Raspara

The Raspara were a political party formed in the Four Quarters Empire while it was being occupied by AlphaLEAP. They were one of several political parties calling themselves the Cold Men, and thus used the untranslated name "Raspara" to clarify the distinction.

Etymology of name

Raspara is a Pabappa name, related to but not a direct cognate of the Andanese name Lahilili. The word lahalala, which is also found in Andanese, is a loanword from Palli of a name which had in turn come from an earlier stage of Andanese. If the name that produced lahilili in Andanese had survived in Pabappa, it would have produced *Rasara; however, this is largely a coincidence, because in the original language, only the first syllable was the same.

The alternate Andanese name Lahalala can be appreviated to pipa using the numeric readings of the syllables: lahalala is 1-3-1-1, and pipa is 13-11.

Language

The ancestors of the Raspara were a tribe of Meromo people living near Tŏli, who were descended from the Thunderers who had lived a few centuries earlier in the same area. The Thunderers had ruled at a time when it was tradition for every political party to identify with a unique language. In earlier times, when Nama had been the uncontested military guarantor of the known world, a tribe with its own language would obtain certain privileges that made it advantageous to do so, even if it hindered communication with other tribes.

The Raspara came to power at a time when there was no longer any advantage to cultivating a separate language, so the language the Raspara identified with was no more than an amplification of the dialectal differences of the branch of Meromo from which the core of their members had come.

Nevertheless, the tradition of maintaining a separate linguistic identity remained strong, and members of rival parties who defected to the Raspara were required to learn the Raspara dialect in order to become Raspara. Even people who already spoke another dialect of Khulls were considered to be learning a new language as they learned to abandon their own dialect's accent and colloquial vocabulary in favor of that of the Raspara.

Khulls

The Raspara admired the Khulls language, the ancestral language of the Crystals who had slowly conquered most of western Nama over a period of about 1200 years. Nama cooperated with the Crystal invaders, seeing them as less threatening than their other invaders, and eventually made Khulls its official language. The Raspara were also descended from people who had invaded Nama, and who had become enemies of the Crystals even though they were both also enemies of Nama. The ancestral language of the Raspara people was called Meromo.

The common parent language of Khulls and Meromo had split up around the year 600 AD, and after 3500 years of separation the two languages resembled each other very little. The Raspara people planned to transition to speaking only Khulls, even though it would mean cutting ties with their ancestors, because they believed the Khulls language to be superior to their own. In this, they were helped by the fact that the Raspara people came from diverse origins, and were not simply a tribe of Meromo speakers with a common political orientation. However, few of the people who converted to the Raspara party were of historically Khulls-speaking tribes, since the Raspara had always preyed on Nama.

Pabappa and Andanese

Many Raspara also learned Pabappa or Late Andanese, which were the primary languages of the Swamp Kids upon whom the Raspara preyed. Pabappa was a sister language of Khulls, but sounded entirely unlike Khulls and was no easier to learn for Khulls speakers than for the speakers of Meromo.

Philosophy

The Raspara believed their destiny in life was to abuse other people. They selected the Swamp Kids, a gullible population who had just emerged from the world's most repressive authoritarian regime, as their new hosts and penetrated their nation at its weakest points.

History in Anzan

The Raspara did not have formal legal authority in the Swamp Kids' nation, called Anzan, but they stood on the toes of the Swampy leaders and often assassinated Swampies who did not obey their orders. The Raspara claimed that they were destined to rule over the Swampies because they were physically superior; Raspara men were much taller and had more masculine body types than Swampy men, who seemed little different than their women. Although Raspara were indeed taller and of a more masculine body type than the Swampies they ruled over, they kept secret the fact that it was their abusive political philosophy which was mostly responsible for keeping them in power. They knew that if the Swamp Kids learned the truth, they could be overthrown, but so long as the Swamp Kids believed that the Raspara's success was related to their physical body type, the Swamp Kids would believe the Raspara were destined to rule.

Boundaries of Raspara settlement

The Raspara called themselves Cold Men, and believed that cold weather gave them power. They settled territory between 29°N and 37°N; the 37th parallel, then as now, was the approximate northern limit of human self-sufficiency. There were human tribes such as the Moonshines living further north, but they were dependent on the sea for their food and needed to be constantly on the move, meaning they could not build many permanent settlements.

Relations with other armies

The Raspara often fought against the Zenith, another abusive minority population in Anzan who had been living there for thousands of years. The Raspara refused to ally themselves with the Zenith, considering them an eternal enemy, and some Raspara even portrayed themselves as heroes for enslaving the Swamp Kids because their slavery was not as harmful to the Swamp Kids as the prostitution and erratic violent crime that the Zeniths inflicted on them. The Zeniths were also much taller than the Swamp Kids, but lacked the organized conspiratorial power structure of the Raspara and despite living among the Swamp Kids and their ancestors for thousands of years had never achieved political power.

The Raspara's main weakness was that their power was tied to the continued existence of the Swamp Kids. Even though they abused the Swamp Kids, they had to allow the Swamp Kids to maintain an independent military so that their many other enemies would not eat them up and throw the abusive Raspara out of power. After forty years of abuse, the Swamp Kids began a quest to escape their nation and settle in Baeba Swamp, which was much smaller than Anzan but offered the Swamp Kids a safer place to hide from their abusers. When the Raspara heard this, they blocked the paths out of major population centers and massacred the Swampy army battalions that had intended to provide the citizens a safe path out of Anzan. Nevertheless, those Swamp Kids who did manage to escape through other routes indeed founded a new settlement in Baeba Swamp, and the remnant population of Swampies in Anzan no longer had a powerful military. This left the Raspara with no protectors, and they were forced to disperse into the wilderness and abandon their abusive lifestyle.

When the Raspara reemerged a few years later, they were also in Baeba Swamp, attempting to impose another abusive slave system on the Swampies that had run away from them back in Anzan. However, the Raspara were much weaker now, and were forced to dilute their power by allying with other groups that were unrelated to any political organizations that had existed in Anzan. Within a few decades, the Raspara and the Swamp Kids they had abused died by the same sword when the new leadership of Baeba Swamp was handed over to yet another outside army, Asala, which had recently immigrated from Nama.

Post-Baeban history

The Raspara who had not made it to Baeba simply lived in the wilderness, passing down their philosophy to their children, but never again regaining power. In the end the descendants of the Raspara were swallowed up by the surrounding peoples, and were not part of an organized state for more than a thousand years afterward, when they were conquered by the Crystals.

Near the west coast of Rilola, the descendants of the Raspara came to settle further north: primarily in areas between 35°N and 47°N. Along the west coast, the climate was warmer in both winter and summer than it was near the center of the continent. This is because the center of the continent was divided by a shallow sea that greatly lowered the temperatures in summer while in winter it was frozen and had little effect on temperature. However, despite the warmer than expected climate, the Raspara along the west coast had a much more difficult time gathering food than they had when they had lived in the central part of the continent.