for my Teppala conworld, not the Camia one, even in these past few months where I've been mostly focusing on writing up the Camia page.

I know from operating a website in the past that pages like these do get substantial readership, so long as they at least appear in Google, though it's likely that the vast majority of the readers were looking for something else and may not read the whole page, or any of it at all beyond the few words it takes to realize it's not the page they wanted. So my writing it abit sloppy, and since I pull from different sources that I've written at different times, sometimes things don't quite match up.

Spelling

For example, I have a hard time sticking to a single spelling for a foreign name, particularly a name that lasts a long time and undergoes sound changes. Is it Tebbala or Teppala? I've never decided, because both are valid names for the planet from two different stages of the same language. I've also spelled it Tīpala, Tipala, Tippala, and Theppala. Those are all names from just one language, Thaoa. The same word is reflected in all of the other languages in many other forms, although despite the fact that Thaoa is not a particularly widespread language on its planet, I have decided to stick with the Thaoa name for my planet.

In some cases, the sources I'm copying from are computerized, and most articles mix different sources, so the spelling can change from one paragraph to the next. For example, Xema is called "Xama" for a few paragraphs in the Swamp Kids article, and then changes to Xema for the rest of the page. I will probably stabilize these eventually, but only if I'm rewriting the paragraphs for other reasons. It's more important for me to change inconstistencies where a whole name is substituted for another, for example calling Anzan "Vaamū" or vice versa (both are names for the same Empire, but from two different eras).

Universal canonicity

One rule I've always held to is to never reject any of my ideas at all. Everything I've written since I was three years old is now and will forever be canonical. When one idea contradicts another, they are either both true at separate times or one of the names is changed. Since creating a nation called "Camia" when I was 11 years old, I've had several more Camias, thus explaining how "Camia" can be utterly destroyed by one of its enemies and then a few hundred years later be on the verge of conquering the world.

I did not hold to this rule early on. I just now found a note to myself "Remember, the plots of the book are completely detached from the comics, which gave way to the book in Nov '93." Neither the book I was writing then nor the comics that precede it are mentioned here however, as they dealt with fine details happening to just a few people whereas my history books deal with large events.

Comically overpowered child superheros

Influences and ideas

A few ideas taken from video games exist in my conworld, but most are in the "short stories" I wrote when I was younger and will not be publishing here or likely anywhere.

Character list

See /Characters for a list of people, places, and organizations in the Camia stories.

Superheros

Since I started writing when I was three years old, and did the bulk of my failed attempt at writing a novel when I was 12, and since I've held to the promise to keep everything I've ever written inviolably canonical, a lot of the characters in my stories even today are children between the ages of 5 and 12 years old. Five because that's when I started writing stories, and twelve because that's when I stopped. I find my early writings amusing in that I wrote mostly about war but never even considered the possibility that one of the 12 year old boys that was cruising around the universe fighting battle after battle in six simultaneous wars might actually someday get hurt. They were always inexplicably invincible not just to death but even to being injured, and I never came up with an explanation for this except impossibly good luck.

In one scene on planet Namma, a 12 year old member of the TCT superhero league, "Teddy", is cornered in his own spaceship by four aggressive enemy soldiers. Three of the men pinned the boy to the floor of the ship while the fourth started kicking him and stomping on him. The boy's reaction to this was to pull his radio out of his pocket and call for his copilot to come into the ship to rescue him. Realizing that this was impossible because the ship was now in motion, he jumped up to free himself from the four men and attacked the fifth man who had come inside to pilot the ship. Then he subdued the other four attackers and brought his spaceship back down to the planet.

A few weeks later, his spaceship was again invaded by enemy soldiers. This time, Teddy was outside the ship when it happened. He responded by rushing through the crowd of soldiers and into the ship, and then slapping away the soldiers until they were finally all on the ground. Then, hearing that his hometown had been invaded by the army of planet Xema, Teddy flew home with three other kids and the four of them defeated the Xeman army in close range combat. Later, their teacher told them they needed to invade Seattle because the capital of the United States was located in Washington, so they left for Earth in a brand-new spaceship.

Contacts with Nanuko

The people of Namma understood that the TCT kids were trouble. On (I believe) their very first visit, two TCT boys named Teddy and Zach landed in a village and were greeted by a soldier, Nanuko, who immediately banished them from the village and ordered them to leave immediately. Then he assigned a young boy to the task of going to all of the other nearby villages to tell them to keep out Teddy and Zach. Teddy and Zach decided to follow the boy to each of the villages so the villagers could meet the people they were supposed to be keeping out. Of the many villages they had been banished from, the boys chose to settle in Torushi Village. They spent their first night on Namma sleeping in a small inn, taking the money needed to pay for their beds from one of the villagers.

A few months after that, while visiting planet Namma, Teddy ran into trouble once again. This time, one of the citizens of Torushi, a boy named Treba, cornered Teddy with a sword, demanding to be given access to Teddy's "dream machine". The ever-heroic Teddy grabbed the sword and rushed to find Nanuko, who was now friendly towards Teddy and the other children. He then forced Nanuko to turn the government over to Teddy and Nauri (a girl whom Teddy had met recently and become quite fond of). The fact that Treba had been pressing a sword against Teddy's abdomen just minutes ago didn't matter at all; he considered Treba so insignificant that he didn't even want revenge. However, Treba was a kunma (see below), and thus even weaker than most of Teddy's other attackers.

The "supervillains" of Xema

The boys fought against two types of enemies: the first type was conventional armies, sometimes enormous ones representing an entire nation but also often small invading forces that had been sent out by a foreign nation not wanting to risk losing its entire army in one battle.

The other type of enemy was the "supervillains" one might expect to see more of in a comic book or a novel originally based on a comic book. For example, Dr. Zāme threatened the kids day after day with all types of enemies, being particularly fond of enormous building-crushing mutants. Often, the boys would be sitting in sixth grade happily doing their schoolwork when the teacher would call them up to the front desk to tell them that Dr. Zame had just threatened their city with another pack of mutants and it was up to the boys to save the city by fighting off the mutants with no weapons or armor to protect them.

Most supervillains the kids faced lived at least part of the time on planet /Xema, "a planet where all villains could go to live without persecution". Villains on Xema did not necessarily like each other, and did not often cooperate with each other, but neither were they allowed to attack each other. Thus, Xema as a whole was not capable of launching a war against Camia or any other nation, but Camia knew that if they were to invade, all of Xema's masterminds would unite and could easily crush the Camian army. Since Camia realized it could not afford to lose its best men in a direct invasion of Xema, they only sent children to fight the Xemans. For example, one a day a young boy named Zachary was told to go on a mission to Xema in order to singlehandedly defeat Dr. Zāme, Dr. Roc, and another villain calling himself "Pain". They figured Zach's chances of success were abysmal, but felt he would be better at taking the hits in the resulting battles on planet Xema than the traditional Camian army soldiers would be. Zachary refused the mission, however, and handed it over to a much smaller boy named Treba.

First snake battle

One day, Dr. Zāme himself called up the boys on their telephones before school to let them know they had a big surprise waiting for them in the local battlefield. The boys' parents wished them well as they converged on the park in the center of town. Long before they arrived, though, they caught sight of their big surprise: a snake so gigantic that even its tongue was longer than the boys were tall. A sportscaster named Bob showed up to watch the children try to fight off the snake, but refused to participate in the battle himself. The snake kept crushing them and trying to poison them but the boys kept slithering away. On the other hand, none of the weapons the boys had been throwing at the snake were able to get through its skin.

Eventually one of the boys decided to freeze the snake with cold weather spells, knowing that snakes shut down in cold weather. Five cold waves soon showered the snake, and then at the climax one of the boys switched to a hot spell in order to shock the snake into a state of distress. This killed the snake. When they returned from the battle, their teacher was so happy that she gave them the day off from school to celebrate.

Missile attacks

At other times, Dr. Zāme preferred more conventional methods of attack, such as shooting anti-aircraft missiles at the kids' spaceships or larger missiles at the buildings in their hometown (although this type of attack required coordination with other people; Dr. Zame couldn't do this by himself.) Once, when three of the boys were on planet Theta for a political conference, in which they were deciding whether or not to launch an invasion of Earth, Dr. Zāme decided to hit the boys with an interplanetary ballistic missile more than a mile long. The missile succeeded in destroying the building the boys were in, but the boys themselves survived, as did the aliens they had been negotiating with. When they returned to their home planet, the boys were attacked by a flock of gigantic man-eating birds which had been imported from the planet Xema. When they hid from the birds, they were ambushed by Dr. Roc, who had been cooperating with Dr. Zāme.

Battles in Wamia

Some of the children occasionally were captured by enemy soldiers, since although they were quite strong their powers were primarily defensive rather than offensive ones. One boy, the same "Teddy" from above in fact, "got caught" by his enemies while spying in a foreign country and was thrown in jail near the city of Buga in his nation's enemy, Wamia. He decided to break out of the jail by drilling through the floor with his "cocoon" superpower. Then he climbed into an invisible spaceship and flew for some reason to Fort Calamity, a fortress of about 20 square miles in the arctic wasteland, for protection even though he was already free and safe as soon as he got into the ship. Dr. Zāme figured this was as good a time as any to invade the kids, but after he got inside the fort he fell into a booby trap and disappeared. Then, a girl named Jen destroyed the "radar computer" (I'm not sure what I meant by that) that Dr. Zāme had used to track them down.

Attacks on other planets

It was not just the boys in TCT that were targeted by supervillains; generally, anyone they befriended also became a target. When TCT found friendly allies on planets like /Namma and Earth the supervillains responded by attacking those allies as well, at least the ones that were young children traveling in spaceships.

Trouble seemed to find the kids wherever they went. On Earth, they were attacked with interplanetary ballistic missiles and well-worn military weaponry familiar to Earth itself. On Teppala, they were attacked by wild animals and gigantic mutants as well as alien invasions bringing the same dangers they faced on Earth. As soon as they found a safe place to stay on planet Namma, a supervillain tracked them down and poured upon them the same trials even there. The Namman military campaign against the kids was mostly headed up by a man named Death. Like many supervillains, Death was an immigrant from planet Xema. Unlike Dr. Zāme and Dr. Roc, however, he chose to live on /Namma, a planet that was mostly out of the picture in interplanetary affairs because although it had a high standard of living its technology was far behind all of the other planets. Death thus had a powerful advantage on planet Namma, since the people he attacked were even more defenseless than those on planet Teppala or planet Earth. Death did not use a "Dr." name such as Dr. Death because on Namma it would've been meaningless. Nevertheless, Death had not appeared on Namma until the TCT kids started visiting Namma. As soon as TCT established a foothold on planet Namma in and around Torushi Village, Death began destroying those villages with mutants, much like Dr. Zāme had done on planet Teppala, and seemingly cooperating with invading armies from other planets when they, too, raided and destroyed villages on planet Namma.

After one particularly long battle, two TCT boys and several other kids whom they had befriended decided to build themselves a paradise in New Zealand (presumably with slave labor) where they could stay and enjoy a pampered life away from all of the gigantic mutants and interplanetary missiles that so troubled them everywhere else they want. They hoped that they would never have to deal with the supervillains ever again.

After a few days in their new private luxury resort, one of the kids, a small girl named Nauri, contacted Death and told him that she was living in paradise in New Zealand. She invited Death to move into the resort with them now that the kids were no longer tied down fighting mutants. He quickly agreed, but once let inside, Death decided to convince the kids to join his new organization, CRWY. Death admired the paradise the kids had built for themselves but felt that it could use some minor reforms.

CRWY seemed like a good idea, so all of the kids in the resort except one joined up. That one was Treba (see below), who at that time was officially the king of Torushi Village, though he was staying in New Zealand along with the other kids. Once Death had secured the allegiance of the kids in CRWY, Death and the kids abandoned their resort and warped back to Namma in their spaceships and began destroying Torushi Village. They decided to bring King Treba along as a slave so they could have someone to wait on them and fetch them food and water while the cottages burned to the ground. Nanuko (the only adult in the kids' organization other than Death himself) spoke out against the destruction of the village and the enslavement of King Treba, and the kids responded by kicking Nanuko out of CRWY and making him a slave. They also enslaved a young girl named Anitak because she had previously been very rich, but complained when the others took away her money and torched her home.

Once Death realized that all of the kids were dutifully obeying his orders, he moved on to the next stage of his attack plan. He sent out a pack of mutants to massacre the young children who had just days earlier invited him into their tropical resort, joined his private organization, and faithfully flown with him to Namma in order to help put him into power. The kids were upset that Death would send out mutants to kill them after all of the good things they had done for him, and they decided in a private vote that they didn't really want to help him anymore. They decided that destroying the village where most of them were living and making everybody homeless hadn't been such a good idea, but realized that before they rebuilt any of their homes they first had to get rid of all of the mutants that Death had sent after them. They formed a private agreement that whoever beat off the most mutants would get to be the new ruler of the village. They knew that Teddy and Nauri were the best fighters amongst all of the CRWY members, and that one of them would likely win. That way, the kids were assured of one small victory amidst their great defeat: even though they had lost their homes and betrayed their families by signing away their power to a supervillain who had only wanted to destroy them all along, at least once they had finished fighting the mutants, their eternal punching bag, Treba, wouldn't be the king anymore.

The preschoolers

There was also a league of preschoolers, BTD, who lived in Baeba. I did not give them a defined age in my early stories, but wrote that they were so small that they could sit side by side in one seat and not overlap the edges. They appeared from time to time, mostly helping out the TCT kids fight off mutants rather than trying to involve themselves in interplanetary politics. They were not as enthusiastic about their missions as the older kids were, and sometimes had to be pulled into each battle. However they were quite powerful; one girl, who went by the name Rainbow, had the ability to conjure up weapons and then throw them at the animals. One day when TCT was trying to track down Dr. Zāme, she destroyed a turtle that was trying to step on the children by throwing an axe from a safe distance just as the turtle was pulling its head back out of its shell.

The BTD children were repeatedly humiliated and treated like trash even by their allies, simply because they had the same basic limitations that other toddlers had and needed adults or at least the older children to help them get around. Although they were valuable warriors, they often left a battle scene partway through because they needed to rest or even take a nap.

Adults are useless

The national government seemed uninterested in reining in Dr. Zāme, or even tracking him down; they simply resigned themselves to the fact that every few weeks there would be a major disaster in their capital city and it was up to a small group of young children to bail them out. Even the boys' parents were unhelpful, soberly telling their kids that they could not go out and play until all of the 20-ton slugs occupying the shopping mall at the other end of town had been eliminated.

All of the enemies the boys fought were adult males. Not once did one of the boys break ranks with the rest, even when I realized I had intended all along for the boys' superhero league, TCT, to be just one of many, thus opening the possiblity for competition or even open warfare between the leagues. Very rarely did the kids have any help from adults in their missions. I believe Nanuko is the only example of an adult character actually helping the kids out in their missions directly instead of just ordering them around from battle to battle. And he was pretty nearly useless. TVTropes "AdultsAreUseless" applies here. There was a second adult that was helpful, actually, one of the 2 characters named Bob. He had a habit of telling lies and pushing his way through crowds of people in order to start fights against unsuspecting victims, but he never wavered from his position of supporting TCT. However, whereas Nanuko joined the kids' adventures and flew in their spaceships just as if he was one of them, Bob worked on his own and made no alliances with anyone except TCT.

Children in power

Were it not for the superheros' apparent invincibility, the world they lived in would be extremely cruel to them. Adults, even their own parents, seemingly existed only to push the kids around, generally into fights against other adults, and then when the kids defeated their oversized enemies their leaders would find another battle for them without even saying "thank you". And the children happily adopted each enemy they defeated and happily made it their duty to solve the problems their former enemies caused them after they had nominally sworn allegiance. For example, Nanuko as above had originally been an enemy of the TCT kids who vowed to track them down and if necessary kill them all. But one day the kids surrounded him and he agreed to enroll in their class and shuttle to Teppala to meet his new teacher. From then on, the kids followed Nanuko around fixing up all of the mistakes he made while trying to help the kids on their missions. On earlier missions, humans from other planets would often either block the kids' path into their spaceships or somehow climb aboard when the children weren't looking. Space travel was very expensive, and these people saw the kids as a free ride to the planet of their choice. The kids generally decided they could deal with their uninvited guests, but once in a while they were kidnapped by their guests.

But, given that their many adult enemies seemed to have no superpowers of their own, the children in TCT and the other leagues were merely just being nice and could have chosen to disobey their orders at any time, but obeyed for the good of their country and their people.

Indeed, when Teddy and Zach found themselves a comfortable place to live on planet Namma, their teacher Nancy realized she could no longer order them around anymore, and needed to find replacements. They still remained friendly to Nancy, and retained their ranks in /STW, but once they settled in on Namma and started enslaving the villagers around them they became the masters of their own fate.

The fact that Teddy and Zach were hilariously incompetent leaders didn't stop them from holding onto and increasing their power, because everyone else around them was incompetent as well, and the boys tended to win any conflict with an outside power, be it a rival slavemaster in another village or a thousand-man army from the planet Xema. This applied to both their steadily growing slave armies on Namma and on their legacy roles as leaders in STW.

Superheros' self-image

I fiund it interesting that in my early writing, the main character (Teddy) never once referred to himself or his fellow TCT members as a "child" or even a "kid", and only occasionally as a "boy". This even extended to the adults around him: the general who wouldn't let the kids into the battle against Xema wasn't stopping them because he was afraid that "the kids" would get hurt, but because one of the four kids was a girl. Once the others convinced him that she was a very strong girl, he had no problem. Dr. Zāme was a minor exception, as he fondly addressed the kids he called on the telephone with epithets like "little ones", but this was largely (HA!!!) because he identified himself with his gigantic mutants and the gigantic ballistic missiles he shot at the kids rather than what he himself was as a man.

Using "belittling" words such as children and kidnap was one of the hardest things for me to avoid when I tried to pick the unfinished novel back up many years later, and why I've completely abandoned that attempt altogether and just returned to the original 44-page stub that I wrote when I was 11 years old.

Yet, Teddy referred to many of the younger children around him as boys and kids (still never "children" though). This shows that the mindset I had at the time was one of complete invincibility and independence from all outside authorities. Teddy literally had no fear at all and saw nobody as his protectors; he was the protector of everybody else. I also seem to have avoided the stereotypically childish word "grownup"; Nanuko was identified as an "adult" and a "man" before Teddy learned his name.

"The Power"

Many years later, I came up with an explanation for why the kids would always emerge squeaky clean from each battle that also explained some of the other oddities in my early writings. All of the supervillains the boys fought seemed to have the same uncanny ability to survive every battle unscathed, even battles they "lost", as did the kids. This is a common staple in comic books and video games alike, and also movies and TV shows ... there might even be a TVTropes entry for it. In the video games I played when I was younger, the designers used one of a few explanations for this:

• The superhero defeated the supervillain, but the villain miraculously "got away" at the end of every battle (Sonic the Hedgehog is a good example of this).
• The superhero never actually fights the villain, but only bosses that the villain puts in his path. (Secret of Mana is a good example, in that the players never actually fight Thanatos, they just fight one gigantic animal after another, culminating in the final boss fight in which Thanatos is nowhere to be seen and the story is explained as a fulfillment of a prophecy entirely unrelated to Thanatos.)
• The villain is just stand-up invincible. This is probably confined to video games, particularly the type where players and enemies alike can "die" hundreds of times and then reappear instantly as though nothing had happened. Link may have died 626 times to defeat Ganon, but it doesn't matter, because Ganon can die hundreds of times too and keep coming back. After all, the very first thing you see in front of you after you defeat Ganon in LTTP is Ganon inviting you back in for a rematch as if all was well and good between him and Link. Likewise with Mario/Bowser and probably literally at least a hundred others that I'm not aware of.

I never chose which explanation to follow. The supervillains in my stories definitely surrounded themselves with mutants and other large animals which served as both their primary means of attacking the kids and their primary means of assuring that the kids would never actually get through to attack the actual villains. I only wrote comics for about two years, and worked on a novel for another year after that, and thereupon dropped the superhero/supervillain concept entirely, so I dont have dozens and dozens of examples to pull upon, but it seems that all in all the pattern I was unconsciously moving towards was the second pattern, in which the villain, though clearly prepared for an all-out battle against the superheros, goes to great lengths to prevent one.

One exception to this pattern of my mastermind villains being forever just out of reach of the superheros is that in the very first "mutants vs. humans" story I wrote, Mr. Zāme (sic) threatened the boys with man-eating birds and gigantic slime molds, and then, when those were gone, tempted the boys into entering his heavily guarded fortress. In the fortress, the five boys tricked Mr. Zāme into letting them all pile on him at once, and they KILLED him with a bomb.

Two months later, "Mr. Zāme" threatened the kids with mutants again, this time right after they had finished defending themselves from an attack by a man-eating firebird. As I wrote the comic, I realized Mr. Zāme had been killed off, and corrected it by adding "His brother, actually." (I drew in pen at the time, so every mistake stood. It kind of helped the realism a bit.) I soon renamed this brother character Dr. Zāme. However, it seems that my original intent was to have them be the same person, so I am sticking with that explanation, and using the "Dr." form of the name for the combined character. This would mean that the kids really had attacked Dr. Zāme in straight-up hand-to-gun combat (Dr. Zāme always carried a gun when he went to battle), and Dr. Zāme didnt run away in fear at all, but actually fired on them and absorbed all of their magic attacks and yet somehow survived.

Attempts at explanations

In my later writing I contemplated the idea that the supervillains were in fact merely grown-up superheros who betrayed the team, and that the children were being misled by their leaders into believing all of the missions they were being sent on, even missions that killed thousands of people, were entirely morally good, and that the many adult male "supervillains" who kept on disrupting them were entirely morally evil. The fact that not even one adult male still sided with TCT gave the adults a strong argument that they were right to attack TCT.

The invincibility was explained as being a natural innate power of the superhero children, which stays with them when they grow into adults and thus turn on their former teammates. I remember also an idea that the invincibility power that the children and the supervillains shared also prevented them from killing each other, because "the Power" could not attack itself. They could only restrain each other and send indirect attacks such as mutants and missiles at each other. When Dr. Roc attacked the boys in a cave on Hurricane Island, he didn't kill the boys, he merely put them to sleep.

I don't remember the full details of this expansion of my idea however, because I no longer include magic or space or superheros as part of my writing. I do believe that at this time, I had decided that the TCT members and the supervillains in fact could die by conventional means, they simply could not kill each other because their Power would not permit them to destroy one of their own kind. In fact, I'm pretty sure that I had always intended the kids to be normal mortal beings, not invincible, but that they simply really did extremely lucky and did foolishly brave things that could easily have killed them many times over.

It should be noted, though, that this explanation doesn't entirely fit with my original ideas, because Dr. Zame and the other supervillains did not have magic powers in the early comics. However, if the four superheros mentioned above (one of the five boys was Gary, who had no superpowers and thus never attacked anyone) cornered Dr. Zāme and yet were unable to kill him despite their best attempts, that would mean that Dr. Zāme definitely did have some superpowers of his own.

Other superpowers

Long lifespans

I just found a sentence in which Teddy says that his grandfather moved to planet Teppala 1600 years ago. I honestly don't know if that was a mistake or if I was intending his family to have developed Methuselah-like lifespans. I do know that in my very early writing, I did indeed have people who lived 2000 years or more, but I thought I had dropped that by the time of the story I just found this sentence in.

Conjuring water

When one boy developed frostbite on his hands, another boy named Zach "generate[d] some water" for the other boy to heal himself with. While most people can only "generate water" in one manner, I do not believe that I would have used such an idea when I was 10 years old. Most likely I was thinking of an elemental spell, a concept I had borrowed from video games, but on the other hand, I had not had much experience with those types of games when I was 10.

Conjuring weapons

Enemies who captured TCT children often noticed that the TCT'ers didn't seem to mind handing over their weapons to their captors. This was because at least some of them could make their own out of thin air. Once, a team of giant spiders from planet Theta stole Camia's national treasure, and two TCT boys invaded Theta in order to get it back. However, the spiders quickly captured both boys and put them in a torture chamber where many other humans were being held hostage. Despite just having been disarmed, Teddy decided at one point to rush directly into a crowd of spiders and hold up a bomb as he did so. Teddy then threw the bomb at the wall , which destroyed the wall and hurt many of the humans that were held hostage, but did not harm Teddy at all.

Reflection on Teppala

The remnant of the child-superhero scenario in my current writing is that Save The World (STW) sees itself as a very child-focused organization, despite being almost entirely devoted to war and enslavement of its enemies, and is led primarily by females with motherly instincts because adult males are frequently kicked out of STW. With very few adult male members, STW must fight its wars in very subtle ways. In my early writing I had no problem pitting a 12 year old boy against an army of 12000 heavily armed soldiers, because I knew that the boy would always win. In my current writing I have to come up with more sensible explanations.

I *just now* realized, after 24 years, that the name Swamp Kids is a symptom of this as well. I dont know why I had to dream in order to remember this, but it worked. Although it's true that the Swamp Kids, due to their high birthrate, did in fact consist largely of children, and although it's also true that they were well below the average body size for the empire they lived in, and were painfully aware of it in every one of their very many wars, the Swamp Kids had abolished child labor on their first day in power and thus relied strictly on a traditional adult-led (in fact, male-only) hierarchy for both their military and their government. The name "Swamp Kids" was merely a symbolistic cultural way of thinking that stressed the virtue of obedience to authority: the ruling class was still allowed to call its people "men", the rest of the people were merely "boys" or "kids".

Superheros without superpowers

The Kunma Kids

My earliest comics were Garfield-style wax paper strips that had no titles. There were only two characters: the me that I hated to be, and the non-existent person I wanted to be. The purpose of every single comic was to let the person I wanted to be torture the person I really was and for the real me to “watch” from outside the comic, seeing each strip from the viewpoint of the idealized me.

Treba

Even those children who did not have magic powers were often expected to behave as though they had. There were actually two types of magic in my early conworld, TCT's type and another weaker type called "Tanta spells". One poor misfit boy, "Treba", lived on a planet (Namma) where all the people around him had many Tanta spells and he had none. Yet for some reason he was expected to defend the entire village he lived in, while all of the stronger magical people around him reclined in their hammocks resting comfortably in the knowledge that their one-boy army was out in the fields fighting off the men in tanks with his miniature battle-ax.

This boy happened to be a slave, so in the middle of a battle he was often forced to take time out from fighting the enemy soldiers to serve his masters a luxurious meal or take their laundry down from their clotheslines. One day, after helping repulse an invasion of men in tanks (and getting bumped around and repeatedly run over in the process) he returned home to find out he had been banished from the village for cooperating with the other people who had beaten off the invaders. However, he was soon back in Torushi anyway because Teddy and Zach forced their way in and brought Treba with them.

TCT took pity on this boy, but nevertheless, shortly after they rescued him they sent him to take on the supervillains on planet Xema, including Dr. Zāme and Dr. Roc, again with no weapons or armor to protect himself, and no knowledge of how to pilot a spaceship.

Later, a girl pays Teddy 2 days' wages to beat up Treba, then a different girl, Nauri, sentences both of them to slavery for violating the prohibition against fighting. Soon, though, Teddy is released from slavery and Treba is transferred from Nauri's property to Teddy's so Teddy can beat up on Treba legally.

I've made a word for this type of character: kunma (also wumma, kunama, etc). A kunma is a character who resembles and represents me, but whose existence is so painful that he is inarguably worse off than me. Sometimes, a character who represents me but is far better off in life gets his joys by attacking and tormenting the kunma, but other times protects him. I think I've only created two such characters in my life, Treba and another boy named "Gary" who I suppose I could mention below.

Gary

Long before I created Treba, I created a boy named Gary to beat up on. I believe I was 7 years old when I drew my first-ever comic strip, and all I remember of it is a bunch of children at the lunch table in 2nd grade laughing at Gary for saying something embarrassing. I had assumed those comics were long gone, but stumbled across them one day many years later. But, due to a flood in our house in 2007, after which we simply threw things away without looking inside at all the soaked papers, they've probably been gone for real for 8 years. Ironically I think I drew on laminated paper with crayons at the time and it would have survived a flood whereas all of my later comics would have been ruined.

I named Gary after cartoonist Garry Trudeau, even though in the pre-Internet age I didn't know anything about Garry Trudeau other than that he was a cartoonist. I was not intending there to be any similarity in personality or any other trait between the two people. I more or less picked names at random when I was young.

When I was 11 or so I drew some comics on construction paper with a pen. (I dont think I ever used a pencil.) In one story, Gary and Teddy found out they were the only two students to have failed the last test. Gary was happy that at least he was not alone in his suffering. But Teddy responded by beating up the teacher, and the teacher agreed to change Teddy's grade to 100. Then the teacher dismissed the class and Gary walked home depressed.

Then, on the way home, an older boy picked Gary up and started hitting him, demanding Gary give him all his money. Then, Teddy stepped into the fight and threw away the boy that had beat up Gary. Five days later, Gary got beat up again and this time Teddy wasn't there to protect him. The day after that, Gary got beat up again. The day after that, Gary got beat up again. People began to tell Gary that he was getting attacked because he was a Wamian immigrant whose family had been invited to move into Camia, but that most Camians weren't cool with it and therefore for the rest of his life he would just have to simply face the facts that he would be getting beat up over and over and nobody would care.

However, Teddy still considered Gary useful enough to bring him along on missions. One day, when Dr. Zāme had threatened Teddy and a few other boys with a herd of gigantic building-crushing mutants, Teddy decided to bring Gary along to use as bait for the animals. Gary ran around on the ground letting the animals chase him from place to place while the other boys knocked the animals out of place just before they were about to eat Gary. They killed all of the animals except one, which they decided was too harmless to bother with since it was just a gigantic slime mold. So, the slime mold survived and started lurching around the city as a symbol of how helpless the military of Camia would be if they didnt have the TCT boys to pick up the slack for them.

In another battle, Teddy told Gary to participate directly by trying to kill an animal that had rolled over onto its back and couldn't get up. But he was unable to harm the animal, so Teddy killed it with a bomb. In yet another battle, while the other boys were casting magic spells and splashing the predatory firebirds with fire and ice, Gary decided to run in and punch one of the birds directly, but he hurt his hand on the bird's beak and later on the bird bit him, incapacitating him for the rest of the battle. Then, one of the other boys accidentally hit Gary with a water spell, causing him to nearly drown. Then he healed Gary with a magic potion.

Soon, Gary switched schools to a "Wamian school" to isolate himself from the bullies around him. On a hot day in late May, Teddy and another Camian boy invaded Gary's new school and took one of the teachers hostage. They said that they were doing it in the name of their homeland, Camia, and that the Wamian school was unwelcome and was trying to brainwash Gary. The teacher pled with the boys to let him go, and promised to prove that they were not brainwashing their students. When Teddy looked at the textbook the teacher had been reading from, he agreed that it was not anti-Camian propaganda and apologized for invading the school. But still they took Gary out of the school and went home.

Two weeks later, Teddy and Gary were walking in the woods. A woman was walking close behind the two boys as they approached a very polluted river. Teddy told the woman to leave them alone, but she refused. Then, when she was facing the other direction, Teddy launched himself on the woman and started kicking and punching her. Then he just walked away, figuring she'd learned her lesson. But the boys stopped at the riverbank, and the woman soon reappeared behind them. She pushed Gary into the polluted river and then stepped back and smiled at what she'd done. Teddy ignored Gary and started fighting the woman again. He gave her quite a thrashing, and decided that it was a good time to search the polluted river for what remained of his friend Gary.

Gary survived, however, and soon recovered. Later that summer he challenged a Camian boy to a race and won. The prize was $100. The other boy, however, attacked Gary and took most of the money away. Gary went home sad but at least happy that the other boy had let him keep a part of his winnings.

Other Kunmas

There werent really any other true kunma characters. A few kids showed up in few strips and were targets of verbal abuse, but not physical abuse. Most of them had magic powers, after all, and could simply throw their bullies out the window but calmly decided to just simply deal with it.

For example, the children in the BTD superhero league (Rainbow, Donald, etc) were all preschoolers, and were made fun of by the other leagues because they were so small even compared to the other kids that they seemed more like toys than people. Yet, these little children were just as powerful as the older ones and they all knew it.

Some characters are extremely unlucky, such as Richie, but are not kunmas because they do not resemble me in any way. For example, a slave named Richie was portrayed as so annoying and useless that he didn't even get sympathy from the enemies of the TCT kids who enslaved him, let alone from the other TCT kids.

I suppose Lucy of "Larnac & Lucy" (possibly my first ever comic, from when I was 7 or 8 years old, unless the laminated wax paper ones were older) could be considered a kunma, since every time she appeared she got pushed around/sat on/etc by Larnac, until the very last comic when she reversed the situation and made it clear that it would stay that way. I never really identified with Lucy, though, as at the time I was at the age where I could not visualize myself as a girl no matter how I tried.

Once in a great while, Teddy and his friends were themselves bullied by larger kids, but these bullies had no magic powers and could not actually harm the TCT kids; they merely assumed that since the TCT kids were small that they would be weak.

Wamia

Arguably the entire nation of Wamia consists of kunmas, as they lived in a much more bountiful environment than the Camians but were so stupid that they polluted their country to the point where children were born with defects and being mentally retarded was so common that it came to be considered normal.

The Cleanup Corps

There was also the "Cleanup Corps", a group of eight elementary school children who went around the Earth cleaning up environmental problems while being attacked by snipers and bombers as if they were the greatest threat yet to the civilization around them. I blame Captain Planet. These children did not even have magic powers or advanced technology; they simply went around the world cleaning up toxic waste spills while dodging machine guns and torpedos. (Because they lived on Earth, they were not in the "gun-free" paradise world that most of my writing takes place in.) The Cleanup Corps is quite possibly the most absurd idea I've ever had.

From my "red notebook" I see that I had originally intended the Cleanup Corps to have literally singlehandedly saved the entire Earth from destruction because another group of eight children, a subgroup of TCT, had been ordered by their teacher to singlehandedly destroy the Earth. Those eight kids did in fact destroy much of the Earth, but when they met up with the Cleanup Corps they suddenly switched sides and the two groups of kids befriended each other. After the Earthlings learned that the Cleanup Corps had saved their lives and stopped the destruction of the Earth that Earth's leaders had previously been unable to even slow down, the leaders decided the time had come to finish off the Cleanup Corps once and for all. TCT decided to rescue them and move them to planet Teppala, where at least only a few people such as Dr. Zāme would shoot at them. Thus, the environmental cleanup missions stopped and the Earth became messier again.

Apparently, once TCT had rescued the Cleanup Corps and moved them to Teppala, they became mostly independent from their teacher Nancy, and Nancy reacted to this by adopting the Cleanup Corps as "the new TCT" even though they didnt have superpowers. At the time, replacing the world's strongest superhero league with a group of younger kids with no powers at all seemed perfectly reasonable to me. What could possibly go wrong?

Also, apparently, a boy named Soap was an STW member in one later incarnation of my story (written in 2008).

Reflection on Teppala

I might rationalize this idea by saying that the children were merely a wing of a larger organization that mostly employed adults. Also, the Cleanup Corps was not a kunma because none of the characters resembled me.

Direct borrowings

Calvin

In fact, I just now remembered that even Calvin made an appearance in my comics, though only as Spaceman Spiff. He had no magic powers, but did have his "mertilizer" gun which put him on a level with the other superheros. Calvin was the only superhero who carried a gun, and the others were thankful for his unique presence. Stupendous Man never appeared, nor did the obscure Capt Napalm or just the "regular" Calvin. Spaceman Spiff was usually referred to as "Calvin" by the other characters. In one strip, the Teddy character mistakenly referred to him as "Gary", which, due to my using a pen, I could not undo. I fixed the problem by immediately adding Gary into the plotline (it was a battle scene) alongside Calvin.

My early comics were quite Calvinesque, the kind that the "real" Calvin would have read, except that mine always had much worse artwork: I didnt even realize birds had beaks at first, I just drew mouths. I also was fond of depicting conversations as taking place mostly or entirely outside the panels, so that it was literally just speech bubbles within each panel, colored according to which person was speaking.

Archie

Further back in my childhood, I used Archie Comics characters as well. I remember one story that had Archie, Jughead, Betty, Veronica, Dilton, Reggie, and myself. My character was very much like Jughead. I believe I was writing myself into the story as being about 18 years old, to match the other Archie characters. I didn't seem to get the idea to self-insert my character as the age I actually was until shortly afterwards.

I borrowed some ideas from TMNT, which was owned by Archie at the time, but no actual characters. Ace Duck was the only character to even be mentioned, and he never actually appeared.

Video games

Some indirect borrowings from video games still exist. The Raspara people stereotypically wear bathrobes because they are patterned after the Wizzrobe "people" in the original Legend of Zelda video game. When I was young (maybe 8 years old) I pretended I was Link and that I had made friends with a Yellow Wizzrobe when we met each other in a doorway. This is why the "Yellow Raspara" befriended the Swamp Kids and the "Blue Raspara" doubled down on their abusive practices. Let's face it, Wizzrobes were the meanest of the mean; they would love being portrayed as Raspara.

Early on I had some direct borrowings, such as from Mystic Quest. This game features an unusual art style with tiny humans fighting animals literally thousands of times larger than the humans, such that even an enemy named "Basilisk" (an insect) is able to "scrunch" (presumably meaning to crush) the players, humans attack by jumping up at the enemies' feet. (Note: I might be misremembering: it was either a Basilisk or a leech that crushed me. Or both.) Likewise, a slime mold attacks humans with a pseudopod because the humans are so tiny that even an amoeba can cradle one with just a tiny part of its body.

This led my early comics to feature humans (mostly boys around my age at the time) fighting off gigantic mutants created by the Zāme clan. True to my inspiration, most of these animals fought the kids by crushing them instead of using sharp teeth or claws against them, even if doing that would have been far more effective. For that matter, essentially all of the animals the kids fought could simply have swallowed them whole, but never attempted it. Even the snake whose tongue was bigger than the whole bodies of the kids who were fighting to take it down merely tried to poison the boys with his tongue (!) but never succeeded because as above all of the children seemed to be invincible.

Female characters

A few girls did appear, but I just now realized that most of my female characters were also based on video games I was playing at the time. However, video games in the early 1990s didnt have much room for personality development in their characters, so really I was being original after all because I was giving personalities to the otherwise very flat characters in the games. I did have some female characters that were entirely original, but most of them appeared in backup roles or in typical female roles such as teachers and people's mothers. (Only very late in my comic career did I begin to introduce "girlfriends".)

As above, although the national government of Camia was helpless to track down Dr. Zāme or any of the other men who kept making life hard for the TCT kids, they were seemingly okay with going after women. For example, in the year 4190, Camia declared war on an middle school teacher living in Baeba Swamp. Most of her students were already imprisoned, but two girls were still at large because for the most part, girls were left out of the most dangerous missions. Thus, the two girls flew to Wamia to free the other kids. When they arrived they broke open the prison and let out the six kids being held prisoner, and then the eight of them flew to Earth to rescue the rest of the kids. Then, they all flew to planet Namma to get away from the war that their own nation had started with them.

End of comics and novel attempts

In 1994, I drew my last comic, "JEPARODY", a parody of all of the comics I had drawn up until that point. It started as a Jeopardy game, but when one contestant (probably Teddy) got a question wrong he responded by crushing Alex Trebek and then turning on all of the other contestants as well. Every character was badly drawn, and most of the panels consisted of people fighting or people talking in speech bubbles while remaining outside the panel.

I had outgrown my hobby.

By this time, I had also stopped writing my novel, although I did not intend at the time for that state of affairs to be permanent. I just never was able to pick it back up again. I've tried three times since then to finish the novel, and even have quite a long plotline mapped out, but I jsut don't seem to be able to do it. Thus, since resuming writing in late 1998 I've essentially only written in "history book" format, writing about whole nations' thousand year histories instead of the affairs of individual people over a span of a few weeks.

Geography and climate

Camia's planet (Teppala) was only slightly larger than Earth. In my oldoldoldold stories I drew up maps full of countries with names like "Gunther" and perhaps "Bornovia" but I'm not sure that I even at that time had a Camia. When I was 10 years old I came up with a map of Camia with a shape based on my bedroom. Most of the settlements were on the east coast, which is where my bed and later on my computer was. The bedroom closet was a separate state in the far north. Since all of the superheros in TCT and other leagues such as BTD were from Camia, Camia was by far the most important country on the planet. In chapter 1 of my novel I mentioned another location on planet Teppala called "South America" (!), showing that my imagination for creating names had not really evolved very far at that point, but put no effort whatsoever into developing the other countries on the planet except for Camia's enemy, Wamia.

Wamia was shaped like a "fat" Vietnam, meaning that most of it was near the (south-)east coast, but it had some land further inland than anyplace in Vietnam. Nevertheless, the Wamians were a very sea-oriented people, and since Camia kept them from expanding further inland, they pushed out to sea. The Wamians even tried to build cities underwater (despite seemingly backward customs like driving cars, this was a far-future setting) to get away from the Camians.

In my late teens, I came up with the idea that perhaps the other countries on Teppala simply didn't exist, since it seemed irrational for a country as powerful as Camia, or even one as powerful as Wamia, to sit content with such a small portion of their planet's land when they could have easily conquered the many other continents around them. I decided that since Camia was by far the more powerful of the two nations, any such conquests would go to them, and there would in fact be only two countries on the entire planet: Camia with 97% of the land, and Wamia with the remaining 3%. However I still held to the idea that Camia's population was very low, and that most Camians lived in the "traditional" part of Camia which represented the "northeast" corner of my bedroom. This contradiction hasn't bothered me a great deal, although it is one of the few contradictions I can't simply wave away as being from two different times since the novel takes place in the "late" era (c 4208) and yet clearly still other countries existed, even if only one was mentioned, in only one sentence, in the entire book. One possible explanation would be that the kids had to travel back only "from another continent", which could mean they were still within their home country. After all, what other country besides Camia would call up a group of 11 year old boys to make world-changing decisions about international politics? Unless they were just vacationing there, of course. I don't remember what I was thinking.

The Cold Wind gives us power

The very foundation of "Camia" was the power of cold. On top of Mt Washington at 10 years old I stood in the middle of summer and experienced 50mph winds at 45°F (about 8°C). Thus "Camia" was born: an country, an entire empire in which in the middle of summer it was still cold and the rest of the year was colder still. Some years later, I found myself walking uphill a mile to school in -33°F (-35°C) weather and thus beat even the very most exaggerated stereotype of the "in my day we had it hard" story many kids hear growing up.

In my late teen years, I went overboard and started drawing climate maps of Camia where great metropolises were built in areas of the country with average temperatures around -170F. I've rejected that and gone back to the early canonical Camia whose major cities are built in a belt around 45N where the temperature is nonetheless sharply colder than any place at Earth, even high altitude ones, at 45N. The climate instead is similar to the southern rim of the coldest tier of Siberia (see Irkutsk) or the very northern tier of Canadian frontier settlement (see Dawson Creek, whose temperature stats are almost exactly in line with what I had originally mapped out for the city that became "Baeba Swamp").

What was important is that Camia chose to settle its people in cold climates on purpose. Camia stretched almost to the equator, and had plenty of tropical land available for its people, but only a few people moved there. It is as if Canada took over what would have otherwise become the United States and much of Latin America around 1800 AD and then nonetheless decided to leave the warm lands more or less alone and build its major cities in places like Winnipeg and the above-mentioned Dawson Creek. Camia fiercely defended its tropical possessions from Wamia and other outside powers, but did not itself make any significant efforts to settle its people there.

They did not establish a lot of settlements in the coldest parts of their empire, either; most of the cities were near the "middle" around 45N (I expanded Camia beyond my bedroom and into the bathroom : ) where the climate was "perfect" ... perfect, that is, in the eyes of the Camians. Any winters averaging warmer than about 15F were too warm, but anything much below 0F was getting a bit too cold. Nevertheless, cities did exist in the cold north, which was shaped like a "tall" Canada, meaning that it extended even closer to the pole than Canada, but was narrower from east to west. Temperatures in this area, "Manitoland", were much colder than those at comparable latitudes in Canada and even Siberia, especially during summer.

Technology and links between the two worlds

My world now takes place in an environment roughly comparable to medieval Earth but with a lot fewer humans than the Earth had had even in that era. This is partly because sapient animals are also present, and have kept humans from growing too strong. Thus, human technology progresses so slowly that it remains nearly static for the first 20000 years after the first settlements on Rilola. Some ideas are discovered and then abandoned because the only civilization making use of them collapsed. I even want to have guns on Teppala, but to have them be so very weak that arrows remain forever the preferred weapon among the elite armies of the world.

Because of universal canonicity, I have a hard time integrating my ideas from the science fiction world I worked on for the first 20 years or so of my writing career (roughly age 3 to age 23 ... i was always into space, from the very very beginning. Maybe that planets-and-stars themed potty training toilet had something to do with it).

The invention of the incubator

In earlier writings, around the year 2001, I wrote sentences like The population of Camia rose back from less than 3000 after the Tinkers' killings in 3827 to over a million in 3833. I dont remember it, but Im pretty sure that I was assuming that the Tinks had invented and perfected an incubator to give them babies, freeing up their women from the difficult and painful role of womb-service so they could focus on actually raising and nursing the babies. Such a birth rate would be impossible with womb birth alone. This may also be why not only the Tinks, but most of the societies that attacked the Tinks during their time in power were seemingly all males, never having to worry about protecting their women at home when they sent their entire male population off on a new military conquest.

Birth control

I seem to have repurposed the phrase "birth control" around the year 2001 to mean birth by an incubator. I only just now realized this, having probably forgotten it about ten years ago.

Alcohol

As I wrote my early conworld entirely without experience in drinking alcohol, it simply never occurred to me as a child, or evne a teenager, whether the Camians should have bars serving wine, beer, etc. or not. If I were to decide to borrow backwards from Teppala into Camia, since the Camians are technically the Swamp Kids, they would inherit the Swamp Kids' extreme prohibitionist viewpoints and therefore ban both the consumption and the production of all forms of alcohol, even if intended for export to one of Camia's many rivals. Since even the Swamp Kids' enemy party, the Raspara, passionately hated alcohol as well, this would mean that the Camians would not be exposed to much dissent on this issue even from their worst enemies.

Having a Camia without alcohol is a bit disappointing to me, but I refuse to violate my own rules even if it would make remembering my old childhood fantasies more interesting. Wamia would not likely ban alcohol, and might even see Camia's insistence on total prohibition as an invitation to smuggle various forms of alcohol into Camia, but Wamia was always far weaker than Camia and would not likely have been very successful. At most they would thrive on letting Camians drive into Wamia (road transport was very cheap, even if space travel was not) and then helping them sneak back into Camia when they were done.

Candy

The Swamp Kids also hated candy. However, they saw the consumption of candy as far less of a vice than the consumption of alcohol, because whereas alcohol is addictive and drinking alcohol is (in their eyes) worse than having nothing at all, candy is merely wasteful since the body consumes it quickly and soon becomes hungry again, and is not addictive.

Xema

Note that the supervillains who spent so much time kicking the Camians around are not identified with the Raspara but with Xema, which in the Teppala world is identified specifically as a colony settled by the Swamp Kids. This is in keeping with my original mindset that all of the supervillains living on planet Xema were in fact Camians who decided to betray their nation rather than Wamians or one of Camia's many other enemies on other planets. Thus Dr. Zāme got his kicks by bombing buildings, torpedoing boats full of little kids, and breeding gigantic mutants to eat up the humans around them, but at least he did it all while stone-cold sober.

Conlangs

To a much lesser extent, i try to follow universal canonicity with my conlangs as well. For example, 22 years ago h was the Moonshine word for "human" (I dont remember the etymology), so I needed to make sure that Khulls hʷ "soldier" could evolve into that same h in the new Moonshine, which is now a daughter languages of Khulls whereas in 1994 it just floated on air.

The Jafa people

Names like Dr. Zāme are taken from a "Camian" language that has no counterpart in my Teppala conworld because it did not evolve from any other language. Ijust now realized that I for a short time called this language Jafa (/jafa/; even at age 10, I knew that j was /j/ in many languages) and stated that the Jafa were a culture that arose within Camia but were not specific to it. I wasn't clear whether Jafa had evolved from English or not and probably abandoned the entire idea soon after I came up with it. I vaguely remember Teddy having to reveal that he was "a fierce Jafa warrior" when he got kidnapped one day by giant spiders, to which one spider's reply was "EEEYIIKES! BRACE YOURSELF, MARGLOOB! IT'S A JAFA!" I don't believe that I intended the Jafa to have their own language, but I am calling what I had "Jafa" because I identify it with a particular stage in my childhood writing career, when I had not replaced Camia's language with something completely different.

I like the look of the "Jafa language" but there is no easy way to take any of my existing conlangs and force them to evolve into something like Camian/Jafa. Even if there were, it still wouldn't "work" because it would only be a valid language for a few hundred years before evolving into something unrecognizable.

Jafa as Khulls

For the most part I identify the spirit of the Jafa language with Khulls, even though Khulls looks nothing like Camian. The similarity is not in the phonology or grammar or even the spelling but in the feeling of intense power and strength that both languages exude to me. A name like Xapalês simply looks strong to me, without even knowing what it means.

A small number of Khulls words, mostly names, are imports from the Camian language, generally presupposing that the Camian-like form was something that existed a few thousand years before Khulls, such as in the Gold language or even further back in Tapilula.

It helps that Camian was basically a stereotypical "bad conlang", the kind that most people create as their very first. It changed from month to month: did it have long vowels or not? I decided pretty early on that "Zāme" was definitely a Camian name, as it was important to the storyline that Dr. Zāme be Camian and not an intruder from a foreign country or even a foreign planet, but how does that mesh with the fact that Camian is supposed to be derived from English after 400 years of sound changes? I never had an answer for that. I would say that the form of the language with the most emotional pull for me is the one with the long vowels, however, as it is the only form of the language that is completely unrelated to English; i.e., it is an a priori conlang. I never got beyond making it a namimg language when I was young, however, because within less than a year I was alryeady recasting Camian as a future fork of English/.

Jafa as Pabappa

In the Teppala conworld, the Swamp Kids arose from a subtribe of the Andanese people, who were at that stage of history largely assimilated as a family of tribes of Pabaps. They thus had historically spoken Andanese, but had given it up in favor of speaking Pabappa in day to day life long before they declared themselves Swamp Kids. Andanese was retained as a religious language but all Swamp Kids were fluent in Pabappa. The Pabappa of this era was actually Babakiam, which looks similar in many ways but has long vowels and many long sequences of vowels whereas Pabappa does not. Bābākiam nevertheless still has a very childlike, even babyish, appearance, with phrases like Paubabi Pumau Bapababe in everyday parlance. This is the very opposite of the strong, masculine, "intense" Khulls language. It could work in a somewhat ironic sense, in that the TCT superheros were constantly forced to deal with humilitating situations as they fought against larger, more muscular adults, but at the same time never felt afraid of those adults because the TCT kids were much stronger in every way, even in physical strength, than the adults who attacked them. However, this does not work very well because I originally patterned Pabappa after the language which in my early writing was spoken on planet Namma (it never had a name). If Pabappa goes to the Jafa there is no language left for Namma.

Jafa as Andanese

For a while, I tried to identify Camian with "Anzanese", by which I mean Andanese but with a very messy way of re-reading the tiny phonology to turn it into something quite large. Essentially every syllable, and in some cases even a combination of two syllables, became a phoneme, and therefore words became a lot shorter. But the only way that this resembles the Camian language of my childhood is the prominence of the phoneme /z/, long a staple of science fiction.

The role of Japanese

Because I played video games at the time, I took some names from Japanese for some of my characters. Thus Camia was a mix of whites and Japanese ... or at least, the one town that most of the action took place in was. The rest of Camia may have been entirely white, but I never gave it much thought. I just knew I really liked Japanese. This is a bit of a problem, because from the very earliest writings I did, I was well aware that even though I represented everyone's speech in my comics and stories as English, they were really speaking Jafa, and therefore encountered trouble when they wanted to communicate with people from Earth. I wobbled back and forth between 2408 AD and 4208 AD as the "present day" time period in which the stories were happening, with 4208 being (I think) the earlier choice. This would make the survival of Japanese intact after 2000 years very interesting. I could, of course, just handwave and say "well, Jafa is represented as English, so this other language is represented as Japanese," but I am pretty sure that even my much younger self would not have taken such a solution. Instead, I would have created a second conlang for the "Japanese" immigrants to speak and be named in. A month or so ago, I decided to use bynames such as "the Mountain" and "the Little Philosopher" for the "Japanese" people, but I want to instead use a newer conlang, probably Thaoa, even though I only very rarely and hesitantly borrow "backwards" from my adult work into my childhood work. I choose Thaoa because Thaoa is identified with the nation of Sara in one story, and in another story Sara is identified with Japan. This causes problems, because Teppala's Thaoa was "Sara" in 2600 AD, and didn't even exist in 4200 AD since it had been smeared into a mess of broken-up mountain villages by the much larger nations around it, but if I borrow only the language and not the culture it isn't really a true contradiction.

If Japanese is Thaoa, Jafa can really only be Khulls, since the Thaoan people preyed on the Pabaps and to a lesser extent the Andanese, both of whom only looked upon the Thaoans with fear in their eyes, wholly unlike the mutual love and respect shared by the Jafa people and the "Japanese" whom they invited to move in them.

Notes to self

• "he only doesnt let me down the stairs" ... complaining someome isnt THAT abusive because he at least still allows access to the hallway
• The (Soap) Bubbles were identified as identical with the Andanese in a scrap story immedaitrely after the TDA story

• However, it was certainly not just an ethnic group; e.g. Pinuha and the Red Sun, the two most powerful people in the government of the Little Country, joined the Bubbles, fired all Swamp Kids from the government, and banished all Swamp Kids from the Little Country.

• One story that uses the word "bubble(s)" fifty times seems to identify them as Mampum, indicating they include Crystals. This would explain why the Crystals of the 4149-4268 era seem to have nothing in common with the Crystals of the 1500AD-3915 AD era. This same story also uses "crystal(s)" 169 times.

• Can "Larnac and Lucy" be here?
• "leaving just Ezra" <--- when did this happen?
• The Swamp Kids may be a fork of the Crystals. The "Vaamūans" that invaded Tarwas and later got invaded by Atlam were identified as Crystals in one source.
• there was a strong localistic sentiment in amade, and the region refused to force its children to learn standard camian, preferring instead the smooth, measured dialect that had come to them from clubia. <--- possibly explains "STW was imported from Clubia"

Not qualified h not ă pappo

:)