Oyster War

The Vegetable War was a war on the planet Teppala which raged from 2662 to 2674 AD. It was so violent that nearly all large animals were killed, leading the people who survived the war to become vegetarians, at least inland.

Parties to the conflict were:

• Litila, actually an alliance between Litila and Thaoa which promised to fight anyone who did not submit to them, even it meant fighting the entire world. Litila is a religion which wants to put a species of worm-like crab called the liui in control of humans. This is still not the same as the Inkʷa/Ifena/Isyna group, which favors animals in control of humans in general, but not just the one specific species of crab. The liui are often called "crabworms" in English, because worm in English is a general term for any organism with a wormlike body shape, and the situation was similar in most humans living in nations to which the crabworms were not native. However, they really are crustaceans, being crabs with very elongated bodies. They communicate with humans purely through sign language: the crabs wave their claws and the humans wave their hands in mutually recognized patterns to spell out each letter of each word in their shared language, which was based on Subumpamese but had many loans from the crab's native language. Written language was also used.
• The Gold Empire, actually a part of the Gold Empire that had rebelled and conquered the rest of it.

Background

Litila was to the north of Subumpam, but also had camps in northern Subumpam. They wanted to turn over control of the government to the crabworms and stop the explosive expansion of human settlement all over the continent. They were rejected by everyone else as masochists with simple minds. But their power grew rapidly, as the crabworms actually were a very intelligent species capable of running an advanced nation. Their exoskeleton was too firm to be pierced by any known human weapon, so humans were forced to fight crabworms by avoiding them instead of attacking them. They were thus very powerful at war, and Litila's military power was limited only by how many crabworms they were able to breed.

Humans' orientations

The war began as a traditional tribal conflict involving humans. On one side were the dark-skinned Star tribes, historically native to the western tropical areas such as Amade, Lobexon, etc. On the other side were the typically blonde, blue-eyed Lenian people, united under the banner of FILTER, and based in Subumpam with territory mostly in colder climates.

AlphaLeap chose to side with the Star tribes, even though they had been profiting from the enslavement of the Stars for hundreds of years. Similarly, the FILTER tribes forged an alliance with Nama, even though they had stolen most of their land from Nama. These alliances were possible because the weaker parties in each alliance felt they would lose even more if they were to submit to the opposing side.

In 2657, the Stars signed a treaty with AlphaLeap that relinquished all past grievances and added AlphaLeap & Wax to the land claimed by the Star Empire, which the Stars were planning to reconquer. In 2658, they formally declared war against the Lenians, and created a parallel government for Subumpam only, which they considered to be part of the Star Empire. That is, Stars living in Lenian territory were responsible to the Stars' government, not to the Lenians. However, the Lenians ignored this, as the Stars had yet to even seize control of their own territory, let alone Lenia.

In 2661, a nation called Xeniholom defected from the Lenians to the Stars. They were quickly followed by a party calling itself Evil Eye. Then, they also absorbed the armies of Lahalalomaha, Yilamu, Qutalaf, Stepstone, and Cila. Yet another wave added the Shadows, Tobom, Atlam, and Tarwas. Most of these nations were fellow dark-skinned people like the Stars, but the dark-skinned people in Tarwas were very different in appearance from the Stars, and highly variable internally as well. Meanwhile, the Shadows were light-skinned people from Nama who had chosen to switch sides.

Meanwhile, the Lenians' alliance was attracting more supporters from areas of Nama that had previously remained neutral as they knew the Stars' armies would never push north. But their numbers were few. The most prominent new member in the alliance was the city of Pilifala (Melemosit). Smaller entities included Reino, Lanitta, Echo, Alon, Half Moon, Shŭppa, E, Princess, MS, Dema, Paba, Shuchupo, and thousands of others. This is because Nama's tribes were typically small and politically independent. However, some of these armies were not Naman tribes at all, such as Lanitta, which was a group within the Star Empire. They called their alliance the Rope, and each army was called a Link.

Many Links were already trying to defect to the Stars just as Xeniholom had. But the Stars were uninterested in them. Spimi signed a pact with Nama, but Spimi secretly controlled a nation called the Refuge which was against Nama and housed many criminals who had fled Nama.

The Lenians had so much internal dissent, with many of them trying to defect to the Stars, that they made few preparations for the war they all knew would soon arrive. When the Star army entered Subumpam, the Lenians surrendered immediately. However, the Stars soon met up with the renegade nation of Litila, which had been neutral in the war. Litila was located to the north of Subumpam, and they began invading Subumpam just as the Stars did, intending to deny the Stars any territory in Subumpam. (They were willing to let the Stars destroy all of Nama, however.)

In 2662, the armies of Litila and the Stars met up and fought for control of Subumpam with no care for the welfare of the Subumpamese. Though the Stars' army was much larger, they were unprepared for Litila's unconventional strategy: rather than risk the lives of their soldiers, they sent crabs to fight for them, and these crabs were impenetrable.

The crabs were very difficult for humans to kill. However, they were also very difficult for humans to control: the army of Litila was quickly torn apart by the crabs they had been expecting to help them, and thus Litila never made it to the battlefield.

First battles

In 2662, Litila invaded Subumpam with its army of crabworms and humans. Litila was much smaller than Subumpam, and was located in the worst possible position, but Subumpam had been weakened slightly by having just come out of another major war against Nama, in which Litila had fortified its borders and remained neutral. Thus Litila was able to attack at full power against a weakened enemy.

Nevertheless, Subumpam was very strong, and they gained allies as they fought as even their enemies in Nama preferred them to the crabworms. Thus the war was the bloodiest war the world had yet seen, and after twelve years almost all animal life apart from humans, crabworms, and a few other mobile species such as birds had gone completely extinct. Surviving humans were pure vegetarians except for a few living along the immediate south coast. Meanwhile the human governments of both sides of the war had collapsed and their replacements were not interested in continuing the war.

Nevertheless, Litila had won the war, as its goal had been no more than to defeat the human population and establish more land for crabworms. Crabworms now set up a new government in Subumpam that excluded humans entirely and considered them merely as food. The Litilala were upset that the crabworms had chosen the very humans that had been helping them seize power as their primary food source, rather than the enemy humans that they had captured. But the crabworms made no distinctions at all among the various classes of humans; to them they were all just meat.

The crabs defended their decision to eat their breeders by saying that only humans believed it was immoral to eat humans; and that their government was no longer run by humans but by crabs. They had defeated human society, and with it, their moral system. They said that when a crab eats a human, only the human suffers; therefore only a crab can declare that a crab eating a human is immoral. They pointed to the example of the all-crab nation of Rasula, which had helped humans in many wars before but now had declared it didn't bother them if Litila's crabs decided they wanted to eat all of the humans in Litila and Subumpam since the eating of humans in a nation run by crabs was no longer a crime.

Thus life in Subumpam was so bad now that all other humans, even slaves bleeding from bites by horseflies on pestilential plantations in Lobexon, were better off than the Subumpamese, and began to take in Subumpamese refugees in their nations. They hoped that they could starve out all of the worms, or at least force them to all move to the coast where a relatively uninterrupted food supply still could be found.

In 2674 a coalition of human nations attempted an invasion of Subumpam from the sea. They had mostly come from Nama, so they landed in Vuʒi, on the southwest coast, and began to march inward in search of crabs and distressed humans. Crabs preferred to live in rock nests, so it was uncommon to see a crab simply crawling out in the open even in a time of safety. But the sight of the advancing mob of flesh encouraged the crabs to come out, as they had been running short on food in this area recently. The humans tried to fight back, but were simply unable to hit the crabs hard enough with their swords and battleaxes to injure them. And so the entire human battalion was killed without the crabs suffering a single casualty in the battle.

A few humans had stayed behind on the ships, and even though crabs could also crawl along the ocean bottom and could burst their ships from below, the area they had landed happened to be empty of crabs for the time being because the fish in this area had also been depleted. When they saw that none of the humans that had marched inland came back that night, they figured that they had probably been eaten and decided to return to Nama.

Back in Nama, the human coalition decided that it was unwise to attempt to invade Subumpam. They looked for other strategies such as chemical warfare, while continuing their attmpts to rescue runaway humans hiding in the wilderness where crabs could not easily reach them. Other nations, and even transnational organizations such as FILTER, offered to take in refugees but refused to help fight the war directly because they were afraid of dying even more rapidly than the Subumpamese had.

The crabs had spared Thaoa from direct geographical occupation because even though it was one of their strongest allies, Paba stood between Subumpam and Thaoa, and the land route was not easy to get over. But even so, the crabs looked hungrily at Paba as their next conquest, and the Pabaps realized their long streak of escaping being involved in the world's bloodiest wars was about to end.

War in Paba

Paba had been preparing for the Vegetable War (Īpipayas) for a long time. At this time, Paba was a strongly militarized empire but had not fought a major war for over a thousand years. But unlike other peaceful nations, they did not let their military skills degrade. They kept an active military at all times even though the high propotion of their people serving in the military caused their per capita income to be lower than the areas around them. Partly, they made up for this by becoming the masters of the sea as well, and dominating trade with their powerful navy that even wealthier coastal nations such as Thaoa were not allowed to question.

Early Pacifism in Paba

SeeBabakiam#Culture.

The Pabap people had been roughly a 90-95% majority in Paba for most of its history, with the largest minority consisting of Tarpabaps, a political ally tribe consisting of people who averaged about three times the body weight of Pabaps and were physically even stronger than their body proportions would indicate. Since they were so tall and strong, and the Pabaps so small and delicate, both groups agreed that Tarpabaps should live mostly inland and focus on farming and the military while Pabaps would live along the coast and focus on fishing and trade. Paba needed a large military to defend itself from its neighbors, so for a long time, even the land army was mostly Pabaps.

However, this began to change around the 1700s when the Tarpabaps decided that they wanted a nation of their own rather than (or in addition to) being a minority in Paba. Many thousands of Tarpabaps immigrated from Laba to Paba, straining Paba's perpetually scarce food supply. Even though most of these were only intending to stay in Paba for a generation at most, and then move on to one of the other new nations that was being formed, those who stayed caused the Tarpabap population to increase from a 10% minority to a 60% majority, with Pabaps being only about 15%. Thus nearly 90% of the food produced in Paba was going to feed the Tarpabaps, and even though the Tarpabaps themselves were largely farmers, the population surge had exceeded the entire carrying capacity of the land and now Paba was forced to send boats ever further out to sea just to feed itself.

Pabaps had full control of the sea around them now, and could have simply refused to seat these people, but for the most part they considered the Tarpabaps a valuable ally, even if they were a very intimidating one. In fact, almost all of the ships that were bringing Tarpabaps to Paba were actually Pabap ships, as the navy of the Tarpabaps' original homeland on Laba had drastically declined as rising seas flooded most of their best harbors, and most Tarpabaps went through their lives without ever learning how to build a boat. (Flooding was also happening in Paba, but here the land was much flatter and more gentle, so settlements tended to slowly creep upslope instead of just suddenly disappearing entirely. On the other hand, because the land was flatter, each sea rise reduced the amount of habitable land much more drastically than on Laba.)

Though the Tarpabaps living in Paba mostly still claimed loyalty to Paba, they felt uncomfortable being a majority and yet not controlling the government. Leadership was mostly hereditary, and Paba had been ruled by the same royal family for nearly its entire history. Paba instituted some reforms in its government which still denied the Tarpabaps access to the ruling class, but attempted to pacify them by giving them more money to help improve economic conditions in majority-Tar areas of the nation, and allowed them to own ships and penetrate the Pabap naval blockade around rival nations in order to carry on independent trade missions with those other nations. (Paba's navy had now become the strongest in the world, as their previous rival's navy had been destroyed in the war immediately preceding the Vegetable War.)

Nevertheless the Pabap leaders were worried. Since Paba's army was almost entirely composed of ethnically Tarpabap soldiers, they realized they were about to risk the lives of almost the entire adult male Tarpabap popilatuon without the Pabaps having to suffer at all. The army had known for hundreds of years that any war that Paba engaged in would likely be fgought mostly on land, and therefore many more Tarpabaps than Pabaps would die, but none of them had expected a war of this degree.

Worried about revolt, Pabap leaders promised the Tarpabaps that since all of Paba was at risk in this war, all of Paba would fight, including the navy and the large civilian population. They also annexed Subumpam, declaring the whole of the huge wrecked empire to now be Pabap territory, and promised the soldiers that they could have it all to themselves if they wished. At the same time, though, they were cautious not to imply that they were deliberately trying to get rid of the Tarpabaps by granting them more land to move into. Even the most suspicious Tarpabap soldiers could not think of a reason why Paba would deliberately risk losing its army in a foreign nation knowing Paba itself would be immedaitely consumed aft6erwards. Moreover, they noted that the large Pabap minority in Subumpam had fared no better than the rest of the Subumpamese, and had ended their lives as food in the bellies in the crabs.

Paba enters the war

As above, Paba had not fought a land war for over a thousand years. They had expected the attack to come from occupied Subumpam's ally, Thaoa, a rival nation of Paba which in fact had originally been settled by Pabaps and had a similar history of dominating other nations with naval blockades but had eventually lost out to Paba. But Thaoa realized that the crabworms eating people in Subumpam were far more powerful even than the best-armed humans in the world. Moreover they were shocked at how the crabworms had run out of food and decided to eat the humans who had helped them the most in the war, and were unsure about even participating in the war against Paba at this point. However they knew that if they asked Paba for an alliance, Paba would demand the immediate annexation of Thaoa's entire territory to Paba, which they were not willing to do even if at the pain of death.

Meanwhile, Paba had not expected an attack from Subumpam, which had had a history of usually being an ally of Paba, and being embarrassingly incompetent whenever it wasn't. Even though the Pabaps were aware that crabworms had broken out of their strongholds in Litila and occupied most of Subumpam, they still figured a human invasion was more likely than a crab invasion and moved only a small part of their army to the western border.

So the majority of Paba's land army remained concentrated near its eastern border with Thaoa, whereas the crab worms were invading them from the west. Pabap civilians fled in terror as the crabs clawed their way through the border walls the Pabaps had built, which were much weaker than the walls on the eastern border with THaoa. The crabs faced little resistance, eating both civilians and the few soldiers that had been posted at the western border.

Nevertheless, since the capital of Paba, Biospum, was also in the west, a stronger army was not far behind. These soldiers were better armed, and better prepared for a fight against an enemy unbeatable by conventional means. Since they knew that even their sharpest swords could not penetrate the crabs' bodies, they did not bother bringing any. Instead they relied on chemical weapons and attempts to bring heavy rocks up to high places so that they could drop them on the crabworms. A leading battallion swept off into the countryside to attempt checmical warfare, but the other half of the army had to occupy the capital city as the land here was so flat that there were no tall buildings anywhere else to drop heavy stones from (crabs did not generally move through thick forests, so occupying trees would be useless).

Crabs move in

To Paba's distress, no crabs were sighted anywhere near Biospum for the first month of the war. They realized that the crabs were a very intelligent species, even if not as intelligent as humans, and that they had no reason to even attempt to occupy the capital city since there were plenty of humans available for them in the countryside. So they realized that the strategy of dropping rocks from a great height would likely never get a chance to be used, and that their only chance of stopping the crab army was to attempt yet another conventional battle, the same strategy that had failed every other time it had been used.

And so a section of the army called Pamimibūppus was sent out from the capital city to meet the invading crab army. They did not have chemical weapons available to them, and they had almost no armor or weapons, so they figured that they were likely to be simply eaten as soon as they encountered the crabs. However, they at least supposed that the battalion that had left the previous monthg, unless it had alreayd been entirely defeated, would at least be able to guard them as they fought and that they would be able to take some of the armor off of the dead soldiers if they could find it.

Advance into Thaoa

Meanwhile, in desperation, Paba decided to attack Thaoa after all, figuring that they might lose their whole territory to crabs and be forced to flee into remote areas where even the crabs could not reach. Even though crabs had come to them from the mountains of the north, they were not native to the mountains: this was just a political movement that humans had set up in an area that was so weak thgat it would otherwise have never been able to invade even the adjacent lowlands. So Pabaps wanted to control the mountains around them, and much of that land had recently been occupied by Thaoa. They also signed a truce with their enemy, Tarwas, allowing the Pabaps to flee into Tarwas on the provision that the crabs would just as soon move to Tarwas and eat people there if they were able to.

The Thaoan army was very strong, but the government of Thaoa refused to even acknowledge that the war was real. In response, the Pabaps endured only scattered fighting from the army of Thaoa and soon reached the capital city and forced Thaoa to surrender. The Treaty of Kafumtem, named after the Pabaps' pronunciation of the Thaoan capital city of Khasunthyn, turned over all of Thaoa's homelands and extraterritorial possessions to the invading army from Paba.

Thaoa was a country of people closely related to Pabaps who had historically been far less soft and submissive than Pabaps had been, and were humiliated by the surrender treaty, but they put aside their differences for the time being because there were much greater dangers about. The Pabaps finalized the name Tabūba for occupied Thaoa.

Thaoa was also the guarantor of most of the land east of it. Nominally, these countries were actually Naman, even though Nama was far to the west, but they were no longer pyhyiscally connected to Nama except by a series of difficult mountain passes to the north that no single country had ever permanently occupied. Paba did not yet insist that Thaoa let the Pabap army into those countries, both because they were hemmed in by the Pabap navy already and because they would be easily conquered by crabs since they were mostly coastland like Subumpam and Paba.

Internal conflict

As Paba's forces advanced into Thaoa, some of Thaoa's few ethnic minorities contemplated siding with the invaders. The parasitic colony of Hŏbe, whose people survived by stealing crops and farm animals from nearby Thaoan farms, angrily confronted the general of Thaoa's army and demanded that he declare war and defeat the combined armies of Paba, Subumpam, Nama, Tarwas, Qoqendoq, Ihhai, Gala, and the Star Empire so that the continued supply of easily stolen food to the parasites in Hŏbe would be maintained. The Hŏbeans warned that if the Thaoans did not defeat the other eight armies, Hŏbe would join the fight on the side of the invaders and use the corpses of the Thaoan civilians as a temporary food supply.

Battles in the West

Meanwhile, on the western front, despite the bulk of the army not having arrived yet from the east, the Pabap army was doing surprisingly well. Although they had suffered huge losses against the crabs, they had become the first human army that had actually managed to at least kill one of the crabs they were fighting. The first dead crab was taken apart and its body parts became armor for the people. Their chemical warfare (besmasā paau) was working, and had the advantage that humans did not need to be physically within sight of the crabs to fight them. Many of the soldiers now were totally unarmed and just walking around in their underwear, appearing to most others including the crabs to be normal people.

Still, chemical warfare worked against humans too, so they realizaed they needed to evacuate the Pabap civilians. Most of them had already left as soon as they had heard of the crabs, but now even the ones who had wanted to stay and fight were forced by the army to move eastward so that the army could poison the water and various other parts of the environmeny in order to make it unfit for life. Since there was not enough food available for them in Paba, many of these people were then taken to the seacost, where they boarded ships heading across the ocean to move permanently to a foreign nation such as Qoqendoq. These missions sometimes failed, however, because the crabs could simply pop open their boats, flooding them with water. Even the unbeatable Pabap navy had been forced to anchor many of its ships further out to sea for the time being to get away from the crabs that had occupied much of the coastland.

Pabaps decided to risk crowding themselves into castles now, as the crabs could not easily enter large buildings, but the Pabaps would have a difficult time getting food. They had been relying on birds fishing the eastern rivers for them, a system that had been used even in peacetime by some of the wealthiest Pabaps. Now the birds had to do this for everybody, and were not happy, but they too had a lot to fear from the crabs and they worked hard to feed the humans out of their own sense of common kindness. And so the countryside of western Paba became suddenly empty of all humans, except a few battalions of soldiers still trying to poison the rivers and animals that they expected the crabs to eat. Paba's population now was about 185000 people, and about 50000 of them were soldiers or had decided to risk their lives on the front lines helping the soldiers. They estimated the crab population to be about 14000, most of which were still on land in Subumpam, as the oceans were becoming difficult for them to hunt for food in.

Humans look for help

Faced with an enemy they could not defeat, humans looked to animals for help. At this point, humans were willing to enslave themselves to animals forever if at least it was an animal that would not raise them for food and eat them when they were still young. Tehey looked aroundf them at ther various animal species that could help so they could bild a mutlispeces army

Firebirds vs. crabs

The firebirds, also known as cilai, wanted an opportunity to help out because they felt that humans were the choicest meat of all and anything that was good for humans was good for them. They could drop rocks on crabs to crush them inside their own exoskeletons, but even the strongest firebirds were not strong enough to carry big enough rocks to do any significant damage even from an extreme height. Thus, they were useless in killing crabs, and the human governors in exile rejected their help.

Dolphins vs. crabs

Dolhpins could eat crabs, but they risked a lot of danger in doing so, as the dolphins could be easily wounded by crabs had the additional handicap of not being able to use medicine since they lived underwater. Dolphins' blood tended to seal up faster than humans', so they would not bleed to death, but could be weakened quickly to the point of being unable to swim. The humans realized that dolphins had nations of their own, and could not promise allegiance to all dolphins since some dolphins were hostile to other dolphins, but they promised that no human would ever harm a dolphin of any side if just one dolphin nation agreed to help the humans.

Hedgehogs vs. crabs

Despite their spies, the hedgehogs wer also yuseless in ciombat so they promise alllegfiant to the hmans but ddi not fight. They were a bit upset that humans seemed to stereotype them as dangerous even though they were vegeterians who only used their sharp spines for defensive purposes, and could not defeat crabs,

Rabbits vs. crabs

Had not emeghred as a hug enemy poem, yet, but also rejected the support of humans

monkeys vs. crabs

Similar to humans but less Ppetizing because of their hair, monkeys tried to put up cities in the ruined human cities. But they were no better at killing brass that the humans.

Crabs ve. crabs

Not all crabs lived in Litila. Crabs were ocean dwellers, after all, and had societies of their own before 2662. The world's largest all-crab nation, known as Rasula, had remained neutral in the war so far. Previously, Rasula had been a common player in human affairs, but its power had waned as the humans grew their societies on land and became more self sufficient. In 2645, Rasula withdrew itself from all human politics and became neutral in all wars. They wanted to set themselves up as the arbiter of human diplomacy. Knowing that humans could not simply dive down into the deep to argue their cases before a tribunal of water-breathing crabs, they purchased some land from Paba to live on and used that as their main conduit for conduct with humans. Thus Paba held the key to communication between humans and the crabs that were eating humans for breakfast.

Paba pleaded with the crabs of Rasula to break its only 30 year old neutrality policy to help fight the other crabs that were eating up humans all over the mainland. They said that if Rasula did not help, the crabs of Litila could just as easily take over the entire ocean and destroy Rasula. But Rasula reaffirmed its neutrality, stating that Litila considered killing a crab to be a crime, and had promised Rasula would be spared. Crabs all had nations on the ocean floor, and Litila had promised not to expand its ocean territory; they just wanted to expand their land territory to include all of the places where humans lived.

Moreover, Rasula stated, although they had fought many wars before, they had never fought against other crabs. Rasula predicted that any humans who moved to Rasula would be safe, though this was too small a nation to support a sizable human population in addition to its many crabs.

By now, most humans believed that the crab invasion had, in fact, been directly caused by Rasula's promise a few decades earlier to remain neutral in all wars. Crabs had been around for thousands of years, and had always been much stronger than humans, and generally when they fought against humans in a war, they won. But there had never before been an invasion of crabs that began on land, and never before an army of enslaved humans supporting those crabs every step of the way as they ate more and more people (originally, Litila had been a human/crab cooperative, and those humans supported the crabs until the very end). They thus believed that crabs in Litila had been wanting to invade Subumpam for a long time, perhaps as much as 700 years (Litila had been founded in the 1900s), but had been prevented from doing so because Rasula had always promised to crush the oceanic part of their nation if they tried.

These people called themselves Supī ("soft"), essentially admitting that they were helpless and needed crabs to fight for them. They promised to enslave themselves to the crabs of Rasula forever if they would only get rid of the crabs of Litila.

Unconventional battle methods

Some humans figured that trying to outmuscle the crabs was hopeless since it seemed that humans were so pathetic that the crabs were actually helped by humans' aggression against them, as it saved the crabs valuable time that would've otherwise been spent looking for food. A new division of the army called Mupu ("food") was created. These were humans who volunteered to be eaten by the crabs, but took with them poisons in the hope that the crabs would eat the poisonous material along with the human body that was carrying it. Thus they had returned to chemical warfare, but were doing it in a much more subtle way now. Some wore leather clothes in the belief that they would be more appetizing to their enemies if they were free of manmade fibers and other plant material.

The people chosen to be the Mupu were generally people who were weak or diseased and figured they had little life left to live anyway. However, some happy healthy people did join the Mupu just because they felt it was the most heroic thing to do.

Previously, crabs had taken human bodies apart piece by piece so that they would not have to eat the humans' clothes along with their flesh. Crabs could eat clothes, as clothes in Paba and Subumpam were simply plant fibers and animal skins, and therefore edible, but the crabs gained no nutrition from these. Likewise, hair was edible but actually made it harder to digest the other food, so hair was avoided (that is why they preferred humans over all of the other larger animals such as deer, monkeys, pigs, etc). Humans in the Mupu battalion needed to make sure that they had a way to ensure that the crabs would eat them whole instead of piecing out the clothes and thus the poisons they carried with them. In some cases, the humans ate their poison immediately before being attacked, but most poison payloads had to be quite large in order to kill a crab, as Paba's chemistry technology had not advanced well enough to have discovered how to isolate poisonous compounds in mushrooms from the mushroooms themselvbes.

Later history

After the war, the human population of this part of the world was so destitute that they did not fight any major wars for another 400 years, and the balance of human power shifted to the colder northern areas of the continent, where large animals had not been affected.

In the early stages of the war, many people had predicted that after the war there would be a major population shift and that afterward, men and women would be the same height but women would be slightly heavier because of their wide hips and broader stance. This came to pass as many of the people who had survived the war had been of the body type in which males were small and fragile, while women were (relatively) tall and powerful.

This population shift led to a slow increase in female empowerment, as women could no longer be outmuscled by a typical, unarmed adult male. However, another shift soon followed: the taboo against assaulting women became weaker with each new generation, as young males felt it reasonable that women and men should be treated equally in a fight, since they were of equal physical strength. Even so, the incidence of sexual assault and domestic violence against women in the early Vegetable Age was much lower than it had been in most societies before.

Resettlement of Subumpam

With the defeat of the crabworms the humans finally felt safe moving back into Subumpam. Subumpamese culture had been essentially destroyed except for a small portion of the people who had fled into the mountains (but not into Litila) early on and escaped the crabworms' claws. Some of these moved further on to the fringes of the polar icecap (the planet was still recovering from a long glacial period, so the icecap reached as far as 34N at sea level in some areas). Others moved westward into territory that was still entirely Repilian aboriginals who were nominally part of Nama but had little contact with its government.

But most people preferred to live in warm climates. When possible, Subumpamese-speaking survivors of the war usually preferred to move back to where they had been before, even if it was now entirely devoid of animal life and with plant life struggling to survive in poisoned soil. Apart from a few fortress settlements such as Pamper that had been created by the Pabap army, any Subumpamese people moving back to Subumpam kept the original names of their cities and states.

The Tarpabap soldiers who were living in Subumpam at the end of the Crab War established a new military government in Subumpam that acknowledged the existence of a prior Subumpamese civilian government but felt that the Subumpamese government had been too weak in suppressing violent opposition within its own territory and needed to be overseen by a more aggressive authority. They actually said it was good for the ruling class to be of a different religion and culture than the civilian class, since they would be more strict on crime and political dissent than a government in which the poorest people were closely related to the richest. Thus, they officially endorsed the continuation of the rule of the Pabap royal family in Paba, now that the Tarpabaps had a kingdom of their own. Although Pabaps were moving into Subumpam now as well, they were doing so in their traditional role as a naval power that accumulated wealth through trade, and did not attempt to gain formal control of the government. Because they were no longer under the jurisdiction of Paba, the Tarpabaps living in Subumpam renamed themselves Merar (a long forgotten name that they had previously used in the tropics).

The Merar declared themselves the true heroes of the war, since they were the only ones who had rushed westwards to fight the crabs while everyone else, including the Pabaps who had ruled over them for more than two thousand years, had rushed away from them in terror. Thus they considered Subumpam their war prize, as Subumpam would have ceased to exist without their help. They abolished the Subumpamese language, along with all of the other minority languages that had previously had been spoken in Subumpam, and replaced it with their own language, a dialect of Pabappa known as Tarpabappa. However, due to their cultural separation from Paba, this soon became a wholly separate language in its own right. (Still, because Paba had remained a world power, they often learned Pabappa in addition. Likewise, they remained committed to the Yiibam religion as they saw no alternative at this time.)

The Subumpamese moving back into Subumpam were depressed that their nation seemed to have a history of switching from being dominated by one foreign power to being dominated by another. The Merar, however, told the Subumpamese that the Merar belonged in Subumpam and nowhere else, and had severed all ties to their cousins in Paba. They claimed the government of Paba was unfair because its land army was made up almost entirely of people from the Merar ethnicity, while the Pabaps almost never entered the army yet had full government control. (Although the ruling class in Paba was just a small subset of the Pabap people, the fact that they exempted Pabaps from military service gave the Merar the impression that they nonetheless favored their fellow Pabaps over the Tarpabaps.) The Merar promised that the army in Subumpam would not be just a single race of people; it would be open to everybody. This was possible largely because the Subumpamese people were much more similar in body type to the ruling Merar people: they were smaller, but not by much. Moreover, many of the Merari soldiers married Subumpamese women, even women who already had Subumpamese children but whose husbands had died, and thus at least some Subumpamese were adopted into the ruling class. This did not happen with Pabaps, neither the ones who had stayed in Subumpam all along nor the ones who were moving in to settle unused land. Even in the wake of the world's worst war, the old taboo against Tarpabaps marrying Pabap women remained as strong as ever. Many Pabaps feared that they would be stuck in a subservient role if they attempted to move into mainstream Subumpamese society now; they had been hoping that Paba would be allowed to annex all of Subumpam, with Pabaps as the ruling class yet again and Tarpabaps dominating the military. But Pabaps now were glad to just be alive and for the time being did not worry about their new inferior social status.

The new Merari government of Subumpam also blamed Nama for the war, saying that Nama was so tolerant of obvious threats to the existence of other nations that they had themselves become a threat. Nama had allowed Litila to strongly influence the government of Nama, preventing Nama from taking action even when it became obvious that a million humans were at risk of being cut open and juiced by crabs. Thus, Subumpam declared independence from Nama (it had been de facto independent for about 50 years now, but had never been formally released) and also cut ties with its mirror nations in northern Nama, saying that they were now controlled by foreign (i.e. Subumpamese) parties.

At this point it became clear that Paba really did prefer that the Tarpabaps stayed in Paba, and were not afraid of being dominated by them, because they pled for those Tarpabaps who were still living in Paba to stay there and promised to try to work out a more equitable distribution of roles for the two groups in Pabap society and its military, although they still even now pointed out that many Pabaps had also died in the war, and did so generally in a most shameful position: they were eaten alive by crabs, helpless to fight back, whereas the Tarpabap soldiers had mostly gone down fighting. The Pabaps in Paba hoped that Subumpam would agree to limit the number of Tarpabaps moving to Subumpam so that both empires could share their common culture. Such a huge portion of the Tarpabap population, however, had been deployed to Subumpam or elsewhere outside Paba that Paba's Tarpabap majority had shrunk to 40% of the total, and it consisted mostly of the elderly and younger women who presumed themselves to be war widows and were unlikely to remarry and have children. Thus the Tarpabap population was set to shrink to just the size of its child population, which was a mere 5% as the husbands had mostly already been deployed during the early stages of the war and therefore almost no new births had taken place in Paba. (The Pabap birthrate had also been low during the war, but among Pabap civilians, men and women were sheltered together.)

Many of the younger Tarpabap women moved to Subumpam now in search of their husbands who had decided to stay in Subumpam, but found that many of these had already married Subumpamese women. This was not necessarily a betrayal, as all three cultures (Pabap, Tarpabap, Subumpamese) allowed polygamy, and the Tarpabap leaders had declared that Subumpam was their new home and they were not planning to ever return even to find their old families.

Aftermath in Thaoa

Meanwhile, Paba declared itself the ruler of Thaoa, and said that htey would never pull their army out of Thaoa. They did not want to oppress the Thaoans, they just merely wanted to stop any potential attacks from Thaoa against Paba. They also promised a fair food distribution situation for the two nations: one would feed the other whenever it encountered a famine. Currently, Paba was in a state of famine because of the deaths of almost all its animals and the poisoning of many of its rivers, so they needed to take food from Thaoa to make up for that. They promised to return the favor if the situation ever reversed itself. THus THaoa became very poor. Note that the army occupying Thaoa was also almost entirely made up of the tall, dark Tarpabap people, not the short blonde Pabap people, but that there was much less animosity between the two groups here than there had been in Subumpam.

New nations in the north

The human population density in around 35N 40E was still very low, and humans in many areas were not even the dominant species. This led to an era in history where humans were fighitning mostly agaiunst animals instead of other humans, although complex wars with human+animal teams fighting other human+animal teams also occurred. In the frigid north, the primary inhabitant was the penguin. Slightly further south, there were rabbits, wolves, eagles, and firebirds (a seagull-like bird). In the water, there were a few dolphgins, but they lived a difficult life because they were walled in by ice on one side and land on the other, and could not escape back to the wider ocean. (They had moved in during an unusually warm series of summers in which the sea ice partly melted and the water was at its most bountiful.)

Penguins did not normally attack humans, but all of the other large animals did. Rabbits were the most dangerous, because they were as vegetarian as humans were, and therefore competed for the same food sources. They also commonly lived in cities, as did humans. Wolves were also very dangerous, but considered humans a third-tier food source as humans were much smaller than the prey they liked to eat. Eagles and firebirds considered humans their absolute ideal food source, but eagles found the climate too cold to live in and firebirds had a difficult time getting to this area from their homes on the other side of the icecap. Dolphins were natural allies of humans, having known about them for many tens of thousands of years because they had seen them on Laba, but the dolphins living here were in danger of starvation and did not even attempt to be friendly towards humans. It is notable that most of the animals that reached local dominance were predators that had out-competed all of the other animals including the other predators. Humans and rabbits were incapable of being predators, and acheieved dominance by artifically strengthening themselves by building cities and learning to use weapons (although rabbits were disadvantaged because of their shape, they could nevertheless use and handle weapons such as swords.) Another example of a non-predatory dominant species was the hedgehog, although humans for the most part were not familiar with hedgehog-only civilizations yet; they had only seem them living in the woods around humans.