AlphaLeap

AlphaLeap is an empire based in a large, rounded peninsula in the tropics, historically between 16°N to 23°N and from 25°E to 35°E. At various times in history, they established colonies in rival nations, and at other times, suffered invasions themselves. They remained a distinct society, however, for many thousands of years.

Language

AlphaLEAP was the source from which the Gold language spread out. For the next 3500 years, AlphaLEAP maintained a contiguous speech area with Nama and Lobexon, and therefore by the time of classical Khulls around 4770 AD the language of AlphaLeap was also Khulls; even dialectal differences were minimal.

However, AlphaLeap also spoke a "Naman" language that may have been of the Andanic branch rather than Gold. This language is the source of long names like Halasala and Hamaluma.

Climate and geography

AlphaLEAP and its ally, Wax, form a contiguous geographical territory stretching from 16°N to 23°N and from 25°E to 35°E, the northern end of the large Ġʷùdu Plain. Both nations together can be called AlphaLEAP. The climate is tropical but very dry; thus the population density is lower than in areas to the north or south, and most food is taken from the sea.

AlphaLeap shares with Taryte a hot and humid, but fairly rainless climate influenced by its position in the desert belt and mostly out of reach of the summer monsoons that produce forests in areas closer to the Equator. Summer rainfall is actually higher in the northern part of AlphaLEAP due to the occasional hits the coastline takes from hurricanes. Winter rainfall is also higher in the north.

Though AlphaLEAP itself is largely dry, the moist tropical air also produces rainfall in the mountains to the west of AlphaLeap, feeding rivers that flow down the coast into AlphaLEAP and Taryte.

Demographics

The people of AlphaLeap have brown skin, somewhat lighter than those of Taryte and darker than those of Atlam. Occasionally light hair is also seen. This is due to historical contact between the dark-skinned aboriginal tribes and many groups of immigrants from around the world. However, there has been little immigration in the last 4000 years, and the originally diverse Leapers have today developed a homogeneous body type. They typically have slow metabolisms and are well adapted for their tropical climate, eating a diet consisting primarily of meat and fish. Body size and most other traits are near average for the planet.

Early history

Founding of AlphaLEAP

In 1103, Thaoan settlers founded the colony of AlphaLeap on a large peninsula in the tropics. The unusual name followed a pattern formulated by the empire of Nama: a leap was a colony not geographically attached to its parent nation, whereas a loop was one that was.

The land in AlphaLEAP was much drier than in Tōžetana, and the aboriginals' population density was much lower. Thaoan settlers thus planned to outgrow the aboriginals and become aboriginals themselves, completely independent of all outside powers, even Thaoa itself.

Thaoa subdued the aboriginals very rapidly, and introduced them to their language, which at the time was merely a dialect of the Gold language. Thus AlphaLeap was the site of the first successful implantation of a Tapilula-family language into the tropical side of the continent of Rilola.

Politics

AlphaLeap's founders forged a middle path between the total pacifism of Paba, which they predicted would soon be home to parasites from all of their enemy nations, and that of their home country Thaoa, which they predicted would soon find itself in an unwinnable war. AlphaLeap's founders stated that their military would be used only for offensive purposes, and would refuse to defend its civilians against invasions from outside powers. Instead, citizens were expected to defend themselves, and were allowed to own and fashion weapons and armor from any materials they could find.

They considered themselves tadpoles because they were defenseless but grew rapidly.

Since AlphaLeap's military was not required to defend its home territory, AlphaLeap declared war on all of the other nations on the planet, planning to fight the war at their leisure and leave the citizens of AlphaLeap to deal with the consequences. They promised to repay the citizens by delivering slaves captured from foreign nations, and also declared all other peoples in the world to be slaves. The Leapers figured that a good place to look for slaves would be a tropical nation with a high population density but a weak army and little or no navy, unable to defend its people or even unify them against a common threat.

Early politics

AlphaLEAP's politics turned quickly away from those of its parent nation Thaoa, but retained many similarities. AlphaLeap treasured the policy of respecting others and early on legalized homosexuality and abortion, and abolished slavery and the death penalty. They considered themselves feminists in a broad sense, but stated that they would not enter a transnational alliance simply on the basis of feminism, and would not defend women's rights in other countries.

By contrast, homosexuality was still illegal in their homeland of Thaoa, and even in neighboring Paba, famously a safe place for people unwanted elsewhere. Homosexuals in Paba were not killed, but exiled; even so, life outside the cities in Paba was very difficult. The poor living conditions of homosexuals led them to be associated with poverty and crime, further insulting their image among the common people of Paba. AlphaLeap offered citizenship to all homosexual Pabaps, but knew that they had no realistic chance of being allowed to board a ship bound for AlphaLeap.

Contact with Tōžetăna

Despite abolishing slavery in their earliest days as a nation, the Leapers their hot, dry climate made hunting difficult and that they would need to depend on plantation labor in order to feed themselves. AlphaLeap selected Tōžetăna as its preferred source of slaves, since the people of Tōžetăna were only weakly attracted to each other and had only a very weak common military, which itself was pledged not to Tōžetăna but to the neighboring empire of Kxesh.

However, when the aboriginal population of AlphaLeap realized what was happening, they rebelled against the colonizers. Despite AlphaLeap having subdued the aboriginal population more rapidly than any other colonizing power, they had carefully followed the Subumpamese model of colonization as they did so, meaning that they had attempted to actually improve the quality of life for the aboriginals, avoid violence, and keep even accidental casualties as close as possible to zero. This meant that the aboriginals had been unwilling to take up arms against the Leapers, but also that their population had survived the colonization intact, and had actually grown slightly despite their being pushed into the interior by the Leapers. The aboriginals signed a pact with the neighboring Star Empire, a weak power that agreed to take in the aboriginals as refugees if they were to lose the war, getting nothing in return except the promise that the aboriginals would defend the Stars against AlphaLeap if AlphaLeap chose to make the Stars their next victim.

Because of the war at home, AlphaLeap pulled out of Tōžetăna, realizing that the people of Tōžetăna would almost certainly join the war on the side of the aboriginals rather than helping the people who had abducted and enslaved them. The Leapers did not give up on slavery, however; they decided to instead invade their original homeland, figuring that if they enslaved people with the same physical type as their abductors, those people would at least in the future give in to racial sympathies and side with their abusers against the dark-skinned aboriginals.

AlphaLeap decided to capture their next batch of slaves from southern Paba, even though Paba was protected by its powerful navy from any outside attacks. They planned to thwart the Pabap navy by establishing parasitic colonies along the coast, which would not be attacked because Paba's royal family had promised never to defend their people against an invasion. From here, they would abduct young Pabap people and carry them off to AlphaLeap, where they would be let loose to fend for themselves. Even though the Leaper sailors knew that the Pabaps they were abducting would immediately attack the Leapers in their colony, they hoped that if the Leaper civilians were able to win the war the Pabaps would in the future eventually become slaves.

Soon, the war began to turn against AlphaLeap. The civilian army had been making progress against the aboriginals in the interior by closing them off from the sea, but when AlphaLeap's pirates began dumping Pabap abductees along the east coast, the Pabaps quickly overwhelmed their intended captors and set up a colony of their own where the Leapers were the ones being enslaved. From this colony, the Pabaps launched an invasion of AlphaLeap, intending to meet up with the aboriginals in the interior and squeeze the colonists between them.

With each new boat docking on the east coast of AlphaLeap, the Pabap population of AlphaLeap increased, and they began to manufacture weapons to increase their chances of victory against the Leapers. The Leapers protested and told their pirates to stop dumping Pabaps in AlphaLeap since they had no reasonable expectation of being able to enslave them, but the pirates decided then to join the war against AlphaLeap on the side of the Pabaps and aboriginals, and they began their invasion from the south coast, an area which was still firmly under Leaper control.

Because the pirates had docked in an area around 16°N, far from where the Pabaps had been settled, the Pabaps were unaware of their presence, and the pirates were able to disguise themselves as allies without the Pabaps suspecting they were allying with their former captors. The combined alliance of the Pabaps, the pirates, and the aboriginals quickly crushed the Leaper civilian population and established a new government for AlphaLEAP, with power split between the Pabap/pirate coalition and the aboriginals. Settlement rights along the coast were extended to the aboriginals and the entire Leaper civilian population was enslaved.

Invasion of Paba

Around 1430, AlphaLEAP declared war on the pacifist empire of Paba and launched an invasion by sea. In the Battle of Mayūas they slaughtered 400 Pabaps who had come out from their homes to offer gifts to the invading Leapers. The Pabaps' plan was to enwrap the invading Leapers in a bubble of Pabaps who would make peace with the Leapers by offering to pamper them and try to convince them to settle down. The Leapers traveled next to the Pabap city of Ŋaananiau, where the women of the city had gathered to greet the soldiers and offer them new homes. But the Pabaps were again unsuccessful, and the resulting Battle of Ŋaananiau killed more than 1000 Pabap civilians.

Later history of 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 AlphaLeap, 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.

Note: This information is adapted from a space-age society I wrote about when I was a teenager, and thus seems out of place in a medieval setting. However, I believe that it makes sense even so, given the context of AlphaLEAP's role in the internal affairs of other nations.

Military policy

Though not officially a pacifistic nation, AlphaLEAP's military had a strict policy of refusing to retaliate against foreign attackers. They allowed foreign armies to invade and occupy territory in AlphaLEAP and did not protect their citizens from the foreign armies. Instead, the citizens were expected to defend themselves while AlphaLEAP's military instead devoted itself entirely to foreign conquest. Essentially, their army was for offensive purposes only, and their leaders claimed that they would survive by continual outward growth rather than by protecting their homeland.

Feminism

AlphaLeap was a feministic society, and in the capital city (usually also called Nisundusa) men over the age of five^? were not allowed to live, nor even to visit unless accompanied by an adult female police officer. Women in AlphaLeap had husbands and children, but their husbands were forced to live outside the city and the women of the city thus generally had two homes: one for their husband, whom they would visit at night, and another to retreat into during breaks at work (transportation was too slow for most women even to reach the edge of the city without a long journey.) Nevertheless, many women in Nisundusa were in fact lesbians, and the Pabappa name of the city, Sāmama, came to be used as another word for lesbianism.

Boys in Nisundusa were allowed to stay until the age of five, and then were required to move out. Some women simply abandoned their sons, while others accepted that in order to raise a son they would need to give up their job in the city center and start a new career in the more traditional society surrounding it.

Unlike societies such as Repilia and FILTER, AlphaLEAP's people were not uniformly tall-femaled. In FILTER, women had been able to push men around and tell them what to do without fear of being physically attacked because men in FILTER had simply been too physically small to hold their own in a fight against a healthy woman. In Repilia this was even more so. By contrast, although the native population of AlphaLEAP was closely related, racially, to that of Repilia, their women did not have the same advantage in height that the Repilians and some other tribes did. Thus, for them to create a society ruled by women only, they felt they needed to physically bar all adult males (and even boys over a certain age) from entering their city.

Violent crime in AlphaLEAP

In their all-female society headquartered in Nisundusa, the violent crime rate was very low. As a result, there was only a very small police force, and that police force was unaccustomed to violence. Soon, adult men began moving into Nisundusa, and even though their mere presence was illegal, the female police force was too weak to stop them, and many police officers ran away, fearing for their lives, whenever one of the male intruders spotted them on the streets. The men made their living by attacking female pedestrians, and sometimes invading homes in Nisundusa to steal food and other household items that they needed to survive.

When AlphaLEAP realized the problem, they created a female response team to replace the food and other household goods stolen by the men with goods of equal or greater value than what had been stolen. Thus, they hoped to dissuade the victims from fighting back against the intruders, in the knowledge that attempts to fight back would only get more women killed. The mainstream police force also promised not to fight back against muggings and home invasions.

However, some men reacted to this promise of invincibility by becoming even more aggressive against the women around them, and in some cases holding entire buildings hostage. For example, one man, calling himself "Caveman", blocked the door of the main legislative building in Nisundusa just as the parliament was finishing its daily business. Even though he was alone, he was the only one in the area with a weapon, and he threatened to stab all of the forty or so women inside the building to death if they did not hand over total control of the government to him. The women were afraid, and could not call for help because the location of the building was such that no scream for help would be audible by any passers-by. The women thus remained hostage in their building for the entire night. However, the next morning, a larger crowd of women approached the building and realized the problem. They left and soon returned with an even larger crowd of women, over 300, who threatened to take on "Caveman" in hand to hand combat. Caveman actually fled into the parliament building, figuring he could have an easier time slashing the throats of the women inside the building than facing off against the women outside the building. But although he killed many women, the combination of the two crowds soon brought him down, and he was placed in prison the next day, where he amused himself by harrassing the prison guards.

Thus almost all crime was committed by adult males, who made up just 1% of the population. However, crimes such as rape and beatings were not particularly common in Nisundusa, and relatively few men chose this parasitic lifestyle, because even those men who intimidated the police so much that they were never brought to justice lived a harsher life than most ordinary men living in traditional societies in the rest of AlphaLeap.

Contrast with Wax

AlphaLeap was a strong ally of the nearby nation of Wax (also known as Lulala). Properly, Lulala was the name of the capital city, not the name of the whole country, but Lulala dominated the life and politics of Wax to such an extent that most foreigners treated them as identical.

Shortly after AlphaLEAP banned adult males from its capital city of Nisundusa, Wax banned adult females from its own capital city of Lulala. The two nations pledged to work together as they soon evolved parallel but very different societies.

Just as AlphaLEAP tolerated an illegal but very visible male minority in Nisundusa, Wax imported a small number of females into Lulala. Most females in Lulala were tied to the walls of large buildings and used as rape slaves by the male population, though a smaller number of women were tied to wooden posts in alleyways instead. Wax was proud of its female minority and told the women that they were as much a part of Wax as were any of the men, and that they should not be ashamed of their role in society.

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. The slaves were amused to see the Leapers struggling to carry water from area lakes and rivers to try to pour it on the fire, knowing that they could not ask the slaves to help because any slave would simply dump the water on the ground. The Leapers were so occupied that they could not even control their slaves, and many slaves simply fled, even knowing that they no longer had a home or any possessions.

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 admitted defeat, and this caused the Halasalans to mostly turn against the remaining Leaper governors. They formed a new political party, the Latiki, for the first time in their emipre's history. A few Halasalans who were loyal to the Leaper governors moved into forts with them, expecting to face the 15000 soldiers of the Latiki army soon. But the Latiki 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 with the firebirds, specifically a species of firebirds that was much larger than average. These were called "20-ton rocs".

Latiki ideals

The new Latiki party was run entirely by women. Latiki ideology demanded that all able-bodied adult males serve in the military and be battle-ready at all times. These soldiers were also required to procure their own food, so much of the farmland in the lowland plains was turned over to the military. Meanwhile, the women at home found themselves vastly outnumbered by needy children. Thus, much of Latiki party policy revolved around children and children's needs. Since AlphaLeap had shut down Halasala's school system when they conquered the empire in 4108, neither the children nor most of the Latiki adults had had any education, and they governed largely based on their emotions.

For example, AlphaLeap had shut down the schools and forced all children to work in dangerous manual labor occupations in order to improve Halasala's economic output. The Latiki governors declared that child labor was cruel and therefore freed all children from their work, but there were no adults to replace them. Thus, crucial occupations such as farming and clothes manufacturing that had previously been performed entirely by children were now entirely abandoned, and the people of Latiki simply stopped producing clothes. Farming continued only in those lands set aside for the soldiers, and these soldiers were unable to provide food for the nation as a whole. Thus, Pabaps turned to the sea to feed themselves, and food supplies dwindled even as their population increased due to the influx of refugees.

The Latiki were all former slaves, and in the egalitarian society they set up, famine affected all people about equally, and they had no outside enemy to blame their hunger problems on. Therefore, they made no changes to their way of life, and the famine continued to deepen as more refugees arrived and Paba's civilian territory shrank.

But as hunger turned to starvation, the Latiki children began to violate the prohibition on child labor. With most adults tied down, children quickly assumed the role of procuring food for themselves and their parents, and most of this food was taken from the sea rather than the farms located in the region south of Paba that had remained under civilian control. The small, clumsy children were prone to accidents and injuries in their boats, but when a group of experienced adult male sailors of the Leaper tribe offered to help them, the children accused the men of catching fish that would otherwise have been caught by the kids, and reported the incident to their parents. The Latiki government then declared the entire coastline off-limits for all adults and all non-Latiki people.

Despite the children's best efforts, they could not catch enough fish to feed the throngs of refugees from the northern tribes who had fled into Paba at the start of the war. Private markets were set up just inland from the shore where the children would sell their fish and receive large sums of money to hold in the event they became sick or otherwise unable to catch fish for a period of time. Childless Latiki families were completely cut off from food production now, and could only survive by selling their property in order to buy food from the children's fish markets.

Raspara settlement

Non-Latiki tribes were allowed to disobey the law drafting all adult males into the military, and the Latiki women had passed a law compensating non-Latiki tribes for the loss of their territory by providing them free property and a monthly stipend to make living in Paba easier. Furthermore, these minority tribes were given extra power in the government to overrule the Latiki majority on certain issues. They hoped this law would entice the tall, virile men of northern and western tribes to move into Paba and marry women who had no husbands because so many men were dying on the battlefield. However, this new law excluded the Raspara tribe of Blop, because the Raspara's land had not been surrendered to the Dreamers. The Raspara men were angry at this, and many Raspara men pushed their way through the Latiki army and asked the Latiki women in Paba why men from faraway places such as Baeba Swamp were treated as superiors whereas the Raspara were expected to live in the same conditions as the Latiki who had invited them in.

The Latiki responded that other tribes were being compensated for their loss of land, whereas the Raspara ruled from the city of Blop, which had not been surrendered. However, the Raspara had built settlements far to the west of Blop, tending farms that they had been forced to hand over to the advancing Dreamer army. Even though the Dreamer army had passed through the rural Raspara settlements and done very little damage, the Raspara still protested that the Latiki women's invitation to the tribesmen of Baeba Swamp, where the Dreamer army had never approached, proved that their law had no relation to property damage and that the women were simply choosing their favorite tribes to absorb and settle down with.

Raspara-Zenith relations

As the Raspara moved into Latiki civilian territory, they encountered members of the Zenith tribe. Like the Raspara, the Zeniths had a tall, muscular body type and were eager to marry the petite Latiki women whose would-be husbands were fighting in the war against Dreamland. And like the Raspara, the Zeniths had been denied monthly stipends by the Latiki government because their territory had not been surrendered to Dreamland in the treaty. Since the Raspara and the Zeniths were both ethnic minorities, they were not required to join the military and thus roamed freely throughout civilian territory whose adult population was otherwise entirely female. Some Raspara proposed an alliance with the Zeniths whereby the two tribes would divide the women between them; the Zeniths would control most of the deep inland areas, while the Raspara, despite having come from the north, would control the southern areas and the coast. This was because the Zeniths had occupied the same areas of land for over 2000 years whereas the Raspara were recent immigrants.

Since all Latiki males were required to spend their entire adult life in the army, both tribes knew that any adult male they met on the street was an ethnic minority. They thus promised that all adult males would be considered friends, and that the Raspara-Zenith alliance would only make enemies of women who resisted their impulses. However, they knew that men from western areas such as Baeba Swamp were also moving to Paba, and that these men would be accorded a superior legal status because they would neither have to work nor serve in the army. However, the Raspara and the Zeniths believed that they could distinguish Baebans on sight due to their distinct body types.

The Raspara promised that they would never intrude into Zenith territory so long as the Zeniths never intruded into theirs.

Though the Latiki government was run by women, the Raspara stated that within Raspara territory, the real power would be in the hands of Raspara men.  The Raspara leaders believed the Zeniths were planning to commit mass rape of the Latiki women whose territory they would control, as the Zeniths had long been known for running illegal prostitution operations using non-Zenith women, and were physically strong enough to overpower even a crowd of Latiki women trying to escape.  The Raspara hoped that the women under Zenith control would be in such pain that they would willingly flee into Raspara territory in order to submit to the Raspara men.  They did not reveal this part of their plan to the Zenith because they wanted to remain allies long enough to enforce the treaty and build walls in Paba to trap the Latiki women inside their territories.

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 had been based entirely in Paba, near the southeastern corner of the Empire, and Dreamland's only border with Halasala was in the extreme northwest. When the slaves overthrew their Leaper governors, the new leaders of the nation, a group of Pabap women calling themselves the Latiki, kept their government in Paba. The Dreamers 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 firmly controlled by the Latiki party, immediately surrendered the vast majority of its territory to the Dreamer army, but maintained its claim to the capital city of Paba and many cities connected to Paba by roads and rivers; these were the areas where Latiki support was strongest. They promised their people that they would hold strong, and would not obey a foreign army that had yet to begin its war. Meanwhile, they offered people in the surrendered territories the right to move to Paba in order to stay safe, even though they knew this would put pressure on their food supply.

Leaper reaction

The Latiki also offered to turn control of the government back to the Leapers, if only because they wanted to see a war between Dreamland and AlphaLeap rather than a war between Dreamland and the still poorly armed Latiki army. They knew that AlphaLeap had been maintaining a small private army, independent from the official imperial army of Halasala. But AlphaLeap withdrew its soldiers from the territories that the Latiki women had granted to Dreamland, and told the Latiki that they would only fight in areas where the imperial army was on the front lines. Since the imperial army was now loyal to the Latiki army, the Leapers refused to fight. Indeed, most Leaper soldiers were now moving back to their original home states, AlphaLeap and Wax, since they knew that the Dreamers were unlikely to push into that territory.

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 to hold onto its conquest, since AlphaLeap's home territory was a desert, whereas the other major powers had little interest in protecting Paba.)

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 to do the fighting for them.

The Four Quarters War

Since the Dreamers had invaded the northern part of the Empire first, it was mostly northern tribes such as the Raspara that had fled into Paba. The Pabaps welcomed these people, even though some members of the northern tribes 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 non-Latiki 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 other tribes for their loss of territory, the immigrants 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 Raspara-majority 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, Lobexon was considered an unlikely target for the Dreamer invasion as it was only reachable by sea, and Subumpam was small.

Pabaps living in Halasala 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 Crystals. Thus, they felt, if they simply threw away all of the Thunder and Crystal lands, they could perhaps prevent the war. But the Latiki 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.

Treaty of Vaamū

Halasala renamed itself Vaamū now, a Pabappa name. (Also spelled Wāmū, Wamu, etc.) The Treaty of Vaamū was signed, stating that the four powers had all agreed that the imperial army would defend only Paba, leaving the northern tribes the choice of whether to remain in their homelands and face invasion or better their chances by moving to Paba. The treaty helped Paba because it greatly reduced the amount of territory the Vaamūan army was responsible for; their army was very small for their land area, and they felt it would be easier to defend Paba than to defend Paba, Subumpam, the Thunder Empire, and the Crystal Empire, whose combined land area was more than half of the habitable land on the planet. The treaty also helped the other three allies because it guaranteed that any battles fought in the war would be fought in or near Paba, thus sparing the other three empires from having to fight the worst of the battles in the war. Although Dreamland was a large nation, Vaamūans did not think that Dreamland had enough soldiers to attempt an occupation of all of the territory that the Pabap army had retreated from. They were worried, however, that Dreamers would start attacking and enslaving civilians living in the other three Quarters.

This treaty also thus stated that anyone living anywhere in the Four Quarters Empire could move to Paba as refugees and that the government of Paba would take money from its own people in order to house and shelter the refugees. Since the Four Quarters Empire had been a single political entity all along, Paba opening its doors to immigrants from the rest of the Empire was not new; indeed, Paba was the most diverse of the four Quarters. But now that they were Vaamū, they disclaimed the other three empires, and almost all of the Pabaps living in those other Empires (except for cities like Blop and their environs) moved back to Paba as refugees as well.

First Dreamer invasion

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. One reason was that Dreamland had acquired an exaggerated picture of the differences in physical form between their people and Paba's: some Dreamers believed that Pabaps were very small people, about knee high, and could fly. Thus they planned to enter Paba and convince the Pabaps to surrender based on sheer physical intimidation.

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. An unintended side effect of the treaty was that the many people fleeing into Paba to escape the invasion were disproportionately likely to agree to sign up for the Pabap military, as they were coming to Paba with few possessions and, even though Paba was offering them welfare payments to offset their loss of property, still had less to lose than most other Pabaps. Thus Paba had partly recreated the old Pabap system where Paba paid ethnic minorities to move to Paba but required them to sign up for the military whereas native Pabaps were free.

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 no longer had 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 they still obeyed their treaty, and agreed to let the Dreamers move through Thunder territory and fight the war in Paba, not Pupompom.

Paba builds its Bubble

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.

Paba invades Dreamland

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. They were hoping to crush the Pabap army between their own army and that of Dreamland, even though they knew Dreamland's army had been massively weakened by this point.

The birth of political parties

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 were the most important natural resource.

Government reform in Paba

Paba realized it was likely to win its war. They decided to take advantage of the situation and put themselves into power. They declared that they wanted to completely eliminate racial conflict in their nation by blending all of the races together. For 3000 years Pabaps had been victimized by everybody else, they said, because Pabaps were much shorter and more delicate than other people, and thus easier to abuse. They wanted to solve this problem by having the Pabap army bring foreign men into Paba and encourage them to marry the Pabap women who were unable to find a husband because most of the Pabap men were at war. They thus adopted the same military strategy that Paba had done almost 2000 years earlier when they were invaded by the Star Empire: instead of fighting the invading enemy soldiers, they invited them to come in even further and paid them money if they agreed to settle down and marry local Pabap women.

Paba realized they were not the only victims, however, and also wanted to marry the Crystals with the Thunderers, the Thunderers with the Subumpamese, the Subumpamese with the Crystals, and so on. They said that even though their people would still be divided by religion, they had had people of different religions living together for thousands of years and never had a war erupt over it.

Paba now also encouraged all their children to become as educated as possible, because their birthrate was now so high that, given that many adult males were away from their homes due to the war, there were more children below 10 in their cities than there were people aged 10 and over. By necessity they knew that they would soon be putting real government power in the hands of teenagers, as there were not enough adults to go around.

Since children could not provide for themselves, Paba realized that they would soon run out of basic resources even given the immense virgin land they had not yet explored if they could not enslave another people to work for them. They started closing restaurants and luxury goods stores, saying that people were going to have to start eating poverty foods until the war was over and perhaps even afterwards. The rationale behind this was that labor hours were urgently needed in other industries, and that even a restaurant was an unnecessary luxury because cooking food would eat up time that could be better spent doing other things.

The Diaper Debate

As the population of infants and toddlers grew, the problem of waste disposal quickly became alarming. In some cities there were so many torn cloth diapers in the streets that the streets had to be closed off by detours so that people could walk around the mess. The problems were mostly confined to bāpieivu, a Pabappa term for a neighborhood where private nurseries cluster together and mothers who work during the day place their babies under the care of the women in the nurseries. Angry Vaamūans soon came to refer to these neighborhoods as napieivu, a portmanteau meaning "dirty diaper neighborhoods", where napei (sic) was a Pabappa word for a used diaper. The Latiki government of Paba declared a state of emergency and formed a federal advisory committee to research possible ways of rescuing their people from their ever-larger diaper problem.

Paba's government refused its advisors' order to institute child labor, as they realized that by doing so they would become the enemy in the minds of their nation's enormous population of children. They especially did not like the idea of giving the most undesirable jobs to the youngest children. The advisors said that they could not assign waste disposal jobs to adults because that would cost them valuable man-hours in every other industry. Only children, they said, should clean up waste products, because that was the only job they were capable of that adults could not do better. But the government refused to change its opinion, and the new Paba became a pestilential mess of flames and feeding insects. The governors promised their people that this would soon change, as the Pabap army was bringing back slaves from Dreamland to come into their nurseries and eliminate their towering mountains of dirty diapers so they could dump them all in Dreamland.

The war winds down

By 4138 the Dreamer population was in full-blown panic. Six years of their strongest men being sent out to attack Paba had, for all they knew, done no good at all, for they had never yet heard back from any one of them. They knew that the Vaamūans must have powerful military technology, since they were able to fight off so many powerful attacks. Meanwhile, a militant wing of the Latiki party, led by a group of small children, had just ordered their army to leave the area around Paba and completely eliminate all of the surrounding nations, not just Dreamland.

At first the Wâmûan soldiers being sent into Rêpâse and the other countries encountered great difficulty, because now they were fighting an offensive war, instead of a defensive one, and the pro-Dreamer nations (Pwêt and others that had previously been part of another nation) were all protected by the same types of natural barriers that had protected the Wâmûans. But the Wâmûans did not give up; they fought battle after bloody battle with courage and a perfect obedience to their commanders that frightened the others. The Wâmûans showed no sign of sympathy for their enemies, and seemed not to react to the deaths of their own soldiers. And the Dreamers' worst fears about Wâmûan population growth were confirmed when they realized that the Wâmûan population had grown radically, and that the Wâmûans saw the war partly as a means to dispose of their excess population, and to steal back some land from the Sâpepans and Dreamers to make room for even more. They figured that the Wâmûans had started the war because they had run out or were soon to run out of natural resources in their own land, and were desperately trying to hold on for a few more years before they exhausted the full supply in Rêpâse as well. And the Dreamers saw that the Wâmûans' physical weakness meant virtually nothing in the war so long as they had enough armor and weapons.

Thus Wâmû's army of 1 million completely routed the Dreamer army of about 1 million (they killed 40%) and forced them to surrender unconditionally. The Wâmûans reclaimed all of the land towards Rêpâse's border, and immediately began herding the conquered peoples into Paba so they could be forced to work for Wâmû. However, some were welcomed as citizens because they wanted to divide the prisoners of war against each other and also because they still held to their philosophy of the elimination of racial divisions through marriage, even if it was forced marriage.

The Latiki promised to allow Dreamland to remain a country, but it was governed partly by the Latiki, who stole natural resources and then held up the resulting poverty to other nations as proof that the Dreamer economic philosophy was a failure.

Indeed, now that the war was over, Dreamers saw that they had been wrong about the Wâmûans being desperate for natural resources. The Wâmûans were not in economic trouble at all; thankful for their technology and their elimination of luxury industries such as cosmetics, Vaamūans had plenty of food and plenty of spare labor left over to build weapons. Still, Dreamers hoped that Vaamū's command economy would eventually collapse due to the abuses it laid upon its people. They also realized that the birthrate in Vaamū was so high that more and more of their people, even males, were devoted entirely to childcare and thus could not do anything else helpful to the nation or to the army.

The Dreamers surrendered, and were thankful that the Vaamūans did not choose to enslave all of the Dreamer people.

Rule of the Raspara

When the Vaamūans had gone westward and northward during the war, they had failed to conquer the nation of Rasparia, which was now located in northern Vaamū, although before the war it had been northwest of Vaamū. Rasparia was a breakaway nation from Vaamū, whose people had set up their own government after escaping the Leapers in 4108. The Raspara leaders knew that the Dreamers' method of attack (physical combat) was doomed to failure, and that the only way to overcome the Vaamūans was to outsmart them. The Raspara (also known as Raspara) wanted to make their nation much like Vaamū, and did not want to destroy Vaamū, but only to overthrow the Loporomo government and rule the nation themselves, rather as the Leapers had, a small parasitic minority ruling over a large submissive majority. Vaamūans outnumbered Rasparas by a ratio of about 70 to 1. Rasparia itself was about 90% Vaamūans, because refugees had continued to flee into Rasparia, irregularly, even after the overthrow of the Leaper government.

The Rasparas managed to convince the nearby Vaamūans that it would be wise to have Rasparas in control of the government, because they were better educated and otherwise more fit for leadership. They merged their nation with Vaamū, and mostly took over the forts that had been set up by the Vaamūans in their former territory. They began to influence Vaamūans even outside their base, and even though Vaamūans outnumbered them by a huge ratio, both the Rasparas and the Vaamūans began to feel that it was inevitable that the Rasparas would soon take over the government of all of Vaamū. Many of the Vaamūans began to feel extremely frustrated at this fact, saying they had just eliminated their only major enemy in the world and had thus effectively conquered the world. Now the Rasparas were asking them to give it all up and become slaves again simply because there existed a nation in their midst whose people were better educated.

The Latiki party thus called for the killing of all Rasparas. But their plans were constantly thwarted by Rasparas and pro-Raspara Vaamūans, and the Rasparas only continued expanding their disproportionate influence over Vaamū. Within a year, Rasparas were making most of the important decisions in Vaamū, and whenever Vaamūan Latiki governors tried to do something to upset them, the Rasparas would threaten to destroy Vaamū, and the Latiki often backed down in order to appease the Rasparas.

When AlphaLeap had taken over Vaamū, many Crystals had fled to ancient homelands such as Xeniholom. Thus, there were many Crystals living outside Vaamū, and though all of the various Crystal groups were known for their radical political ideas, they all frequently disagreed with each other even on core issues. There were even underground movements of Crystal dissent within Vaamū.

The Rasparas realized that they could not continue fighting wars forever, and that Vaamū in its current state was not self-sufficient. They needed to improve Vaamū's economic system, they realized, because the cost of raising so many children each year was putting a strain on the economy. They began to plan a way to trick the Vaamūans into killing each other to the point where the Rasparas would no longer have to worry about a revolt from the Vaamūan population because the Vaamūans would only outnumber them by a ratio of about 5:1, which to the Rasparas was low enough to allay their fears of a revolt. In 4141, they began to draft Vaamūans into the Raspara party, and then launched a war against the other Vaamūans. They mostly attacked nurseries and elementary schools because they knew that those were the places where the population growth was concentrated and because they realized that most babies wouldn't be able to cause much harm to the Raspara soldiers. In this war, they killed most of the Vaamūan population, but remained a minority.

Because of the high birthrate, Vaamū's population soon again consisted mostly of children. The population of Vaamū was now growing so fast that Vaamūans living in some parts of the empire were not getting enough food, because they were eating it faster than it could be sent to them. There were no more slaves to capture, and the native Vaamūans now vastly outnumbered them anyway. The Rasparas decided to introduce child labor. Soon, those Vaamūans who were old enough to work led a much harder life than non-Vaamūans just to break even with their own need for survival. As soon as they could tell 'yes' from 'no', Vaamūan children left the nursery and went to work on plantations and in labor camps where all of their food and clothing were made.

But the Raspara still felt some sympathy for the workers, as they saw themselves as on the same side in a fight against their common enemy, the Dreamers. The Latiki believed that only God could make someone completely happy, and that God could break through any emotions caused by the physical world. But they knew that God had never promised to make the Vaamūan workers completely happy all the time, so they had to rely partly on other sources of good emotions. Alcohol was in ready supply, and Vaamū even began exporting alcohol to other nations.

Although the overseers allowed the workers to play and drink alcohol whenever they wished, there was still a lot of work that needed to be done. The workers were told that they were allowed to do anything they wished that would help themselves, but they were told that bad habits would cause them to be hurt and, if necessary, killed. By no means was the work given to the workers impossible to complete, except for workers who were disabled, but Vaamūans who could not or would not do the work they were assigned lived in fear of the many frightening punishments for those who worked too little.

Vaamū was still low on resources and hungry for land. They began sending explorers to Tarwas to settle the southern third of the nation. But after this flurry of activity in the early 4140s, Vaamū seemed to quiet down somewhat and go back to focusing on their own country. Their population growth had been greatly slowed down now, which allowed their economic growth to speed up. Since their whole economy was directed toward the military, this meant that their military was rapidly becoming more powerful.

Where other nations weren't helping to cut down Vaamū's flowerlike growth, it was the Vaamūans' own misplaced leadership that ruined their ancestors' plans. It came to seem that AlphaLeap's parting words of hatred were correct after all. The Rasparas relied on a complicated political machine to keep their workers in line. Political battles over problems such as the increasing abuse of Vaamūans by their Raspara leaders gradually eroded the ability of the Rasparas to control their subjects, and at times they again lost control over small areas of Vaamū (which included Tata at this time). The Rasparas were aware of these signs of decay in their nation, but they were already doing their best to prevent a total rupture of their government. Adding to the problem was the fact that they were still overwhelmingly outnumbered by Vaamūans, and the fact that most of these Vaamūans were very angry and yet very gullible people, who would listen to and obey orders from people who promised to solve their many problems. Even some Rasparas began to defect from their party and form independent political organizations within Vaamū intending to overthrow the mainstream Raspara government. But most of the new rebels were Vaamūans, who were better at gaining trust from other Vaamūans than were Rasparas.

In 4149, the Raspara were overthrown by a rebel group of Vaamūans known as the Swamp Kids.