Tarpabap people
The Tara people were tall, dark-skinned immigrants from the tropical rainforests of southern Laba. When natural disasters flooded most of their home territory, a small team of sea-hardy Tara sailors found a welcoming home among the blonde, blue eyed people of Paba around 630 AD, though large numbers of Tara only arrived in Paba beginning around 1030 AD. Paba's people were much shorter than Tarpabaps, so intermarriage was rare and the two peoples maintained strictly separate identities. There was another dark-skinned minority in Paba, the Star people, but these people were short like the Pabaps and did not interact much with the Tara either.
As Paba grew, the Pabaps came to rely more and more on sea power, and progressively weakened their land army. The Taras moved inland as the Pabaps moved to the coast, and eventually the Taras abandoned their ancestral seagoing lifestyle entirely for a life of subsistence farming. In some ways, they were much better off than the Pabaps who had given them a place to live, but in some ways the Pabaps were better off. As the two nationalities came to live increasingly symbiotic lives in Paba, the Taras adopted the new ethnic identity of Tarpabap people.
Early language
The Tarpabaps changed their language more frequently than any other people. They had had no common ancestral language on Laba, so they quickly adopted Paleo-Pabappa, the language of the proto-Pabap settlers they lived among. When Paleo-Pabappa split into dialects, the Tarpabaps learned each of these, while also developing their own dialects amongst each other. When immigrants from the Gold Empire settled in Paba and swept away most of Paleo-Pabappa's territory, the Tarpabaps learned to speak Gold as well.
Settlement of Tarwas
Over the years, many Tarpabaps gained exploratory ambitions that the Pabaps who lived around them did not share. The Pabaps were now an entirely sea-based empire, and their land army was composed mostly of ethnic minorities, including the Tarpabaps, who had little in common and had promised never to fight a war, even defensively. Therefore Paba could not grow over land any more, and was becoming increasingly chaotic as many neighboring tribes launched opportunistic invasions of small pieces of Pabap territory, which they then held because Paba's army refused to fight back against the invasions. Since the Tarpabap people were much hardier than the native Pabaps, they comprised much of the land army, but many Tarpabaps were unwilling to join a military which was bound by the constitution to be so helpless as to be incapable of defending its home territory. Beginning around 2100, organized groups of Tarpabap people marched northward through Paba and invaded the northern frontier lands which the Pabap people were afraid to enter. In the year 2144, the new nation of Tarwas was founded.
In Tarwas, the dark-skinned Tarpabap people found a weak, nomadic aboriginal minority calling themselves Repilians and bound by allegiance to a large but very weak military power called Nama. The Tarpabaps ignored Nama and continued pushing through Repilian territory in search of a suitable climate for farming. As they moved north, they descended in altitude, so the climate changed very little. Nonetheless, cold winters soon taught the Tarpabaps that their old way of life was impossible, and the Tarpabaps chose to adopt the Repilians' hunting lifestyle with only limited farming, mostly of animals rather than vegetables.
Living between 30° and 35°N, the Tarpabaps' dark skin quickly proved a liability, and within just a few generations they had become almost as light as the Repilians. This was partly due to their own indigenous variability and partly due to the few instances of intermarriage with the Repilian aboriginals.
Tarwas remained a strong military power for thousands of years, and when the Pabap people began to settle the northern lowlands, they found Tarwas blocking their path. They signed a treaty handing over control of all land east of Tarwas to Tarwas in exchange for Tarwas granting the Pabap settlers free rein over everything to the west. (The two nations were separated by a river.) But some Pabaps began crossing the ice and settling in the lands east of Tarwas even so. Eventually Tarwas found itself surrounded by Pabap people once again.
Exactly 2000 years after their founding, Tarwas surrendered to an army of Pabap people calling itself Vaamū. The Pabap people had evolved to an even smaller body size by this point, and the tiny conquerors kept a great distance from their conquered people. However, the Tarpabaps soon chased out the Vaamūan army and regained control of their territory. Figuring it was safe to make an alliance with a race of chest-high people, they decided to become a formal ally of Vaamū and its successor state, the Swamp Kids.
However, Tarwas soon learned that it had become a minor power as the enormous empire to their west now was home to more than half of the world's population. The Swamp Kids neglected their new ally, and Tarwas was soon engulfed by an enemy of the Swamp Kids, forcing the Tarpabaps to change languages yet again, this time to Khulls. Still later, the Khulls people turned their focus to the west, and Tarwas was once again swallowed up by Pabap-descended people, though the Pabaps by this time had split among themselves, and the name of Tarwas' new language was not Pabappa but rather Poswa.
