Memnumu

Memnumu is a nation founded by the Play party in 4151, from the southeastern quarter of what had once been the Anchor Empire. The Play party had just years earlier claimed the entirety of the Anchor Empire, but, surrounded by enemies, decided to abandon all claims to lands populated primarily by enemy parties.

At the time of their foundation in the year 4127, the Player party consisted primarily of small children, and their few adults were mostly young, single women. Moreover, Play ideology required all adult males to devote their lives to the military, and when Dreamland invaded the Players in 4132, the Players sent their entire adult male population, along with some boys, into Dreamland, and the Players became a nation entirely without men.

Prehistory

See Early history of Paba.

The DRG navy that invaded Oyster Island in the year 2175 may have come from an area of Paba out of reach of Paba's central government at the time, and thus could be considered to belong to the history of Memnumu.

Background

See Players for early history.

When word spread that the Player nation had no adult male population, soldiers from three different and mutually hostile nations invaded the Player territory nearly at once, figuring the Play nation was defenseless even if their army was winning battles against Dreamland far to the north. Though the Players had an all-female police force, the roaming soldiers simply pushed these women aside as they sought to find needy young Play women in search of a husband.

Nonetheless, for multiple reasons, the men of these foreign nations had little success in marrying Player women, and the Player women continued to go without husbands even though they were forced to allow the men to remain in Play territory. Those who did marry often left the Play party and joined their husbands, which meant that the women were no longer considered Play citizens, and were warned that they were subject to removal from Play territory in the future.

Even as the Play women rejected the advances of the men who had invaded them, they soon forced their own soldiers to bring home men from distant territories, chiefly Baeba Swamp, believing that Baeban men would make better husbands. Some of them men who had invaded Play territory warned the women that they would attack or enslave these Baeban men on sight.

Although the Play men dutifully obeyed their orders to help foreign men reach the lonely Play women in Memnumu, this journey was difficult as well, and more unwanted men continued to arrive in their stead. The Play women were still unwilling to marry these men. Instead, they decided to wait for the next generation of Play boys to become old enough to marry. Thus, there was a crop of marriages in which the wives were typically older than the husbands, and the birthrate declined.

Most of the Play soldiers who had won victory in Dreamland never returned home, and the Play homeland in Memnumu continued to live in a situation in which all adult males were illegal invaders, except the very youngest ones, the teenagers who had just become mature enough to marry, but these boys were still required to join the military, and therefore they knew that they would be required to fight against the older adult men around them.

Domestic revolt

Soon, however, trouble came from an unanticipated source. Play territory had early in its history become so difficult to live in that most children ran away from their homes and joined the orphans whose parents had died or abandoned them. Many of these children grew up with no meaningful adult contact, and knew nothing of the world except what older children had told them.

When the runaway boys learned that they would be required to fight the adult male intruders as they became older, various groups of children formed independent nations of their own, mostly along the south coast of Play territory. As the children reached out to the men around them, the men attacked the children, seeing that they would make pliable slaves. This led to a wider civil war that eventually cost the Play party its entire territory by the year 4149.

The winners of the civil war were a party called the Tinks (Neuyubu), representing the adult male soldiers who had returned from Dreamland after the war. They, too, were officially required to fight all of the other men, but had avoided doing so by signing private agreements with the invaders while disguising their activities as border patrol in order maintain their Play membership.

Final stages of the war (4151 — 4268 AD)

After the Tinks invaded Paba in 4151, Paba's Players formed the new nation of Memnumu. By this time, the population of Memnumu had grown to about 1.2 million people, and again, about 75% of these were children under the age of 13.

Memnumu (4268 — )

After the declaration of world peace, the Player government remained effectively a one-party state, with other parties permitted to exist and hold elections but locked out of power by the vast Player majority, and only allowed to hold votes on issues affecting their own members. Play was the official language of the nation, with the teaching of foreign languages confined to diplomats only, and the capital was henceforth only called Tatūm.

As the Players built schools and acquired knowledge of history, their radical politics became more moderate in many ways. They claimed that they would never reject Play ideology, but only reinterpret it as a freestanding ideology fit for a peaceful world, where the original Players had embraced extremist politics because they were at war with many larger enemies.

Political platforms

As their territory was ignored by outside parties fighting over Baeba Swamp, the Player government based in Paba survived with no invasions after 4190. The Players entered the new Memnumu Era with their party platform intact, and maintained the laws nationalizing the ownership of most types of property and the distribution of food, and tying food and housing distribution to family size only. Therefore the birthrate remained extremely high as couples married very young in order to acquire new homes, and raised many children in order to keep both themselves and their children well fed.

New factions of the Play party arose when the newer generations began attending school and reading literature written by outside entities such as Moonshine. Strictly speaking, these were not indepndent parties, and the conservative faction of the Players did not try to suppress them. They continued to use the inherited terms ŋaŋe and vap to refer to the various political parties of their nation and the world around them, but because only the Play party could hold power, diplomats began to identify these terms with nations rather than parties, and use new terms such as peim to refer to the Play factions that closely resembled the independent political parties of Baeba Swamp, Moonshine, and other distant empires.

Common bonds

The Play constitution of 4152 affirmed the need of the Players to run a one-party state, saying that it was simply natural for a nation to be in charge of its own territory, as any outside party would have a conflict of interest. They allowed dissenting movements within their party platform, but all known foreign parties were banned and Play factions could not endorse tenets of these banned parties.

The constitution was revised over the decades as the Players learned more about world history and politics, and new factions of the party arose. Nonetheless, the core tenets of the Play party were unchanged, as none of the Play factions that had arisen during or after the war had shaken their core beliefs. Among the beliefs shared by all Play factions were:

1. The Play party has the right and the need to rule uncontested in order to keep the Play nation safe from the influence of outside enemies; multiparty democracies are inherently unstable and doomed to failure.
2. Play party membership is hereditary.
3. Players must be loyal to their nation and not participate in conflicts between two foreign parties.
4. Play supporters living in foreign nations are not Players until they move to the Play nation and acquire citizenship; Players are thus not obligated to defend foreigners who claim allegiance to the Play Empire.
5. All adult female Players are allowed to vote. Men and children cannot vote. Political office is reserved for adult females.
6. Men must dedicate their lives to the military; the military's duties in peacetime involve farming, fishing, and other noncombative tasks.
7. The Play nation's extremely high birthrate prevented foreign powers such as the Leapers and the Raspara from conquering Play territory in the past. A high birthrate is necessary to preserve the Play nation's territorial integrity.
8. Food production must be collectivized and food must be distributed according to family size.
9. The early Players' poor hygiene practices helped Players win wars by spreading diseases into enemy territories well beyond the Play soldiers' furthest advance; nevertheless the Players' diseases also killed Players at home.
10. All Players must attend school during childhood.
11. Children must not be made to work; the definition of work, however, is a matter of debate. Children shall not be made to compete with adults in any type of labor, whether voluntary or forced.
12. The Play party is sovereign over all of Play territory, including private property. The Play police force is responsible for rescuing children from abusive parents, and as such, can enter people's homes at will.
13. Criticism of the Play party constitution is illegal; anyone criticizing the constitution shall lose their Play party membership, and with it, the right to live in Play society.

Effects of the constitution

Because men could neither vote nor hold political office, male-led rebel groups such as the Tinks could not gain legal recognition in the Play Empire, just as societies such as the Flower Bees and Rusted Pearls could not. Likewise, if a group of women proposed granting men the right to vote, they would be immediately banned as a foreign party for violating the Play constitution.

Definitions

Though the Players considered themselves a single political party, their diplomats accepted that outside nations saw the various Play factions as equivalent to other nations' political parties, and that the various non-Play parties were equivalent to other nations' banned parties. The Players continued to use the Play word peim to denote their party factions, but created no translated form of this term and Play diplomats increasingly used the word to refer to the internal political parties of foreign nations as well. Thus it came about that vap was the word that had no proper translation, and Play diplomats needed to identify the various Play parties as an alliance or a union since foreign nations no longer saw them as a party.

Nevertheless, the factions of the Play party were bound together more tightly than the independent political parties of the past. All Play party factions were bound by a military agreement to fight alongside each other in an integrated army, to have a common trade policy, to speak the same language, and to send their children to the same schools. Any groups of people who refused to obey these laws was ruled out of the Play party and therefore also ruled out of the Play nation, and could be imprisoned or killed without penalty, as they would be considered foreign invaders.

New parties

As above, these new parties were identified by traditional terminology as mere factions of the Play party, but as full political parties in international discourse. None of the parties was permitted to support a tenet that went against the Play party's constitution.

Police

The all-female police force organized early on into a closed-entry party, Šeŋumu Ŋenavu, and demanded superior representation in Parliament. This party name meant "family protection (trail)" and also served as their empire's word for the police force itself.

The Play constitution restricted the vote to adult female citizens, but did not specify that all female citizens' voting power be equal. Thus the Police claimed the right to amplify their members' voting power by five, and the right to defend this provision by force, as they were armed and the others mostly were not.

The Police defined their party membership by their occupation, meaning that men were not allowed to join the Police party. The Police believed this would help stabilize their rule, as it meant that the husbands of Police women would by law be required to join other parties, and that therefore the Police would have supporters within the rival parties of their empire. However, as a hereditary organization that shared their empire's traditionally high birth rate, the Police knew that it would be impractical to require their entire population to work in law enforcement as a day-to-day occupation. Rather, they defined the Police as a group of women with the right to own weapons and the duty to work in law enforcement when needed, but where most derived their income from unrelated occupations side-by-side with the members of the less powerful classes in their society.

The Police chose their voting multiplier as 5 because they were slightly more than one fifth of the Play population at the time of their foundation. They rejected an early plan that would have locked in a permanent Police majority in Parliament by untethering voting power from population entirely because they were worried that, if the Police ever acquired a lock on voting power, a ruling elite within the Police would emerge and fire all of the opposing members from the Police, while still retaining their parliamentary majority, thus reserving unchecked power for a much smaller group of people.

Comparison with AlphaLeap

The Police modeled their power structure after the abusive Leaper government that had ruled the Play Empire from 4108 to 4127. The Leapers had taken over the area around Memnumu by force, ruling for only a short time before the then-new Play party threw them out of power. The Police privately conceded that they might someday become as abusive as the Leapers had been, but believed that they would succeed where the Leapers had failed in establishing a common bond with the people they ruled over.

Because the Police restricted membership only to women, they relied on mixed marriage to reproduce, and there was no hereditary Police tribe. The Police hoped that this alone would be sufficient to stop future Police from abusing their subject peoples, but they also established legal limitations on the power of the Police that could not be easily eliminated even in far in the future.

Combs

The conservative Players were pushed out of power by the Moonshine-allied Police faction, even as they remained a majority. The new government structure was no longer a true democracy.

The losing party called itself the Magic Combs (Ŋani Taumnui), based on their refusal to comb their hair. That is, they did not comb their hair because they claimed their hair was already in the state it needed to be, and thus had combed itself.

Another name for the party's members was žaya, a well-known word describing physical hardiness, based on a popular saying that the wind combs the hair of the hardy, again referring to their having no need for combs. However, all Players, not just the Combs, shared the claim to physical hardiness, as it was written in the Play party constitution that their hardiness had won them several wars.

The Combs also did not carry weapons. The ideology of disarming one's own people in favor of the Police was denoted with words such as ŋāka. It was the opposite of tīae (sarabism).

Although the words ŋani and ŋāka appear close in the dictionary, the Players of the time typically did not connect the two words.

Milk Bottles

The tiny Milk Bottle faction remained in existence, and continued to support the extremist policies of the early Play era, but they had very little support because the other Play factions realized that they had been responsible for the child runaway rebellions and that very few children of the Milk Bottles had remained in the Milk Bottles as they approached adulthood.

Traditional Play parliamentary system

The Play party's constitution restricted voting rights to adult women only; not only could men not vote, they could be imprisoned if they complained about their disenfranchisement within earshot of any female Police. Indeed, women could not complain about this situation either, as anyone criticizing the constitution in any way immediately lost their citizenship.

Throughout time, many democracies had granted small children the right to vote, sometimes even from birth. Block voting was common in most such societies, and each election was little more than a census of the population of each neighborhood in each town. Citizens took it for granted that their children could vote because the children were citizens just like their parents and deserved representation in their parliament.

However, the Play party restricted the vote to adult women, saying that children of both sexes, along with men, had other duties to take care of, and since they could not serve in government, they would not be able to cast an intelligent vote. Therefore, even though the Players cast themselves as a children's rights party, the decisions affecting children's lives were made entirely by adults.

Furthermore, since childless women had the same voting rights as women with large families, they helped limit the Play party's devotion to children's issues. Childless women often felt that they related better to young children than those children's own parents, as they were more able to see a given situation from the other side. Nonetheless, because it was in the constitution, childless Play women could not vote to overturn the food distribution system that locked them out of the supply chain, and therefore Play women married young and childless women were few.

Parliamentary vote sessions and frequency

As before, each session of Parliament (Pupumūs) was theoretically open to the entire Play adult female population, since every member of the Play party was allowed to vote directly on the issues affecting them.

Community pre-vote sessions

The Play Parliament did not pay its representatives, nor was there a convenient means of transport. Play representatives therefore had to arrange for their own travel to the capital city of Pūpepas even if they lived far away. Yet the Play constitution insisted that all votes be taken from the entire adult female population.

Rather than send their entire female population to the single Parliament building in Pūpepas, each community in the Play nation would hold a preliminary local vote on each of the known issues before the Parliamentary vote, and then send a representative to Pūpepas to deliver their town's total vote count to the Parliament. Therefore the typical session of Parliament had just a few representatives from each village, in many cases just one.

Morning vote session

The expectation was that the representatives would truthfully report the total vote count of their community, and that communities would forever retain the right to send multiple representatives in order to prevent falsification of results.

Afternoon vote session

Then, when the session met, they would additionally vote on the unknown issues, which typically were those which had arisen very soon before each session. The parliamentary representatives were allowed to vote unanimously on these issues on behalf of their community even if their community had been sharply divided on the previous votes for the pre-announced issues.

This system had served the Players well for more than a hundred years, and the Players had often claimed that corruption was not possible in the Play Parliament.

New governmental reforms

As the Players became more educated, they modeled their government increasingly after Moonshine. Nonetheless, they retained some distinct features, such as a unitary government structure, meaning that the entire Parliament could vote on issues applying to a single area, and that town's people would have no special privilege to overrule the wider Parliament vote.

Apportionment of representatives

For more than a hundred years, the Players had restricted the vote to adult females and also insisted that all votes be weighted equally. Thus, there was no elite comparable to the Ghosts or the Leapers, who in their nations had managed to win parliamentary votes with just 10 to 20% of the votes in their favor due to the presence of non-democratic elements in their parliaments which could not be overruled.

But now, citing the need to keep order, the Police announced that heretofore, votes would be weighted according to occupation, with members of the Police given five votes apiece, whereas commoners had only one. Police membership was hereditary, and therefore, Play commoners could not join the Police, although their daughters could be adopted into families headed by Police women and thus become Police themselves.

Disenfranchisement

Meanwhile, the lowest class, including all men, all criminals, and groups to be defined upon the future whims of the Police, was disenfranchised, making them legally equivalent to non-Players. The Police had the right to disenfranchise any entity ranging from a single person to a broad class of people, simply by accusing them of treason, a crime which the Police reserved the right to define.

However, because the Police could also fire and arrest each other, they were subject to the same fate as commoners when accused of treason, and because most Police were married to non-Police, even attacks against non-Police families could lead to anger from other Police. The Police thus believed that their new system would weather the challenges facing their nation, and that the Police would never seek to abuse the common population by disenfranchising anyone who posed a threat to the interests of the Police in Parliament.

The Play commoners, who came to call themselves Combs, therefore considered themselves a middle class rather than an underclass.

Preliminary Police votes

It soon came about that the Police determined their votes on most issues before each session Parliament met, and largely voted in line with each other; because the Police were more than one fifth of the adult female population, the Police could outvote their opposition in Parliament unless an issue arose on which the Police were split nearly evenly. This was the new equivalent of the traditional community vote system. Thus, the Police brought to table in Parliament only those issues in which they could not agree among themselves and therefore sought the advice of commoners. This meant that, often enough, the only issues that came up in Parliament were new bills unknown to the general public, meaning that the votes of the Combs' representatives would be also unknown to their constituents.

Originally, the Police had planned to create more levels in their hierarchy, such that members of disliked occupations would be assigned even less weight per capita than the commoners, while some occupations would rise to a status intermediate between the commoners and the Police. They soon rejected this system as impractical, as it would require the Police to deny entry into occupations between groups that had no hostility towards each other, and because members of some occupations would have difficulty attending Parliament and would need to send proxies from other occupations to vote for them.

Rejection of absolute power

The Police did not want absolute power in their nation because they believed that the weaker parties they ruled over deserved a voice in government. They merely believed that the share in power of these weaker voices need not be equal to their share of the empire's population. The Police claimed that their system was vastly superior to the traditional Gold parliamentary system, where each tribe was assigned a single vote in Parliament, regardless of their population.

On any issue where the Combs and Police agreed, their combined votes totalled nearly 100% of the population, and such policies were unstoppable. They also considered adopting a policy from the Thunder Empire stating that the greater the support for any law at the time it was passed, the greater a majority would be needed to later overturn it. Thus such laws would be effectively indelible.

On issues where the parties disagreed, the Police easily dominated during the first years of the new system because of the massive extra weight assigned to their votes. But the Police knew that in the future, they might become so small a minority that they would be forced to decide whether to cede power to the commoners or to further increase the amplitude of their own votes. And they knew that even some Police would be opposed to further increasing the imbalance of the system.

Rejection of census-based voting

A rival democratic system in common use around the world involved making all community votes unanimous, meaning that the census would determine the voting total, and that the representatives would be allowed to remain in their parliaments full-time instead of traveling back and forth to collect votes. Typically, nations using this system had counted their entire population, rather than their adult population or their adult female population.

The Players had traditionally rejected this idea because they believed it was anti-feministic to allow men the right to vote, and that giving children the right to vote, even in such an indirect manner, would lead to children drowning out the adults' votes with demands for ephemeral pleasures. For example, one Play representative threatened to create a new party that promised to immediately abolish all schools. Since children outnumbered adults in nearly all Play towns, her party would capture nearly 100% of the vote in a census-based election system.

But some Players believed a compromise was possible: the votes would be census-based, including men and children, but the representatives would still be appointed by adult women only.

Rejection of absolute matching

Another idea for reform involved the Police affording themselves one representative for each representative sent by the Combs, with the idea that the Police representatives would have exactly the same voting rights as the commoners, meaning that each side could win a vote if their representatives were absolutely unanimous. The Police assumed that no legitimate vote among the commoners in such a large nation would ever be truly unanimous, whereas the Police allowed their leaders to dictate the votes of lower-ranking Police, making truly unanimous votes common. The Police denied this idea, as well, saying that the commoners would actually be better off if the Police had a surplus of votes, since they would be more willing to divide amongst each other, whereas a system that was nearly evenly matched would lead to the Police voting unanimously out of panic, even if they actually did not all agree with a given issue.

Formation of unions

This may be as early as the 4180's, and as such could simply be moved to the Players article. However, it is likely that it postdates the many-sided wars, and possibly also the war against Nama.

Attempted breakup of Police

The Police had restricted themselves to a single faction so that they could not oppose each other's interests. Their votes were not required to be unanimous, but because the women at the top of the command chain could revoke party membership at any time merely for disobedience, the Police did not in fact have a free vote in Parliament, and when the party officials required it, they were required to vote unanimously or surrender their membership.

Some Police wanted to further increase the state's control on issues inside the home, saying for example that women with too many children would need to surrender the youngest to families seeking adoption. Since the Police were not allowed to split into factions, these women could not win their vote, and so attempted to enroll Players from the peasant class as Police, even knowing that their street occupations would not change.

Teenage adoption loophole

Police party membership was hereditary, but new members could be brought into the party through adoption. Adoptive families preferred to adopt teenagers so that they would not need to spend thirteen years raising a child just to gain their faction one more vote. By adopting large numbers of young peasant girls into their families, both Police factions attempted to achieve a solid majority, even as they realized they were creating a shortage of women in the peasant parties. The authors of the constitution had not foreseen this development, because they had assumed Player politics would be stable enough that no one would adopt a child just to increase their vote share in Parliament.

Contemplation of partial dictatorship

The Police leaders realized that they would need to take a stand on this new development: they could either force the newcomers to vote with the leaders, effectively abolishing democracy, or they could allow the Police to break into factions while retaining their right to an amplified vote, even if it meant that the nation would have two independent police forces, neither responsible to the other.

The Police were not threatening to create a dictatorship because their commands would only apply to their own members, and therefore, while there would always be a bloc vote of Police in Parliament, non-Police Players could outvote it at least some of the time.

Culturebound political issues

Most Players were living in a filth-free environment at least into the early 4170s, and possibly all were. Hygiene laws had been passed in 4150, and may have lasted until around 4170 without any dissent. However, this was not written into the constitution, so it was possible to change, and indeed it did change towards the end of the century. By the late 4270s (sic), at least one Play faction was once again openly pro-filth, reviving all of the early arguments about plagues protecting the Players from invasions and saying physical hardiness, including resistance to plague, was a virtue that all people should strive for.

Children's issues

The Players entered the Cosmopolitan Age with the world's highest fertility rate, and maintained it by collectivizing agriculture (including fishing) and tying food distribution to family size. Thus Players married young and had large families. The rapidly expanding population kept the Play army at war until 4268, long after their enemies had conceded defeat and fled into the wilderness; thus the Play soldiers were by this time fighting more animals than people.

The Play parliament's typecast inertia, coupled with the belief that their nation's high fertility rate had spared them the fate of the ruined nations around them, kept the fertility rate high even as population pressure increased. Furthermore, it was illegal to publicly criticize the food distribution system, as it was to criticize any other law that had been written into the original Play party constitution of 4151. These laws applied even to the ruling classes; Police would be fired immediately for so much as dissenting from the party's opinions, and likewise the Police tended to have large families because they, too, were prohibited from maintaining a private food supply.

Cities, especially the capital, Pūpepas, had been built with large families in mind: in eastern Pūpepas stood a school built for a student population in the tens of thousands, larger than most cities by itself, and smaller neighborhoods within Tatūm were built with playgrounds in the center. The capital city was so known for its families' high fertility rate, above even the Play party's average, that they referred to it as Bābā, "nursery ward", and this became the common word for a capital city. Even as the fertility rate declined, the child population in absolute numbers continued to increase, so the Players were well able to maintain and make use of these structures made for children.

Child labor and discipline

The Police and Players cooperated on many important issues, and the opinions of both parties held firm for centuries. Both supported the right of children to attend school, and to be free from financial obligations to their parents; they also supported the right of children to run away from home and to stay in government-subsidized foster homes provided that they continue to attend school and obey the adults running the foster homes. Both asserted that children had the right to play, and could not be made to work alongside adults, though they also both agreed that children should be made to work farm labor and to help catch fish, which they no longer considered work. Thus, despite maintaining Play as the name of their party, they now endorsed some activities that the original Players had considered child labor. They did this upon learning that this had been the historical way of life in their territory and that child labor of this sort may have been responsible for the era of economic prosperity that preceded their invasion by AlphaLeap alongside other foreign powers.

Corporal punishment

The founding Players dedicated themselves to opposing corporal punishment inside the home, promising that their police would risk their lives to rescue children from abusive homes. Yet, since the government afforded the Player police force the right to overrule parents in their own homes, the Police were the only political party with the power to inflict corporal punishment on children.

In increasing order of severity, the Police practiced corporal punishment on women, children, and men. Men were typically shorter than women but were expected to be physically hardy.

Like the Moonshines they admired, the Play police officers spent much of their time supervising children, both indoors and outdoors, to protect them from each other and from adults. Adult male Players were confined to certain areas of Play settlements, and young Play children often spent more time with police than with their own fathers.

Child labor

Likewise, the founding Players abolished child labor immediately upon taking power, but by allowing the legislature to define child labor, they found ever more ways to keep new generations of young children bound to their work.

Parenting and adolescence

While much of the world saw childbirth as a burden, women in the Play Empire relied on their large families to access food supplies, and came to believe that having many children was a virtue in itself. The fertility rate remained high for hundreds of years after the Players ran out of living space, leading to famines and disease on a scale they had never experienced even during the early wars.

Even here, the Players' birthrate remained among the highest in the world. Nevertheless, Play family planners knew the difference, proposing to address the declining birthrate by changing their nation's cultural attitudes towards childhood.

Further new parties

This may be united with the new party section above.

The Thumbs (tanisīmū) wanted to promote childlike behavior in adolescence and even adulthood, delaying marriage so that when people did marry they would not feel like they needed to delay childbirth any longer. By prolonging the period of life in which childlike behavior was acceptable, meanwhile, they would replace the missing children with adolescents and make it seem as though nothing had changed. The Thumbs stated that this new era would be even more playful than before since children would have more years of childhood to enjoy.

The Nipples (Natua Mem), on the other hand, wanted to accelerate childhood by introducing young children to adultlike concepts in order to eliminate, as much as possible, the entire concept of childhood in Play society, stating that the Players' strong society had not depended on the sheer number of children per adult in each family but on Play families' careful attention to the needs of children and their being at the center of every political issue. The Nipples stated that it would no longer be appropriate to have long parliamentary debates about the appropriate bedtimes of toddlers and schoolchildren, when the nation's population no longer consisted primarily of children under age 13.

Both parties' names were transparent references to the founding Player faction, which at one point called itself the Milk Bottles. Just as a baby goes from a nipple to a bottle, and from a bottle to their thumb, so too the Nipples and Thumbs positioned themselves on opposite sides of the longstanding Bottle party line on this particular issue. The Nipple party's name can also be represented in English as Milk, but they refused to use such a euphemism in their political campaigns because they were firmly to one side of the early Milk Bottle position. Nevertheless, this same mem was in both the name of the country (Memnumu) and the name of the original Milk Bottle party.

Because of the presence of the Thumbs and Nipples, the original Milk Bottle name was revived for the centrist position, which nonetheless continued to mostly refer to its party as the Combs.

Feminism

Absolute obedience

The Play party constitution stated that all men must immediately obey any command given to them by a woman, even a stranger. The government, including the police force, was made up entirely of women.

To prevent situations such as a lone woman ordering the entire male population to commit suicide immediately, all men were required to obey more than one woman, and such situations did not occur. Rather, the chain of power proceeded upward from a happenstance encounter with a woman on the street, to a man's wife, to a police officer, to the chief of police (who herself was supervised by non-Police women but not controlled by them).

Nevertheless, it remained that any woman could order the police to arrest any given man simply for refusing to obey her, and the man would be detained until his wife or a member of the police declared him innocent. Furthermore, the police could arrest any man at any time without giving a reason.

During the first centuries of the Play Empire, the male population was heavily armed, and these laws had little meaning; when the Police ordered the army to disarm itself, the Police took full control of the nation and men became very weak in society. Some men worried that it would soon be commonplace for Police women to slaughter hundreds, or even thousands, of helpless men whenever food supplies in their nation ran short, since Play culture had long established the custom that men would be last in line for food and that their wives could not buy food for their husbands if it meant that children or women would starve.

Food distribution

Importantly, both the Police and Players supported maintaining the collectivization of agriculture and the distribution of food rations according to family size, meaning that families without children needed to either forage for food in the wild (which was not considered agriculture) or continuously sell property in order to feed themselves. This put strong pressure on teenagers to marry immediately, and to have children of their own as soon as possible. The Police also applied this new law to their own party members, meaning that although the Police tended to be wealthy, they would rapidly run out of wealth if they did not have large families just like the Players they ruled over. This concession set the Police apart from all of the nation's previous occupiers, such as the Raspara and the Leapers, who had always created difficult laws and then exempted themselves from them.

Language issues

The Play Empire was a unitary parliamentary government superimposed on an array of small independent tribal nations, and as such, the Players spoke many languages. Their common unifying language, spoken in the capital city, came to be simply called Play per a longstanding tradition associating languages with political parties on a one-to-one basis. Most Players were bilingual, as Players with a different ancestral language learned to speak Play, while those who spoke Play learned other languages as well, most commonly Late Andanese. Bilingualism held strong even when war held Players back from attending school, as they tended to learn these languages through passive exposure.

Traditionally seen as a handicap, the Players came to see their empire's language problem as a strength when they built their long-awaited school system and realized that their teachers had access to knowledge written in languages nobody outside the Play Empire would ever be able to read.

Attitudes towards clothing

The Play people were proud of their physically strong bodies. They claimed that they were immune both to sunburn and to cold, and therefore did not need protective clothes either in summer or in winter, as did the Dreamers, despite Dreamland's milder temperatures and higher latitude. Likewise they said that they did not need clothes to protect them from thorny plants either, as did the Dreamers, though in this case neither side knew that Play territory happened to have fewer plants with sharp thorns than did Dreamland.

The politics of underwear

The Play party had run out of clothes even before they went to war with Dreamland because they had declared that clothes were a luxury, and outlawed the creation of any clothes. Yet, rival parties demanded that the Players put on clothes whenever they left any Play-only territories. Later generations of Players compromised and agreed to wear the minimum allowable amount of clothing, which they called puta, and which other nations considered underwear.

Because bodily decoration was also banned, the only means of expression the Players had was in their choice of what style and color of underwear to wear. As certain difficult colors came to be seen as status symbols, a faction of Players called for the return of nudity so that everyone would again appear the same on sight. These people tended to live in the warmest climates and in areas where nature presented relatively little danger to unprotected human skin; thus, they lived mostly along the south coast, where the economy was based on fishing, as fish was Memnumu's main source of food. The nudists did not create a specific Nudist faction of the Play party because they wanted their idea to appeal to all groups within their society and not tie nudism to a bundle of unrelated political issues such as economics. This meant that the nudists had political divisions of their own, but as they had been mostly of the lower class in Play society despite their access to the sea, they did not mount serious challenges to each other.

Even the nudists accepted the necessity of humans to wear blankets to protect themselves from cold weather, and (unlike the founding Players) admitted that babies should wear diapers to protect both themselves and their caretakers from disease. Both the nudists and the clothed Players agreed that clothes were meant to be cheaply produced, and to have a rough texture similar to that used to make bags for carrying heavy items around. Thus attitudes towards clothing formed a spectrum rather than a two-way divide: some Players insisted that clothes were to be avoided at all costs, while most others believed that clothes should be plain and rough-textured, and only a small group, mostly of the upper class, believed that clothes could be used as a fashion statement.

Tribal conflicts

Social stratification based on height

The very tall Repilian people, who had recently joined the Moonshines, settled in Play territory just as the last survivors of the very short Andanese people were fleeing to Xema. The Repilian women renamed themselves the Police, establishing a hereditary but all-female police force, and reassigned their men to other tribes. Because the Police by definition could only marry non-Police, they assumed that their nation's height profile would eventually become more homogeneous. In earlier periods, some Repilian women working along the seacoast had found themselves surrounded by full-grown men no taller than their hips; now, the shortest adult Play men were typically between belly and breast-high against the women of the new Police force.

Territory

In theory, Creamland's territory could expand to take over the entire area that was reserved for Thaoa before Thaoa was defeated. However, it is possible that another power takes over here; remember "Gold people even settled Laba now" and that this territory would be considered as remote as Laba was.

Orange War

In 4286, the Ghost Empire declared war on the Players and immediately invaded. Moreover, they had the support of Dreamland in this war. The unitary Play state remained united against their enemies, unlike in past wars where dissenting groups within their society had used war as an opportunity to rebel. The unexpected Ghost-Dream alliance was winning its war against the Players, but seemed unlikely to ever conquer the whole of Play territory.

NOTES

1. Earlier wrote that POSSIBLE DATES for the new war include 4239, 4241, 4250, 4261, and c. 4270, with the first four coming from variant readings of the "padopom" document and the last assuming that it was never part of the same timeline but must at least postdate the Players' treaty with Nama (which was not a surrender).
2. The padopom document never mentions Nama, and towards the end describes events as if the Players had been the same entity as Nama all along, even saying that the Play party had been the "Nama's old leaders" who attacked Asala/Reino entity that had taken over Baeba Swamp.
3. This war must have lasted into the 4300s, and though the Ghost-led alliance was winning, they were forced to pull back because of events in Dreamland which in turn led to other events in nearby areas.

Note that DREAMLAND did not enter this war until 4286, but the Ghosts may have declared war earlier on.

Dreamer war propaganda

The Dreamer side of the coalition was one of the few remaining societies on the planet where men were taller than women. The Players and other feminist tribes had been winning wars, while other nations shifted from tall-male to tall-female by peaceful means; for example, the Ghosts had come to power as a mixed population, but then quickly handed over power to people mostly descended from the Crystals.

The Dreamers had studied recent world history, and modeled their new philosophy largely after the defeated Matrix army, which had managed to seize control of the Players and other nations which greatly outnumbered them. The Dreamers marched under a banner reading "Rape, Kill, Eat", and promised that they would be even more cruel than the Matrixes had been, and also more cruel than the Zeniths, the Slopes, and the Scorpions.

The Dreamers promised their invasion would be particularly painful for the Players, as the Dreamers were also one of the tallest tribes in the world, and the Play tribes were among the shortest. The Dreamers made no apology for their planned invasion, and stated that it had nothing to do with the Players having invaded Dreamland in earlier times, as the new generations of Dreamers did not believe in the concept of justice.

The Dreamers were against both feminists and tribes whose languages had the acoustic properties of Play, which they now considered infantile. Because the Dreamer tribes included some with languages of this type, they vowed that they would graduate such people out of their population over the generations as the Hipatal languages slowly became dominant.

The Dreamers had been unable to raise their empire's sagging fertility rate, but now claimed that they had turned their weakness into a strength: because there were few children in the Dreamer states, it would be easy for the Dreamer women to shelter and protect them from harm, leaving the Dreamer men free to move in large numbers to Memnumu where they would assault the Play women, men, and children.

Players panic

The Players were alarmed when they realized they were at war with an army promoting overt sexual assault, and that the invading army was specifically targeting Players because of their body type. This new war was not ideological or even territorial; the Dreamers simply wanted slaves, and figured that the smaller the slaves, the less likely they were to revolt.

The Dreamers stated that it was simply natural for taller, stronger people to control abuse the tribes who were shorter and weaker. Since the Players supported a life close to nature, the Dreamers told them to submit and accept their role at the bottom of the new Dreamer-led society. The Dreamers promised that unlike the Matrixes, they would not breed a middle class to control the lower class; the Players would be forever small and thus forever helpless under the watch of the Dreamers.

Though Dreamland was thousands of miles away from the Play homeland of Memnumu, the Dreamers by this time had conceded that their army was weak, and so they planned to revive their status as a naval power. Thus, the Dreamers threatened to invade the Players by sailing westward around the entire planet, through the islands of Laba. Though this journey was longer still, the Dreamers had established permanent settlements on the islands and signed a treaty with the Hipatal islander tribes stating they would cooperate in their new war. Xema's naval conquest of Play territory in the 4180s, though brief, proved to the Dreamers that their plan was feasible. Furthermore, they noted that Laba had established a colony in Play territory to help fight off Xema, and that the descendants of those Labans were still there; since Dreamland was now at piece with Laba, they hoped that the Labans in Play territory might switch sides and help the Dreamers.

The Players mobilized their navy for a defensive war and, as their new government was run by the Police, they enacted very strict laws to control the population. The Play leaders believed that the best way to win their war was to return to old strategies that had served them well: strict gender roles, a very high fertility rate, and the spread of plagues near and beyond their borders to bring down soldiers before they could reach Memnumu. They knew, however, that it would be difficult to spread plagues to an enemy that was invading them by sea.

Differences in body type

The Players had beaten the Dreamers in a land war before, and although both populations had changed, the Players and the Dreamers had in fact both increased their average height, and most Play military strategists knew this. However, the Players expected that most of the Dreamer sailors would be from Laba, the traditional maritime power region within Dreamland, and that they would attack the Play homeland from the east, invading states such as Thaoa whose populations were shorter than average.

Ghost-Play diplomacy

The Players also believed that the dominant force in the new Ghost-Dreamer alliance was the Ghosts. The Ghosts had completely different reasons for attacking Memnumu, and the Players hoped that the coalition might break up and start a three-sided war in which the Players would be able to quickly wear down a war-weary Dreamer army while trying to make peace with the Ghosts.

The Players, already surprised at their new war, were further surprised when they realized that the Ghosts, who supported feminism, were siding with the Dreamers who were gloating about their plans to rape the Player population. The Ghosts organized a diplomatic meeting with the Players to explain their position in the new war.

Diplomatic symposium

Following tradition, the Ghosts traveled into the Play capital city of Pūpepas and met the Players in their own Parliament building. Unlike most previous meetings, however, there was no set language. The Ghosts mostly spoke Leaper, believing it to be the language of world diplomacy, but for many of them, Leaper was a second language. Meanwhile, the upper class of Play society had historically spoken the Moonshine language, which at this time was still similar enough to Leaper to be mutually intelligible, but they had been keeping Moonshine off the streets in Play territory and most of these Play leaders now spoke Play better than they spoke Moonshine. Therefore, the diplomats agreed that both sides would do their best to communicate in Leaper, whether the Moonshine dialect or the Baeban (standard) dialect, but that nobody would be excluded from the meeting for not being able to speak the language.

The Ghosts promised the Players that Dreamers would never be welcome in Ghost territory, and that they would not allow the Dreamers to cross through Ghost territory to reach the Players. That is, although both nations were to the northwest of Play territory, the Ghosts were reserving the direct route, over land, for themselves. Thus the Ghosts were invading the Players from the north, whereas the Dreamers were being forced to take a much longer route, all the way around the planet, and would be invading the Players from the south. The Ghosts even stated that they hoped to establish a new empire that would incorporate all of the Ghost and Play territories, so long as all of the Players would convert to the Ghost party.

Critique of nationalism

But the Ghosts made it clear to the Players that they considered the Play ideology to be even more evil than the Dreamer ideology. Because the Players pushed hundreds of thousands of young children into the world each generation, knowing that even in the best years there would not be enough food for all of them to survive, the Play leaders were inflicting even greater abuse on the Play peasant population than the Dreamers ever could.

The Ghosts told the Players that their world had entered the Cosmopolitan Age, and that nationalist ideologies like the Players' were no longer valid. The Ghosts and the Dreamers, they said, were cosmopolitan ideologies (Leaper lăkʷi), because people in any nation and tribe could join them, whereas the Players, though internally diverse, were loyal to their nation and their nation only.

The Ghosts said that nationalism was inherently wrong because while cosmopolitans shared common interests, nationalists were at odds even with each other. They said that there was no common ground, for example, between the Play nationalists and those of other nations.

The Ghosts classified the Players as nationalists, and told the Players that any future conflict between the Ghosts and the Dreamers would need to wait until all of the world's nationalists had been eliminated. The Players responded to this by saying that, once the Ghosts had eliminated all the other nationalist parties in the world, only the Players would remain, and therefore the Ghosts' objection that nationalist parties were inherently hostile to each other would no longer apply.

Players' responses to Ghost arguments

The Players opposed the Ghost position on multiple points.

Firstly, the Players argued that nationalism was good, as a nation needed to serve the interests of its entire population rather than balancing the interests of the population with groups living outside the nation. Secondly, they argued that nationalism worked best in a one-party state, where the interests of the nation and the party would coincide, whereas multiple-party democracies, even if led by a strongly nationalist party, would forever struggle with the minor parties' attempts to find allies outside the nation.

The Players conceded the Ghosts' point that nationalist groups could not form a worldwide alliance with each other, since the interests of one nation would be inherently opposed to the interests of other nations, but argued that they could reasonably form transnational alliances with each other even if both sides of the war included nationalist parties.

But the Players also argued that the Ghosts and the Dreamers were nationalist parties as well, as the Ghosts had restricted citizenship to Ghost party members, and that, while some Ghosts lived outside their home nation, they were allowed to vote in the Ghosts' elections and therefore there was no meaningful difference between the Ghost party and the Ghost Empire. Meanwhile the Dreamers were spread across many nations, but these nations all had a closely linked cultural history spanning thousands of years.

Further arguments

By this time, both the Players and the Ghosts had effectively abolished their democracies. For example, the Ghosts restricted citizenship to their own party, meaning that even when elections were held, both the eligible voters and the eligible candidates were required to be Ghosts.

But whereas the Ghosts still claimed to be democratic, the Players' ruling Police faction had declared that winning their war was more important than maintaining democracy, and that even a one-party democracy could give rise to factions that would help the opposing side in their war. They had used this rationale in previous wars.

One of the Ghosts' strongest arguments for their transnationality was that they were racially, culturally, and linguistically diverse, having arisen as a merger of parties with very different ancestries. But the Ghosts were unable to use this argument in the meeting with the Players because their leadership had quickly come to consist of people historically from the Crystal tribes, and had even ejected the descendants of their early leaders as they had been planning at the time to start a war against Dreamland and anyone whose ancestry traced to the Dreamer tribes and the adjacent Lenian tribes to the northeast (even those which were hostile to Dreamland). Since the Ghost underclass was diverse but the Ghost leadership was not, their society's structure closely resembled that of the Players, in which a Moonshine-speaking overclass had migrated and taken over the diverse Play society.

Players regroup

The Players created the Maušīm Papevaa army here, a combined army-navy force consisting of adult male soldiers, and stated that they would never again expose small children to the dangers of the battlefield. Yet they told their children to be ready for war, and built forts scattered throughout Play territory to serve as schools for the time being but as hideouts should the need arise.

Naming pattern

The Players' fondness for puns had fallen into disuse in recent decades as their contacts without the outside world had turned ever more hostile. Rather than a pun, the new name was a euphemism for female prostitutes and an archaic name for Laba, which had betrayed the Players by siding with Dreamland. By adding Vaa to their name, the Players claimed that they were the only true Laba, and that the islanders who had joined the Dreamer invasion had surrendered their right to use the name.

Claiming to be Laba was an unprecedented move. Even more bold, however, was the Players' decision to name their army after the Dreamer pirates' intent to sexually assault the soldiers and their women. The Play women who had chosen the name argued that it was clear that Dreamer men were much taller than Play men, and that there was no point in pretending otherwise; reminding the Play men of their place in the Dreamers' minds would serve as a much better motivator than a futile attempt to portray the two armies as equals.

The Police told men that they lived in a feminist nation, and therefore had no right to be proud of their bodies. Furthermore, as men they were required to defend their nation, even if it meant enormous death totals for the men, because it would be better for thousands of men to die than for the Dreamers to assault a woman or child on the Play mainland.

The Police told men that the ideal body type, including for men, was feminine, and that it was better for them to think of themselves as defective women than as men. The Police believed that demoralizing their male population would help them unite against the Dreamers, since if the Play men did not think of themselves as being men, they would not seek to ally or submit to the Dreamers.

New wave of government reforms

The ruling Police party, which had rewritten the constitution to give themselves a strong but not invincible grip on power, declared that defense of the Play nation would take precedence over all internal conflicts as well as the Players' ongoing settlement of eastern Nama and Repilia. Yet they knew that the settlement of Repilia especially would serve them well in their war, because neither the Ghosts nor the Dreamers could reach Repilia without first invading at least two other outside parties. (The Cold Men had mostly dissolved by this time.)

The Police restricted membership to adult females. This was different from the other Play parties, which restricted voting rights to adult females but extended membership rights to everybody. The Police had done this on purpose to ensure that the Police could never evolve into a hereditary overclass; because they did not allow men, their husbands by definition always belonged to rival parties and thus the Police, despite their disproportionate share of power, could not reproduce without wooing the men of the rival parties.

The Police still rejected the idea of a head of state as being unwomanly and thus not fit for a feminist nation; borrowing from Moonshine, at the top of the hierarchy was not a commission but a circular power structure, each woman in charge of one other and supervised by one other.

The right to pick fruit

By this time, they had established wild plants, including fruit trees, throughout much of the countryside, and stated that these were not covered by the cash economy and therefore were free. They claimed that, just as anyone who caught fish was allowed to keep all the fish they found, so too should anyone who picks fruit be allowed to keep all of the fruit they had found, even if it took very little effort by comparison to the fishers. This applied also to wild plants of other types. The Pitušaiva society thus was born.

The right to cry

The Players also adopted a concept from their allies in Moonshine, which by this time had become pro-Play but was still pacifistic and therefore of little help in the new war. Moonshines believed that it was impossible to cry insincerely, and therefore, in any situation in which any person, whether adult or child, was seen to be crying, all other people would immediately drop what they were doing and attend to the crying person's needs. The Players were not convinced that it was truly impossible to falsely cry, but empowered their police force to arrest anyone who was seen to ignore the plight of anyone in their vicinity who was visibly or audibly crying. They also stated, nonetheless, that if any person was found to be falsifying their emotion in order to gain sympathy, this would be a crime as well, and as with many other crimes, the Play police force warned that their laws would apply to children as young as five years old, and that their parents could not override the police's decisions.

Changes in lifestyle

With their living standards improved, the Play leadership announced that they had finally brought the right to play to their child population. They nonetheless warned that, even during play, there were dangerous enemies waiting to strike, and fortified cities such as Ŋapata Ŋūa that had previously been easy to invade by sea.

New Play language policy

The Players maintained their belief that linguistic diversity would allow them to preserve knowledge that no outside cultures could understand, and that the Late Andanese language was a good means of intertribal communication. However they stopped teaching Late Andanese in schools, saying that their nation no longer had any people whose ancestry was solely Andanese, and told these schools that they could only teach in Play from then on. The government also maintained tight control over the teaching of the Play language, since dialects had been diverging as populations in outlying areas grew apart. The government outlawed the teaching of any dialect of Play that was not readily understandable to those speaking the standard language taught in Pūpepas, saying that the preservation of existing languages was for reasons that did not apply to newly evolved languages.

Traditionally, the /l/ sound had been a marker of Andanese cultural identity, for which Play speakers substituted a /w/ sound. Later, a spelling reform had changed this to /b/. But now that the Andanese people had been legally abolished, Play speakers were allowed to pronounce the /l/ sound. This came into fashion as Play speakers began a conditional sound shift of y > l, meaning that the inherited /b/ sound remained as /b/.

The Police continued to speak Moonshine, a language closely related to and intelligible with Leaper, which had become the language of world diplomacy. Moonshine was a very complex language with separate speech registers for men and women. Because all Police were women, they had no reason to teach the language to men, and therefore no need to communicate with men, even their own family members, in Moonshine. Thus, the Police stated that only the feminine speech register of Moonshine would be taught in Play territory. They also passed a law criminalizing any use of the wrong speech register, which effectively made it illegal for men to speak Moonshine, even if repeating words they had heard Police women use. This new law therefore created yet another new crime that Police women could use to arrest men.

Meanwhile, by restricting use of Moonshine to the Police, the Police firmly established Play as the operating language of their nation. While other cultures scoffed at the Play language, describing it as infantile in sound, the Police told the Play speakers to be proud of their language, and promised that the police force would not be allowed to hide knowledge from the public by speaking Moonshine.

Retirement of Andanese

Traditionally, the Players and their ancestors had been fond of puns involving their two official languages, Play and Late Andanese. This had led to the creation of many proper names that were meaningful in both languages, such as the Players' own party name, pata, and many longer names such as kupukapukipa.

The coinage of words like this extended to common nouns and had a long history. Loanwords were rare; instead, Players tended to use phonosemantic matching, a form of pun, to link words between the two languages.

For example, Play nuīifaekes "orphanage building", which meant literally "young adolescents in the dark", had been coined because it sounded like Late Andanese nuyiihaiku, a transparent word made up of the native Andanese word yiiha "orphan" surrounded by the building classifier circumfix nu-...-iku. But the Play word did not contain the Play word for orphan, tāu, and therefore had needed to be learned as a word on its own.

Nativization of vocabulary

As Late Andanese became a ceremonial language, its ornate scripts survived in works of art such as flags, where the geometric shapes corresponded to the letters of the Andanese syllabary, but few people understood what they meant unless a translation was provided. Therefore, newly coined proper nouns typically no longer had any meaning in Late Andanese except by pure happenstance, and even these names were scarcely ever understandable as wordplay.

The Police thus purified the Play language by replacing words like this with natively coined derivations, which were typically shorter and easier to learn. For example, in place of the disliked /nuīifaekes/, the Police created the new word taves, which was transparently derived from the word for orphan.

Celebration of sounds

Having been freed from the constraints of the two overlapping phonologies, most newly coined Play names had a sound more typical of the language as a whole, with an even greater use of the bilabial sounds p b m v (the last of which spells IPA /w/), and very little use of the velars k ŋ. The Players felt that k ŋ might nonetheless come back into fashion someday as their cultural association with Andanese diminished.

Toy block script

The new Players promised to keep the many ornate Andanese scripts in use, and therefore preserve the Andanese language even though it would be for ceremonial and artistic use only. But they also created a new artistic script for the Play language, pupumūes, based on the colored toy blocks (pupumuba) their children played with.

Traditionally, Play children had learned the letters of their main script by reading the letters carved into each block and spelling out longer words. But this had been problematic as their script was syllabic, and therefore a large number of blocks were needed. Now, new blocks were cut with no carvings at all; the blocks themselves were the writing medium. Since there was only one size and shape of block, the colors and positions of the blocks indicated the syllables of the words. Therefore the script was two-dimensional. When the player ran out of space to position more blocks, a new row would be built beside the first one, creating a three-dimensional array of blocks.

Only two colors of blocks were needed, though it was common to see three colors, such that each block would have two faces painted with each color. Another alternative used four colors, with two faces each painted in the two primary colors, and one face each in a color, often darker, intended to complement the primary colors. The script could also be imitated without colors on a traditional medium by outlining clusters of the same block color together, and then indicating the color by etching a pattern within the shape.

The new toy block script was important to the Players because traditionally the ornate scripts so loved by all had been for the Late Andanese language only, whereas the Play language had only one script, a traditional one, which itself was partly based on Late Andanese.

Omission of vowel-initial words

The new script was entirely independent of Andanese and, although it could be used to write Andanese as well, it was best suited for Play.

For example, the new script had no way of indicating a vowel-initial word, and no easy way for future users of the script to work vowel-initial words into the script, because the first letter of any word could not be positioned relative to a previous letter and therefore had fewer possible values than succeeding letters. Play had very few vowel-initial words and the small resulting ambiguity did not hinder communication. (The word-initial glides y v were considered phonetically to be allophones of /i u/, but were spelled as if pronounced /bi bu/ since these sequences did not occur before vowels in Play. Word-initial a e could not be respelled in this manner because the sequences /ba be/ were common in word-initial position.)

Admiration by foreigners

Although long messages in the new toy block script ("the Parliament script") were mostly written by adults, foreign diplomats who saw children playing with the blocks and spelling out sentences were amazed at what they saw, and this further underscored the common belief among some foreign powers that even the youngest Play children were smarter than the traditionally educated adults of the societies outside them.

Restoration of sleep letters

Late Andanese had been written with a 30-glyph syllabary because Late Andanese teachers had considered their language to have only 30 syllables. The Players had augmented this with a few dozen more glyphs, but found this clumsy. Now the Play teachers announced the restoration of the full alphabet that had been in use more than four thousand years earlier, which contained 484 syllabic glyphs and an extensible means to transcribe heavy syllables and bisyllables. These long-forgotten glyphs were called sleep letters and were similar to Japanese hentaigana. Overnight, the Play syllabary swelled with tens of thousands of new glyphs, all derived in a formulaic way, but with some shapes such that they had to be learned independently. These were intended as abbreviations for common words and syllable sequences. For example, the word pupumuba was usually spelled out, but could be compressed into a single glyph, whose sleep pronunciation was /nuba/ because the part of the glyph that spelled /pupumu/ was originally intended to be pronounced /nu/.

Influence on Moonshine

THis section will rewrrite to clean up as due to hurry i had no time. The Moonshine-speaking Police also admired the Play language and its many scripts. Because they tightly restricted the use of the Moonshine language in Play territory, Play adopted nothing significant from Moonshine, while Moonshine took on much influence from Play.

The Moonshine Parliament enrolled representatives for the Police even though they lived outside Moonshine territory. Because of the status of Memnumu, the Police could vote on laws effective in the Moonshine territory (because they were voting for party-internal resolutions), but the Moonshines as a whole could not vote on laws effective in Play territory except in the case where such laws also applied to the entire Moonshine territory as well. Therefore, despite the Parliament's tight control of the Moonshine education system, they could not also control the Play education system.

The Moonshines voted to preserve the Late Andanese language and script for all eternity, seeing it as their duty to preserve such a beautiful language and all of its ornate scripts, even though the language was of no use to the Moonshines. They also made their children's speech register after Andanese, rejecting a Parliamentary proposal to make Play a so-called children's language in Moonshine territory, displacing their own native children's speech register, stating that Play was, despite its sound, a language of education and therefore a language equally fit for children and adults.

Unlike the Players, they did not adapt the ornate Andanic scripts to their own language, Moonshine, even though at the time Moonshine's syllable structure was only slightly more complicated than Play's. (MS had more consonant clusters but Play had more vowel sequences and diphthongs.)

Instead, the Moonshines created an ideographic script resembling that of Dreamlandic, a language that they were told to hate passionately, and stated that they were going to clean the Dreamer script so that it would be appropriate for use in a language as beautiful as Moonshine. Some of the Moonshines wanted to also extend the ideographic script to Play, but the Police in Play territory refused this and stated that they preferred the angular Play scripts even though they were full of masculine, anti-Moonshine energy. The Police also continued to write their own Moonshine language in the Play-derived script, refusing both the ideographic script and a proposal for a mixed script. Nonetheless, the result of this was that Moonshine's central Parliament, which had tight control of education and thus of language policy, made it that there was no official script for Moonshine, since the Police's decisions were legal in their territory, and stated that all of the scripts that were in use anywhere were legal, meaning that Moonshine had the world's most complex orthography, since they were allowed to use all of the scripts in use in all of their territories, including the Play scripts, even the toy block script, and the new scripts created with Dreamer influence by the northern Moonshines closest to Dreamland.

Comparison with Dreamlandic

The Police avoided belittling the Play speakers as the Dreamers were now doing. The Dreamers, despite their own languages somewhat resembling Play, were now switching to speaking Leaper in diplomacy and other languages in daily life, mostly those of the western Dreamer tribes, those belonging to Laba's Hipatal tribal confederation, which did not have the infantile acoustic impression shared by Play and the easternmost Dreamer languages. This had long been a source of embarrassment for the Dreamers, as the very tribes which had been most successful in war were the Baywatchers and the Dolphin Riders, whose languages sounded very similar to Play. Now, Dreamer propagandists were phasing out these languages in favor of the western Hipatal languages, and saying that the Rider and Baywatch languages were suitable only for children's slang.

Because the Police propagandists wanted to disagree with the Dreamers in every way possible, they promoted the Play language as a source of cultural pride. They highlighted the differences between the eastern Dreamer languages and Play, using the Dreamers' own propaganda from a hundred years prior, when they had been more pessimistic. They said that the Players were in fact much more mature and adultlike than the Dreamers, even if not more manly, and that this was the reason why Play society had managed to survive so long with such a high fertility rate while the Dreamers' fertility rate was barely enough to keep their population steady.

Proposals for reform of Parliament

Here again, the Police began to consider reform ideas, both old ones and new ones, to help keep their nation united in their new all-out war.

Men's representatives

Rather than allowing men to vote, some Police women, along with other Play women, wanted the Parliament to have a seat reserved for a woman from the executive branch (yīpapu), and that this woman would speak for the male population of the nation. Some Players were shocked at their nation's new propaganda saying that the ideal men should be feminine, and that Play women should find these feminine men attractive. Because all men were still required to join the military, the concepts of "soldier" and "man" were equivalent, and the new Play proposal suggested that the new representative be officially considered to speak for the military rather than for men explicitly, even though she would spend much of her time talking about non-military issues.

The understanding was that the new representative would have a token vote, not related to the size of the nation's male population, and would be still legally a member of the Play party. (Note that even men were still considered Players, but could not be Police.)

Children's representatives

A similar proposal was put forward for a representative in charge of children's issues. The Players had traditionally denied calls for children's suffrage on the grounds that childhood was a lifestage and not an occupation, and that all children would become adults except in the event of untimely death. As with the proposal for a men's representative, the Play reformers wanted to tie this representative to the executive branch, in this case to the education system. They further proposed that there could be other executive-branch representatives in Parliament, and that the others would represent women of different occupations and walks of life, such as shopkeepers, breathing life into the early Play idea that each occupation would have its own representation in Parliament.

Notes on timing

NOTE that this war precedes the period in which Dreamland is depicted as being wholly controlled by the Teenprop corporation, such that even old enemies contemplated a humanitarian mission into Dreamland. Nevertheless, there is a gap between the Ghost-Play war and that event, possibly a large one, and it is likely that at least some Dreamers did reach Play territory even if they later were pushed out by the Ghosts.

Orange War economic reforms

Because the new war was global, the Players shut down all trade with foreign nations, and announced that foreigners who had permission to enter Play territory would need to trade their currency at an unfair rate, biased towards the Players by a factor of more than ten to one, because the Players had no reasonable expectation of being able to spend any foreign currency given to them.

Agreement with Moonshine

The Players had shut down all trade with foreign nations, even with Moonshine, their sole remaining ally, because they their only connection to Moonshine was through a river; the two landmasses were separated by hundreds of miles. Moreover this river was steep and much more difficult to ascend (that is, to move towards the Players), than to descend (towards the Moonshines). But because they were allies, the Moonshines provided the Players with basic essential goods that they could not get anywhere else, and promised that these would always be delivered free of charge, with no expectation that the Players would ever give anything back. The Moonshines believed that this deal was fair because the Police force that was now controlling the entire Play nation was firmly linked to Moonshine and could extract payments from the Players by other means if Moonshine's economy were to falter.

Scattered figures and events

These events are not in order and some may occur before the 4268 treaty.

Licele

Licele may be identical with the Ghost party. However, its appeal was transnational, and included people who had converted directly from the Play party and were not coerced; however, it is not made clear whether they were converts living in Memnumu or if they had moved.

Licele was not anti-Play, but rather anti-imepo. But licele supporters were known for their belief in hard work nonetheless, and in such a way that even the hypocrites in the Play party who excused child labor would not have been able to claim alliance to both Licele and Play.

The licele supporters are the same as the "people of the night" who depicted themselves as carrying lanterns to illuminate the dark world around them. Note that this name is extracanonical, however, as it relies on the pseudo-Latin "pali mali" becoming PM and then referring to the night; this pun uses Earth languages and therefore cannot exist.

Pissies

By this time, the so-called Pissie party exists; this party name was a pun just like the many names that had preceded it, but it was a derisive pun coined by outsiders rather than a name celebrated by the founders. The Pissie philosophy was a replacement for a movement called licele, which itself was only a few decades old at most (unless it is considered to be identical with Pupasupa). The Pissies were probably mostly converts from the Ghosts, who spoke Leaper and later turned the "pissie" insult towards their enemies, even though those enemies were not the ones who had coined the original insult.

The intended meaning of the name of the party that came to be called Pissies is lost to time. It may have been no more than a happenstance placename where the Pissies first became powerful. A newly generated name for their original homeland could be such as Leaper Larakʷil, ending in -xil "bay, inlet" and therefore a typical Leaper placename. But the offending "piss" morpheme would need to be added artificially, since such a placename as Piss Bay would never exist in the Leaper language internally, nor retained from an aboriginal language. It may be that a Play toponym was used, but even so the argument is weak for assuming that the Ghosts would choose a placename that was obscene in their own language even if it was originally a foreign word.

The Grand Unified Dictionary lists licele and pupasupa as being the same entity, but even this still does not mean that they were identical with the Ghosts, because the original pupasupa was an ephemeral pun and could have fallen away and been revived later as a freestanding party name. The so-called Pissies would then have arisen from within licele/pupasupa.

It is likely that the Pissies begin calling themselves the Work party once their war with the Players consumes their attention. In the original writeup, because the trade language word for work was pēd- (cognate to pad- "play"), the names Pedom and (incorrectly) Pedopom thus existed, and it was said that the Pissies had traded a bad name for a considerably worse one. However, this relies on Earth languages, and no such pun is possible in Play or any other language spoken on planet Teppala.

It is not clear if the old-guard Licele supporters fought against the rise of the Pissies, or if they all agreed the new Pissie party was superior. This could explain the lack of resistance to the name, since it would mean that the party internally did not need to change its name from Licele/Pupasupa at all.

Sleep

A female military leader named Sleep exists in this era, but true to her name, she neither protects her people nor launches any attacks on her enemies. It may be that Sleep is not a person's name, but rather a position in the government, and that the original Sleeper did in fact lead her people to victory. It could even be that the original Sleeper was the female military leader who led the Thunderers to their last stand around the year 3958, and that the Ghosts were claiming to be followers of the Sleepers because they claimed the rights to Thunder territory and to one of the historical Thunder parties. It is not clear whether Death Domme is the same person as Sleep.

Sleep is described as helping run AlphaLeap. She launched a war against the 40 Thieves, who had fled from Nama to Xema. The Players sided with the Ghosts, meaning that this was either before the Ghost-Play war (which was very long) or after it. If afterwards, this event must take place in the 4300s at the earliest. (Indeed it is listed as being in the 4550s, but this was originally from a different timeline, and it also shows the war against Naxum being in the 4550s.)

Sleep also supported imepo at one point, though it may not be that all instances of Sleep are the same person. The Crystals (probably identical with the Ghosts) supported Sleep despite knowing she was pro-imepo, and also opposed Šasuasa, although this may also be a different person named after the original. There was also a Play boy named Hamalebadanota who was placed into power at the age of three and may have been an orphan. The Crystals are described as claiming that queen Šasuasa, who took power as a young girl, was usurping the position intended for Hamalebadanota.

Naxum

There was a female military leader named Naxum who believed in a philosophy called Naxun. These names are in "Laban" and in particular the same language that the Play military leader Šasuasa spoke, but they may have both been exonyms. Naxun was simply the word for human, and therefore is very distantly cognate to the various words with /nʷ/ appearing in the mainland languages.

It is stated that the Pissies, the Players, and Naxum were the three dominant military powers worldwide, with the Pissies and Players being enemies (because by this time, Players had won control of much of Nama), while Naxum was a utilitarian leader ruling from the distance who had hoped to snatch territory indiscriminately from both sides of the war. The Pissie army soon routed the Players, which neither side had expected, and therefore turned to face Naxum head-on, which she had not expected. The Pissie/Naxum war destroyed much of both armies, and animals filled the power vacuum once more.

The Sibyls were people who had fled away from the fields of battles before those battles had begun, thereby surviving in refuges that none of the three major armies had bothered to claim. The Sibyls were not a party and did not seek to form a party or even a nation of their own; they mostly lived as nomads.

It may be that the Cosmopolitan Age only truly begins once the Pissies, the Players, and Naxum are all defeated, leaving only the Sibyls. This may not have applied to Laba. Nonetheless, at least the padopom writeup claims that the Play party survived intact, even though they had been the first major power to be defeated. If so, they likely survived in their original homelands, not in Nama, since the Pissies had been fighting a traditional land war, meaning that they had to march through Nama before they could march through the Play homeland of Memnumu.

Rainman

A male military leader named Rainman supported the Ghosts, but then switched to the "imepo" side of the war (not specifically identified with the Play party, which was only ever called padom or (incorrectly) padopom), and then married and abused a woman named Allay, while she tried to convert him to the licele movement, which may have been the same as the Ghosts. He created the Ocean Army because he identified imepo with water and the sea, but she was upset so he dissolved the Ocean Army. It is not clear if the Ocean Army was a naval force or an ordinary land army with a naval motif. All of the events involving Rainman happened BEFORE the Ghosts declared war against the Play party.

Teenprop

The rise of the Teenprop corporation overlapped many of these events. Reino was one army who was involved in this.

Nama invites Players

Nama invited the Players to move to Nama in (according to REINO) the 4400s, and did not demand that they switch parties. Howewer, this project was pro-imepo, so it is likely that by this time Nama was pro-imepo.

Slopes

Remember that the Slopes still reigned. They had absorbed some of the Dolphin Riders and formed ties with the Gold party.

POM

STW may have surged back into power. POM, originally a derisive byname, is used here for this post-canonical STW corporation. They were not the same as Teenprop.

Hedonism and Hebetude

The hedonism debate, though mostly centered in the northwestern area of the continent, may have pulled in opinions from the Players. The two sides can be called "hedonist" and "hebetude" in English since they both began with the same letter in most of the languages of their supporters as well.

This mostly involved the northwestern area of the continent, but it may have pulled in responses from the Players, and the Players may have been on both sides of it. This is not the same as the imepo/anti-imepo debate, nor is it the same as the play/work debate. All eight combination of play~imepo~hedonism + work~anti-imepo~hebetude are possible without contradiction.

Other information

The early Creamers (and possibly the founders) were racially exclusionary, allowing only Lenian people to join their movement. Thus, they were united by their tribe and not by their political ideology. This was also true of most enemy parties within their territory, and it could be said that Creamland never embraced true political debate and simply remained tribalistic as it had been for thousands of years. Even so, their relations with the outside world depended on all of the tribes working together in their common interests.

Indeed, Creamland's government was remarkably stable despite the violence raging within its borders, and Creamland was one of only three powers which could believably claim to have survived the great war that introduced the Cosmopolitan Age. The situation may have been similar in Tarwas, which had long been a centralized state led by a single tribe but with many smaller tribes living within and throughout it.

The Play party at its peak had tied food distribution to childbirth, such that all childless women and all men were entirely cut off from the food supply, and had to find their own food. The Play empire collapsed quickly, but they were merely building on a long-established cultural tradition in their area, in which children worked farm labor instead of attending school, and the most powerful women were those who had large families. As living standards declined, it became more difficult for women to have such large families as they had had during the Play era and the centuries leading up to it, but the government remained in place, and could have even continued to deny access to food to childless couples and to single men.

Politically, the Creamers were isolationists, refusing to help their ideological partner, Dreamland, against the more powerful armies in Baeba Swamp. Neither did Dreamland participate in the politics of Creamland.

Creamland remained a child-focused culture as the birthrate declined. Many cities were likely already built in the Creamer style, in which houses for families were built facing each other, and had a nursery in the center where small children could play. School was not important; children split their time between the playgrounds and the farms. Nevertheless, the people were well-fed because men were no longer required to serve in the military, and children were no longer forced into jobs they were physically incapable of.

The Andanese people did not survive as a cohesive social group anywhere inside Creamer territory. Thus, the Andanese languages died out, with Late Andanese surviving as a ceremonial language, and the Cream languages likely took in fewer Andanese loans than some other branches. Note, though, that the Andanese people living eastward of Paba fared better than those living within Paba, who had been directly in the line of attack many times over with no allies at their side. They would still have been mostly trapped inland, as the Andanese people were so small they had difficulty rowing boats, and their society suffered any time food production shifted to the sea.