Zenith

The Zenith is the name of a political party that reached the zenith of its power around 4208 AD, fighting against the Crystals, the Swamp Kids, and the Matrix.

Origins

The Zenith people native to the southern slopes of the Sučithasi Mountains were the ancestors of the Zenith party. However, for most of their existence, they were not a political party or even a religion, but rather an ethnic group, the Məla. Like the Sakhi tribe of Thaoan origin, the Zenith's ancestral tribal name refers to a type of fairy that lives in mountainous areas.

Unlike the feministic "fairies" of Sakhi, however, the Zeniths were well known among other ethnic groups for their aggressive promotion of violence against women. They claimed that women were naturally oriented to feel fear, and to submit to the strongest power, and that the way to make women do good deeds is to give them commands and punish them violently if they fail to meet them. Unusually, they were more than 50% male, and were constantly trying to pull women into their party.

The Xʷugâ did not have nations of their own, but rather preferred to live in nations founded by other people. They claimed to be the majority in the Subumpamese state of Vuʒi, which had previously been a nation that was part of Nama, but Vuʒi claimed they were merely a subtribe of the Vuʒians.

Nama

InNama, the Xʷugâ lived mostly in the extreme southeast, just south of the peaks of the Potoppos Mountains, but not in lowland areas that were populated by Astyzzians or other dark-skinned tribes.

Subumpam

In Subumpam, Xwuga were called Fužai and found mostly in the west, but some could be found in the far north as well.

Paba

In Paba, Xʷuga were called Fua and found mostly in the north. However, they find the name Fua offensive and prefer Pabaps to call them Fužai as in Subumpam. They made up 70% of the prison population of some northern Pabap cities despite being less than 2% of the total population. Most of these were males. However, the Fua themselves have often been more than 50% male, at least in Paba, because in Paba some criminals of non-Fua ancestry will join the Fua for protection once convicted of a crime, and these people tended to be mostly male as well. The Fua did not ban anyone of any ethnicity from joining the gang. Paba early on banned Fua people from joining its military, which means that they also cannot collect welfare benefits. Thus, there was little incentive for Fua people living in the highlands to move to Paba.

However, the Pabaps persistent refusal to fight back against their abusers led to the Fua becoming the strongest of the many early Xʷugâ subpopulations. In some cities, the Fua used the Pabaps as prostitutes while robbing stores selling food and basic household supplies so that they would not have to find work if the prostitution money dried up. Pabaps would arrest these people, but once in jail they would dominate the jail and often murder the prison guards, leading to their release.

Later history

One might expect the Zenith, hated by all, to have been wiped out early on and been long forgotten by the time of the greatest battles of the world's history. But in fact they survived, and participated in those battles as one of the major players in the war: see STW.

The Republic of Kibodèga

In the year 4206, the Zenith invaded Baeba Swamp. Outside Baeba, they discovered the newly independent republic of Kibodèga, which they also invaded. Also known as Pipatia, Kibodega had been founded by people of the Doll tribes fleeing slavery and violence in Baeba Swamp. The Dolls knew that in Kibodega, they would never find peace, but hoped that by settling in a less desirable habitat they would face fewer threats. At its founding time, Kibodega consisted of a single mountain slope. The climate was very hot, even high up; the Dolls needed to build shelter to protect themselves from the sun.

When the Zeniths entered Kibodega, they declared that inhabitants of Kibodega would fall into one of two classes: the Zeniths, and their Doll subordinates. Though the Zeniths did not announce the introduction of slavery, the Dolls knew from their knowledge of history that Zeniths were often very abusive slaveowners. But now, they were trapped between the invading Zeniths and their angry masters in Baeba Swamp, and neither group would let them go.

Nevertheless, most Dolls preferred the Zeniths to their other abusers and to the violence raging in Baeba Swamp, where the Dolls were easy victims and had no competent army to defend themselves with. The Zeniths considered any resistors, including indigenous non-Zeniths who refused to accept the life of a Doll, to be enemies of the state, and denied these people even the few rights that they had extended to the Dolls.

The Zeniths and Dolls developed a peaceful coexistence, as the Dolls were supportive of the Zeniths' invasion of Baeba Swamp, and the Zeniths considered Kibodega unimportant in the long term. Nevertheless, some Dolls were upset at the Zeniths' ecologically destructive farming practices, which caused forest animals to attack the Dolls and rob the farms of food, and the Dolls predicted a famine would soon occur if the Zeniths did not slow down the burning of the forest. The Zeniths responded to this by burning the Dolls' own houses, forcing them to hide out in the forest and face the animals themselves. A few Dolls fled further up into the mountains, seeking land that was undesirable even for the Zeniths. However, the Zeniths were from a cold climate and the Dolls could not find terrain higher than the Zeniths' lookouts.

UAO invasion

At this point, the Unholy Alliance invaded Baeba Swamp, following the same route the Zeniths had taken. They thus attacked the Zeniths from behind as they coursed from high to low terrain.

Swamp Kids invasion

Shortly after the UAO invasion, the Swamp Kids (EE3) also invaded Kibodega. The Dolls realized that their attempt to find unfavorable terrain had failed; all of their predators had followed them right into their refuge, and in their new habitat they had even less protection than they had had before. In response, the Zeniths established universal slavery for all non-Zeniths within their territory, meaning that the Dolls became enslaved. The Swamp Kids were invading uphill, meaning that they were pushing into Zenith territory, but fighting more Dolls than Zeniths as they went. The Dolls again chose to submit to the Zeniths, seeing even slavery as safer than facing the Swamp Kids' roving armies. The Zeniths agreed to do most of the fighting in the war, since they had expected to be fighting the Swamp Kids anyway, and the Zeniths even signed a treaty with an isolated army of Raspara people (LTU), padding their military with seasoned veterans of prior wars, as well as many more foot soldiers.

Swamp Kids-Dolls relations

Nevertheless, the leader of the Dolls chose to submit to the Swamp Kids instead, and signed a treaty giving the Swamp Kids control of any land within Kibodega they could conquer. As a formality, this land was assigned to RMC, a league based in the faraway arctic areas of Anzan, which had no feasible means of getting to Kibodega. The purpose of this was to ensure that neither the Swamp Kids nor the Dolls assumed that all of Kibodega was theirs. However, RMC did have some members in the area, and more RMC members supported Dolls than Swamp Kids.

Most of the Dolls who had followed their leader chose to flee Kibodega rather than join the Swamp Kids' army, as they feared they would be quickly eliminated. Dolls were physically distinct in appearance and tended to be untrained in combat, and they knew that the Zeniths would be more eager to kill Dolls than to kill Swamp Kids, who had proven themselves competent by conquering Baeba Swamp against all odds a few years earlier.

Doll-Matrix relations

The fleeing Dolls built a bridge across the river into Matrix territory. They generally considered the Matrixes to be the most abusive slavemasters of all; indeed, it was the Matrixes who had created the Dolls in the first place, as an amalgamation of defeated peoples whom they had cut off from their historical identities in their original homelands further east. Indeed, the Matrixes saw the entering Dolls as free meat, and they followed the fleeing Dolls into Kibodega, realizing that any land from which Dolls were able to flee was land that had fallen out of control of all other armies. Thus the Matrixes quickly conquered 80% of Kibodega while the other three armies (Zeniths, Swamp Kids, and UAO) were busy fighting each other to a standstill in the mountains.

The conquering Matrixes signed a treaty with the Zeniths now, however, as they realized that the Zeniths had many men to spare, and they preferred to split their spoils with the Zeniths instead of the Swamp Kids. Thus the Zeniths and Matrixes stopped fighting each other and turned against the Swamp Kids. By this time, UAO had been pushed into the higher mountains where they were unable to communicate with each other, and many settled in caves to escape the roving Zeniths who had taken all of the high terrain in the treaty.

RMC internal conflict

At this point, RMC expelled its Doll population, meaning that the Dolls no longer had any claim to Kibodega even if the Swamp Kids were to win the war and choose to honor their earlier treaty. The non-Doll RMC members purchased weapons from the Zenith and began slaughtering the Dolls.

Dreamland is on the Yəʕ river. SAME as leap.

Contact with Baeba Swamp

At this point, the Matrix-Zenith coalition government of Kibodega agreed to unite with Baeba Swamp. They delcared that peace had finally come to Kibodega, and that the Zeniths would not object if they were overruled by the largely pro-Matrix government of Baeba Swamp itself. However, the Zeniths held on to uncontested power in the hills and mountains of Kibodega, where Baeba's rule was weak. The Zeniths deliberately underreported their conquests in the slow but still ongoing conflict in the northern mountains so that Baeba would not attempt to patrol secret Zenith hideouts on the northern slopes.

Zenith-Doll relations

The Zeniths declared war on the Dolls, seeing them as a useless, frail people who insulted human beings by their mere existence. The Dolls simply submitted to whichever enemy presented the closest danger, they said, and therefore could never be trusted even as slaves. Earlier, when the Zeniths had been enslaving the Dolls, they had inadvertently infected many Dolls with a series of plagues to which the Zeniths had much stronger innate resistance. But the Dolls didn't fight back. The Zeniths figured that a masochistic ally in a war was no ally at all, and that the Dolls were intractably masochistic.

The Zeniths were proven right when the Dolls responded to the new war by migrating up the mountains into the Zeniths' secret territory, which had recently declared independence from Kibodega as the new republic of Gatwăna (Anasaratala). This was unbeknownst to Baeba, which had just allowed the Zeniths to gain power even in Baeba itself, where previously the Matrixes had locked them out.

Rainbow Revolts

The Matrixes declared war on Baeba Swamp, even though they were the leading party in the government of Baeba Swamp. They purchased an area of land they called "Burlia II" and revived slavery with the Dolls as the victims yet again. Now some Dolls defected to the Swamp Kids, which Baeba's central government considered its true enemy. Thus, Baeba Swamp began to support the Zeniths' plan to exterminate the Dolls. A Baeban marksman assassinated the head of the pro-EE3 Dolls and falsely declared that she had been killed by the Matrix.

Birth of Issia

A new independent state for Dolls only, Issia, seceded and claimed an alliance with the Swamp Kids. The Swamp Kids enslaved all of the Dolls in Issia,but soon realized that some of the Dolls were still bound to masters from other leagues. Thus the Swamp Kids were losing money on the deal,and chose to invade. STW signed a pact with the Swamp Kids now, and joined the invasion. A new regional power, the Slopes, also invaded. This time, all three invaders were on the same side: they had chosen to put aside their differences and take up arms against their slaves.

The Dolls' leaders promised to fight back against the three invading armies without using violence, and the Dolls began foraging for wildflowers that they hoped would injure the invading soldiers as they entered the Dolls' houses. They also began building a road to Baeba in the hopes that more armies would invade and thus fight for the rights to enslave the Dolls. They also started wildfires in the forest and released a plague of worms. They hoped that these four nonviolent attacks would repel their enemies.

Battle of Issia

The Doll commanders told their soldiers to suppress their fear of pain: though the thorns on the flowers would cut their arms and legs, the wildfires would destroy their homes, and the worms would infect them with debilitating diseases, all of their suffering was necessary to preserve the safety of their people.

The battle began in late summer with the Slopes leading the charge. The Zenith archers scored an impressive body count against the unarmed Dolls who were out in the fields doing slave labor, and the Dolls quickly counterattacked by sweeping in from the surrounding hills and throwing their thorny flowers at the Slopes. In response, one of the Slope men ran uphill to take on the Dolls while the rest of the battalion roved it's way further down the valley to reach the main Doll settlements.

Great Wall of Tata

As revenge for previous conflicts, the Zeniths had sponsored the construction of a wall around Tata, and a subsequent cooperative effort by other leagues to entrap the Matrixes in Tata and ensure that their quality of life always remained worse than that of any other leagues, including the Dolls.

Earlier, the Matrixes had abolished crime, saying that any action by one Matrix against another was a cooperative decision, and thus legal. Now, as the Zeniths joined the others in spreading plagues across Tata, they earned de facto Matrix membership as a reward. When the Zeniths realized that there were more plagues spreading through Kibodega and Issia, they took Dolls from those territories and moved them to Tata as slavemasters, where they could be simultaneously victims and oppressors while making conditions in Tata even worse than before.

Although Tata had a warm climate, some Matrixes were forcibly moved to slave camps in historically Raspara areas of Tata, which were in the mountains, and thus colder. Here, they were denied warm clothes and told that they could warm themselves up by working harder. Two corporations called Enasisira and Papsa were formed to compete with each other in who could torture the Matrixes the most efficiently. Enasisira was formed from what had once been a Matrix stronghold, and some of its people were former victims of the Matrixes who had been liberated by the Zeniths. Papsa, on the other hand, had never had any contact with Matrixes before.