Meromo

In 3348, the nation of Meromo was born. It was a nation founded by Mammans (originally from Kava) who had settled in an area they at first called Putu Lake. But the water of their lake made them sick so they constructed a building (Sapeepa) far to the west of the Lake where they kept all the diseased people that they felt could not function in society. But the people who were in charge of the building were also diseased, and they felt more love for the prisoners they ruled over than they did for the rulers of their parent nation, Meromo. The governors of Sapêpa gave birth to children, and told these children that they were Sapêpans, not Meriras. Since Sapêpa was so far away, and because Meromo wanted to ignore Sapêpa, Sapêpa quickly achieved de facto independence from Meromo, and its people began to try to become economically self-sufficient so that they could begin to refuse the free gifts of food and labor that were coming unwillingly from Meromo. In fact, Meromo was ruled at this time by the Pĕp government, which believed in a form of utilitarianism which stated that unhealthy people should be killed in order that they might not be able to suffer or cause other people to suffer. This offended most of the sick people (who called themsselves putubuta), and the putubuta developed a secret political philosophy based on "angry" egalitarianism. Their form of egalitarianism was full of hatred and stated that people who were unintelligent were simply not trying hard enough. Thus their philosophy was often not much kinder to fellow putubuta people than that of the Pĕp.

The society around Merisa was not completely destroyed by sickness, however; they had many advantages which the people living there previously had not. For example, they had access to pure water from the caves to the south, where few other people lived. The people that did live there were very poor and could not prevent the Meriri from stealing their water. And the people of Putu Lake did not let the fact that roughly 20% of their population was severely disabled stop them from yet again attempting to create the age-old Maba dream of a perfect society attempting to spread itself over the whole planet. They had already succeeded once, on Aboa, and they hoped to be able to do it again. Also, the Meriri had friendly, non-Putu kin living in only slightly better conditions to their west. These people were Mâta, and therefore they saw each other as allies against the non-Mâta nations that surrounded them. People from the Mâta nations (Meromo and Kâlika, which the Kâlikans collectively called Têupí) often moved back and forth between Tixtƀm and the other areas. Soon the westerners (away from the lake) began to see the easterners (around the lake) as part of the same nation, Têupí, as the westerners. The easterners proclaimed independence, but there were seldom any violent conflicts between the two groups of Mâta people, as they both knew they had many other problems to worry about, such as the takeover of the Swamp.

Some of the liberal Meriri raised their children to embrace the severely disabled members of their society rather than shunning them. Although the Meriri people were never as prosperous as the neighboring societies of Mâta people (to whom they still saw themselves as closely related, and therefore they loved these people), their nation survived for hundreds of years, and for various reasons managed to escape attacks by all other nations.

But the new Mâta had not learned to abandon the violent ideologies of their ancestors; indeed, they hated the Swamp people even more because these people were much more prosperous than the Mâta, who still had to live in sheltered caves because they didn't have the technology available to build houses such as those the Baebans lived in. Their only hope was to form an alliance with non-Mâta people against the rich people living in the Swamp, but they did not realize this, and instead continued living in poverty, wishing the death of the non-Mâta people but being too weak to attack them. Instead they often led invasions on weaker villages outside the Swamp, and stole food and other basic supplies which were scarce in their own territory. At least they had escaped the Repilia, who could not follow the Mâta southward because, as they believed, the Swamp people were constantly casting magic spells to keep them out.

The one advantage that the Meriri had over the more wealthy peoples they were trying to destroy was that the Meriri were born into disease, and had to endure hardships and death every day. Thus, they were more willing to work building weapons than to gather and throw parties, and more willing to kill strange people than to love them. They had no machine technology, but they could create sharp spears and other weapons from rocks. Thus they could physically overpower unarmed Swamp people and steal from them, and escape persecution because the Swamp had no real crime control at this time. They soon did develop crime control, however, and began to take revenge on the Meriri, who felt that despite their disabilities, they would soon develop for themselves a prosperous society, and would be able to conquer the Swamp. The Swamp people, meanwhile, were too focused on themselves to realize the Meriri's threat.

Later history

The Meriri living in Meromo established a government called the Pĕp government, which forced the people living in the hospital building called Sapêpa to allow only the smartest and strongest people to reproduce, because they did not want to raise people that would be a liability for the nation as a whole. But a few of the people living in the building escaped the sterilization laws and gave birth to babies anyway, because the government was weak.

Around 40°E (northeast of Punu Lake), the Pĕp people had built a large building out of hardened "soap stone" bricks. The building was built to house Meriri people who were severely diseased. Many of the people in the building were mentally retarded and needed constant care just to survive. Although the healthy Meriri loved these people, they believed it best for the nation as a whole if the most disabled people were kept apart from the rest of society in a large building. Even though the nation as a whole was very poor, they spent much of what little money they had taking care of these people, because they loved them as much as they loved each other.

In 3431, the people in Sapêpa revolted and became an independent nation. They said that they were going to reproduce faster than all other peoples and eventually take over the world. But many of their leaders were very perverse, and did not plan far into the future. Many of the Sapêpans revolted against their leaders and left the building. They settled in the nearby swamps that the Sapêpan leaders had planted recently (Warm Planet Policy), and became known as 'savages', people disliked by all others on the planet except the Gãms, who had rejected racism and come to embrace every race as equally deserving of love.

The savages lived like animals, in almost total ferality. Only the Sapêpans that were very strong survived, and children were ill-treated by their parents, and often not protected well enough to survive in the swamps. Thus, even though the Sapêpans were reproducing very quickly, their kids kept dying, with the exception of those kids who had wiser parents, and these kids tended to be wiser as well, like their parents. Warfare broke out among the many Sapepans living in the Swamp, and they began to eliminate their weaker members through warfare. Many of them believed now that stupid children should be killed so that only smart children would survive, and so they began killing their more disabled children to add to the already very high child mortality rate.

Shortly after the breakup in 3431, a new government called the Thunder government began to take over Sapêpa. The Thunderers believed that the rights of the majority were the only rights that mattered at all - and there was no such thing as fairness, because everyone was ultimately part of the same universal being. Thus they were communitarians. It was very much the opposite of the rather perverse Pĕp government that had preceded it, but the Thunder leaders had taken no steps to burn off the frustration they had accumulated while living under the Pĕp government, and they were as perverse as the people they replaced. (The Pĕp government was still in control of Meromo.) They believed that all crimes should be legal, so long as they benefit the perpetrator more than they benefit the victim. They were also a very racist group of people, but unlike many groups of racists who had preceded them, they didn't want to eliminate other races - they wanted to enslave them. On the other hand, the early Thunder government was the least paranoid government that Sapêpa had yet had.

The Sapêpans planted huge tracts of swampland wherever they could, whether or not the land there was sufficient for swampland growth. The swamps housed many creatures, such as snakes, that frequently attacked people while they were sleeping or otherwise defenseless. It was part of their "Warm Planet Project"; they felt they could do whatever they wanted to Sapêpa, and not face any opposition. The environment got busier and more bounteous every year, until in some places humans, especially children, could not survive and had to pull out.

In 3431, the governors of Sapêpa, who were disabled, but much more intelligent than most of the people in the building, had declared independence from all other nations and set up their own. These people had been segregated here by the rest of the nation, as although they were loved by the healthy people they were not allowed to live amongst them. They were able to break free because at the time their nation was spread over such a huge territory that government was for the most part voluntary. They declared that all of the diseased people in the building were now citizens of their new nation, which they called simply Sapêpa (the name of the disease), and they also claimed a large amount of territory around the area they were living in, and threatened to kill the related people living there if they did not hand the territory over to the people of Sapêpa, who called themselves Thunderers. The new government was run entirely by Thunderers who had great and terrible plans for their new nation, which they immediately transformed into an army. They killed the most disabled of their people, claiming that true Thunderers could never be so helpless as to let a disease confine them to a life of suffering. Their remaining subjects, however, were still disabled, and they had been living very harsh lives. These people saw nothing wrong with their rulers' plan to kill people in surrounding nations in order to better the lives of their own.

The Thunderers retained the Meriri religion and much of the Meriri worship of pregnancy and childbirth, but added in the worship of the spirit of Sapêpa, because popró, a Swampborn manmade religion, taught its believers to worship 'the people who will conquer', and the Thunderers believed that Sapêpa would conquer the world. They also worshipped each other, as did many other popróans.

All of the Thunder governors at least believed they had a strong faith in God, and they all wanted their children to believe in a religion that promised salvation for those who would obey the governors and kill the rich people around them. Over the next sixty years, the birth rate increased dramatically, the death rate fell, and yet the material wealth of the population actually rose. This was because their people were very intelligent, despite their disabilities, and because the Thunder governors worked them harder than did other people. Life in Sapêpa was difficult, but it was already improving to the point where it was better for an Sapêpan to live in Sapêpa than anywhere else, because now many other nations had come to reject Sapêpan immiugrants, killing them as soon as they were found out. These people often tried to flee into Sapêpa, where they were welcomed (even if they were not Mâta), but few of them ever made it because they usually had no help.

The Thunderers proclaimed that it was a great virtue to be Sapêpan, and therefore they excused sin after sin, saying the misdeeds of Sapêpans were not sins after all but expressions of the power and beauty of God. They exonerated their entire population, essentially declaring all Sapêpans innocent of all sins. With this mentality, Sapêpa became strongly united and ready to begin attacking outside nations. Even though its military was very weak, the Thunderers began preparations for war against Têupí almost immediately after they declared independence.

In 3434, the Thunderers attacked Punu Lake, but they were driven back by the Têupíans. The Thunder army was happy, however, to see that the battle had only disposed of their army's least valuable members, that is, those who were the most disabled. The stronger part of their army was still in its collective childhood. Early in 3435 they attacked again, and took over the Lake. Then they quickly began attacking more and more of the nations around them, winning most of their battles. Those battles that they lost were not terribly upsetting to the Thunderers, because their own nation was not hurt at all by the defeats.

The Thunderers stressed the great importance of maintaining a high birth rate in their society, and praised good mothers who raised large families for the nation. The Thunderers abolished marriage and replaced it with a system designed to maximize the amount of children each woman could bear, where each man who was allowed to would live with as many as ten women, and the rest of the men would be in the army, ready to fight (some women were in the army as well, but not many). Thus their birth rate rose much higher than that of all the nations around them, including even Têupí. Almost all of the children being born were intelligent, healthy, and powerful.

Within one generation under the Thunder government's strict supervision, the population had shifted from one composed mainly of severely disabled, essentially helpless people to one composed mostly of intelligent angry young children who believed firmly in their parents' hatred for all outsiders. They believed that they were superior to all of the peoples that lived around them. They proclaimed that a new age had dawned, one where Sapêpa would rule and eventually obliterate all surrounding societies. They had formed a new race that was physically distinct from the Mâta.

The Thunderers began to settle more and more lands around them, mostly mountainous areas to their west that lay between the Swamp and Punu Lake. They captured the highest peaks of the Black Mountains, where the atmosphere was so thin that no human could breathe it. Also, it was so dark here even in midday that nobody could see without artificial light helping them, as the clouds blocked out virtually all incoming sunlight. Thus, Sapêpa was essentially unconquerable to all other nations. The Thunderers themselves only survived because they were living in large buildings, or in deep caves attached to the buildings. They almost never ventured outside. Their nation was still very small, numbering only a few "thousand" people, but the area they inhabited was larger than the Swamp.

Language

Because the founders of Meromo were exiles from Kava, they had the same language as Kava. But as they lived among many other peoples, they were familiar with many foreign languages, such as Khulls and Babakiam. Khulls at this time was still 1400 years away from reaching its classical stage, and Babakiam was 600 years away. Nevertheless both languages were very recognizable. The major sound changes that had not yet happened in Khulls were the loss of syllable-final /k/ and /ḳ/, the change of the inherited voiced stops /b d ġ/ to fricatives and approximants, the loss of the distinction between palatal and postalveolar consonants, and the change of labialzed coronal consonants into labialized dorsal consonants.

The Sapēpa side of Meromo mostly switched to speaking Khulls early on, even though they had no history with the language and it did not significantly advance their interests with respect to being considered a legitimate government by Nama (where most Khulls speakers lived), let alone being considered part of Nama.