Oyster War

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

Parties to the conflict were:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Later history

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