Lantern Empire
The empire of ʕʷōra (herwafter Vōra) was created from land the Thundererrs had conqeuered from Nama. Vōra soon became the Thunderers' stronghold, and took over Altotta.
Geography and politics
In the late 3560s, a female military warlord named P created the nation of Ḳotagʷurî (hereafter Kotagwuri) with its largest settlement on the polar icecap at around 42N. [1] P was the Khulls word for schoolteacher, and she had been trained as an elementary school teacher in early life but decided she preferred politics and war. The name is pronounced as just a single consonant with no vowel. She used her unusual name to modify words by adding a /p/ in front of them. e.g. the name of the planet, Lîġʷă in Khull,s would be Plîġʷă if she took over the planet. Although these newly coined words simply meant "teacher planet", "teacher empire", etc., the choices of words made the context clear.
Crystals were welcome in Kotagwuri, which was unusual in Vora. P had attacked Nama just as Nama was winning a major war against Kava in the south. Her philosophy, Pism, was very welcoming to outsiders, and proved popular from its very begiunning, and Kotagwuri soon became the largest nation in Vōra, whereas before it had been second to Sāto.
An Aze (Gaze believer) named P had founded Kotagwuri in the late 3560’s, just as the greatest chaos of Nama’s sealing Kava off was occurring. She established the nation to be a haven for Vorans to live in, but she also welcomed in Crystals and others who wanted to join the political alliance. (Vora means "cymbidium flower" in Khulls.) Thus, there was no law of unanimity in Kotagquiri, unlike in Sāto, where only Vorans were allowed to live. (Meanwhile, Cila had absorbed a wave of Crystal immigrants. (Although there was not much difference between the two groups anyway.)) Another difference between Sāto and Kotagquri was the spirit of free enterprise that P taught her children to follow: people were allowed to live for themselves, rather than for the good of the state, as was the case in both Cila and Sāto. Thus, she insured that there would be a steady stream of people seeking refuge from the difficult lifestyle of Sāto by sneaking into Kotagquri. And she welcomed them, because she wanted the population to grow as fast as possible, regardless of the fact that everyone who lived there would be allowed to have as many children as they wanted, so long as they could support their own children. Thus the population of Kotagquir grew very fast from the late 3500’s until by 3720 it was almost twice the population of Sāto.
Meanwhile, they had also managed to bargain away with Sāto for the use of large quantites of old Sāto land, and they had gained unseeable amounts of land in the northern part of the continent as well. By 3720, Kotagquri had coastline on the “north”, south, and west coasts of the continent, and more than twice the total land area of its nearest competitor. Sāto had shrunk so much that it was even smaller than Cila now, and conflict within Sāto had resulted in the formation of two breakaway republics that also took away land from it and often provided economic support to AS. The Vorans refused to change, however, although they began in the late 3600’s to realize that Kotagquri was the new lord of the continent and that they should submit to Kotagquir if they wanted to continue to exist at all. Thus they adopted a policy of total cooperation with Kotagwuri and began to freely allow their citizens to move to Kotgwuri. With the loss of their refuge-seeking people, the Vrans, led by 2 women named Cyclops and Wolfspider, figured that those who had remained must be very orderly, disciplined people, and they began to make their own laws stricter and stricter. Cyclops was a powerful warlord who had managed to set aside some Sāto land for herself to raise a second community of Vorans, and the citizens of Sāto were upset by her large purchase of land (she had taken almost 1/3 of what had then been Sāto), but they could not object and had to obey her. Wolfspider, meanwhile, was ill and could not be an effective leader. She was tormented by Sāto's lack of leadership and the resulting flow of people into Kotagwuri and even into CVila, but could do nothing about it. In fact, the Pists promised that newcomers into Kotagwuri would be treated even better than regular citizens, and many of them actually became governors of regions within Kotagquri, and some of these regions were geographically larger than the entire nation of Sāto.
Settlement of the coast
In the early 3700's, immigrants of mixed Laban and Thunder descent settled a coastal area in an organized, preplanned effort. They stole all their territory from the Crystals. The Crystals called these people Wamians. Both the Crystals and the Thunderers hated the Wamians, even though the Wamians had not attacked the Thunder Empire and stated that they did not ever plan to.
Two nations from within Kotagwuri broke away in the early 3700s. THey formed an alliance with each other, and both were led by power hungry dictators. The eastern nation, Ḳíkòlarisò, was led by a dictator named Boé who was hated by all other nations. He was both mentally and physically ill. Kikolariso invited refugees such as the Crystals and even the Xʷugâ to move to Kikolariso, because he wanted to grow his population immensely even if it was made up of people who would have a hard time getting along. However, very few people moved to Kikolariso.
The western nation was called ʕʷēga (hereafter Vēga), and its dictator was even more power-mad than Boé. His name was Pompomim (he was Pabap) and he believed in a cult religion that told him to break away and set up his own nation. Unlike Boé, he was at first well liked in other nations, but in 3719 he launched a military assault on Kotagwuri, and managed to kill more than 5% of their population. Not only that, but he had mainly attacked children and women, the most defenseless people of all, and had attempted to kidnap many of them back into Vēga to force them to work for him. Eventually the P army, led by JDS, drove Pompomim out of Kotagwuri (JDS province) and he returned to Vēga to find his own people armed and in revolt against him, and he was killed immediately and Vēga was annexed back to Kotagquri. Kikolariso remained an independent nation but never gained any significance, but Pompomim's cult died down as the Kotagqurians invaded the land and forced the citizens to convert to the Gaze religion.
Smaller states
Mé was a nation that started where Mikagu and its neighbors ended and then extended northward into the icecap. It was an arctic workshop for people just like the others, but its people were militaristic and demanded total submission to the leaders of the nation. Unlike the other workshops, its citizens were not allowed to retain citizenship in other nations while they were in Mé. Mé broke away, and became mostly separate from other nations, although they never drifted far from their alliance with their northern neighbor, Ḳotagʷurî.
Mé had no coastline becuase the entire eastern "coast" of Belopal was now occupied by a nation named Nōnala-lixʷ (hereafter Nonalalix), part of the Wamian Fede3ration. It was an economically advanced nation, in some ways more so than all others, but it had very poor mechanical technology and its society was in chaos. They were part of a small minority of Labans in Belopal, and many non-Laban people wanted them out. Thus, even though the Thunderers were all descended from Laban immigrants, they had been living in RIlola for a few thousand years now, and considered themslves aboriginals. Any further immigration from their ancient homelands was condifered a bad thing.
Aside from Nonalalaix, there were a few other nations made up of Laban immigrants, and although they were all part of the Wamian Federation, Wamia gave them all essentially complete political autonomy so long as they pledged allegiance to Wamia and did not try to make any alliances with non-Laban people. The other nations were Nōnala, Kilga, and Pyū-lixʷ, although an organization in Pyūlix had developed a strong sense of patriotism for the workshop nations of the north, particularly Mé, and wished to free those nations from the plague of Nonalalix that covered the entire "coast" of the continent. Thus there was a war in Nonalalix, and the rebel group was kicked out and sought refuge in Ƥē. In Ƥē they were mostly executed, but a few fled all the way across Ƥē into Kotagquri and Asup, where they found refuge.
A few people in Kotagwuri and Sāto had set up alliances to form their own nations, but these two nations were both very small and politically and militarily unimportant other than the fact that they cut into Sāto's land. The main reason for breaking away was to experiment with a different lifestyle that even Kotagwuri would not allow.
A nation called Altotta North had been set up by rebels from Sāto who had attacked Cila,[2] but it was little more than a series of forts, with no real population. Alotta North's motto was “do it or die”, and their symbol was a thunderbolt, because they liked to attack with sudden bursts of power and greatly endanger themselves in the process. So many Altists died in battle that their population had to keep being refreshed with volunteer fighters from Sāto and Kotagquri just to keep it level. Altotaa North was a very small nation, but it was militarily powerful.
