Paba
Bābākiam is the name of the parent language of Poswa and Pabappa, spoken around the year 4200 in Paba. The name means simply "language of Bābā", where Bābā is the old name of Paba. Its people are called Pabaps, which is an unusual word formation for this language (most other nationalities are formed by adding -ta).
Phonology
Babakiam is the parent language of Poswa and Pabappa and thus shares with these languages many characteristics.
Vowels
There are four vowels, /a i u ə/, spelled a i u e. The first three vowels can also be long. The schwa is the rarest of the three vowels, and words with schwa are usually cognate to words with no vowel in closely related languages such as Khulls.
In its classical stage, Babakiam was notable for allowing unrestricted vowel sequences, particularly of /a/, for example bāaaau "(park) bench", which is syllabified as bā-a-a-au (four syllables), and paaapa "dark-haired". Such words were rare, however, and almost always transparent compounds (as in the case of bāaaau) or loanwords (as in the case of paaapa). Nevertheless, Bābākiam does maintain the unusual distinction between long vowels and a sequence of two short vowels, and minimal pairs of this type are very common. Vowel sequences often result from the deletion of voiced fricatives between vowels (/ž/ is the only voiced fricative remaining in the language), whereas long vowels generally were long in the parent language and result from a series of much earlier sound shifts. Other words, such as taīū "maple leaf", exhibit both types of changes.
The vowels /i/ and /u/ become /j/ (spelled "y") and /w/ (spelled "v") before other vowels and in some positions also after vowels. Thus a word like patiyiyibis "bladder" is phonemically /patiiiiibis/, with five /i/'s in a row.
Babakiam was still called Babakiam as late as the year 6000, because the dialects were mutually intelligible (and indeed almost identical) to the language spoken in Paba (then called Baba). No phonemes were lost going from Babakiam to Poswa other than the vowel length, which was lost early on. On the other hand, Pabappa lost many of its phonemes.
Consonants
The consonant inventory is very simple: /p b m f w t n s š ž j k ŋ/, unless /w j/ are considered allophones of the vowels. It is unusual in that it lacks liquid phonemes entirely when all the languages around it have /l/ and most also have an /r/-like sound. Thus Babakiam sounds like children's speech. /b/ is the most common consonant, and in later stages of the language, it became even more common because /b/ was inserted to break up the monstrous sequences of /a/ and /ə/ that had existed in the parent language. Thus classical Babakiam taabābā "nest" became tabababababa and bāaaau became bababababar.
Most words end in vowels, but can also end in /p m s/.
Comparison of words:
- 4200 Babakiam peskavu sabayiuŋaus
- 6000 Babakiam pyskary šalergos
- 8700 Poswa pwaršalios
- 8700 Pabappa pospalerba "soap bubble wand"
Culture and history before 1500 AD
- See Early history of Paba for more details.
Bābā (hereafter Paba) was founded in 633 AD by immigrants from Laba. Though later famous for being the most pacifistic people in the world, the earliest Pabaps were even more violent than their neighbors. They landed and estabslihed a new settlement on a bay in the south coast called Tamusur, meaning "by steps", as they planned to grow their settlement slowly but steadily from its base. Tamusur was the capital of Paba in its infancy, but the capital soon moved inland to the city of Biospum (also called Pasa, and later just called Paba.)
Foundation and early divisions
Paba was from its very beginning sharply divided into two major racial groups: the majority Pabaps and the minority Tarpabaps. While the Pabaps were numerically dominant, it was often said that the Tarpabaps made things happen and the Pabaps merely followed along.
The Tarpabaps originated in the equatorial rainforests of southern Laba, and were all very tall, thin, very dark-skinned people. They had historically survived mostly by fishing, and had a well-developed navy, but by 500 AD their land was flooding much more quickly than most others because it was almost entirely coastal lowlands, and the few mountains they had were inconvenient places to seek refuge from rising tides.
The Pabaps had some coastland, but mostly lived in the temperate mountains. They were quite short people, ranging from chest-high to belly-high against the Tarpabaps. They had pale pink skin, blonde hair, blue eyes, and distinct facial features. The size difference between the two races was so great that both groups agreed to a cultural taboo against forming mixed families. This held true even when they came to share the same religion, Yiibam.
Once in Paba, the two groups switched places. The Pabaps clung to the expansive south coast of Paba, creating a strong navy and a secure food supply based on fishing. The Tarpabaps mostly stayed inland to work in farming and the military. However, for most of Paba's history, the land army was still mostly Pabaps, because the Tarpabaps were a minority.
Early wars
The Pabaps found plenty of land to settle on, populated mostly by poor but peaceful dark-skinned tribes collectively known as Sukuna. But in the year 633 they saw one tribe, the Astyzzians, that would not let them in, and the Pabaps decided to focus all of their settlement efforts on subduing Astyzzia. They won the War of 634 with only a single battle because they had ships and the Astyzzians did not. But the Pabaps lost most of their adult male population even so, meaning that despite their new city, Tamusur, being the capital of their new nation, it was weak and needed help from the other Pabap settlements around it. Moreover, the nation of Kăha immediately east of Paba, which was also populated by dark-skinned aboriginals, now decided that Pabaps were no longer welcome in Kaha. THis meant that Paba could not expand its territory to the east, only to the west.
Around the year 670 Paba launched another war, this time against the Nik people living in the nation of Niklas. The Niks were another dark-skinned tribe who had chosen to settle in southwestern Paba figuring that Paba would welcome them in and let them grow into a prosperous and safe society. But Paba was angry and claimed the immigrants were invaders. They claimed that Niklas was founded on the territory of the previously existing aboriginal nation of Biada, yet another dark skinned tribe native to the area, and that by attacking the Niks the Pabaps were helping the weak, underprotected Biada people. But in reality the war was because Paba had come to quickly see that its success so far was due to its young but powerful navy, and the Niks had crashed through their navy and threatened Paba with their own small but brave navy.
This war was much longer and more strategic than the War of 634, and there were more than two sides. Since Niklas had invaded Paba, they had the extra advntage of having a large population of Pabap civilians under tehir control. That, combined with the fact that Paba's land army was very weak since Paba relied mostly on its navy, caused Paba to persistently avoid a traditional land-based war in favor of attempting to outsmart the Niks instead. Although Paba did manage to entirely destroy the Niks' navy in this war, they could cause no harm to the Niks on land that would not result in even greater harm to the Pabap civilians living under their control, and so Paba eventually conceded defeat to the Niks and created the new state of Niklas out of southern Paba's territory.
However, Niklas later joined Paba after all, as a new and more peaceful regime had taken power in Paba, and still later Niklas split into three separate states. The Pabap royal family promised to pay the Niks expensive stipends for remaining in Paba and staying peaceful, which put their standard of living above that of the Pabap majority. The Niks later pointed to this treaty as proof that the Niks had defeated Paba, even thouigh their nation was now part of Paba.
Ethnic groups
Unlike most nations, Paba frequently imported people from Laba to live among its people. It could be argued that Paba was biethnic from its very beginning, since Pabaps had used Tarpabap sailing ships to reach their new homeland, and most Pabaps realized this, but since the original founding population was 95% Pabap and the ruling family was entirely 100% Pabap, and since the Pabaps and Tarpabaps did not intermarry, Paba was generally considered to be a Pabap nation that has many minorities inside it.
Note that in Paba, minorities were genuine ethnic minorities and not merely political or religious groups. This is in contrast to Nama and its holding territories, where two groups sharing the same culture and religion could form separate organizations based around politics. Indeed, Nama had always intended for all of its parties to be purely political, but because politics had always tended to coincide with religion, and religion with ethnicity, this ideal was never reached in practice.
Different groups had different statuses; they were not simply all treated as "minorities". The Andanese, for example, mostly preferred to identify themselves as simply a tribe of Pabaps rather than adopting an ethnic identity as they did in other nations. This was because they considered Paba their home nation. There were actually many Andanese tribes, each of which considered itself a subset of the Andanese, and considered the Andanese in turn a subset of the Pabaps, while considering all of Paba's other ethnic minorities to be completely separate from the Pabaps. Thus, the Andanese gained all of the privileges and all of the disadvantages of being Pabaps. Note that this applied only to Paba: Andanese living across the border in Thaoa and Subumpam identified themselves as Andanese, not Pabaps.
Besides the Pabaps and Tarpabaps mentioned above, Paba had many other ethnic groups:
Sukuna The Sukuna people in Paba had a more painful hiustory than their neighbors across the border in Subumpam. Paba had contained the easternmost Sukuna settlements, and these were very weak. The original Pabap settlers had not yet decided to become pacifists, and simply killed any Sukuna people they met who did not convert to Yiibam and lay down their weapons. They were able to do this because even the poor, desperate Pabaps immigrating into wholly unknown territory in the early 600's AD still had better weapons than the Sukuna, who had been cut off by mountains and sea for thousands of years. For the most part the Pabaps did not even need swords; they simply repurposed their fishing spears and wood axes as weapons since most Sukuna people were nudists who could be defeated by a single contact with a sharp object.
By 2000 AD the Sukuna had been mostly absorbed into the Pabap population and, like the Andanese, mostly identified as Pabaps. However separate social status was available for those Sukuna people who preferred to remain politically and religiously independent, and this offered its people both advantages and disadvantages.Nevertheless, the genity system encouraged these people to marry out, even if it is to other Sukuna people who belong to the mainstream Pabap culture, so this population was always dwindling.
Nik A settler people from the tropical rainforests of Laba who founded several colonies along the south coast of Rilola. Early on, their settlements were between Paba and Subumpam, particularly the Subumpamese city of Pipaippis. Like the Tarpabaps, they were very tall, dark-skinned people, and simply could not blend in amongst the waist-high Pabaps, nor even the taller but still very pale Subumpamese people to their west. Their culture was similar in many ways to that of Paba, in that they preferred to live along the coast and make a living mostly from catching and selling fish. They were disappointed when Paba began aggressively expanding its navy, however, and told the Nik leaders that they would no longer share their sea space with Nik fishing boats. Some Nik people moved to Subumpam and tried to blend in with Subumpamese people there, but most stayed in Paba and tolerated the new rules since they realized that they at least had a safe place to live and were still the owners of most of the coastal land in their home area which meant that they could still profit enormously from the fish trade even though their boats had been beached.
Like the Tarpabaps, the Nik had been a strongly violent culture in the past, and their cities had a high violent crime rate, but they considered it a far greater taboo to attack the helpless Pabap people than to attack each other. Thus the Nik, despite being a heavily armed people as fishing in this age was done mostly with spears, never seriously considered an attack on the strong Pabap navy to their south nor on the weak Pabap civilians to their north. As above, though, they still confidently ruled their home states of Waba, Pusa, and Pama,[1] and coerced the Pabaps that they deserved extra money from Paba's government to ameliorate their situation. Paba agreed, and monetary poverty among the Nik was abolished, as even the poorest Nik citizens now earned more money from Paba's government than the entire Pabap underclass and much of its middle class. Nevertheless, the high cost of food in their areas coupled with their larger appetites meant that this money was only enough to prevent starvation, rather than to actually eliminate poverty.
Some Nik people abandoned their way of life and moved into northern Pabap cities and took normal jobs among the Pabap peasantry. They adopted Yiibam and came to live a lifestyle much like the Tarpabap people. THis meant, however, that they were subject to military service, and although Paba avoided wars at extreme costs those few wars that did occur tended to kill far more Nik soldiers than Pabap soldiers, as the Nik were much better soldiers and were given front-line combat positions.
Unlike the Tarpabaps, the Pabaps created a separate genity (see below) for the Nik. This encouraged them to marry Tarpabaps and thus become Tarpabaps. Thus the population of Niks declined in every region except their original homlenad in southwestern Paba. In the southwest, by contrast, the Nik split into two groups so they could marry each other without worrying about accidental cousin marraiges. The two groups were the Orange and the Purple.
Fua are people living mostly in northern Paba who are disliked by all of their neighbors, even other marginal groups. They were called Pispitam by Pabaps, meaning "kings of cutting", because they seemed to cut open or otherwise destroy everything they touched. Fua was simply the Pabap transcription of their Khulls name, xʷugâ. Unlike other minorities, Fua people rarely identified themselves as such, since doing so only brought them disadvantages. It was not even clear to Pabaps whether the Fua were aboriginals or if they had come from Laba and reached Rilola even before the Pabaps had and then moved away from the coast. What was clear was that nobody considered the Pabaps to be racists for singling out the Fua as the target of their hatred; everyone else, including Paba's enemies, also hated the Fua if they had any Fua people living amongst them. The one exception to this rule was Nama, which did not bar any ethnicity from being welcome in Nama. This, combined with the fact that the Fua lived mostly in mountainouse areas, led many people in Paba, Thaoa, adn Subumpam to believe that the Fua had come to them from Nama. Most violent crime in northern Paba was committed by Fua people against Pabaps and Sukuna, and they make up 70% of the prison population historically. Although this is largely because sometimes non-Fua people would join the Fua for protection once convicted of a crime, making the Fua's per capita crime rate higher and that of the other groups much lower, in some cases zero. Also, although it didn't happen often, a Pabap attacking a Fua was often considered a revenge crime, since Fua had hurt the Pabaps so much, and because Paba considered its notoriously pacifistic people to be still too violent, which paradoxically meant that those few Pabaps who did commit violent crime were confused with Pabaps who were mentally ill and thus not punished (but were usually sent to do farm labor where they could not hurt anyone.)
Other, later names for the Fua living in Pabap territory included Pessitam, Mibassitam, Mibaptam, Paspetam, Vaspetam, Mibažvwob, and Pambuob.
Thaoans Few Thaoans moved to Paba. Thaoa's government philosophy despised the submissiveness of Paba's massive lower class, and Thaoa realized that its citizens, if they chose to move to Paba, would not be entitled to join the upper classes even if they had been the upper class in Thaoa. In Paba's later days, some Thaoans were invited in for the sole purpose of easing the transfer of underclass Pabaps to slave plantations in Thaoa. These people did not openly identify themselves as Thaoan, however, for fear of a public backlash.
Subethnic divsions
- See Pabap culture.
The Yiibam religion divided the people of Paba into genities, or moieties, called lisa. Each was assoaciated with a color name, and the people traditionally wore that color at least as underwear. Nudism was allowed, and provided a freedom from the constant association with one's genity. The genities, however, largely corresponded to ethnic groups in early Pabap society, and only became blended together much later.
Blue A group consisting of the navy and all people who work primarily at sea, whether they be fishermen, traders, or explorers. This is because all of these groups are dependent on Paba's strong navy for their existence and for the most part actually overlap with the navy. In much of Paba, especially far eastern Paba, the Blue people have a very close culture, with men spending days a time without seeing their wives. Note that Paba's genities are not ethnic groups because people are encouraged to marry outside their group. Thus, most Blue men do not have Blue wives, although the taboo is not strcitly enforced in the fishing-dominated areas of the east because the vast majority here is Blue and therefore the population would simply die out if they were forced to marry non-Blue people.
Purple The land army. The color is named after Paba's wine grapes, the source of much of its fame and wealth. They were early on the commonest choice for Orange people to marry, and thus the Orange people got a strong link into Paba's military. The military is purple becayse protecting Paba's vineyards is almost as important at protestcing its people. The Purple group also includes workers on the vineyards, but does not include other farmers such as those involved in growing large vegetables.
Red A term for the farming class. They generally live on hereditarily owned farms, but many of these farms are large enough that they can hire outside laborers. These laborers, however, maintain whatever their original color association was, and do not simply all become Red.
Yellow A term for people who live in large cities and mostly work manual labor jobs. However, schoolteachers are also Yellow. The term "Gold" is avoided because it is the name of a much larger and unrelated political organization based in Nama. Gold people in Paba are usually classified as Black.
Orange A group created for the Nik, a group originally found along the southwest coast, just west of the original Pabap settlement in Tamusur Bay. Many of them moved north into the core of Paba, but did not blend in because they were very tall and dark skinned and didnt feel comofrtable marrying the small, blonde Pabap people. However, they were discouraged from marrying other Orange people, because that could lead to accidental cousin marriages, so when they first moved north they oftne had a difficult time finding marriages.
Green A group consisting of the decendants of anyone who has violated hte marriage restrictions, or has married a foreigner. Orange-Orange marriages are not actually illegal, it just is that their children are put into the Green group instead of inheriting the ORange. Anyone marrying Green becomes Green themselves, as do their children.
White The ruling class, living mostly in and near castles in Paba's capital city of Biospum.[2] They generally do not marry any non-White people, but doing so is not forbidden. They do not have a problem with inbreeding because the Whites are the descendants of the entire founding population of Paba save for the ethnic minorities that came with them on their ships.
Black A group for foreigners outside the caste system. Not a synonym for Green becasuse anyone marrying a Black becomes Green, not Black. Thus Blacks can only have Green children.
Geography and early politics
For its entire history, Paba has been an absolute monarchy. In the latest era of its history, it submitted to the Poswob Empire, but the Poswobs allowed the internal government of Paba to remain a monarchy.
The Pabap royal family, Paptupa, has absolute power throughout the Pabap empire. They are often called White Pabaps, but this is not in reference to skin color, but rather the fact that they are the only people allowed to wear white clothes. They believe in the Yiibam religion, which worships gods that are physically present in Paba. There is one supreme god, Yīa, above all others, but this god is invisible and is often referred to as "the unknown". Yīa is noncorporeal and is often imagined to be purple in color as purple is the rarest color in nature. Purple is also associated with wine grapes, which form a large sector of Paba's economy, but the Pabaps do not carry the association so far as to associate Yīa with alcohol or even with grapes.
Political parties are forbidden. Although no nation on Teppala during Paba's peak power time was a democracy, Paba gave its citizens distinctly less freedom than most of the surrounding empires. Even hungry Thaoa, which prided itself on its people's ability to invade other countries (even Paba) without fear of a revenge invasion, allowed its people to form political parties which were allowed to hold opinions on controversial issues such as slavery.
Paba's ruling class did allow its citizens to stage political protests to make their opinions heard. For example, in 2060, the Pisimimbin people protested Paba's apparent lack of interest in the fates of the many Pabap teenagers being dragged off by Nama into the ungovernable tropical rainforests of southern Lobexon, never to be heard from again. The Paptupa family responded by reforming the system so that Paba would have greater control over which Pabaps were picked to go there, but did not stop the exportation itself as Paba knew it was overpupopulated.
However the Pisimimbin incident was a sign of a longstanding tradition of Paba's upper class having little interest in the welfare of its lower class, openly allowing foreign nations such as Thaoa to grab thousands of innocent Pabaps to work on plantations in Thaoa, so long as Paba's government was paid nicely for their complicity. Although the Paptupa were quite well off, and could afford to pour most of this money back into development of roads and industry in the towns the slaves had come from, the lower class of those towns still generally did not benefit from this and only during some eras were the families of the slaves compensated for their loss.
Of Paba's many neighbors, only Nama complained that Paba's absolute monarchy was unfair to its people. Thaoa did not mind that Paba was a monarchy because they believed that the monarchy was the very reason why Pabaps were so unreasonably submissive and even after generations living on plantations would never rebel against their Thaoan masters. Subumpam did not complain because although Subumpam was not a monarchy, its government was very strict, and felt that it needed to be in order to ensure that the 11 nations of Subumpam would stick together instead of trying to go their own separate ways. The Star Empire did not complain because, similarly to Thaoa, they believed that Paba's absolute monarchy was the only reason that Paba's people seemed to be unable to assert their interests, and therefore were easily captured as slaves. However, the Star Empire did not officially allow slavery; they merely tolerated the knowledge that in the tropical rainforests of its extreme south, there were many Pabap slaves toiling away under the watch of their Star masters, producing agricultural products that the Stars themselves found too painful to work for.
Like a trophoblast, Paba divided into many states as it grew, but remained united. They had traditionally had a high birth rate, and mostly avoided wars, which is why such a large empire grew from a small founder population. Unlike Subumpam to its west, Paba was really a single nation that divided itself into 41 states over the years rather than an alliance of historically alien cultures that merged together. This is why there was never a name such as "Pabap Union" and never any wars between the various states in Paba.
Note that the original Pabap state, Tamusur, is the small purple state in a deep bay along the south coast. Previously, the Haswarabic people of whom the Pabaps considered themselves a member had built many fishing settlements on the much larger and more obvious southeastern peninsula, but none of them had ever achieved strong population growth, nor did they seek political unification with each other, and so they only became part of Paba when Paba began aggressively expanding its empire towards the southeast and made peace with the people they met living there. This is not a contradiction of the above statement that Paba originated as a single nation because the small fishing nations of southeastern Paba had mixed origins and considered Haswaraba, rather than the Pabaps that were a subtribe of Haswaraba, their unifying nationality.
In the 1700s, two western Pabap states seceded from Paba and joined the Subumpamese Union instead.[3] Paba did not complain, because the Subumpamese Union was a multicultural empire where Pabaps were welcome and even dominant in some areas. From the 1700s to the mid-1900s there were 39 states in Paba. 25 of these were coastal states, and the other 14 all had waterways to the sea. Thus Paba was a very sea-focused nation even from its early beginnings.
History 1500 to 2000 AD
Relations with other empires
Pabaps moved into Nama during the period roughly 1400-1700 AD to work in mining. This was a painful, dangerous occupation, but it was highly profitable. Nama had been living for 18000 years in these mountains without realizing they could extract the metals. Paba thus gained an early advantage in war because they had access to metal both in Nama and in their own territory, and could build swords and shields out of iron where others had only wood. They did not attempt to take over Nama, however, and immigration into Nama soon stopped as Paba increasingly oriented itself towards the tropics.
Paba was blocked on its eastern border by the nation of Thaoa. Thaoa was happy to border Paba because the Pabaps were small, physically unthreatening, and easily captured into slavery. The Thaoans had plenty of other cultures around them, but they did not generally enslave those people because they felt intimidated by them. Early attempts at enslaving Repilians had led to revolts, whereas the Pabaps captured by a slavemaster would only smile and pretend their wounds had healed.
Thaoa invaded Paba many times, always trying to get more slaves. Paba sold Thaoa many slaves legally, at one point sacrificing more than 1/4 of their adult population in a single transfer, but Thaoan farmers formed paramilitary organizations to capture even more slaves illegally to put to work on their plantations. By this time Paba had become famous as a submissive nation that did not protect itself from aggressions by others, but simply looked for the least abusive partner to ally with. Paba admitted this but claimed that their strategy was still superior to that of other nations like Subumpam which seemed to look for the strongest possible partner to ally with, even if the relationship was extremely abusive.
Paba declared itself a pacifist nation and around 1700 promised to go a thousand years without a war, no matter what other nations did to them. By this time it seemed that other nations did not respect Paba's borders and slave ships were a common sight on Paba's shores, despite the presence of the powerful Pabap Navy which seemingly did not care that its people were being abducted to work on slave plantations. Thaoa assumed that by promising to go 1000 years without a war, Paba really meant they were volunteering to endure 1000 years of constant abuse and exploitation by Nama only, which no other nation could stop without having to face off against the military of Nama. However, Paba's people seemed to have an uncanny talent for balancing their nation amongst the great powers of their eras, even as the balance of power in those nations was constantly changing. Even as Thaoan slavemnasters spat on the Pabaps for having no pleasures of their own aside from doing what their masters told them, Thaoa was forced to admit that if any other nation invaded Paba, Thaoa would have no choice but to immedaitely invade Paba and chase out that other nation, because Paba was the only nation that willingly sold its people to Thaoa as slaves.
Likewise, Nama was a huge empire with a tiny coastline. Nama's people used Paba's rivers and sent rich Namans to Paba's south coast to trade and do business as though Paba were just another part of Nama. Paba had willingly consented to all of this, and Namans often walked around Paba's streets feeling superhuman because they were living in a foreign nation and getting rich exploiting Pabaps and Pabap territory, but they realized all in all that should war come to Paba, Pabaps would be hiding under wooden tables and Naman civilians would be on the front lines protecting them.
The Famine of 1823
In 1823, a severe cold wave in summer destroyed food supplies for Paba and all of its neighbors. Many Namans moved into Paba now to live off of food produced by Pabaps. Refugees from Subumpam poured into Paba as well when Subumpam's pantries ran out. Thaoans starving on their barren plantations killed and sold their Pabap slaves in meat markets, and then used the profits to move to Paba in search of a better food supply. Pabaps had nowhere to go, as other nations wouldn't let them in except as slaves, but they were at least grateful that by this time Paba had a larger coastline than any of its neighbors and thus had seen its food supply diminsh the least. Still, the task of feeding the Namans, Subumpamese, and Thaoans and having enough food left over to feed themselves made this famine a very stressful time for Paba. After the famine was over, Thaoa purchased a large number of slaves from Paba to replace the ones that had been eaten, which meant a sharp decline in Paba's young adult population.
The Star War
In 1989, Nama declared war on the Star Empire. The war was fought mostly in Subumpam, the poorest part of the Star Empire and the least well-defended. Paba officially had joined the war on Nama's side, but avoided combat for the sake of protecting Pabaps from a war that promised no possible good for Paba. They did invade eastern Subumpam, but only to protect the many Pabaps living in Subumpam.
When it became clear that the Stars were going to lose all of their territory in Subumpam, the Pabaps living in Subumpam began inviting the Star soldiers to move to Paba and live as regular citizens. Even though Paba was officially at war with the Stars, and had invaded Subumpam, they made it clear that they had only joined the war because Nama forced them to, and that Paba's army in Subumpam was a nonviolent one, present only to protect the Pabaps living in eastern Subumpam. Nama had occupied much of Paba, partly because they needed Paba's help getting supplies to soldiers in Nama, but partly because they were worried that defeated Star soldiers would spill themselves into Paba and surrender there because they knew the Pabaps would be much gentler to them than the Namans. Indeed, the Star navy had made it official policy to surrender their ships to Paba whenever possible, knowing that Paba would not turn them over to Nama. Once in Paba, the Stars pretended yo be aboriginals who had fled from Subumpam to Paba because they knew Nama was hunting Paba for Stars and knew that many of them would be found near the sea.
Nama's army killed every Star person they met, whether military or civilian. Paba welcomed every Star person they met and offered them a home and a stipend to live on so they could survive in Paba without speaking Pabappa.
Thus some battles in the war were fought in Paba. The Stars who moved to Paba tended to have their weapons and armor intact, meaning the Naman occupiers in Paba could not simply kill them on sight they way they did to Star civilians. Nama was angry that Paba claimed to be a strong ally of Nama while inviting thousands of dangerous Star soldiers into their country even while Paba was still officially at war with the Stars. They claimed now that Pabaps were the softest people in the world, and that even if Nama completely routed the Stars in both Subumpam and the Star Empire itself, their ally Paba would perpetually have a hostile minority within it eager for revenge. Paba claimed that their love for their enemies in wartime had in the past often charmed those enemies into becoming Pabaps themselves, and hoped it would happen again.
Nama demands action
But Nama was not interested in playing nice. They called for a diplomatic meeting between Nama and Paba, with no other parties present. At the meeting, Nama promised that the Naman occupiers would never leave Paba if Paba refused to hand over the Stars as prisoners of war. Paba claimed they could not do this, as even the small number of Stars they had managed to rescue were heavily armed and could defeat the entire Pabap Army if motivated to do so, given that much of the Pabap Army was had been ordered into Subumpam by Nama and the ones who had remained in Paba were poorly equipped and had no motivation to fight a war. In fact, the entire Pabap Army at home was occupied with the difficult task of finding the migrating Stars safe places in Paba to live where they could be free from the intentions of Nama's own soldiers in Paba. Paba thus had no soldiers left to mobilize. The Pabaps did not try to take weapons from the Stars, and thus the Pabap Army was exposed directly to the Star soldiers. Nama's representative was angry at the way Paba seemed to choose the most masochistic option whenever they were faced with a crisis, noting that Paba was seemingly not interested in rescuing Naman soldiers, but happily carried in thousands of heavily armed enemy soldiers and settled them in the most delicate parts of their nation. Paba said they were simply following their own philosophy of pacifism, which had served them well in the past. Paba admitted that there were so many Stars in Paba now that Paba was at risk of becoming a Star-occupied state, but predicted that all would end well for Paba because the Stars had no grudge against Paba and would soon assimilate into mainstream Pabap society, given that the Pabap civilians outnumbered the Star soldiers by more than 100 to 1.
Nama threatened to extend the war into Paba, with Namans fighting against everyone else. They had already occupied the western third of Paba early in the war, in order to secure a route to the sea and a network of land supply routes. But the Stars were being pumped into the eastern areas of Paba away from Nama's control. Nama saw that they were easily winning the war in Subumpam, and could afford to move some of their soldiers from Subumpam to Paba. Nama saw that Paba seemed to enjoy having heavily armed enemy soldiers running around inside them, and offered to double their pleasure by launching an all-out invasion of Paba from a new front in the north. They warned that the Naman army would be far more brutal than the Star army had been. In fact, Nama had already occupied the capital of the Pabap Empire, simply because this capital was near the western border.
Nama claimed that the Pabap soldiers were so weak that they could kill 100 Pabaps for every Naman. But Nama realized privately that Paba was much larger than Subumpam, and that even if they pulled out of Subumpam, they would not be able to put enough soldiers in Paba to hold their own against the combined team of the Pabap Army and the Stars. In fact, those few Stars who had elementary knowledge of Pabappa were joining the Pabap Army themselves, as they were almost all males, and Paba allowed them to form a battalion in the Pabap Army consisting entirely of Stars speaking their own languages with only a few bilingual commanders keeping contact with the rest of the Pabap Army. Thus, Paba had indeed managed to increase its own population and the size of its military simply by always being soft and gentle to its wartime enemy. Their "masochism" had paid off handily.
Stars move east
Paba promised the Stars that the government of Paba would protect them and provide them free food and a home to live in so that they would not ever have to get a job to support themselves. This was Paba's general policy towards immigrants with no fluency in Pabappa. Native Pabaps could not get this welfare, as they were expected to be able to find a job on their own and work hard at it. Thus, for 1400 years, Paba had been inviting people from all around the world to move to Paba and live off the hard work of the native Pabap people, never having to work at all or even be thankful for what they were given.
Paba's government considered this policy necessary because the native Pabaps preferred to have their army composed largely of ethnic minorities, as they tended to be hardier soldiers. Life in Paba was still a very good deal for these minorities because the Pabap Army very rarely needed to go to combat, instead spending much of its time performing manual labor considered too dangerous for civilians. But the soldiers were not always allowed to bring their wives and family with them to even the most peaceful parts of Paba's empire and therefore the life of a soldier was often more painful than the life of an underclass Pabap wage laborer or farmer. Moreover, occasionally Paba really did go to war, even if they were officially present in a non-combat role. Thus male Star immigrants who had stealthily moved from Subumpam to Paba, settled down, and in some cases married Pabap women found themselves suddenly forced back into Subumpam again to help the Pabap Army protect the Pabaps in Subumpam. Some Stars became resentful of Paba and its culture, seeing that they were being forced into a war in which their own family members, who had been unable to find a Pabap rescue road, were being murdered.
Some Stars now called for Paba to break its neutrality policy and declare war on Nama unless Nama offered to move all Stars into Paba. Thus, Paba was being pulled into war from both sides: Nama wanted them to stop rescuing the Stars and turn them over to the Naman army, which would kill them; the Stars wanted Paba to force Nama to turn the Stars over to Paba, if necessary declaring war against Nama. As it had in the past, Paba refused to do either of these things because they claimed that their army was intended for defensive purposes only and could not invade another nation except with help from a larger power. When the rescued Stars complained that they were being sent to war to fight Stars, the Pabaps offered the rescued Stars the option of simply rejecting their rescue and moving back to Subumpam. Few accepted this offer, as they realized that Nama was almost completely in control of Subumpam by this time and was killing all Stars, even civilians. Instead, these desperate people often piloted ships and joined the naval assault on Nama itself. But many simply remained in Paba, considering it the safest territory of all for the indefinite future, since they knew a full-scale invasion of Paba by Nama was extremely improbable. Since by doing this they were rejecting the orders of the Pabap royal family to join the military, these people lost their welfare benefits, and had to struggle to find work in Pabap cities amongst a people who were terrified of them and did not speak their language. But the Stars realized they were still the luckiest people in the world, as they had found their way into the only empire in the world that rewarded enemy soldiers with a life of luxury. They also knew that Paba was not actually pro-Star, as the Stars had killed Pabaps in the war, but that Paba's pacifistic policies had told them to rescue their enemies instead of fighting back. After all, the Stars were just one many groups in Paba that had been adopted this way.
In the end, most Stars agreed to move back to Subumpam and spend their time trying to rescue fellow Stars and move them to safe places in eastern Paba, near the border with Thaoa where Nama had no presence. Thus the war continued with the rescued Stars playing the same role as the pacifist Pabaps, even as they knew that most Stars were living in the west whereas the rescuers had positioned themselves with Pabaps in mind and were stationed entirely in the east.
Peace treaty
The war lasted until 2057, with Nama's total victory. Nama had driven the Star people not only out of Subumpam, but out of the wider Star Empire as well. The non-Subumpam part of the Star Empire had been named Lobexon. Lobexon was now a series of slave plantations in which Namans enslaved the Star people. They tried to create divisions among the slaves by cutting them into groups organized by religion, with names like Crystals, Gilgosi, Kampa, etc. which was partly successful. They abused their slaves so badly that even native Namans began launching rescue missions to Lobexon to bring the Stars back to a better life in Nama. Thus, Nama itself was now exhibiting the selfless "masochism" they had previously criticized in Paba, and Nama realized its own home territory would now be home to many thousands of Stars. They ended their military occupation of Paba, but retained a small nonviolent presence to make sure an invasion of Nama was not in the works.
Nama aggressively recruited Pabaps to move to Lobexon to help them run the government. Nama's people were good at running pineapple plantations, but with the exception of a small upper class that preferred to stay in the corner of Lobexon that bordered Nama, were not well equipped to run a government. Nama admired the Pabaps' commitment to obedience and pacifism, which seemed to stick with them wherever they went, in contrast to Namans' impulsiveness and incompetence. Nama sent thousands of diplomats into Paba immediately after the war, hoping to convince Pabaps to balance out Lobexon's violence and chaos with their own calmness and pacifism. A subgroup of Pabaps named Pisimimbin formed in Paba to oppose these efforts, claiming that the operation was either a poorly disguised attempt at a slave drive or a naive and fatally flawed attempt by Nama to fix the problems Nama had created that would only cause the Pabaps who agreed to move to become enslaved anyway, as they would be let loose in the world's largest slave empire with no protection.
Paba did not allow political parties, so Pisimimbin could not push itself into power even nonviolently. They were forced to use street protests instead, and spent much of their time screaming at the Naman diplomats to leave them alone. The Pabap royal family refused to listen to Pisimimbin, however, as they liked the prices Namans were willing to pay for the Pabaps they were taking.[4] In the end, though Paba did win some concessions for itself from Nama, such as the ability to control where in Lobexon the Pabaps would be settled. Most chose to live in the far north, where most Namans that were not slavemasters were. When Nama realized what was happening, they realized that the whole project might have been a mistake since the Pabaps who moved to Lobexon were essentially duplicating government functions that had been already working well when they were only staffed by Namans, and in fact the Pabaps were actually competing for power in the government of Lobexon itself as they had formed a political party of their own. Nama's political party, the Gold Party, was not allowed to outlaw the Pabaps because the Gold party considered any Gold party that outlawed a rival to be no longer Gold.
Later history
Unlike Subumpam, Paba did not have true political parties. Once the Paba agreed to send thousands of Pabaps to Lobexon each year, Pisimimbin's people realized they had lost, and disbanded. However they had won a small victory in that Paba was taking more control over which Pabaps were chosen to move, and Pisimimbin supporters simply chose to remain in Paba, thus increasing their influence slowly over time.
Come to Paba!
As Pabaps left their nation for Lobexon, Paba quicvkly became a target of immigration from various Laban nations. The Andanese people moved from Laba to Paba and reached their highest population density in Paba. They did not convert to the Yiibam religion, which was a rare exception to Paba's policy of insisting that their new nation respect only the Yiibam religion. This was allowed because the Andanese in Paba had sworn to always be loyal ot Paba, effectively considering all of Paba to be Andanese home territory, rather than behave as they did in many other nations where the Andanese minority was aggressive and unwelcome and often collaborated with invaders during a war. And even though their religions were not closely related, they worshipped many of the same gods and began to exchange ideas about the spirit world and the afterlife.
Early on, the Tarpabap people were the second largest minority in Paba. They had come from the far south of Laba, including the equatorial islands that were being rapidly flooded by rising ocean waters as the glaciers of the interior quickly melted. They felt they needed a new homeland to settle in and chose Paba. Earlier, Paba had had river access to the most convenient port in all of southern Laba from which to embark on a sea journey to reach Rilola, but they had very few seaworthy boats because they had no coastland of their own in that area apart from a few cities in Andanese territory in which they had become a majority but not achieved formal independence. Thus the Tarpabaps, being all along an oceangoing people, gave Pabaps their ships in return for a formal alliance in which the two peoples would stick together. The Tarpabaps converted to the Yiibam religion more easily than the Andanese since their native religion had already been similar. Nevertheless, not all Tarpabaps converted, and those who stuck to their oreiginal religion from the tropics were treated badly by others in Paba, including the other Tarpabaps.
The Tarpabaps did not blend much with Pabaps because the two peoples were so strongly phyiscally different: Pabaps were among the shortest people in the world; Tarpabaps were among the tallest. The Tarpabaps loved Paba because the Pabap government paid ethnic minorities a stipend simply for living in Paba, meaning that they did not even need to find a job to support themselves. However, the amount of money that Paba allotted to Tarpabaps was lower than that given to most other minorities because the Tarpabaps could not claim that lack of Pabappa language skills was preventing them from getting a job.
Immigrants from the Gold Empire
There were also a few Subumpamese people in Paba. Subumpam bordered Paba on the west, and therefore there was a lot of potential for immigration, but Subumpam did not have a high birthrate, and few Subumpamese were interested in moving to Paba. Most Subumpamese who moved to Paba were economic migrants who merely wanted to take advantage of Paba's generous welfare system, including the ability to remain unemployed for their entire life and yet make more money than a lower-class full-time wage earner of Pabap ancestry would get. Paba accepted this even though they were able to control the Subumpamese more easily than other immigrants because in Subumpam there were three Pabap-majority states which could easily govern the Subumpamese more harshly than Paba itself did.
Instead, Pabaps mostly moved into eastern Subumpam. The Subumpamese shared the blonde hair and blue eyes of the Pabaps but had facial fewatures and a body type more like the dark-skinned Tarpabaps, so in some ways they were a bridge between the two. Still, this led to Tarpabaps marrying Subumpamese, not Tarpabaps marrying Pabaps.
The Gilgosi were a people native to Lobexon who were famous for their history of massacres of Pabaps living in Lobexon. They claimed Pabaps were the enemy of not just the Gilgosi, b but all of the natives of Lobexon because the Pabaps used their naval power to dominate the economy and reach a status even the slavemasters on the plantations were jealous of. But Paba felt bad for the Gilgosi, who had alienated even their other fellow oppressed peoples in Lobexon and after the Treaty of 2057 found themselves afraid to identify themselves as Gilgosi for fear of arrest by the Lobexonian government. Thus Paba's navy began rescuing Gilgosi people from Lobexon and moving them to Paba in the year 2061, hoping that if they moved to Paba they would get over their hatred of Pabaps and form a stronger nation for both groups. Their intent was to settle the Gilgosi people all over Paba and encourage them to blend in, but they realized for the meantime that none of the Gilgosi people spoke Pabappa and that they would need to be mostly held in place along the coast so that they could be surrounded by Pabap people on all sides. Most were settled in the southwestern coastal Pabap states of Waba, Pusa, and Pama, which were bordered by Pabap fishing communities on the east and west, and by Pabap farming communities on the north. They did not want the Gilgosi to become fishermen, however, as the sea was being fished heavily already; they wanted them to settle in cities and take up work in commerce similar to what most free Gilgosi people had been doing in Lobexon. Thus they were similar to the Pabap "yellow" middle class. Paba offered free education in Pabappa for Gilgosi people but most were not interested. However, many of them married into Pabap families and thus their children were raised speaking Pabappa after all.
The Crystals
Most people moving into Paba now did so by sea, aboard Pabap trading ships, and thus were watched closely and approved of by the Pabap navy as welcome additions to their new homeland. They tended to prosper and live peacefully. But a few groups, mostly from Lobexon, came of their own power.
Beginning around 2175, a large number of Crystals moved from Lobexon to Paba. Their name derives from their religion, which believes in a sacred treasure called the Four Gems of Tebbala. They seemed an unlikely fit in Paba, as in contrast to previous immigrant groups, they openly despised Pabap culture and religion and told the Pabaps they were stupid, impulsive, and closed-minded people. The Crystals simply wanted a safe place to live as they had been entirely outlawed in their old homeland of Lobexon, and Lobexon was a very large place, so there were a lot of Crystals that needed to get out. They figured Paba was a safe place to move because Paba had been entirely without war for 500 years and had a history of happily rescuing and adopting immigrant groups.
Once in Paba, the Crystals quickly wore out their welcome. Even the Gilgosi people who had been preaching hatred against all Pabaps 100 years earlier had quickly shut their mouths when they realized that the people they had considered their utmost enemies were in fact the only ones willing to risk death to rescue them from the oppressive government of their homeland, and happily agreed to start new lives on Pabap soil as members of the middle class. They swore off violence and some even went so far to as change their religion to better suit Pabap culture, even if they still privately believed in the GIlgosi religion. This was because they wanted to ensure that their children would also get along happily with Pabaps instead of reverting to Gilgosi religious nationalism.
But the Crystals came to Paba expecting Paba to change itself to suit them instead. They believed that all Crystals had a right to own deadly weapons, and refused to enter Pabap cities unless they felt confident they had enough weapons to kill the entire Pabap civilian population in the event of a war. They drew murals along brick walls showing Crystals beating up helpless Pabaps and burning them in massive bonfires, promising to make each mural the site of an actual massacre in the future if the Pabaps did not meet their demands. They did not send their children to school and preferred to teach only the very basic life skills at home. A subset of them learned Pabappa so they could communicate with the Pabaps around them, and some of these went on missions to try to convince the Pabaps to dump their Yiibam religion, which the Crystals called "the religion of fear", and convert to the Crystal religion. They stood on street corners blocking the path of Pabap civilians going about their daily routines, in many ways reminding Pabaps of an even more aggressive version of the "Crabs" of 100 years earlier. But the Crystals soon learned that while the Pabap government had painfully tolerated the Crabs because they saw a strong future for Paba in cooperation with them, they were strongly hostile to the Crystals, and in particular were sensitive to any attacks on the Yiibam religion which was at the core of Pabap society.
Paba did really believe that they were doing a good deed by rescuing the Crystals from Lobexon, as they had when they had rescued the Crystals' main enemy, the Gilgosi, from the same fate beginning about 100 years earlier. But the Gilgosi had in Paba almost entirely been friendly and did not try to convert Pabaps to their religion. Paba was unwilling to use violence against the Crystals, but they hurriedly passed a new law banning the Crystal religion and cut off their welfare benefits. THey still did not want to push out the Crystals themselves, but told them they were no longer welcome in Paba if their main hobby was seeking new ways to destroy Paba's society.
Most Gilgosi living in Paba had essentially forgotten all of the politics of their old homeland in Lobexon and had no reaction to the new law. But a few of them, despite not being affected by it in anyway themselves, protested the new law on behalf of their ancient enemies the Crystals. For some of them, this was because they honestly felt the law was unfair; for others, they merely didnt want a law banning the Gilgosi religion to be next on the table. By 2180 most people in Paba identifying themselves as Gilgosi were descendants of the Gilgosi who had not married Pabaps and still held onto much of their original culture and language. They felt increasingly comfortable openly admitting that they opposed the politics and religion of the Pabap majority now, but still swore off both violence against Pabaps and any form of alliance with the Crystals.
Meanwhile the Crystal minority considered itself the world's bottommost oppressed group, and was surprised by the Pabaps' lack of sympathy for their painful existence. They generally refused to leave Paba, saying that any of the other placesd they could go would likely enslave them. They simply refused to admit the possibility that a pacifist empire like Paba was capable of even so much as getting them to leave. They dared Paba to attack them, saying the Crystals would kill far more innocent Pabaps than the Pabap army could kill of them. They promised they would leave Paba eventually, but only once they had developed an army in Paba which would invade Subumpam in order to secure a new nation for Crystals only along the coast of Subumpam, which they considered to be even more militarily underpowered than Paba.
The Crystals had mostly traveled to Paba on their own will, and settled wherever they felt like instyead of following the orders of the Pabap government. However, this turned out to be a disadvantage since they were dispersed all over Paba and not organized into strong, fort-like settlements. They could not fish the ocean for food, as Paba's government granted fishing rights only to a select group of people, mostly hereditary. They thus had to rely on hunting and farming, but found this difficult as well, as there were no Crystal-majority cities; Crystals lived only in places where Pabaps were the majority. This in turn meant that they were subject to being sold into slavery in Thaoa if they could not make a living in any other way, and Thaoa was happy to help out. To escape this, some Crystals actually moved to Subumpam after all, even knowing they were risking slavery since Subumpam had been forced to adopt slavery recently by the Gold government. Those that remained in Paba soon became even more widely dispersed, as they realized that their dream of invading Subumpam from a safe spot in Paba was unlikely to happen soon. Many Crystals walked northward to the poorer mountainous parts of Paba, figuring that if they surrounded themselves with poor, non-farming Pabaps, they would have an easier time making a living off the land. Of these, some blended in with the Xʷugâ tribes and effectively became Xʷugâ.
Thus, the Crystals' attempt to wrap all of Paba around them as a strong ally in their war in Lobexon had failed, and the Gilgosis had entirely assimilated to mainstream Pabap culture by this time, which meant that Paba had remained neutral in the war in Lobexon and was thus able to protect its people from being dragged into a foreign war with no benefit for Paba itself.
Tarpabap domination
Despite the importation of many groups of people from Lobexon, immigration soon came to be dominated by the earliest immigrant group of all, the Tarpabaps who were coming from the increasingly flooded equatorial rainforests of Laba. They were the only group that Paba was actively seeking to import more of, as they considered Tarpabaps part of the core of their society, just as much as Pabaps.
Tarpabaps had been moving to Paba for over 1500 years, but historically had never passed beyond a 10% minority. Now Paba was planning on moving a large number of Tarpabaps from Laba to Paba, figuring that Paba could become main destination for all immigrants from all parts of Laba and therefore become the continent's strongest ally of Laba, even though Laba was host to hundreds of nations and had no unified political structure with which to form an alliance.
Tarpabap settlers saw that they were surrounded by Pabap people no taller than their bellies and many expected Pabap citizens would be afraid of them. They were surprised that Paba had even let them in at all, and moreover allowed Tarpabaps to own dangerous weapons, whereas most Pabap people went about their daily lives unarmed. Tarpabap leaders beleieved this showed that the Pabaps were helpless at identifying dangers around them, and figured that Paba needed Tarpabaps for protection from its rulers' dangerous illusions. They predicted that the Tarpabaps, despite being a minority divided into even smaller minorities by differences in language and religion, would soon easily win control of the government of Paba. But they found that this was not so. Pabaps had wlecomed many immigrant groups over the centuries, from a wide range of cultures, sharing nothing in common except the the fact that they were all taller and stronger than the Pabap people they lived amongst. Pabaps had learned how to hide themselves from danger both internal and external, and by and large Tarpabaps were unable to convince the Pabaps to stand aside and let Tarpabaps take power. Pabaps living in Paba were being constantly reminded of how unnaturally small and delicate they were, and the Tarpabaps were unable to break through their defense measures.
Neither did they have success in dominating the Andanese minority, who were even smaller and more physically delicate than the Pabaps due to a lower amount of body fat. They realized t hat Pabaps were a peaceful people, but could do quite well at organized violence so long as they had a trustowrthy military leader telling them what to do. THus both Pabaps and Tarpabaps were good soldiers in their own differern ways , and realized that they would be better off as allies than as enemies. Likewise, the Pabaps enjoyed bringing Tarpabaps into Paba, and kept sending out ships to Laba to encourage ever more desperate flood-threatened people to move to Paba.
However, as both groups had high birthrates and there were generally no wars, the population was persistently overcrwoded. Some native Pabap people, though careful not to offend the Tarpabaps, claimed that there were too many Tarpabap people in Paba now and that their strong but still famine-prone empire was not capable of dealing with any more immigration. They formed a new political organization called Wampabansam. Wampabansam supported diversity, but felt that diversity was only good so long as it was like a fruit salad, with every group well represented. The new program of importing Tarpabaps in large numbers threatened to overwhelm the fruit salad by ruining its taste with too many pineapples. Like pineapples, the Tarpabap people were huge and strong, and worried that their harmonious empire of cherries and strawberries was about to be crushed by a tropical invader that wouldnt even notice the blood that they had spilled under their outer shell.
Wampabansam claimed that Tarpabap people were helpful, but did not want them to become a majority. Using the fruit salad analogy again, they said t hat pineapples were tasty, but so juicy that a salad consisting of half pineapples would be simply thrown into the trash. They did not see a problem with Pabaps themselves being a majority, however, because they claimed Pabaps were not generally power-seeking people, and claimed that Paba's history of taking nonviolence to extreme levels was proof of this. They thus agreed with the early naive Tarpabap settlers that in a nation consisting of roughly equal proportions of Pabaps and Tarpabaps, the Pabaps were sure to endure a lot of abuse.
Paba was ruled by a strictly hereditary monarchy, so Wampabansam could send advisors to the royal family, but had no power in government even at local levels. They figured only violence old topple a monarch hy, and were unwilling to use violence.
As boat after boat beached on Paba's already struggling coast, they began to explore other nations on Rilola, but found that essentially all land had been occupied. Most of the land around them had either been settled by fellow Gold-related cultures that were materially successful but mostly hostile to accepting even more people, or by aboriginals who had never been as weak as the ones living in Paba because they were not cut off from the rest of the world by mountains.
Expansion
This problem is one area where the Pabaps and the Tarpabaps tended to break apart culturally. The Pabaps preferred to live along the warm southern coast, and if they ran out of land, they planned to settle other tropical areas even if they were controlled by hostile powers that would only allow Pabaps to move in as an underclass. This was because Paba had in its short time on the continent already become a master of naval trade, and its people felt comfortable living under foreign powers because they would often live better lives than their supposed dominant cultures and because their mastery of sea power would give them an easy exit if the host nation turned suddenly hostile.
The Tarpabaps, meanwhile, typically preferred expansion into the much larger and more open northern territory of Repilia, even though Paba was walled off from Repilia by the world's tallest mountain range. Tarpabaps were not happy being simply a minority in another nation's culture; they wanted a country of their own. Thus the two peoples had essentually switched places: Pabaps were descended from rural mountain peoples with extremely low living standards but had become the masters of sea power and among the richest peoples in their new home continent, while the Tarpabaps, who had come from the hot wet jungles of Laba's equatorial maritime region, had mostly already forgotten how to build boats and dreamt of clawing out a huge invincible mountain nation for Tarpabaps only.
Early Tarpabap settlements in the interior focused on Repilian territory, as Repilia (labeled simply as Nama on the map above) hugged Paba's northern border from end to end. In 2144, the nation of Tarwas was founded. This led to revenge attacks against Paba and strained relations between the Pabaps and the Tarpabaps. Paba always had been an ally of Repilia, even if for morally questionable reasons: the early Pabap settlers had attacked the native aboriginal Sukuna people, who had been the blood enemies of Repilians for thousands of years. Thus there was never any animosity against Paba from the Repilians, and Paba had welcomed Repilian settlement into Paba, giving Repilians their only access to the south coast. But now Tarpabap people were cutting their way through the mountain passes and setting up shop in the choicest pieces of land, even daring to launch preemptive attacks against Repilian settlements in order to increase the security of their own.
Since Paba itself had a second nation, Pubapi, inside Naman territory, and Repilia was a part of Nama, the Namans tried to put pressure on the Pabaps to stop Tarpabapla's explosion into Repilian territory, saying that they would shut down Pubapi if the attacks on Repilia did not stop. But even Nama knew that they were in a very weak position, because other nations were stabbing their borders as well, and they had up until now seen Paba as a strong ally and specifically as a naval ally.
In Pubapi, the Pabaps told the Naman diplomats that Paba's army was not as strong as it seemed; they were afraid that if they tried to stop Tarpabaps from settling Nama, the Tarpabaps would turn back around and attack Paba. Since Tarpabaps were now much stronger than the Pabaps, they were worried about total conquest. Indeed, when Repilians did launch revenge attacks into Paba, they targeted ethnic Pabaps, not ethnic Tarpabaps, because even though the Pabaps were basically innocent they tended to be unarmed and therefore much easier to kill. Already some Pabaps had begun to fear that Tarpabap conquest was inevitable and decided to move to the Tarpabaps' new nation, Tarwas, and essentially become Tarpabaps themselves. Tarwas allowed Pabaps to live in Tarwas despite earlier saying that it would be a nation for Tarpabaps only, because they too had weaknesses and did not want to alienate a culture that provided them their only access to the sea, and was still actively importing more Tarpabaps from Laba. Some believed that in the far future, Tarwas would be strong enough to rush back down the mountains, conquer all of Paba, and become the world champion of military power both on land and at sea, since they would take control of the Pabap navy and learn from the Pabaps how to build ships. But even the most aggressive and optimistic Tarpabaps realized that this could only happen many hundreds of years in the future, if at all, and that Tarwas' best military strategy for the time being would be to consider itself an absolute inseparable ally of Paba. The leaders of Tarwas told themselves that their people had been living in Paba for many generations, and had never attacked Pabaps, whereas Repilia had, and yet the Pabaps still considered Repilia their ally. This was also their argument to Paba to convince Pabap to stay loyal to Tarwas even if meant losing the support of Repilia and Nama, which were much stronger.
Reform in Paba
However, the Pabaps became uncomfortable when they realized they were now afraid of being attacked just going about day to day life in their own home country. It wasn't just that the other people were tall: generally, only ethnic minorities were trained in how to use weapons, since Paba assumed that they had moved to Paba to servce in the military. In northern Paba particularly, a rising crime rate was due to the rapidfly growing Fua population's increasinly aggressive attacks on unarmed Pabap people. The Fua had been hated for a long time, even by other ethnic minorities, and were banned from the military, but had acquired weapons from other people living in nothern Paba. There were revenge attacks against the Fua, but it was by other minority groups rather than the Pabaps.
Nevertheless, Paba's sea power remained supreme. Paba did not call for a slowdown of settlement of the tropics by Pabaps, as they felt that few of them would return voluntarily. They merely wanted to better strengthen Pabaps in Paba so that they did not have to worry about beign attacked by Tarwas or Tarpabaps within Paba (even Repilians living in Paba were attacking Pabaps now, although they mostly went after Tarpabaps). They allowed Pabaps to own weapons and made sure that even though they were still exempy from military service, they would be able to defend themselves in the event of a civil war.
Paba was unhappy at the problems caused by the cultural differences between them and the Tarpabaps they were hosting in their nation. Paba wanted to settle outworld areas in the tropics, which led to expanding Pabap power overseas but very little growth at home even with rapid immigration from the Pabaps' home area in Laba. Meanwhile, few Tarpabaps left, so their population in Paba grew rapidly, approaching 30%, and they actually had a majority in the army now since the Pabaps were focusing mostly on their navy. Paba was worried about an ethnic conflict arising within its own army, with the huge Tarpabaps massacring tiny defenseless Pabap soldiers, if Tarwas decided to invade Paba. Tarwas was still a strong ally of Paba, but Paba felt that this was largely because of the Pabaps' strong assistance they were giving to Tarwas, even going on missions to Laba to gather boat after boat full of Tarpabap people desiring to immigrate to Paba.
A small subgroup of settlers spoke an early branch of the Pabappa language that had eliminated the letter /p/, drastically changing the sound of the language. They persisted with this language for several hundred years but as time went on and more settlers arrived it became increasingly pressed down by standard Pabappa. These people called themselves Hinku.
Settlement of the north
- Main article: Kava
In 2371, a wandering troop of Pabaps calling itself Hīnkù declared war on the Repilians living in Kava and started rushing up the mountains. They planned to create a new nation carved out of territory in the north. Since this was similar to how Tarwas had grown, they claimed that they were founding a newer, smaller Tarwas. Just as Tarwas was a nation for Tarpabaps only, Hinkulas would be a nation for Pabaps only.
Since Paba was a pacifist empire, they did not allow wars. Paba immediately severed all ties with Hinku and told the Hinku people that even if they changed their minds about war in the future, the Hinku people would never be welcome in Paba. Nevertheless, since Paba was a pacifist empire, it also refused to help the Repilian diplomats who came to Paba pleading for military intervention against Kava. Paba was in a difficult situation here. The Hinku people had deliberately invoked the analogy with Tarwas to expose the hypocrisy of the Pabap ruling class in instantly denouncing Pabap violence against Repilians living in Kava but ignoring and even supporting Tarpabap violence against Repilians living in Tarwas. In truth, Paba was against violence in both cases, but they were a strong ally of Tarwas because they were afraid of what Tarwas would do to them if they tried to drift away.
Hinku's soldiers wore white clothes and marched under a white banner. This, in Pabap culture, meant that they claimed descent from the Pabap royal family, as those were the only Pabaps who were allowed to wear white. The Hinku did not actually believe that they were from the royal house, but chose to wear white specifically to show that they considered themselves equal to the very uppermost Pabaps. Paba was unimpressed and secretly hoped that the Hinku people would be massacred by their enemies. Paba could easily have defeated Hinku in a war, but the Pabap government did not want to break its promise to never fight a war. They actually sealed their borders to prevent Pabaps from leaving Paba to get away from pacifism and join Hinku.
The Hinku said that the Pabaps should stop worrying about their nation being crushed by outsiders because it had already happened. They claimed Paba was oppressed by its pacifist government, which allowed other nations to abduct slaves from the Pabap lower class, never harming any of the ethnic minorities in Paba. Meanwhile, Pabaps were victimized by these same ethnic minorities because Pabaps were not given weapons to defend themselves. They thus claimed Pabaps, apart from the tiny royal family, were in fact the lowest class in Pabap society and the only one denied even the ability to protect itself.
However, in reality, Pabaps were not denied the right to own weapons. It merely was that they generally did not join the military, and never were trained to use weapons in the first place, whereas at least the males of most of Paba's ethnic minorities did. Most areas of Paba had a low crime rate, and people who did not own weapons did not feel unsafe living among those who did. In areas where the crime rate was higher, per capita owernship of dangerous weapons was indeed much higher. Hinku was correct, howeve,r that slavery had always taken almost exclusively Pabaps, and that this was why Paba's population had not grown even higher. Hinku promised to avoid enslaving Pabaps even if Paba remained eternally an enemy of Hinku.
The Hinku were Pabaps who spoke a dialect with no /p/. This had been a conscious change, because they felt that Pabappa's infantile sound system was partly respondible for Paba's adult population not being taken seriously by others, and why Paba always took abuse from other nations and merely sought the one that would abuse them the least. But they soon changed back to standard Pabappa because they were receiving many illegal immigrants from Paba, generally ones who had traveled to Subumpam first to get around the border barricades.
The Hinku were not a very physically intimidating people. Like other Pabaps they were small and delicate. They did not include ethnic minorities because they said these people were the entire problem in Paba. They had no armor at all. Their men dressed like women, including wearing crop tops and short skirts. This was unusual for Pabaps and for all of the other people around them. They had been nudists back in Paba, which was also unusual but nevertheless legal along Paba's south coast. When they moved north, they realized their new climate was very cold, and needed to wear clothes. The Hinku women adopted the fashions of the Repilian people around them, and the Hinku men simply copied their wives and girlfriends' clothes for themselves. Hinku men were not bothered when Repilian people laughed at them because they were killing Repilian people every day.
Hinku claimed loyatly to the Kakpewo people, but unlike Kakpewo, Hinku people loved nature and did not start forest fires to clear out dangerous animals from the lands they settled. They preferred to see themselves as a part of nature rather than at war with it. This meant that Hinku people were often eaten by wildcats. However, they saw wolves as potential allies and allowed wolves to live in even the centers of their cities. The "grape wolf", whose unusual name was due to being named after a city in Paba that grew grapes, became a symbol of Hinku culture early on.
When FILTER came to realize that its existence depended on waging a relentless war against the Repilian peoples all over the world, they decided to favor Hinkulas/Kava, since Kava was the only nation of Pabaps that was willing to fight Repilians. However, FILTER considered itself superior to Kava and figured that they would one day become enemies.
Cohabitation with penguins
- See Teppalan wildlife#Penguins for more information.
However, some Pabap settlers had essentially given up trying to expand by means of war, and moved northward into a barren land, scarcely occupied even by aboriginals, just west of the Tarwastas. They were much stronger than the Repilian people that had been there before, and provided a check on westward expansion of Tarwas. By now Tarwas was about the size of Subumpam, and thus about half of the size of Paba, and still growing rapidly, taking all of its land from defenseless Repilian tribes.
Even though these new Pabap settlers were also invading Repilian territory, they had better relations with the Repilians and were much less violent than the Tarpabaps, so their settlements tended to prosper. They actually reached the north coast of Rilola in 2412,[5] but did not settle very much there because the climate was still too cold, with the harbors frozen most of the year apart from a few narrow inlets where the ice thawed out into "lakes" surrounded by land on one side and the polar icecap on the other. The average temperature in winter was about 18°F, and in summer about 50°F. Penguins were the topmost predator here, and their ocean was very fishy because most large fish had never swum in from the wider ocean and thus small fish that would be easy prey elsewhere were surviving quite well here. Moreover, intelligent predators such as dolphins could not reach the area at all because they would need to swim under the icecap, and thus run out of air. This is the source of the saying "Fish can swim through ice, but dolphins cannot." A human woman signed an agreement with the penguin emperor stating that humans and penguins would share the land but would reserve a few fishing spots for each other. Further, the penguins agreed to help humans settle the icecap itself, even though humans knew that life on ice would be excruciating since they would only have fish for their food. Sysep was the Pabap name of a penguin nation that allowed humans to move in; another was Wabubbu. Typically humans in these nations did not hunt for food, since they knew that penguins were incomparably better hunters at sea than even humans armed with spears and stabbing from sturdy boats. Instead the humans did other work helping the penguins dispose of waste material and providing medical care, both things which penguins needed but were unwilling or unable to do.
The Soap Bubble Societies
Nevertheless, huamns did not merely want to become the underclass on the fringe of an animal's society. In 2401 three new huamn-only nations named Ŋapkamša, Šim, and Paemža were created along three natural harbors.[6] These three soon came to think of themselves as nations, as travel between their new homes and Paba was impossible. Their religion, Yiibam, worshipped gods that were physically present in Paba, and although Yiibam did not discourage Pabaps from leaving Paba, these new settlers had cut themselves off from their parent society in a way that had not been done for thousands of years. The settlers in the three new nations expected their climate to warm up in the future, although they knew from studies of their own history back in Paba that it would likely take hundreds of years for the water to become navigable. Thus they had not chosen these nations specifically for their waterfront. In fact, they had earlier intended to go even further north, but were stopped because they did not have the means to build more ships due to the lack of trees in the area, and the knowledge that the ice would force them to abandon the ships in an unknown location and then strand them on an icecap.
Tarwas considered these nations to be intrusions on their territory, as the part of Repilia they had chosen was already claimed by Tarwas, but held off on declaring war. Tarwas had actually been a very peaceful nation outwardly despite their killings of aboriginals, and was unprepared for a war. THey actually called their territory Abilo or Abilas right now,[7] and it was rich in natural resources, and was uphill of its neighbors. They had a tiny amount of ocean in the north, but it was unusable because the climate was too cold.
The Tarwastas preyed on the inhabitants of Šim, the largest of the three nations, and imported them into Tarwas as slaves. Thus Tarwas adopted slavery. However, perversely, the people of Šim cooperated with the slave masters, and profited from exporting their people to Tarwas. Generally the ones chosen as slaves were chosen by the Šim people rather than the Tarwastas, and were commonly new arrivals to the colonies who had no family ties to the existing inhabitants, and were so emptily poor that even slavery was a better life for them than staying in Šim.
Many Subumpamese people moved to the three new colonies, and FILTER exported its people as well, adding an element of Feminism to the new countries. They also brought in the Sisnasi religion, and many Pabaps converted to Sisnasi, a very unusual occurrence helped in large part by their isolation from their ancestral homeland. Nevertheless, Pabappa remained firm as the language of all three nations and the dialects spoken in Mabimbižip differed only slightly from that spoken in Paba itself.
The blending of Pabap and Subumpamese culture helped solidify the identities of the new nations as being non-Pabap, and they formally unified into the Mabimbižip Alliance several years later. Mabimbižip means "soap bubbles" but it is not related to the Bubble Party or any of the other soap-related names that Pabaps came to use for themselves in later years. The use of the name "soap" had actually begun with FILTER, and was originally a Subumpamese word, mayinī. (They later changed their name from Soap Bubbles to just Soap to avert confusion.)
The westernmost of the three Mabim states, Ŋapkamša, had a city that later became Blop. It was also the state with the strongest Subumpamese influence (rather than Pabap). Thus Blop arguably started out as a Subumpamese colony, albeit one that was politically aligned with Paba rather than Subumpam. (Its original name was Paaba, which did not lead to confusion because the name of Paba at this time was Bābā.)
Conflict with Tarwas
Tarwas actually blamed the Mabimites for the slavery problem, saying that because Mabim was selling its people to Tarwas for a profit, Mabim must also be practicing slavery, and had imported its slavery into Tarwas. They declared war on Mabimbižip and occupied all three nations during the winter of 2421. Until this time, Tarwas had only adopted slaves from Šim, not from Ŋapkamša or Paemža, as the other two were more distant. Now they enslaved all of the Mabimites, and said that henceforth the Mabim slave labor would be provided to the Tarwastas at no cost. THey promised to eventually free the slaves, not because they felt any sympathy for them but because they blamed slavery for dragging down northern Tarwas' economy in the last decade before their invasion. THey also believed that Mabimbižip was an illegal settlement to begin with because it was on Tarwas' land. Nevertheless, they were worried that Paba would discover that they had attacked, so they did not kill any of their new slaves.
To their surprise, they found that Paba was actually sending inspectors to the new nations to make sure everything was okay. They learned of this only when one Pabap official was seen in the open and a group of Tarwastas assumed he was an escaped slave. Even though Paba was very far away, transportation had been improving and it no longer took several years to get from Paba to Šim. They realizsed that if they killed the captured official, or made him a slave, Paba would know something was wrong, and if they let him go, Paba would also know something was wrong. They nevertheless decided to enslave him, to set an example to the other Mabimites that their rule was strong. Nevertheless, the official did eventually escape, and arrived back in Paba several months later.
Tarwas realized that they were still officially an ally of Paba but had just directly attacked and enslaved three nations that were direct descendants of Paba and worried that the news would reach Paba soon and Paba would be angry. Since Tarwas realized a war with Paba might be imminent, they considered asking Repilia for an alliance, even though they were still finishing off killing those few Repilians still living in southern Tarwas. They claimed that the Mabimites had occupied Repilian land, and that through an alliance with Tarwas the two huge powers could crush Mabim and give the land back to Repilia. The Tarwastas thus now admitted that their own claim to the land was invalid. Repilia refused the alliance, although a small number of Repilians, acting on their own will, moved into Mabim to help Tarwas' military keep control of the slaves.
Soon the slaves in Mabimbižip, backed up by surrounding armies of Repilians, began to fight back against their dominators. They started fires in the woods, making the land useless for the lumber industry, hoping to chase out the Tarwastas. Since one of the slave tasks that the Tarwastas had forced the Mabimites to do was to plant trees, this was a direct insult. However, as they had only been enslaved for a few years, the trees that they were destroying were preexisting ones. The Tarwastas responded to the forest fires by torturing Mabimites whether they were the ones setting the fires or not.
The Mabimites saw that their "soft" warfare that deliberately avoided violence did not work, so they launched a conventional war and began to allow killings. They let loose a swarm of parasitic worms and a plague, both of which affected Tarwastas more than they affected Mabimites. Even though their attempt to fight a war by burning down trees had not worked, Mabimites still insisted that they wanted to fight without weapons, and focus on "messy" warfare, in part because most of them were too small and clumsy to comofrtably use the weapons that they captured from Tarwastas, and in part because they had had success in those methods in the past. Nevertheless, Mabim did have an army of conventional soldiers with arrows and body armor, which was part Repilian and part Mabimite. Soon the war spread back into Tarwas, and the occupiers in Mabimbižip were forced to leave to go defend their homeland (they had been mostly soldiers, which meant that northern Tarwas had been unusually weakly protected). Even though Mabimbižip was now a wasteland, they were being provided food by Repilians in exchange for allowing Repilians to move back into Mabimbižip.
Mabimbižip then invaded Tarwas itself, although they made clear both to their soldiers and to the Tarwastas that they were not intending to permanently occupy even a small portion of Tarwas. All they wanted was the release of any slaves still in captivity in Tarwas.
Paba sidelines itself
Paba was unable to react to this war. They had tried to smile when diplomats from Tarwas thanked Paba for their help in Tarwas' aggressive expansion of territory; they were shocked when Mabimites traveled upriver to Paba and told them that Tarwas was enslaving them. Paba's government strongly held to its ideology of pacifism, and had been worried for a long time that they would eventually be forced to choose between two wars.
Paba sympathized with the Mabimbižip slaves, but were afraid that if Paba officially declared war against Tarwas, the Pabap land army, which was largely Tarpabaps, would either refuse to fight or turn around and even attack Paba. Meanwhile, though few people on either side expected it to happen, some Tarwasta diplomats had been asking Paba to continue its alliance with Tarwas and actually send its army into Tarwas to conquer back the Soap lands.
Paba was surprised at how poorly Tarwas was doing in its war against the Soap Bubble Societies, and figured the threat of an invasion of Paba from Tarwas was quite small. They figured that they could afford to remain neutral in the war, knowing that Tarwas was still dependent on Paba for many things, and that no other coastal nation would seriously consider an alliance with Tarwas if they decided to seek economic independence.
Soap Bubbles move in
Tarwas was a very large country, and they could not simply cruise throughout the entire perimeter looking for anyone of their kind. Since most slaves were at work in farms, they could not rely on hidden messages from the captives such as Subumpamese words written on tools or clothing. They again released a plague that spread by infected fleas biting humans' feet, which meant that going barefoot was the easiest way to spread the disease. However, fleas occasionally bit humans higher up on their body, or while they were sleeping, so simply wearing shoes would not stop the spread of the plague. Various animals could also get the disease. Tarwas insisted that they were against slavery and that no slaves had ever been taken into Tarwas, but the Mabimites were not satisfied. Eventually, as farmers died, slaves appeared and tried to escape to freedom. Even though many of these were also dying of the disease, and others were simply killed by other Tarwastas, enough escaped slaves made it back to Mabimbižip that the Mabimites were able to convince themselves that they had won the war. They pulled out their army but kept a very strong force along the southern border, intending to keep Tarwas permanently landlocked.
Tarpabap treaty with Paba
Tarpabap settlement of the interior had reached a new phase where instead of explosively spreading out all over the place they built cities and forts in their strongest areas and did not generally expand far beyond them. They had acheived their goal of creating a new nation for Tarpabaps only, and they had chosen the best land available to live on. Their new nation, Tarwas, split Repilia right through the middle, meaning that Repilians wanting to travel from "West Repilia" to "East Repilia" and vice versa would need to go through Tarwas (unless the ice along the north coast melted). Tarwas was happy now and did not want to expand further. Thus even though the Tarwastas had killed many Repilians and destroyed their culture, the Repilians living just shy of the borders of Tarwas began to believe that perhaps they were at least finally safe from a Tarwasta invasion.
Likewise, the fear in Paba of a Tarwasta invasion also began to subside, as even though the Tarpabap minority in Paba had reached 35% (and about 15% Andanese, 20% Repilians, 25% Pabaps, 5% mixed) the Tarpabaps in Paba no longer considered themslves kin of the Tarpabaps in Tarwas (who had come to call themselves Tarwastas).
Ships from Laba continued to bring Tarpabaps to Paba, but now the majority of Tarpabaps stayed in Paba instead of moving north. Those that did move went to other tropical areas since Tarwas itself was no longer interested in drawing in much more immigration, and the other cold northern lands were becoming steadily more difficult to invade. Thus the population of Tarpabaps in Paba began to grow and soon became a slight majority. On the other hand, the new generations of Tarpabaps mostly stayed near the coast and often did not consider themselves Tarpabaps. Unlike the mainline Tarpabaps, they retained their original Laban languages instead of learning Pabappa, which led them to be increasingly isolated not just from Pabap society but also from each other. So instead of calling themselves Tarpabaps, they retained their original tribal names and considered themselves simply minorities within Paba. Yet thse people considered themselves citizens of Paba only, and did not want independence.
Colonies grew along the south coast of Paba, one for each Tarpabap nationality, with one more for the new-Tarpabaps that had chosen to learn Pabappa after all and one more for the Pabaps themselves. These were not strictly racially segregated habitats, but rather religiously and linguistically segregated. Still, the profound difference in body types between the Pabaps and the various Tarpabap groups led to relatively little intermarriage.
Tarpabaps who learned Pabappa found themselves better off economically than those who did not, and although they mostly preferred to stay in Paba for now, some of them moved to neighboring countries such as Subumpam and Thaoa, or even to Nama. Not as many moved to Lobexon, even though the government of Lobexon promised them immunity to its slavery laws, because the Tarpabaps preferred to live in places where Pabaps also lived.
Later divisions and separatism
Tarwas soon realized that despite its size, it was under the constant threat of famine. People from Tarwas began to move to Paba now, saying Tarwas had failed to achieve its objectives and that they merely wanted to live in their ancestral homeland again. Tarpabaps reached 55% of the population of Paba, with Pabaps only about 20%, and began to complain. Some wanted total control of the government, with a Tarpabap royal family replacing the Pabap royal family; others wanted a multiethnic coalition government patterned after Nama, in which ideally political parties rather than ethnic interests would be the dominant power players in the government.
Paba decided to shut off immigration from Laba for the time being, except for a few "Paleo-Pabaps" that were suffering from famines in their ancient homeland. Pabaps were becoming worried about being trampled in their own capital city. Yet they still had total control not only of their own coastline, but also the coastlines of every nation to the east of them, and quite a few to the west. They decided to cement this control by passing a law stating that the only navy allowed eastward of Nama was the Pabap Navy (Vaapami). They threatened war on any nation that did not comply with this rule, even if they had been previously an ally of Paba. They then told the Tarpabap diplomats that they had been extremely generous for hundreds of years, and in fact that they had allowed Tarpabaps representation in government so long as they converted to the Yiibam religion, but that they were now shutting down this system as well, saying that the Tarpabaps had been unfaithful to Yīa (the god of Yiibam) and that many of them were not even pretending to believe in Yīa. They even threatened the Andanese, who had previously been immune to Paba's religious doiscrimination laws.
Tarpabaps were upset. They had a strong majority in the army, and considered erupting a civil war against the ruling but largely weaponless Pabaps in the city center. But they still had a strong cultural taboo against killing small people, and Pabaps were still very small compared to Tarpabaps as there had been almost no intermarriage. In fact, they had become slightly smaller over time since the ones marrying out tended to be taller than average, and because of a small amount of blending with the Andanese. Average adult male Pabaps were belly-high to chest-high measured against adult male Tarpabaps, about the same as an average Tarpabap 9-year-old. This is the main reason why Tarpabaps were so overrepresented in the army to begin with. For the time being, the Tarpabaps worked out an agreement not to seek power in Paba even by nonviolent means so long as the Pabaps would pay them money to fix their economy and also let the Tarpabaps open holes in the naval shield so they could carry on independent trade without relying on the Pabap ships.
Still, the Pabaps realized that they had a problem with their army. Their standing army was now almost entirely non-Pabaps: it was about 80% Tarpabaps, and the rest mostly Andanese. There were actually far more Pabaps living over the border in Subumpam now than in Paba itself, but those Pabaps were increasingly loyal to Subumpam rather than Paba, despite maintaining their religion. They contemplated the radical idea of dissolving their army, becoming entirely undefended on land, even though they knew that the last country that had voted to dissolve its army (1950's Subumpam) was immediately invaded and conquered for more than a hundred years. They figured that this could work if they could find a trustworthy nation to defend them, in return for an alliance at sea. But Pabaps did not want to submit to Nama, as they had survived several disastrous wars that Nama fought in right on their borders without themselves suffering any significant damage. They also contemplated ending themselves altogether by marrying into Tarpabap families and essentially handing over their power. But this would put them at odds with the many Pabap minorities that had settled other nations, and at risk of losing the alliance with Nama. Even the Tarpabaps realized this, and had long preferred the face of their diplomats to be Pabaps. They also contemplated splitting the army into sections corresponding to each geographical area of Paba. Previously, they had deliberately blended everyone together so that there would be no possibility of religious or sectional infighting in their army. This had always worked well. The capital city of Paba, Biospum, was located in the state of Yakīs, for example, and if Yakīs had its own army, there would be no possibility of Yakīsian Pabaps being attacked by foreigners serving in their army.[8] They could then dwindle the proportions of the non-Pabap areas of their state without significant objections from those areas. But they did not want to disrupt a system that seemed for the time being to do well. And so the Pabaps held off on making any changes to their army, while publically telling their soldiers that they would in the future try to bring more Pabaps into the army, and more Tarpabaps into the navy, and might decide to split the army along geographical lines.
Shift of power
A famine swept Paba in 2543, and showed the people that the navy was the true source of Paba's power, as it was only the navy that could bring in food from the tropical areas of the Star Empire. Even though the Pabaps had decided to fully embrace the Tarpabaps as true allies now due to the famine's stress on both of them, they could not help their innate tendency to give more aid to fellow Pabaps, and some Tarpabaps starved. Tarpabaps required more food to survive even proportionally to their much higher body weight, so a meal for each Tarpabap had to be four times the size of a meal for a Pabap. This led to very painful social conflict, since almost all of the people delivering food were Pabaps, but 93% of the food was delivered to non-Pabaps, with almost all of that going to Tarpabaps. They did deliver the food, but charged high prices which bankrupted the Tarpabaps and left them wondering if they would be better off moving overseas as slaves than remaining in Paba where a year's worth of wages bought them only enough food for a week.
Thus, to escape the famine, Pabaps and Tarpabaps together immigrated into Lobexon under the impression that Lobexon would not suffer famines. Pabaps living in Lobexon now were an unquestioned upper class, above even the slavemasters, though the standard of living of everyone in Lobexon now was far worse than it had been 500 years earlier. Paba had now gone a full 900 years without a war, and its population had kept expanding throughout all of this time and its navy extended its reach now throughout the entire east coast of the continent, and much of the west. The new nation of Plumbiam was founded in a small hole in the icecap. Even with the best shipbuilding technology of their day, the Plumbiamites knew that they were deliberately stranding themselves here and would never see Paba again. They merely wanted their descendants to have a strong nation in their control when the climate warmed up enough for Repilian aboriginals to discover the new land. Thus Paba controlled most of the world's trade.
Meanwhile, Tarwas and Subumpam had both also suffered in the same famine. Tarwas was able to survive partly by taking food from surrounding nations, mostly fish from Mabimbižip, and partly by moving further north, as this famine was not related to cold weather. They did consider war against Mabimbižip, but figured that they would likely lose a large number of people to starvation even if they won the war and all other nations stayed out. So they held back. They realized, however, that Tarwas would be much better off if it had significant coastline, and prepared to explore territories further north and east.
The Vegetable War
During the Vegetable War, Paba was invaded by the impoverished nation of Litila. Litila had signed an alliance with Thaoa, which had always been poorer than Paba and despite a history of naval conquest, had been trapped on land by the powerful Pabap navy for hundreds of years. But the invasion came from the tiny and aggressive nation of Litila, as Thaoa had become too frightened to even agree to participate in the war.
The Vegetable War got its name because it was so destructive that people were reduced to eating vegetables after it was over, and even this was difficult due to the war tactic of poisoning the soil and water and burning forests.
Although Paba won the war, most of the fighting had been done by non-Pabaps. At this time, only about 15% of Paba's population was ethnic Pabaps, and almost none of these were in the land army, which had done most of the fighting. Most Pabaps either took shelter on boats and often left Paba entirely or hid out in high places where they hoped they wouldn't be seen. Some of these Pabaps did try to fight, but their fighting only helped the enemy crabs because the Pabaps were helpless and simply provided meat for the crabs to eat. Thus Pabaps for the most part considered that they did not deserve any rewards in this war, and did not try to claim any. They awarded Subumpam as a prize to the surviving members of the Pabap military, and those people almost all stayed in Subumpam. Since the war was so violent, the entire army had been deployed, and thus Paba was entirely without a land army in the immediate aftermath of the war.
However, although the Pabap navy had fought in the war, there was little they could do, as even though the crabs lived in the ocean they did not have the means to attack crabs from aboard their ships, and since they did not want crab claws suddenly appearing through their ships' decks and bursting them open, they for the most part did not even anchor their boats on the coast but rather on ridges further out to sea where crabs were much fewer in number. Thus, from the point of view of Paba's royal family, the navy also deserved none of the spoils in the war, and did not try to claim any.
Thus Paba lost most of its population, and of those who survived, most of the ethnic minorities had moved west to Subumpam, and a few others east to Thaoa, leaving Pabaps in control of only other Pabaps, and in many ways reverting their nation to the situation it had been in a thousand years earlier as a young, poor, but once again rapidly growing empire. (The Andanese mostly came to identify as Pabaps for the time being.) They faced the question of what to do with their military. They were the only nation in their immediate vicinity with no army, as their army had essentially become the army of Subumpam and Thaoa now. They did not actually expect an invasion from these countries, but worried about intimidation.
Paba realized that they probably did not need to raise a strong army at the current time, and could rely on its neighbors for protection, but they did not want to become entirely undefended as they worried about opportunistic invasion from tiny foreign armies that would otherwise have no one to prey on.
Peace comes to Paba
Paba realized that Subumpam was going to be a strong military power and that it would not be happy with a previously existing treaty signed by the Subumpamese government which had promised that Subumpam would allow Paba to patrol Subumpam's entire coastline and never attempt to build a navy of its own. Although the new Merar party promised that Subumpam would be an ally of Paba, the fact that the government itself was military showed Paba that their thousand-year reign of pacifism powered by military supremacy was now over.
Still, the Pabaps were satisfied that at least Subumpam did not force the Pabaps to abolish the treaty entirely. They merely divided the world into two hemispheres: one for Subumpam, one for Paba. Subumpam took naval control of their own coastline and everything to the west of it, including the hot moist tropical rainforests of Lobexon where many Pabaps lived. Paba was granted control of its coastline and everything to the east of it, including the islands of Laba from which both the Pabaps and the Merar had come. Both nations were still dependent on outsiders for food; for the meantime, Lobexon was the greatest supplier of food. Largely they provided Pabaps and Merari with pineapples and coconuts, since those were the foods that were best able to survive the journey across the sea; but they also exported live animals, some of which were killed upon arrival and others kept in farms to breed more of them. Since these animals also needed to be fed during the journey, the Pabaps came to subsist mostly on an unusual variety of animals sharing in common the ability to survive long journeys without food. Many of these were snakes.
Economic developments
Paba declared itself a pacifist nation, and promised not to take part in any of the benefits of conquering Subumpam and Thaoa. They claimed that essentially all of the soldiers in Paba's army were ethnic minorities, and these were the people who deserved the rewards, but that even they only deserved them if they were already in Subumpam or Thaoa helping to rebuild those countries. Paba told people who disagreed with this idea to move to Subumpam, where a military dictatorship had taken over and had made no promises other than that they would avoid slavery. Paba thus planned to insulate itself from war once more. They had become an economic champion by lasting a thousand years without a war, and they planned to go at least another thousand years without a war in their new government.
Most of the ethnic minorities who had remained in Paba during the war moved to Subumpam soon after the war was over, whether or not they expected to be promoted to the ruling class. This meant that almost all of the tall people had moved out now, leading Paba to consist mostly of Pabaps and Andanese, the two shortest peoples in the world. The Andanese mostly came to identify as Pabaps now, as the entire concept of ethnic minorities had lost its meaning and the primary difference between Pabap and Andanese culture was religion. The Pabap royal family realized that this made Paba much like Thaoa had been for most of its history. Many Pabap leaders wanted a huge wave of immigration from Laba to replace the Tarpabaps that had moved out, and Paba's government indeed began sending boats to southern Laba to encoyrage members of the tall dark-skinned tribes to move in. They said that everything that had been true before was still true: Tarpabaps and other ethnic minorities would be given handsome amounts of money merely for living in Paba, and not required to work for it, but their males would be subject to military service, and most ethnic Pabaps would not. However, Paba was very poor now, and their stipends seemed meager in comparison even to the living standards of southern Laba. Thus, few Labans immigrated to Paba; most Labans who moved out now preferred the longer journey to Lobexon. Thus Paba remained the homeland of the world's smallest people.
Meanwhile, the three large nations around Paba — Tarwas, Meraria, and now Thaoa — were ruled and largely populated by the tallest people in the world, averaging three times the body weight of the average adult male Pabap. (The remaining borders were with Nama, whose population in this area was nearly as tall as those others although they were a different race of people.) With no land army to defend its borders, Pabaps began to fear for their safety. Even an ally could become an enemy if a famine struck their homeland and they saw that Paba consisted mostly of tiny farmers barely able to lift their huge vegetables onto their horse-drawn carts. They tried to protect their interests in world diplomacy organizations but increasingly found that when Pabap diplomats visited nations around them, they were laughed at and their opinions not taken seriously even by the Merar people who shared their language and religion with the Pabaps. Literature published in Subumpam now depicted Pabaps as eternal children whose main concern was the high price of candy and where to find more "big people" for their military while the main concerns of everyone else were rising seas and rising crime rates.
But even so, Subumpam's strong military was primarily interested in cleaning up the ruined environment of Subumpam, not invading Paba which was only slightly better off. There thus was no serious threat of war for the time being, and Paba realized it could afford to raise only a small army, and to have this army focus not on combat skills but on cleaning up Paba's own environmental problems and reestablishing agriculture. But they still worried about a war in the far future in which their soldiers would be literally crushed underfoot by their neighbors. They tried to work out an agreement with Nama, figuring that even if Nama had had a mixed history militarily they were still very strong, and had no reason to abuse any relationship with Paba. They saw Nama as a comforting, motherly ally, who sometimes had problems that no one could solve but tried its hardest to protect its children even then. It was a coincidence that the very name Nama was the Pabappa word for "nipple", as it actually meant "apple farm", but the coincidence influenced the minds of both Pabaps and those Namans who had learned Pabappa, and Nama did not create a new euphemism for itself.
Relations with Nama
Paba came to be more interested in Nama. In part this was because they felt bad for Nama, which seemed to be losing every war it took part in, whereas Paba, despite its decreasing prominence as a world power, had been entirely free of war for 1200 years save for the one large exception of the Vegetable War. In part it was because it seemed like Nama's destiny was to die, and the Pabaps felt that if nothing else they would at least be a much gentler occupying power than all of the other groups. From diplomatic relations, Paba learned that Nama was losing battles against seemingly unlosable odds, with their enemies putting up forts openly in the wilderness and Nama not taking advantage of it. Although Paba still did not want to participate in a war, even one which seemed so clearly to be an example of good vs evil, they wanted to do what they could to help Nama at least survive.
As above, Pabaps, particularly males, were embarrassed by their own 2000 year old problem of being shorter and physically weaker than the people of every other tribe in the world, and hoped that Nama's tall, gentle people would provide the terrified Pabaps a hip to cry on. They figured that if Nama lost its entire territory to its enemies, they could at least survive by moving to Paba. Even though Paba was as overcrowded as ever, they figured that their people would welcome Namans, particularly Repilians, as a new immigrant group since Repilians had always been their allies and never were responsible during those times when Nama as a whole was hostile to Paba.
The Namans who lived immediately north of Paba , known as Ihhai, happened to be taller than average even for Repilians, and their women were far taller than their men and dominated all levels of society including the military. The Ihhai that joined the military tended to be even taller and stronger than that skyscraping average, and Paba felt an occupying force of Ihhai women in Paba would tower over even the males of the other nations around them and strengthen Paba greatly. And even if this occupation force turned hostile, the Pabaps knew that at least their enemies would focus mainly on attacking the Repilian women instead of the Pabap men cowering under their gigantic breastplates.
In the 2710s Nama agreed to the terms of the agreement wherein Paba would allow itself to be occupied by Nama, but told Paba that they were very poor and needed these soldiers to be paid very well. Paba was also very poor, just having come out of a war that ate half of their population, and so they did not have the money to hire a large force of Repilian women to patrol the streets of Paba at this time. Thus although both parties agreed to the arrangement, they also agreed it would be better for both countries to focus on trade and rebuilding their economies for the time being instead of worrying about stopping potential far-future military invasions. Nevertheless, a few Repilians moved into Paba at their own behest, expecting no money for their service since they were not specifically asked to come. This had happened before, mostly in the 1900s when Nama was shipping heavy furniture and weapons from Repilia through Paba to get to the seacoast more quickly, but these Repilians had been mostly eliminated during the early stages of the Vegetable War, even before the crabs attacked, because they had originally intended to fight for Nama and Paba was at that time insisting that it would stay neutral.
Most of these women did jobs involving heavy lifting and reaching long distances, since htey were much stronger than the native Pabap men and even stronger than some of the ethnic minorities who had chosen to remain in Paba.
A tall order
Some Ihhai women moved to Paba's southeast coast, which had previously been wealthy but became depressed as the economy moved increasingly to the zone bounded by the Epa and Esempapa rivers further west. The women moved into a chain of cities along the Pumu Sea from Pamap to Pissira, planning to work in the fishing industry, the one sector of the economy that was still doing well. Paba's government was unsure this was a good idea, figuring that the number of fish caught would not go up simply because more people were fishing. They worried that the Ihhai immigrants would simply take away from the fish catch of the native Pabap fishermen and drag down the Pumu seacoast economy even further.
The Repilian Ihhai turned out to be generally good at fishing expeditions once taught the basics of how to move at sea. Previously, commercial fishing in Paba was almost exclusively done by adult males, as it was dangerous and Pabap men generally did not want to see their wives in danger. The fishermen formed a very tight social circle since they generally did not see their wives or children except at night and spent most of their time with other fishermen. But the Repilians moving in were entirely female. Most fishermen had not been aware of the deal until the first Ihhai women arrived and were introduced by representatives from the Pabap government. Since the Repilian Ihhai mostly could not speak Pabappa, the government was worried that the two peoples wouldn't get along. However, some Pabaps had actually learned Ihhai languages, as Ihhai was one of the territories Paba was in common contact with, and a few Ihhai had also learned Pabappa.
These Ihhai women were not as tall as some others. Nevertheless, they were still quite tall. At first the Pabap fishermen were embarrassed to meet women who could lift them up and carry them off, and worried that the Repilian women would soon push them off the beaches and into poverty, but as these women did not have husbands, they seemed no threat, and the Pabaps and Repilians came to see each other as friends. Some of the previously all-male wine bars set up for fishermen began to allow women now, albeit only women who also fished. Others stood back cautiously and wondered if the introduction of so many unmarried foreign women into a society of men who were mostly married but believed in polygamy was a bad idea. They kept a close eye on the Repilian women's bellies, knowing that the fishermen's wives would not be happy to meet the newest member of their family.
Relations expand
Also, many Repilian women moved into the Pabap state of Blip to help govern it as this was the most distant state from the warm lands of the south and had always had trouble trusting the royal family. Also, it was unique in being the only Pabap state that contained the source of a river that flowed northward into Ihhai territory. Even though the Ihhai territory was at a higher elevation overall, it had a low, broad, valley which was fed by the Wibla river flowing north from the northern extreme of the state of Blip. Four cities had been founded along this river, and the people of Blip had thus had intimate contact with the people of Ihhai across the river many times before. However, the rest of the state of Blip had not taken part in this, and the capital of Blip, Pumpappa, was founded instead near the source of the much more economically powerful Esempapa river which led through eight other Pabap states before reaching the ocean in the Tamusur Bay.[9] This is the part of Blip that the Repilians were most interested in.
Blip said it was open to allowing whole families to move in, rather than just single young women, but Ihhai did not want to terrify the male population of Blip and also did not want Ihhai people to put down roots in Blip in case the experiment of running a state with an external government failed. They figured intimate relations were unlikely, as Repilian women were being given liberal amounts of power in Blip's government, and they believed that few Repilian women would want to marry a powerless, tiny Pabap man or even have an intimate affair with one. But babies soon were born, and Paba realized its love for its norhtern neighbor had delivered Paba its newest minority population. Blip declared the experiment a success and hoped the Repilian women who were still single would stay in Blip and marry Pabaps, since few of them were interested in returning to Ihhai. They unexpectedly early blossoming of intimate relationships in Blip was due largely to the fact that all of the Repilian immigrants in Blip spoke fluent Pabappa, and some had already met men they fell in love with even before they were officially hired into the government. Soon the Blip experiment was repeated in the states of Mumpuni and Nupebla, both adjacent to Blip although not as poor or mountainous.
With the success of their relationship with Ihhai and the other parts of Repilia, Paba began to see itself now as a feminine empire, in contrast to the dangerous, unstable masculine nations around it. They thus aligned themselves even more closely with Nama, and opened relations with FILTER, which had started a raging war in the interior that even turned Feminist armies against each other. Whereas Paba wanted to go 1000 years without a war, it seemed that FILTER's strongly female-led society wanted to go 1000 years without a peace treaty between FILTER and any of the nations they were fighting against.
Paba was more friendly to an army of frighteningly violent women than an army of frighteningly violent men, but preferred peace to both. They signed a pact with FILTER but did not allow FILTER to actually occupy Paba, either on the mainland or the coast, while still retaining that privilege for Repilia, a much more peaceful Feminist tribe. By this time, the Crystal army had been a strong ally of FILTER for several hundred years, although they did not consider themselves to have merged, and Paba was worried that its Crystal minority could turn violent in the future if FILTER told them to. FILTER had no problems with attacking Feminists, it seemed; indeed most of their battles were fought in Nama against tribes whom the Pabaps had previously wanted to make an alliance with. Many of these tribes had submitted peacefully at first and then been attacked when one of their leaders disobeyed a commandment from the FILTER supranational government. FILTER had already declared several times that they had conquered the world, only to start fighting again saying they were eliminating dissent from within.
Paba finds a purpose
However, Paba was not planning to submit entirely to Nama and become an empire whose only military was foreign. They created a new Pabap army, saying that Pabaps were again the majority and they could not simply expect foreign peoples to defend them anymore. But their military was small in proportion to their popualtion size, and was mostly deployed on the borders of their empire, as they didnt think a revolt from within their own territory was likely.
Paba decided that perhaps they could no longer be the world's strongest military power, or even the world's strongest naval power. And they realized that perhaps they simply were destined to be ruled by people much taller than their own, whether they be an all-male occupying force from Tarwas or an all-female one from Nama. But, they figured, Paba could still be #1 in other ways. The new government of Paba decided to use the new time freed up by cutting the military to become the world's foremost educational power. For the first time, they promised, the entire nation would go to school. Previously, school had been a matter of how much time a child's parents could spare on their farm or workshop or wherever else they were. Thus, education was mostly for the upper class. And even this was more education than most people in the rest of the world got. But now Paba promised an entire nation of scholars, to be used for their own benefit and those of the neighboring nations above them.
As they were surrounded by nations of people much taller than themselves, Pabaps began to stereotype foreigners, even Repilians, as essentially good for manual labor only, and said that the Pabaps were destined to become the world's smartest people simply because they were too weak to be much good in any physical labor task. Since most Pabap slaves in the surrounding nations had either been killed or freed during the Vegetable War, there no was no stark counterexample of Pabaps forced into underclass positions by foreign slavelords while the Pabap royal family looked up happily and sold the slavelords cart after cart of even more slaves.
This new ralignment also led to an increase of Pabaps moving to Nama. Previously, Pabaps had essentially settled every nation around them except Nama, because Nama derived most of its wealth and power from tropical nations around it while the center of Naman territory had become a military powerhouse but remained materially poor. But now Pabaps wanted to live in Nama to put their newfound education to good use, whether it be helping Nama run its own government or more concrete ideas such as figuring out the best places to put concrete roads connecting villages in the Naman highlands. Pabaps in these areas attempted to marry into the tribes they settled among, despite the often dangerous childbirth. In the eyes of many, these people ceased being Pabaps since they were willing to learn foreign languages and put Pabappa behind them. By 2856 with little opposition Pabaps had peopled themselves all over the cold Naman highlands, and their common language was Khulls rather than Pabappa. They thus helped Nama's most deprived region unify itself under a common banner and improve its strength both economically and militarily. A ring of Naman states including Maimp, Gàlaqi (an Andanese stronghold), Wimpus, and Litila became strongly tied to Paba now, and although Nama would not allow them to formally become part of Paba, with their military alliance Paba had managed to mostly encircle Subumpam on land. Wimpus in particular was important because it was on the north side of the mountains, and bordered only other Naman states, rather than being merely an extension of Paba or of a part of Subumpam that had been taken over by Paba. However, Paba did not take over the much more powerful coastal states of Kava and Nèye, which were the ones destroying innocent villagers all over Nama.
Paba-Qoqendoq relations
At teh end of the Vegetable War, Paba's army had occupied not only Thaoa, but also a series of countries that Thaoa itself had previously colonized. The warmest of these, a peninsula geographically similar to Florida, was Qoqendoq. Qoqendoq was a stopover for people moving from Laba to Rilola or vice versa and thus was economically powerful for more than just its climate.
Many Pabaps had moved to Qoqendoq in the afterrmath of the war, hoping to escape being dominated by the Tarpabaps. Although the Tarpabaps had occupied both Thaoa and Subumpam, the situation after the war was greatly different in the two empires. In Subumpam, the native population had mostly been killed during the war, and most of these casualties were eaten alive by crabs. The conquering Tarpabaps found Subumpam barely habitable but chose to settle there and marry Subumpamese women. They thus made Subumpam their new home, and most made no attempt to ever reconnect with their families back home in Paba. Thus the Tarpabap population of Paba had lost an entire generation of males, and dropped quickly from a 60% majority before the war to little more than 5% a generation after it had ended. However, they had been pulled in both directions. When the Tarpabaps took over Thaoa and its colonies, they also mostly wanted to settle down and make Thaoa their new homeland. The native Thaoan women were happy to be rescued but found intimate relationships difficult due to problems of anatomy. Moreover, the Thaoan male population had been scarcely touched by the war, and was not happy to see men three times their size moving an and flirting with their women. However the Tarpabaps nevertheless married Thaoan women and became Thaoans themselves. Often, these women were of aboriginal tribes who tended to be taller than the people in the lowlands who formed the majority. Others, however, did neither of these things, and instead boated back to Paba to reunite with their families, and found that their wives had in almost every case remained single and were happy to see their husband still alive. These families then moved back to Thaoa. This was possible because Thaoa shared a land border with the part of Paba where most of these families lived, whereas Subumpam was on the other side and was much more difficult to reach.
Since Qoqendoq was the furthest of the Thaoan colonies, it had the least settlement from the occupying Tarpabap army. Moreover it had had a significant Pabap minority even before the Vegetable War. So although they had a hard time pronouncing the name, Pabaps began moving from Paba to Qoqendoq in ever greater numbers hoping to build the world a second Paba in a safer area. Qoqendoq's 20 states were in combined area about the same as Paba's 39 states, and had a slightly milder climate, and due to the influence of global warming the new well-educated Pabaps predicted it would eventually become tropical rainforest, although they knew that this might not happen for thousands of years.
They were distressed, however, when Paba's government declared itself pacifist, and swore off all of the access rights to the countries they had conquered, leaving Qoqendoq an independent nation as both Paba and the Tarpabap government of Thaoa had declared that they were no longer interested in Qoqendoq. A subgroup of Pabaps split from the majority, calling itself the Violent Pabaps (Pabap Pussani). Pussani consisted mostly of Andanese, as they had fought in the land army and thus gone down fighting whereas the Pabaps mostly had been hiding out without weapons, or taken shelter at sea. Many Pussani members moved to Qoqendoq, and the Pabaps already there often agreed with them. However, they did not wish to become hostile to Paba, as they still depended on help from Paba and were encircled by the Pabap navy. Qoqendoq figured that economic prosperity was moving rapidly north and it would take more than a thousand Pabap fishing boats to make a world power out of a nation whose name is primarily remembered by English speakers as a reminder of an embarrassing truth-or-dare session at a beach.
Nevertheless, since Qoqendoq was undesirable for others, it was never considered worthy of a war, and Pabaps living in Qoqendoq were able to grow as quickly as they could find fish in the water to live on. They did not bother the Repilian aboriginals, and in fact largely blended with them the way the Repilians were taking Pabap husbands in Blip and Mumpuni. Nevertheless, a spectrum soon emerged where Pabaps were commonest in the southeast, Repilians in the north and west (Qoqendoq was somewhat like a mushroom, as though Florida had the coast of Georgia in addition), and blended people in the middle. Like other Repilians, the Repilians of Qoqendoq were Feministic people with women in control. Pabaps at first tried to fight these women, but when they learned that Paba itself was turning pro-Feminist they decided to stand down.
Wine production
An informal "Berry Alliance" was signed, since Subumpam was now famous for its production of cranberries and similiar fruits while Paba was famous for its production of grapes, raspberries, and strawberries. (The word was actually "small fruit", in contrast to the true tropics where pineapples and coconuts predominated.) Large animals had not yet returned to the area because for that to happen, they needed to regrow their forests and repopulate their lakes and rivers with fish. Paba rebuilt itself strongly around wine production, as wine grapes grew easily in the areas that had been burned down and the climate had been favorable for grapes all along. Since Paba had considered purple its national color for over a thousand years, the new wine industry received even more attention and pride than it otherweise would have. However, purple was associated primarily with the Yiibam religion, not with Pabaps specifically, and so was also popular in the new empire of Subumpam.
Thus Paba became associated far afield with the production of wine, and the word pam became a household wortd in many languages that did not even have a word for grapes.[10] Wine had originally been produced in even greater quanitites in Thaoa, but the Vegetable War converted more than half of Paba's farms into vineyards, and Thaoa could not ship its wine anywhere without going through Paba anyway. For the next two thousand years, alcohol was synonymous with Pabap wine throughout all of Rilola, as the plantations in Lobexon had that previously produced alcoholic drinks from banana plants and palm trees and had been converted to basic essential food production. Often, raspberry syrup was added to the wine. Raspberry wine was called pāana and was more expensive than plain grape wine. Note that this does not refer to wine produced from fermenting raspberry juice; grape juice was still the main ingredient even here, as no other fruit was known to the Pabaps to produce alcohol so readily. Bee honey fermentation had not yet been discovered.
Raspberries and strawberries were also important products in their own right. The harvest of raspberries in particular was a very painful occupation, as the thorns on the raspberry bushes carved open wounds in the arms and legs of the harvest workers, which could then in turn lead to fatal microbial infections. They thus were the most highly paid agricultural workers of all, and this allowed them to rest during the remainder of the year since they had usually already made eniough money during the harvest season.
In Lobexon, which had also suffered during the vegetable War despite nominally being the winner of the war and not having had to deal with crabs, the new treaty spurred mixed emotions as they now realized they were likely all going to be slaves for the Merar in Subumpam or at best economically submissive in the sense that they would be forced to export most of their food at low prices and get little in return. Subumpam was now exporting wine, including the pricy Pabap raspberry wine, to Lobexon, but it was aimed mostly at the new settlers rather than the natives. In 2689 they formally annexed Lobexon into Subumpam, thus creating the Star Empire III.
Paba soon began to learn what it was like to be a minor power instead of a major power. With the annexation of Lobexon into Meraria, Paba realized that they would likely never control the tropics. Lobexon still had many Pabaps living in it who were now, they realized, probably all going to be enslaved. There were still tropical locations even further south than Lobexon that had not been annexed, but the treaty gave Meraria's navy control of all known land to the west of it, and that included the entire continent all the way to the equatorial jungles.
Figuring they had to turn away from their dreams of the west now, Paba busily settled southeastern nations such as Qoqendoq (which they renamed Kakamšap) hoping to put a buffer between their tiny people and the tall-people nations of Merar, Tarwas, and Thaoa. Qoqendoq was largely Pabap already, with the remainder of the population being other small people such as Andanese and a few Repilian aboriginals who were taller but more feminine than most other people. Since it was on the southeast corner of the continent, it was often the first stopover for travelers from Laba (although the very first Laban settlers had not used that route. ) THey also resettled Fox Island, which was east of Qoqendoq. They figured that since Tarpabap people had taken over Thaoa, and Qoqendoq was a subject state of Thaoa, even Qoqendoq might not be a safe haven for them for very long. They figured in the end an island might be the only place left where Pabaps could live in peace and safety. But Fox Island was already overpopulated, and the Pabaps were not looking to start yet another war even though they still did have naval supremacy.
Relations with the Teeth
Even though power had shifted massively to the north, in many ways Paba was better off weak. They had managed to yet again avoid being pulled into a new huge world war, as their old, disowned colony nation of Kava had invaded Nama and conquered more than 30% of its territory, starting from less than 1%. Much of the rest of Naman territory was occupied by allies of Kava, namely the Crystals and FILTER. But Nama did not blame Paba for any of this, nor did they expect Paba to make any significant contribution to help stop the invasions.
By 3141, communication between the Kavan nation calling itself The Perfect Society (Nipanu-Malamuppa) and FILTER had been reestablished, and the The Perfect Society was happy to discover that the FILTER army was about to take over all of Subumpam, and that their only enemies now were in remote locations. The FILTER society in Subumpam was developing into quite a powerful one, and although it was dangerous they began to send their people into The Perfect Society in the hopes of increasing the population there.
But The Perfect Society had massacred its aboriginal Repilian population in a recent war, and now wanted more Repilians in their society. The Perfect Society passed a new law stating that FILTER was only allowed to send female immigrants, who would ideally marry male Repilians. The children of these marriages would identify as Repilians. FILTER was wary of the unusual law and tried to send as few women as possible without appearing hostile, not wanting to anger The Perfect Society. The Perfect Society now even looked suspiciously at its home empire of Kava, which had transformed itself into a nomadic troop where almost all the men were trying to settle new territory, killing already existing inhabitants, and almost all the women were busy giving birth to babies as fast as they could so that the populationg would rise. Thus The Perfect Society now considered itself superior to Kava due to the fact that they wanted to import Repilian slaves into their nation to replace the Repilians they had killed, whereas the other Kavan nations preferred to enslave Repilians for only long enough to have them build fortresses for the Kavans, and then kill.
They saw that Kava was developing a robust economy based on military products and that its people could percievably be a threat to The Perfect Society in the distant future, if they ever became powerful enough. The Kavans thought very little of The Perfect Society, and it seemed possible that when Kava conquerred all of Nama, The Perfect Society would be the Kavans’ next target. Meanwhile, FILTER's army in Subumpam cut all contact with The Perfect Society, and focused instead on developing Kava.
The Thousand Year Fear
Paba soon realized power had shifted irrevocably to the north, and that their main ally, Nama, was losing power every year. Whereas before Pabap people had enjoyed the privilege of being considered too delicate to fight in a war, now the Pabap people came to fear that war would be forced on them. Unlike their relatives the Thunderers, the Pabaps had not significantly married into the taller, stronger aboriginal tribes of Nama, even when they invited Namans to come surging into their nation and put thsemlves in power. Thus they were still, after three thousands years living on the continent of Rilola, the world's shortest people, and they were surrounded by many of the world's tallest people in all directions on land. Furthermore, they were surrounded by tall people over the ocean too, as most immigrants into Paba during this era tended to be people from those same nationalities who were moving to Paba because they figured that the Pabaps would be so frightened of them that they would obey their every order. An informal anti-Paba alliance was signed between Thaoa, Tarwas, and Subumpam (now led by Merar people). All three nations were led by people of the same very tall, very strong body type that so terrified the Pabaps. Thaoa was the leader of the coalition, because it was the most powerful of the three nations and the one that felt the least guilt about their 1500-year-long history of abusing Paba. Tarwas the weakest, even though they had not been involved in the Vegetable War, because they had collapsed and been settled by outsiders from the Thunder Empire.
Paba withdrew increasingly from relations with outside nations, except those that were part of Nama or the Thunder Empire. Even though the Thunder Empire was hostile to Nama, because the Thunder Empire had stolen its entire territory from Nama, the Thunderers still respected Paba because they knew that they had, far back in the past, arisen from Paba. Moreover they felt sorry for the Pabaps and claimed that they shared many of the same fears themselves.
With other nations, diplomacy soon entirely stopped. In 3441,[11] a meeting was called between the leaders of Thaoa, Tarwas, Merar, and Paba. Paba was expecting to be able to hold negotations about access rights to the bay around Fox Island. Instead, once the members were all seated, the speaker from Merar stood up and told the Pabap leader she was not allowed to speak. Then he announced he had decided to invade southwestern Paba, and told the Pabap leader she needed to go home and tell her people they had six months to get out.
From this point on, meetings between Paba and other nations consisted entirely of those other nations describing what they were about to do to Paba, and what Paba needed to do in order to lessen the pain for their people. Pabap people were not allowed to speak at these meetings unless told to. Pabap diplomats often closed their eyes when they were forced to speak and tried not to cry. They could not understand why their nation was being bullied by its stronger neighbors even though for 2000 years Paba had been the gentlest and most pacifistic nation of all, and had never tried to harm any of its neighbors even nonviolently. But they were not allowed to complain.
Many slaves were still taken from Paba, but compensation was no longer given, and the slave buyers, not the Pabap royal family, had the choice of where to take slaves from and whom to take. The royal family itself was seen as an ideal source for slaves as they were not accustomed to physically fighting back against other people. Many Thaoans moved into the royal family's castles now in order to more easily select and deport the Pabap princesses off to the slave plantations of Thaoa. Some females were allowed to remain, because they did not want the population to plummet too badly, but they realized that the Pabap princesses were going to give birth to many babies in Thaoa and that in the end the population imbalance would solve itself.
Pabaps realized that they needed to attend their diplomatic sessions dutifully so that they could best prepare their people for the next invasion. They were a well educated people, and said that their Thousand Year Peace would be replaced by a Thousand Year Fear (Pambavubu Pumau Bapababe, but often shortened to just Pambumapababe or pambum1000) if they could not restrngthen Nama to the point where Paba could submit to Nama and feel safe. Nama felt the same way; it was Nama that was spilling its population into Paba now, hoping their gigantic people could be safe among the tiny Pabaps for long enough to find a way to ensure both peoples had a bright future.
Relations with Thaoa
In many ways, Thaoa and Paba were made for each other. Paba in the Pambum era was peaceful and painfully submissive; Thaoa was sadistic and gleefully violent. Thaoan leaders spent hours every day thinking up new ways to abuse the Pabaps, both the slaves captured in Thaoa and the Pabaps living in Paba itself. Thaoa had become almost entirely apolitical now; their only purpose was to survive, grow, and abuse their neighbors. Nobody in Thaoa proposed abolishing slavery any longer. Thaoa indeed had developed many problems of its own, but for the moment they were winning over their main enemy and if Thaoa itself became unstable they could simply run into Paba and make Paba their new home.
Relations with Tarwas
Tarwas was an unhappy partner in the TTM alliance. They were actually hostile not to Paba, but to the Thunder Empire, which was descended ultimately mostly from Paba but was politically isolated from Paba. Essentially, Tarwas agreed to join TTM because they would rather see their own people controlling and abusing Pabaps than let the Thunderers control and abuse Pabaps. Unlike the Thaoans, the Tarwastas still held to their ancient cultural taboo against physically attacking small people such as the Pabaps. However, they had blended with the Pabaps and were no longer as tall as they had previously been. They were also somewhat of an exception to the pattern that tall people always ruled over small people, since the Thunderers who had invaded and built colonies in Tarwas were much shorter than the native Tarwastas. However, they were able to do this mainly because they outnumbered the Tarwastas greatly, and could afford to put far more soldiers into any one battle than could the Tarwasta resistors.
Relations with Merar
Merar was an entire nation founded by a military invasion of Subumpam by Paba. Almost all of the soldiers in the army had been ethnic Tarpabaps, with a few Andanese. They considered themselves loyal to Paba, but joined TTM because they realized their nation had no room to grow and that if they wanted to reach their goal of making Merar a world power they would need to take most of Paba's coastline and add it to their own empire. Thus, even though they promised to be nonviolent whenever possible, they made it clear to Pabaps that the Pabaps would have no choice but to surrender their most valuable land, and perhaps their entire empire, to Merari control.
Shift of politics
As the Pabap royal family watched Thaoan slave lords cart off their wives and daughters to Thaoa, and then abuse the men that had been left behind, they contemplated that perhaps total pacifism wasn't working for them anymore. Previously, the world had mostly centered around Nama, the only true ally of Paba, so any nation in that era seeking to violate Paba would have to face Nama in addition. But Nama had declined a long way. Nama didn't consider itself pacifist, but its military had since 2000 AD been so pathetic that in some cases Nama simply didn't respond to a war because their army was tied down fighting several other wars. Currently, in the 3400s, there were several roaming armies in northern Nama that were fighting against each other, considering the fact that they were fighting in Nama wholly unimportant because Nama's own army was too weak to harm them. Pabaps who felt their nation's situation was dire were depressed when they visited Nama and saw Namans celebrating their military's victory in claiming back the southernmost 2% of a piece of land that had been taken from them by one of their many invaders.
Paba still had a strong navy, although it no longer had the supremacy guaranteed to it by a treaty. Instead, Thaoa had mostly taken over control of the sea, and Paba was forced to admit Thaoan ships entry to Paba's ports. But the Pabap Navy was still strong enough to keep any potential naval invasion at bay and to prevent a blockade of Paba's long, shapely coastline by any outside power. It was the land army that was particularly weak. When Merar invaded Paba and Paba evacuated its cities ahead of time, the Pabap leaders said they were doing it because they were pacifists, and the pacifist response to any war should be to evacuate their people and cede control of the land to the invading power and then attempt to buy their way back in. However, in reality, both sides knew that Paba's military was far too weak to resist a land invasion, and that they had surrendered merely because they didn't want to lose what little army they had and see many Pabap people die.
Some of the people invading Paba told the Pabap underclass that Paba's real problem was its abusive government. Pabaps weren't getting bullied because they were pacifists, or because they were too small to stand up for themselves, or because they deserved it for something they had done 2800 years ago; they were being abused because their government openly allowed abusers into their nation promising not to ever fight back so long as the royal family itself was spared. The Pabap royal family repeatedly made it clear that the entire population of Paba was their property and that the common people of Paba had no rights whatsoever. They merely chose to treat some parts of their population better than others, and had chosen to place the native Pabap people at the very bottom of the hierarchy because the superior status given to immigrants ensured that the nations from which those immigrants had come would treat the Pabap royal family kindly in any war.
But now the invaders had grown so powerful, and Paba so weak, that soldiers of the invading Thaoan army were humiliating the Pabap princes on their stone castle floors, and watching them stumble out the morning after to smile and tell their people that everything was going well. The royals realized that even if they gave up pacifism and tried to start a war against their abusers, it was too late because the abusers had already taken complete control and would prevent their message from getting to the army. Furthermore, they realized that to allow their people to be tortured for 1500 years, and then suddenly switch sides when some of that torture was heaped upon themselves for a few weeks, would be so hypocritical that the army would probably simply side with the abusers in return for a chance to torture the royals as well.
Moreover, even the traditionally naive Pabap underclass was beginning to realize that they were the royal family's least favorite people and might need to convince the Pabap army to disobey the royals if they wanted to ever be free again. Thus far, the Pabap army had dutifully obeyed the royals' commands to retreat rapidly any time an invading army advanced into Pabap territory. Thus, the army was getting closer to the center of Paba, where the royal family lived. The royals were now under Thaoan control, and could no longer issue commands to the army, but the army still promised not to fight back against any invading army even if it meant being trapped in a corner in the far north of Paba or pushed into the sea by an invasion from the north.
Cessation of power
After more than 1000 years of seeing their standard of living steadily degrade while their only major ally steadily ceased to exist, in the early 3700's the Pabap royal family, Paptupa, decided to cut its losses. They had been whittling down their army and navy for the past hundred years to save Paba's shrinking tax base. Now they moved the army inward to a small sliver of land around the original Pabap settlements from 633 AD, and shrank the navy down to a four mile stretch of coastland just south of the city of Pambampa. This was where the Pabap royal family lived. A few battalions of soldiers moved north into Nama instead of sticking around with the royal family. These were mostly hoping to reach Altotta and join Altotta as ordinary Thunder citizens.
Since the only area of Paba that was protected by the military was the area where the royal family lived, and that army swore allegiance to the royal family rather than to the wider people of Paba around them, Paba was now entirely undefended. Meanwhile Thaoa had developed their military technology natively and become superior to all of their potential enemies, even larger ones; they only lacked people to rule over.
By now, many Pabaps had become vegetarians, and thus did not need weapons for hunting or fishing. The most dangerous weapons available were wooden chairs and kitchen knives. But most Pabaps did not realize what had happened to their country and refused to believe the rumors that they had been sold out. Seeing no army awaiting them, Thaoa thrust itself into eastern Paba and started telling Pabap cities that they were now all under Thaoan occupation and even the ruling class of those cities would soon be slaves for Thaoa.
The Pabaps bravely fought the Thaoan army's swords and spears with their pots and pans, confident that the Pabap army was merely hiding out in the city and would soon rescue them, just as it had reliably done for 3000 years, but no army ever came. Finally the Pabaps realized that the royal family really had abolished the army, and had abandoned their entire nation so they could sit securely in their fortified castles sipping on their fortified raspberry wine.
The remnant Pabap army did nothing when Thaoa ripped deeper and deeper into Paba, set up slave plantations, and forced Pabap people to sleep under trees while the Thaoans slept in their beds. When they felt resistance, Thaoa fought "battles" against the unarmed Pabap citizens in which the Pabaps suffered four digit body counts and the THaoans suffered a few minor cuts and bruises.
When news of the massacres spread, even Paba's enemies felt bad. The Pabap royal family had tried to diaper up their new philosophy as being just an extreme form of pacifism, but when the Crystals decided to invade Paba from the west, hoping to meet Thaoa in the middle, the royal army still did nothing. When other nations learned of this, many of them offered to rescue Pabaps and bring them to their own empires even though they could not guarantee that the journey would even be possible.
Many nations saw Paba as a plaything now, much as Nama had been in previous centuries, and launched opportunistic invasions of what remained of Paba's territory. Blood enemies became friends as they agreed to split up the choicest pools of Pabap slaves between them. The Crystals decided the time had come to finish the project that they had tried to build 1600 years earlier: a nation for Crystals only, carved out of Pabap territory near the Pabap capital city. The Crystals had become a lot less violent themselves over the centuries, as their fortunes had improved markedly. So they did not abuse the Pabaps, nor did they enslave the Pabaps. The Pabaps thus saw them as the nicest of their many abusers, and many Pabaps tried to escape into the Crystal territory even though it was the most overpopulated area of Paba due to the much lower Pabap casualty rate there.
The Thunder Empire (Altotta) was also very sympathetic towards the Pabaps, but its leaders had a difficult time understanding what was happening. Paba had fallen behind in technology, and its main partner, Nama, had collapsed to a level even worse than Paba's, so they could no longer use Nama to announce to other nations what their foreign policy was. Paba had to rely instead on direct diplomatic connections with its surrounding empires, and there was no direct connection between Paba and Altotta. Altotta knew that they shared many ties with Paba, but the common people of Altotta often had never even heard of Paba and those who had often still pictured it as a mystical land in which people could fly but were too physically weak to lift up garden vegetables or fight off angry rabbits.
By 3919, there were 27 different hostile foreign armies occupying strips and patches of Paba's territory, each respecting the claims of the others but worrying about a potential future civil war in which one colonizer would go to war with another. Many of these 27 armies were from nations that had previously been very poor and weak, but had heard of the collapse of Paba and realized that even a tiny nation could defeat Paba in a war now. There were also some colonists who were not even part of the 27 armies, but simply came of their own will and conquered a small town. At the most extreme were towns that were held in siege by just one person, who had the only weapons in the town, and was able to hold the entire town's population in slavery. This tended to be Altotta's preferred method of occupation. However, once in Paba, Altotta had no power over these occupiers. Thus Altotta did not directly participate in occupying Paba.
Notes
- ↑ Known as Nibra, Nebra, Nupfas, Nipuas, etc
- ↑ Later, Paba reliqnuished control, and Paba just came to refer to the city.
- ↑ They joined as a "confederation", meaning they were in a union with each other and could in some ways vote in each other's parliaments.
- ↑ These were paid to the government, not to the families of the Pabaps who left. This is because they were not being enslaved.
- ↑ Technically "2412 + 6z".
- ↑ Their modern names are Džaptampa, Šem, and Pabumba in Poswa (their present-day official language) and Paptansa, Em, and Pabuma in Pabappa.
- ↑ Also later "Pornop" or Pornopia but that name is not used here for OBVIOUS reasons. Pornop means "clawing" in Pabappa.
- ↑ The city is usually just called Paba, but "Biospum" can be added to denote the city itself rather than the city and the area around it.
- ↑ The Wibla river is the very same one that feeds Blop, and is thus far larger and more poweerful even than Esempapa, but Blop had not yet come into prominence and would not do so for nearly 3000 years.
- ↑ However, even a 7000-year deep history of winemaking did not save this word from being eliminated by Pabappa's many sound changes: today in modern Pabappa pam primarily means "tree" and cannot be used as a word for wine even as an adjective. The most common modern Pabappa word for grape wine is poppapom.
- ↑ wrong date?
