Crystals

The Crystals were a religion and political organization founded in the proto-Star Empire around the year 1500 AD.

Language

The early Crystals had adopted the Gold language which had come to Lobexon in waves between 1103 AD and the 1500s, carried by settlers from AlphaLeap, the economic powerhouse of the tropics. In this time period, the known world was ruled by Nama, and Nama granted military protection to any tribe that had its own language. This incentivized tribes to adopt a new language, even if it hindered communication with friendly neighboring tribes. In the case of the Crystals, they adopted the Gold language because they identified themselves as a transnational religion and did not want to be thought of as simply another tribe among many in Lobexon.

Over thousands of years, the Crystals developed their dialect of the Gold language into Khulls.

Culture and sociolinguistics

The Crystals considered themselves to be feministic pacifists. They believed that they could overcome the masculine powers around them by practicing "feminine diplomacy" and avoiding war. Many Crystals were slaves, and a treaty signed in the year 2057 made all of them slaves, so being in a passive position was familiar to all Crystals.

However, the Crystals' insistence on fighting only for themselves quickly made them enemies of other feministic tribes such as the Repilians who made up much of the population of Nama, the same Nama that ruled their homeland of Lobexon. Thus, though they remained feminists, the Crystals refused to make alliances with other powers on the basis of feminism, and though they remained pacifists, their presence led to new wars in each nation they entered, and the Crystals militarized their entire population to ensure their survival.

Education

The Crystals traditionally opposed education; employment began as soon as children were capable of working under supervision. Thus, children were valued for their labor, and this led the Crystal nations to have higher birthrates than those of surrounding nations.

Economy

The nation of Baeba Swamp was much richer than all other nations, but even Baeba was not the richest nation on the planet. Economists in the Lantern Empire typically measured their nations' economies against those of Dreamland.

Early history and growth

The Crystals' homeland, Atlam, was within Lobexon, which consisted of a long stretch of tropical and subtropical lands, oriented southwest to northeast along the southern coast of the continent of Rilola, ranging from 13°N at the border with Kxesh to 27°N at the border with Nama. There were no major mountain ranges in this area, and the entirety of the land was humanly habitable. Thus, Lobexon was a very large area, many times the size of Paba, and could support a large and strong military. However, the Crystals were, for much of their history, just a minority in Lobexon, one group among many, and were geographically dispersed, with no land set aside for Crystals only within the borders of Lobexon. Thus, the Crystals sought to expand outward and claim land for themselves outside of Lobexon.

Settlement of Dahàgʷu

Around 3010, the Lenians formally opened their nations (called the Tendrils) to diplomacy with surrounding nations. The Crystals also signed this treaty because they were allied with the Lenians, but they did not form a unified empire.

The Crystals mostly moved westward, into land that was also tropical but much drier than Lobexon. For this reason, few humans lived there, and they were able to move into the land without facing violent resistance. The Crystals called this largely uninhabited land Dahàgʷu (in Gold; the later Khulls form of the name was Laxàġʷu). Dahàgʷu was very large; in fact, it was larger than Paba. However, being centered around 20°N, its climate was very dry, and major rivers from which a reliable supply of food could come were absent. Thus, the Crystals in Dahàgʷu remained mostly rural nomads, but a sizable number of Crystals also moved into the aboriginal city of Baeba Swamp.

Settlement of Baeba Swamp

The Crystals' growth was very slow. Nevertheless, none of their political enemies were willing to invade the desert of Laxàġʷu to defeat the Crystals, and their military power increased gradually throughout the centuries. Finally, in the late 3300s, after almost 2000 years of slow growth, the Crystals managed to capture Baeba Swamp, and they then declared it the new capital of the Crystal Empire. They also changed the name of the state Baeba was in to Ƥē, and made Khulls the official language of Ƥē and Baeba Swamp.

Some time after the Crystals had conquered and subdued Baeba, they were attacked by their ally, Meromo. Meromo soon pushed the Crystals back out of Baeba. Some Crystals responded to their defeat by moving into Meromo, showing that Meromo's land area was far too large for the Meromo army to defend, and that they were extremely easy to invade. But these people were mostly intending to reach other nations such as Tarwas rather than to establish a permanent invasion inside their former ally's empire.

Foundation of Dreamland

In 3373 AD, the Gâm people, immigrants from the islands of Laba, declared war on the Crystal Empire and headed towards Baeba Swamp. They claimed that the invasion was political, and that Crystals who defected to the Gâm would be welcomed and given citizenship in the Gâm empire once the Gâm victory had been secured. Very few Crystals defected, but many Thunder people from the neighboring Thunder Empire did. The THunder Empire was bound by a military alliance with the Crystal Empire but had not been invaded, and the Thunder Empire refused to help the Crystals fight off the invaders. However, the Dreamers never reached Baeba, and Baeba remained the capital of the Crystal Empire.

The Lantern Empire

Internal demographics

The Crystals were the first party to build small nations with nontraditional population structures. For example, some nations were entirely female, and others had few women or children. These nations were found only in the tropics, where the land was fertile enough to support a large population in a very small area. Thus, for example, women living in the all-female nation of #Katalpa were self-governing, but could visit men living in #Taràta or #Egàqi within a day's journey, and many women formed marriages across the border but still continued to live in geographically separate nations.

During peacetime, Crystal men were allowed to move around the Empire, and thus could form traditional marriages with women and live together in the same house, all while remaining a citizen of the masculine nation they had come from. Because the husband and wife in such a couple were citizens of different nations, they paid different taxes and followed different laws. The laws of the masculine nations were typically strict, and thus, for example, a married woman living in Taràta could freely criticize the government, but if her husband were to say the same things, he would be imprisoned.

Furthermore, most Crystal nations required men to dedicate their adult lives to military service, and their armies spent much of their time at war.

Toparchies

Some toparchies were set up for political purposes, and often embraced radical ideas. The rulers of these nations intended for adult residents who disagreed with them to move out, and claimed that their nations' continued existence proved that they had many loyal supporters. Because these were all independent nations, the rulers could make any laws they wished; however, they were still bound to military allegiance with the Empire.

Taxation

There were no taxes above the national level, but Baeba derived much of its wealth from trade with the nations around it, and Baeba's leaders often increased tariffs instead of increasing the taxes on their own citizens.

Tribes within the Lantern Empire

The Lantern Empire was racially diverse, with blonde Lenian people (mostly of the Thunder party) living mostly in the northern latitudes, and the dark-skinned Crystals living mostly in the south. However, from the very beginning, internal migrations were common, and many blonde people lived in the tropics, just as many dark-skinned people lived in the north. Because the tropics were densely populated and the Empire mostly expanded northward, migration from the tropics to the northern latitudes was more common than the reverse. Furthermore, the nations of the tropics tended to have high birthrates and therefore people moved north both to lessen the burden on their countrymen and to help fill out the sparsely settled nations of the north.

The Empire did not categorize people by race, but only political party, and each newborn baby was enrolled into the party their parents chose for them. Thus the children of the many mixed marriages between the Crystals and the Thunderers were always either Crystals or Thunderers, and no mixed category ever arose. However, despite the founders' intent that political parties represent people according to their opinions, conversion was fairly rare, and Crystals continued to be mostly dark-skinned people while Thunderers continued to be mostly light-skinned people, often with blonde hair and blue eyes.

Because the birthrate was much higher in the tropics, the Crystal share of the population grew larger with each new generation. The Lenians in the north opened their nations to Crystal settlement early on, and some historically Lenian nations even came to have Crystal majorities. Only one nation, #Sàkʷalo, explicitly prohibited the immigration of dark-skinned people by law, although an allied nation called Ládara did the same thing without the need for a law.

Origin

The Lantern Empire was an alliance between three empires that were already large on their own. These three empires were run by the Crystals, the Thunderers, and FILTER.

The Thunderers considered themselves an alliance of Lenian tribes rather than a political party. Thus, there were many avenues of political dissent within the organization, but all of their supporters were of the same blonde blue-eyed body type.

The Crystals were a political party, and therefore they had only one set of opinions, but their party was open to all races and tribes. Even so, almost all Crystals were dark-skinned aboriginals, as they ruled mostly in the tropics.

FILTER was in between: though they began as an association of blonde Lenian tribes, they early on submitted to the dark-skinned aboriginal Sword people, and the two tribes melded together to create a third empire with a racially diverse population. Yet, they still thought of themselves as tribes, and excluded foreigners who were not of provable FILTER ancestry. They ruled in diverse climates ranging from frigid to tropical wetlands even hotter than the Crystals', and their racial boundary was east-west rather than north-south. Thus, many Lenian people soon came to live in the equatorial regions where there previously had been only dark-skinned aboriginals. FILTER allowed political parties, but FILTER itself was given special powers to keep the dissenters from challenging their authority. Since FILTER had been originally the light-skinned tribe, more Lenian-like people occupied the highest posts of power even after hundreds of years, but there was no racial discrimination and any dark-skinned people could register as FILTER members to join the power structure. Soon, most Filterers were of racially intermediate body types.

Nations within the Lantern Empire

Throughout its history, the Lantern Empire grew to encompass nations with widely spaced founding dates. Those that survived to 3765 AD are listed here.

Nations located in the tropics are typically much smaller than nations located further north, and tens to hundreds of times more dense.

Crystal nations of the Baeba region

Baeba Swamp

Baeba Swamp was a large and heavily populated nation consisting of both lowlands and highlands stretching from about 26 to 30N . it was at the mouth of a very large river, and thus, though dry in the summer, supported a swamp and rich agriculture. the climate was far hotter than other areas at the same latitude because it was at the northeast edge of a shallow, sun-warmed sea. temps were almost never below 50F in the lowlands even though areas further east got heavy snow every winter.

The Crystals called Baeba the capital of their empire, but its power over the nations was only indirect, expressed through trade and military agreements. Baeba could not make laws that applied to other nations, but could favor cooperative nations in trade and afford them greater military protection.

The Crystals had originated in the desert areas over 1000 miles south of the Swamp, but when they took over the Swamp they realized they needed to make it the focus of their power even though it was, at the time, the very northernmost extreme of their empire. They solidified their power over Baeba Swamp by invading the mountains to its north and built fortresses there, even though the mountains themselves were not ideal places to live.

Baeba was the strongest and most populous nation. It was called the capital of the empire, but not even Baeba could overrule laws passed by other sovereign nations.

Ƥē

This nation south of Baeba included a small corner of swampland near the border with Baeba. They allowed immigration of Lenians from the Thunder Empire even though some Lenians disliked Ƥē's politics. Ƥē contained most of the eastern shore of the Baeban Sea.

Most Crystal nations supported Ƥē, and Ƥē acted in many ways as if it were a part of Baeba Swamp. In 3719, Ƥē, acting alone, sent soldiers into #Vega to help topple its corrupt leader, even though Vega was part of the wider Lantern Empire.

Tallìlo

Coordinates:	28°N, 3°W
Population:
Languages:	Crystal

The nation of Tallìlo was a late conquest with a violent history. Its native population was a confederation of Lenian tribes calling themselves the Foam or Soap (PDP). When the Crystals conquered Baeba Swamp, they drove out the aboriginal Hook tribe into Lenian territory, where they prepared for a counterattack against the Crystals. But the Crystals soon conquered Tallìlo as well, and pushed the Hooks deeper into Lenian territory.

Soon, many male immigrants from the tropical states of Taràta and Egàqi moved into Tallilu. They built forts and prepared for a future war against Dreamland. The Raspara were one group of immigrants from Egàqi.

Nations northeast of Baeba

Lăro

Coordinates:	27°N, 1°E
Population:
Capital city:	Laxìǯe

Lăro, home to a political party called the Drillers (DRL), was a nation northeast of Baeba Swamp. Lăro had been founded in 3435, with the original site being Punu Lake.

Lăro had no military, and its foreign policy was dictated by Baeba. Much of the population consisted of Lenians, and these Lenians often supported other parties such as the Thunderers rather than cooperating with Baeba's Crystals. There were also some Cappinians.

A small number of immigrants from Dreamland moved to Lăro, but despite Laro's government being generally open to immigration, they excluded the Dreamers, and these immigrants never acquired citizenship.

Yīspʷilinâ

Focused on trade and pursued political neutrality in all conflicts; its faction was called YPN. The citizens were wealthy but military defenseless, and many foreign states housed troops in Yīspʷilinâ.

NOTE, This is possibly a duplicate of some other entry here because I added it at a time when I was away and couldnt use my map.

Tata

A coastal nation bordering both Baeba and Dreamland. Those living in the interior supported Baeba and mostly considered themselves Crystals, but those living along the coast were pro-Dreamland and thus the Crystals in Tata were poor.

The Crystals also called Tata Lamàta.

Gàkʷi

Northeast of Tata, another nation whose coastal native population was pro-Dreamland and spoke the Baywatch language.

Enanàči

Enanàči was northeast of Gàkʷi and had a similar population distribution.

Nōslina

In the north. Mostly Lenians, but is considered a Crystal nation. The ruling faction was called RCV, and was founded by a man named Charm Wolf (Nalaxʷá).

Gàqa

East of Nōslina. A small nation, very friendly to the Thunder nation of Halaspa. The ruling faction was called DOZ.

Poise

Coordinates:	37°N, 15°E
Population:
Languages:	Crystal, Thunder, Cappini

Founded in the upper Čappini river region, Poise's racially diverse population of Crystals, Lenians, and the native Čappini tribes came together to support the Crystal party. However, Poise soon became notorious for its prostitution and illegal labor, attracting immigrants from wealthier nations of the Empire. They were able to do this because there were no global laws in the Crystal Empire. Many of the native prostitutes sought out foreign men because they could pay more money than native men. However, there were so many foreigners in Poise that the population was predominantly male, and the prostitutes organized a society, KTI, to protect themselves from their clients.

Poise bordered Noslina , Gaqa, Osansele, and Hōmoya. The natural environment was poor, and were it not for their lax laws, they would not have been able to survive. Some Crystals wanted all of the nations in the Empire to vote against Poise and shut down their prostitution and other illegal labor operations, but most of the ones supporting this were uneducated people who lived far away.

Olansele

Coordinates:	42°N, 17°E
Capital:	Pimpepperu
Other cities:	Galahamìna
Languages:	Crystal, Thunder, Cappini

North of Poise, Olansele bordered Hōmoya and Sàkʷalo along the coast. The nation stretched from 40°N to 45°N, with the coastline at the north end. Olansele formed a strong alliance with Hōmoya. Their population was largely Lenians because they were so far north, but many of these had Čappini ancestry and some did not speak the Thunder language. The ruling Thunder faction was called XIG.

Olansele did not allow foreigners to live in their nation, but immigration laws were lax. Thus, many people moved in, but they had to surrender any prior citizenship if they intended to stay permanently, and in some cases this meant that they and their children could not get back out. They had little interest in friendly relations with other nations, except for their ally, Hōmoya. They strongly supported their military, which, though bound by treaty with the Crystal Empire, sometimes took small actions against Dreamer ships in the northern strait area without permission.

The capital city was named Pimpepperu, but the largest city was the Crystal-dominated settlement of Galahamìna at the foot of the eponymous river. The people of Galahamìna were poor and mostly uneducated, working in trade and farming. Even though their city was on the ocean, they were walled in by a strait and thus could only reach the ocean by passing by Pimpepperu or a foreign nation.

In the empire's later years, the Raspara tribe became fond of Olansele's society.

Independent states within Amade

In the ruins of Amade, the Crystals had also split the southern part of their empire into many separate states. (These names are derived internally from Khulls words, not respellings of native names.) The economy here was extremely weak; per capita income in Amade in 3565 AD was a mere 1.3% of Dreamland's.

Gender relations

Amade's nations were all mutually codependent because of their population structures; the nations of the west were mostly or entirely female, and the nations of the east were primarily male. There was no neutral zone. During peacetime, citizens were allowed to travel between the nations, and because the nations were all very small, daily life in Amade was similar to daily life in the rest of the Empire, and women had no trouble finding men. But the laws of the nations applied to their citizens even while they traveled abroad, and the masculine nations had much stricter laws than did the feminine ones. Thus, women in Amade were legally superior to their husbands and enjoyed many rights that their husbands did not.

One important example of female superiority was freedom of speech: the feminine nations allowed their citizens to criticize the ruling government, but the masculine nations did not. Some men were thus imprisoned merely for agreeing with their wives, and when a man witnessed an argument between two women, he would often hide to avoid being forced to share his own opinions. Men could purchase credits from the government which would allow them to speak their minds, though they were made to pay by the word.

The Heap

Coordinates:	15°N, 19°E
Population:
Languages:	Crystal, Amadean

Xateyèna, also known as the Heap, was the foremost example of the non-traditional population structure of some Crystal nations; most citizens were children, and the few adults were nearly all women who worked in childcare. There was no military and much of the food was imported. The Heap was the largest nation in Amade.

The Heap allowed boys to remain until they were adults, at which point they were forced into the military unless they were too physically frail to survive. Men in the Heap were banned from their entire nation, and only returned when the imperial Crystal military allowed them to visit.

Men were allowed to escape the military by resigning their citizenship and aligning with a different nation. Indeed, the only men in the Heap were those who had done this and yet chosen not to leave the Heap. This was legal, because the Heap allowed noncitizens to live within its territory, but noncitizens were given a very low standard of living and could not buy food during times of famine. Furthermore, since these men were citizens of other Crystal nations, the laws of those nations applied to them even while they were in the Heap, and in most cases the other nations showed little interest for the welfare of men who lived in the Heap.

Economy

The Heap had no significant economic activity because the male nations of the east paid Heap women for the boys they sent to join the military, and early on a law was passed that also paid women for girls even though the girls mostly remained in the female nations. These payments were disbursed at birth, but the Heap soon passed strict laws to ensure that women did not simply neglect their children in order to collect more payments without the effort of raising a large family.

Women were supplied with vouchers for food and basic items from government-run stores, but men were required to pay for their basic supplies. However, women were limited to amounts that the government felt would be sufficient for one person only, and therefore they could not also feed their husbands. Sales tax was paid to the locality in which the purchase was being made, while income tax was paid to the person's home nation.

Women of childbearing age typically married at the earliest opportunity, and once their first child was born they remained in their homes most of the day to direct their energy towards childcare. Fathers were present only irregularly, depending on conditions beyond their control; when present, they divided their time between childcare and typical adult male occupations such as farming and hunting. Likewise, elderly citizens divided their time between helping newlyweds with the difficult aspects of caring for young children and helping other elderly people.

Because childbirth was the main source of income, the birthrate in the Heap was the highest in the world, and young children outnumbered adults by a wide margin. However, the Crystals disliked education and never built schools in their nations. Children old enough to work thus were active participants in the traditional cash economy, both as producers and as traders.

Gender relations

Men living in the Heap were a very small portion of the population, but they committed a vastly disproportionate share of violent crime against the women and children who surrounded them. Much of the Heap's female police force was tied down trying to control these men, who typically showed little respect for the law and little fear of its enforcers.

During peacetime, the Heap's police periodically called in the men from the military nations and together they rounded up the rogues indiscriminately; then, these men were treated according to the whims of the military. Since this could lead to severe punishments even for nonviolent men, some men living in the Heap tried to restrain the others, and sometimes even killed those they saw attacking women. The escalating male-on-male violence was declared legal early on by both the Heap and the male nations, and therefore, life for men in the Heap was far more dangerous than military service during peacetime. The military promised to exempt crime-stopping men from their punishments, so long as they had the support of a female witness, and therefore these men also tried to befriend local women.

However, during war, the men in the military nations were mostly stationed abroad, and renegade men roamed freely through the female Heap cities, often committing mass rape and physical assault as they teamed up to split the women between them. Even so, men still fought other men, and some men actually fled into the military in the belief that even a war would be safer than living in the Heap. This left the remaining males as the most criminal of all, and even though the women greatly outnumbered them there was vastly more male-on-female violence than the converse, and the women often clustered together for protection. The Crystals were well aware of this pattern, and the leaders of the Heap knew what their men were about to do to them whenever they prepared to launch a new war. However, because the Heap's main source of wealth was the money the military delivered to them for the use of their male population, the Heap's leaders never mounted an organized opposition to the Crystals' wars and did not consider themselves pacifists.

Payment for military service

The Heap had been founded during the height of the Crystals' war of conquest, and many Heap families produced strong men who greatly expanded Crystal territory. Each soldier the Heap sent to other nations earned the government a large sum of money, and this money was passed on to the families who produced the soldiers. Soon, the payments were awarded at birth rather than at adulthood, and were applied to both male and female children. Thus, childbirth quickly became the main economic activity and the birthrate rose far above that of all other nations. But when their wars ended, the other nations voted to reduce the economic awards, and some Crystals considered turning the Heap into a traditional nation. But the local government overruled these people, and they continued to exist as a nation almost entirely without men. Soldiers were still stationed in other nations, but the military came to be seen as a career path for homosexuals because there was little chance of combat and the soldiers were stationed only with other soldiers.

The Heap had been the capital territory of Amade in earlier years.

Ḳatalpa

The Crystals turned the tiny nation of Ḳatalpa into an all-female society. Women here typically moved to the Heap when they became pregnant, and so Katalpa had very few young people. The territory was only about 15 miles across, so physical contact with males living outside Katalpa was still common. Like the Heap, Katalpa suffered from invasions by renegade males, but they typically had more success in defending themselves because they did not need to defend children in addition.

Taràta

Coordinates:
Population:
Languages:	Crystal

These two nations were founded in a protected area and contained many of the men whose wives & children lived in Xateyèna. However, they also had many traditional families.

Taràta was almost entirely males, and resembled a smaller version of Wax. Indeed, its alternate name, Lulalaha, was derived from the same word as an alternate name for Wax, Lulala. Most men in central Taràta were gay, like those in Wax's colony of Kudhaus.

Egàqi

Coordinates:
Population:
Languages:	Crystal

Egàqi was another military training camp for young men from the Heap where they prepared to fight in the military. When peace came to the Empire, the men instead moved to #Tallìlo in preparation for a future war against Dreamland. They wanted to invade the Dreamers through either Popa or Peri, both of which would give the Crystals a connection to the north sea and split the Lenian confederation in half. Then, the eastern Lenian tribes would be blocked by the Crystals and could no longer interact with the western tribes, who had traditionally been the main military threat.

Homosexuality was legal in Egàqi, but much less prevalent than in Taràta. Most gay men moved to Taràta, particularly the capital.

Purges

Taràta and Egàqi frequently purged their populations to prevent their missions from being disrupted; their army was being destroyed by its own commanders almost as fast as the women in the western nations could raise more boys to join it. A few Crystal men escaped the purges and fled northward into Lenian nations where they married local women, but they had to get there by passing through roundabout paths since both Sapeepa and the various Crystal nations had promised to arrest military runaways, and disguise was difficult. Indeed the closest nation that had promised to shelter the refugees was #Hōkī, nearly 2000 miles to the north. Those men who reached Hōkī typically journeyed on still further, as their prime target was the much richer nation of #Lăro, on the border with Baeba Swamp.

Birth of the Raspara

One group of people, called the Raspara, escaped from Egàqi and eventually settled in Dreamland, where they preyed on the locals until being pushed out towards their enemy, Baeba. When Mižipa was at the height of his power struggle in #Etatăni, he tried to encourage Raspara to settle in Etatani and join his army, but they refused because he was against Hōkī.

Thunder nations

The Lenians in the northeast mostly claimed loyalty to the Thunder party. The economy in this region was very poor; upon the signing of the Lantern Treaty in 3565, the per capita income of the Thunder region was a mere 2.3% of that of Dreamland.

Bʷísu

The oldest nation; also known as Sapeepa, Mirror Wall, and Bʷičsʉ. it was a survival from the pre-Thunder days of Meromo. The Plume party abdicated in favor of the Thunderers, but this branch of the Thunderers was called the Mirror and they invited Crystals to move in with them. By the peak of the empire, Mirrorland had more Crystals than Thunderers, and the Crystal name for the territory became the predominant one. The local faction of Thunderers was called TOT.

Sapeepa included much of the upland desert area later called "Nippon".

Hōkī

Coordinates:	39°N, 25°E
Founded:	3567
Languages:	Crystal, Thunder

The founder of Hōkī (also called Hōmoya and Xómeye) was a woman named the Teacher, who allowed Crystals to move in. Immigrants were legally superior to the native-born. Hōmoya soon overtook Sàkʷalo, largely due to its rapidly increasing ethnically mixed population. Many factions were represented, but the Teacher's original membership in the FAN wing helped that wing's popularity.

The FAN people felt that people should work for their own good, rather than serving the state, as was required in Sapeepa and Sàkwalo.

The Crystals in Hōmoya soon built a settlement on the shore of Lake Garăga, and restricted habitation rights to Crystals only, with power concentrated in the HUS faction. Garăga also controlled much of the river that flowed into the lake, meaning the Thunderers could not freely travel through their own nation. Soon, Garaga threatened to divide Hōmoya in two and rob the Thunderers of their access to the river.

Refugee program

Despite the Crystals' abusive presence in the center of their nation, Hōkī's leaders invited Crystal men from the nations of #Taràta and #Egàqi to settle in Hōkī to escape their oppressive governments. They distributed maps and instructions to the men explaining how they could leave their homelands and arrive safely in Hōkī. They considered this a humanitarian effort and explained that it was their duty to shelter the Crystal men even though the Crystal immigrants of the previous generations had turned hostile. Thus, many Crystal men soon arrived in Hōkī, and although some of these men married local women, most continued still further on, heading for the upriver nation of #Lăro, on the border with Baeba Swamp.

They also adopted refugees from their neighbor, #Sakwalo, but avoided direct comparison between Sàkwalo and the tropical nations because they did not want to offend their ally.

Sàkwalo

A large nation with a long and bountiful seacoast. The local Thunderers, called HOL (Šelpa), banned all non-Lenians from entering, however. At the height of its power, two women ran the government: Wolfspider (Kmeł) and Cyclops (Tɐxʷumʷ). These women made tyrannical laws that forced all citizens to adhere to strict behavior codes in order to retain the right to live in Sakwalo. This was in addition to the racial purity laws in Sàkwalo. Anyone could leave at any time, but Sakwalo was rich and therefore there were few emigrants.

The two women did not consider themselves feminists; the Lenians and especially the Thunder tribe were simply known for supporting female military leaders. Cyclops obtained a lock on power in her district, which contained about one third of the total land area, and though she never formally seceded, Wolfspider was unable to project her power in that district.

Ládara

Rebels from Sakwalo formed an army, LAD, and invaded Sapeepa. LAD had built forts in remote areas and therefore continued to exist as a nation despite losing badly in their fight against Sapeepa. Their population was almost entirely male, and their land consisted mostly of forts, but yet their existence was secure because rebels from both Hōmoya and Sakwalo kept moving into Ládara even as the LAD army mostly suffered defeats in Sapeepa.

Even though this war was illegal, the Parliament allowed Ládara to send its representatives and respected their votes because the voting representatives were not themselves engaging in combat. Furthermore, Sapeepa never launched a counterattack, preferring to instead trap the LAD fighters in Sapeepa and imprison them. Ládara's leaders claimed that Sapeepa's feminist government had made Sapeepa weak, such that anyone could invade and push the locals around as they pleased, and that Sapeepa therefore deserved any abuse they suffered at the hands of LAD. Thus, Ládara sympathized with Sapeepa's original Lenian population, but disliked the Crystal newcomers and the political leadership. Even though Hōmoya and Sakwalo were mostly run by women as well, they were not explicitly feministic, and some female leaders in those nations agreed with Ládara that Sapeepa was inviting harm by refusing to protect itself against invasions.

Ládara's leaders published propaganda attacking the Crystals on racial grounds, saying that dark-skinned people belonged in the tropics. Some claimed that Sapeepa had forfeited the rights to its name and that Ládara would someday become the capital of the Empire and claim the name Sapeepa for itself. They pointed out that of the original three major Thunder nations, Sapeepa now had a Crystal majority and Hōmoya had a Crystal minority that had built a major city in which no Thunderers could travel. Ládara wanted to send the Crystals back to the tropics, and promised that their own people would never move into Crystal territory.

Many common people in Sakwalo supported LAD's attacks, though only a few joined the war. Many Lenians in Hōmoya supported LAD as well, and Hōmoya's people joined the army as well. However, relatively few of the Lenians living in Sapeepa itself supported LAD, even though LAD specifically avoided attacking fellow Lenians. LAD took this as a sign that the Crystals in Sapeepa had subjugated the original Lenian inhabitants and made them submissive. Meanwhile, Ládara noted that the only remaining all-Lenian nation, Sakwalo, had suffered steady economic decline and blamed the Crystals for this as well, saying that the Crystals preferentially invested in politically submissive nations and that, although nations with cold climates might always be poorer than the tropics, Sakwalo would quickly rebound economically if the Crystals were pushed out of the other two nations.

Halaspa

A very small and short-lived nation run by a dictator named the Cat. The common people hated the Cat, but knew that the only way to remove him would be to convert to a different party such as the Crystals, and therefore the Cat remained in power. This setup was typical for small nations in the Empire; there was no true democracy, but a ruler whose subjects converted to other parties would lose his representation in Parliament.

Nonetheless, continued conversions weakened the Cat's hold on power, and when he finally resigned Halaspa became part of DOZ.

Etatăni

A very small nation run by a dictator named Mīžìpa. He invaded Hōmoya and fought against both the Crystals and the Thunderers, focusing his attacks on feminists and women generally. Hōmoya's JDS faction led the counterattack and they soon pushed Mizipa back into Etatani, where the locals overthrew him and then attached their nation to Hōmoya.

Pumpkin-Pointer alliance

A group of Lenians settled Tarwas and set up two new nations, Pointer (Lakī) and the Pumpkin (Nahalmi). These nations became very powerful economically, but Tarwas denied them a military, and therefore all soldiers in these nations were controlled directly by Tarwas. The Pumpkin-Pointer alliance was not interested in supporting Tarwas, but had fled there because they were opposed to the governments of their home empire.

The per capita income here was approximately one seventh that of Dreamland, and almost exactly one fourth that of the rest of Tarwas.

Tarise nations

NOTE, Tarise is probably Leaper territory, and that is why the ruling party seemingly had no name.

Anēga

Possibly incorporated into Amade ... need to check newer map

Lyihēs

The largest state in Tarise. In 3696, Lyihēs' Kaxaràra army (KYR) invaded #Sapeepa, unaware that their enemy, LAD, was also invading Sapeepa.

Other areas

The Thunderers claimed dominion over Čappini, earlier known as Kakpoko. These people hated the Thunder and Crystal parties alike, however, and preferred to isolate themselves even though they were surrounded. The Thunderers also claimed dominion over the Lenians living to the north of Čappini, holdouts from Meromo, although the people here did not think of themselves as a unit because some of them supported the Thunderers while others did not.

There were also Lenian colonies in Mevumep, whose income averaged only 1.3% of Dreamland's.

Time Passes Slowly

This nation was founded by FILTER. In TPS, the laws were codified upon the founding of the nation, and one of those laws was that no changes could be made to any laws for the first 2500 years of the nation's existence.

The climate here was very cold, and upon its founding, still contained many glaciers. The land had actually not been conquered yet at the time of the founding, but since it was so cold, the Filterers knew that they could move in and face no organized opposition from the Naman aboriginals.

AlphaLeap

AlphaLeap claimed to have fully submitted to the Crystals, and therefore the internal government of AlphaLeap was dissolved and replaced with a Crystal-like setup. But, informal ties remained, and its traditionally ally, Wax, rarely acted without AlphaLeap's express permission.

States of Atlam

Atlam was originally 11 states.

Evil Eye

Located in the tropics, near Atlam.

Stepstone

A very small island with a very small population. They used their location to command outsize influence in maritime trade, like AlphaLeap, but even so, their navy was so small that outside powers could obey or disobey the Stoners with little consequence.

The Shadows

A Naman nation that had allied with Kava early on, and thus ended up winning the Oyster War while the rest of Nama got invaded.

Later history

Lenian slave population growth

Taryte had not traditionally been a democracy, but when they joined the Crystal Empire, they were forced to allow their citizens to vote, and to take frequent censuses of their population so they could appoint the proper number of representatives to represent each group of voters. As in the rest of the Empire, legislation was passed by representatives whose voting power in Parliament was determined by the number of people in their party. Even slaves were allowed to vote; most slaves in Taryte were Lenians who were assigned to the Diver party (DIP). The Divers' representatives assumed that all Divers would oppose slavery and therefore did not ask their members their opinions on this; they also assumed that the abolition of slavery would be the single most important issue for all Divers. Thus, at each session of Parliament, the Diver representatives simply presented a bloc vote for the abolition of slavery and abstained from most other questions. But they had always been outvoted by the pro-slavery parties, and therefore slavery continued.

The census of 3625 showed that the Diver population had reached the tens of thousands, and that their share of the population was growing. There were also many thousands of free Lenians: some were escaped slaves, and some had moved to Taryte to work in paid labor even though they knew Taryte applied harsher punishments for crimes if the perpetrator was Lenian, and that merely by living there they were at risk of becoming enslaved. Most of these people also supported the Diver party, and as the Lenian population grew, the Tarises became worried that the Divers would soon vote themselves into freedom and their masters into slavery.

In 3626, an alliance of militants calling themselves the Shoe party (Kaxaràṭa; also known as KYR) formed and pushed for the abolition of slavery, but also the expulsion of the entire Lenian population into any nations that would accept them. The Shoes were very similar in ideology to the much older Stump party, but there was no continuity, as the Stumps had been founded in the 2160s and had survived only a few generations.

The Shoes claimed the Lenians by nature were impulsive and violent, yet physically frail and unwilling to organize in their own defense. They pointed out that Taryte's farmers had been enslaving the Lenians for more than 1,200 years but had never suffered an organized revolt. However, the slaves had revolted in the past when the Crystal army had been able to help them.

Because expelling the slaves entailed freeing the slaves, many Lenian slaves defected from the hapless Diver party and joined the Shoes, although the Shoes warned them that they would not abolish slavery until the entire Lenian population had been expelled. Free Lenians generally still supported the Diver party.

Centennial revolt

In 3665, a band of female Crystal military leaders from Amade sent their troops to attack the Sapeepan city of Gahʷăla, and proclaimed it a new independent nation for Crystals only. The women banded together and proclaimed that they should be given control of all available land, and that they would bring safety to all of the 200,000 or so people living in the Lantern Empire, not just to themselves. These Crystals called themselves Hilites because they had originated from an army that had obeyed a commander named Hīli.

The Hilites believed that the best soldiers were people who were trained as soldiers from early childhood. They compared themselves to the lazy, pathetic people of Dreamland, which was a country much richer than any other, yet had no military and was overwhelmed with crime. Hilite children were so strictly supervised that there was virtually no crime at all.

The Hilites were ethnically Baeban, but they taught their children three different languages: Xap (descended from native Baeba), Asup (an ancient language from pre-Vora Tarwas, spoken in a few areas that the Tars had fled to in 2998), and proto-Moonshine (from Moonshine). Asup and Moonshine were very complex languages, and were completely pure, with no loanwords; Xap was much simpler and was impure, with many loanwords. They spoke Xap only for convenience, saying that the other two were inspired by God and were more fit for anyone, even children, than Xap. They also said that anyone who learned to speak either Moonshine or Asup would be purified by it, and thus discarded the idea held by some other nations that their languages could only be spoken by pure people.

The population of Lanitta grew very quickly, much faster than those of any of the nations hostile to Lanitta. Thus they figured that the time for war would soon come.

In 3665, the Hilites banded together and took control of Gahʷăla, a small piece of land near the geographical center of the southern part of the Empire. They then chased out all the non-Crystals and proclaimed themselves an independent republic, and invited in anyone who wanted to escape the chaos of the surrounding Lantern government to come live in peace under the Hilites.

Though the locals vastly outnumbered the invaders, they were unprepared for battle, and suffered many casualties. Furthermore, the government refused to allow the locals to kill the invaders, instead simply pushing them back into Amade.

But they were surprised at what happened next; people poured in by the hundreds, but they came heavily armed and they ruthlessly attacked the Hilites. The resulting Battle of Gahʷăla was the longest and hardest the Hilites had yet fought, and their troop barely survived long enough to retreat back southward.

Afterward, the Hilites became very weak. Even so, many Thunderers felt sympathy for the women, and did not chase them back into Amade.

Star uprising of 3696

In 3696, the Shoe army seceded from Lyihēs and invaded the pacifist nation of Sapeepa. The leaders prohibited enslavement of Lenians and promised to enslave only their own supporters in the future. They instituted universal prostitution for all adult females, although the women were not paid for their services. Education was prohibited, and all children were forced to perform heavy manual labor. They warned the locals that their new colony was intended to expand rapidly and that they would soon need to take over most of Sapeepa's farmland.

Within months of the invasion, a team of Shoes abducted locals and forced them into slavery. The mainline Shoe faction expelled these people from the colony, but they could not track down all of the violators. The violators called themselves Stars (Xṅtăxʷu; also known as XNT) and they dispersed further into Sapeepa as the colony's army prepared itself for an attack from Lyihēs, which had declared war on both the Shoes and the Stars.

In 3700, as the Shoe army expanded its control over Sapeepa's land, Sapeepa signed a pact called the Thunderstorm Treaty which committed itself to an alliance with the Shoes and declared the Shoes' new settlements to be legitimate.

Restoration of the Star Empire

In 3704, the Stars launched an all-out assault on Sapeepa's population, but Sapeepa's pacifist government still refused to mobilize its military, forcing the civilians to fight the soldiers on their own. The civilians eventually won, but they could not hunt down all of the rebels, and therefore the Stars prepared for a second attack. In 3707, the Stars sent out a much stronger force and captured Sapeepa's capital city. They declared that occupied Sapeepa was the Third Star Empire,and that they would soon move back to the tropics to occupy their original homeland as well. The Stars thus ignored the claims of the much earlier Merari tribes who had claimed to have set up the Third Star Empire a millennium earlier.

The Stars restored the original way of life that Taryte had followed before the Shoe invasion, but yet they were hostile to Taryte because Taryte was cooperating with the wider Crystal Empire and allowed slaves to vote. By contrast, the Stars had never allowed slaves to vote, and therefore there was no need for Star leaders to worry about a peaceful overthrow of their government.

In 3710, resistance to the Star occupation grew, but the Star army was very strong by this time. The Lenians in LAD pulled their army out of Sapeepa because they considered the Stars' war to be a good thing even though the Stars had killed more Lenians than Crystals. Some LAD members even submitted to Star control, since the Stars had promised to spare Lenians who betrayed other Lenians. Thus LAD's original plan to confine all dark-skinned people to the tropics was defeated. However, LAD's soldiers also killed Crystals, and both the Crystals and the Lenians outside Sapeepa declared war on the Star-LAD alliance and promised to someday reclaim Sapeepa.

Etatani

In the early 3710s, the dictator of Etatăni, Mīžìpa, invited the Raspara tribe to move into his nation, but the Raspara leaders refused because they knew from third-party sources that Mīžìpa was secretly hostile to Hōmoya, which was more powerful and had also invited Raspara settlement.

In 3719, Mīžìpa launched an illegal war against Hōmoya and focused his attacks on women and children. Like LAD, he believed that feminism had made the Empire weak and hoped that military supremacy could be recovered by killing the women who were keeping men from going to war. His army slaughtered many of the weak, unprotected citizens of Hōmoya, but because he had little support from the wider Empire, an opposing coalition army emerged within months and pushed him back into Etatăni, where his own people then executed him.

War of 3785

The Crystals in Baeba declared war on all Lenian nations in 3785 and cut through Lenian territory in a rapid march towards Blop. They pushed the Stars out of Sapeepa but chose not to invade the tropical lowlands where most Stars now lived. Thus the ancient border between Amade and Tarise was now the border between the Crystal and Star Empires.

The Crystals signed a pact with AlphaLeap after they had won their war. The census of 3785 recorded a mere 2,000 citizens, compared with 500,000 in Dreamland. But the Crystal census did not cover most of the barren areas.

War of 3844

Dreamland invaded the Crystals' occupied territory and pushed the Crystals out of Treehouse territory. Additionally, they conquered much of the Crystals' original territory. A band of Lenians called the Soap Bubbles sided with the Crystals and fled into the remaining Crystal territory. The Dreamers did not conquer the Crystal capital city of Baeba Swamp, even though it bordered directly on Dreamland and was vulnerable to invasion from the mountains, because the Crystals chose to defend Baeba at all costs even as they lost important geographical connections between Baeba and their ancient homelands in the equatorial zone. They retained contact by sea.

The Soap Bubbles living in Crystal territory maintained an independent military and lived in undesirable territory so that the Crystals would not attack them. Despite being a much smaller party, their military soon came to rival the Crystals'.

War of 3884

The Thunderers revolted against the Dreamers in 3884, and quickly won their independence.

Thunder reforms

In 3884, the Thunder Empire established racial discrimination and enslaved all Crystals. Crystals were denied the ability to convert to Thunderism, and thus could not buy their way out of slavery. Furthermore, they passed a law forbidding the immigration of any person with dark skin, even those who claimed allegiance to the Thunder party, as the Thunderers intended to keep their vast empire racially homogeneous.

The Thunderers claimed they were morally superior for enslaving the Crystals, as they pointed out that in the past, enemy tribes such as the Stars had not enslaved Thunderers, but rather killed them. They claimed that the Stars were a wing of the Crystal party, which was in fact technically true, but the Thunderers ignored that the Crystal and Star parties had been separate for thousands of years.

Furthermore, the Thunderers pointed out that the Crystals had invaded them without provocation in 3785, and occupied Thunder territory for sixty years, whereas no Thunderers had ever invaded Crystal territory or that of any of the Crystals' allies. They claimed that they would therefore punish the Crystals with slavery.

Many Crystals in Baeba Swamp established peace with the Thunderers, as the ruling faction in Baeba had distanced itself from the crimes of the earlier occupiers, and many Baeban Crystals even agreed that the descendants of the occupiers deserved to be enslaved. But others set up a deal in which Crystals would buy slaves from the Thunderers and then release them in Baeba to become normal citizens. Thus, they planned to ensure the Crystal slave population in the Thunder Empire would decline over time even as the Thunderers bred slaves to produce more slaves.

Crystals in Lypelpyp

See STW.

In 3915, several hundred Crystals illegally migrated from the Crystal state of Yīspʷilinâ to the Thunder city of Lypelpyp. Lypelpyp was near the western border of the Thunder Empire, and easily accessible from Yīspʷilinâ, but distant and not easily reached from the Thunder Empire's major population centers in the east. Soon, more waves of Crystal settlers followed the roads up from their homeland and settled in Lypelpyp.

Within months, the city of Lypelpyp was divided equally between the illegal Crystals and the local Thunderers upset that their government had refused to send its army to protect Lypelpyp from the Crystal invasion, or even help them put the Crystals into slavery. After attempting to fend off the Crystals on their own, the Thunderers suffered a disastrous loss in the Battle of Lypelpyp and surrendered their city to Crystal control.

However, the conquering Crystals quickly became peaceful; they chose to live in Lypelpyp as though it were just another Crystal city that happened to be outside the borders of their Empire, and treated the Thunderers as welcome neighbors. Yet the total lack of resistance from the Thunder military told the Crystals that the Thunderers' promise to protect the borders of their empire was a lie, and that further Crystal penetration was possible.

The Crystals in Lypelpyp soon revealed that they were not Crystals at all, but employees of a corporation named Save the World (STW), whose employees were required to drop all outside party allegiances. STW had its own army, which quickly seized control of the only trade route between Baeba Swamp and the Thunder Empire, and therefore controlled traffic in both directions.

Birth of the Moonshines

See Proto-Moonshine culture.

In August 3948, a group of Crystals announced the formation of a new political party, the Moonshine party. Like the mainline Crystals had done thousands of years before, the Moonshines considered themselves feministic pacifists, and stated that they would ensure the survival of their people by practicing feminine diplomacy and refusing to engage in warfare, even in self-defense. The Moonshines were far more strict than the mainline Crystals in their definitions of feminism in pacifism, and claimed that the Crystals were scarcely different from their enemies in this regard.

Meanwhile in Baeba Swamp, the local Crystals came to reject the Moonshines and came to call themselves the Rocks, saying that they were what was left of the Crystals when all of the shine had been removed. They still allowed the Moonshines to call themselves Crystals, however, and invited the Moonshines to send representatives to Baeba's Parliament, but Moonshine replied that they refused to participate in any government which included males, even at low-level positions.

War with Laba

Another new party called the Fairies rose to power in the Thunder Empire at this time. In 3952, the Feminist War Council, the highest military authority in the Thunder Empire, came to have a Fairy majority. The Fairies then voted to exclude the Crystal Empire from the territory that they were willing to defend, and therefore they ceded the Crystals to the invading army from western Dreamland, led by a man named Ntampamwa (Adabawa).

Further Crystal split

Some Crystals living along the Oyster Coast, far out of reach of the Dreamers, formed a new wing of the party called the Phoenixes.

Anzan

A series of empires rose and fell in the vast eastern expanse of the continent, which came to be called the Anchor Empire, while the Crystals held onto power in Baeba and gained back lost territory in the tropics. By 4149, little had changed in Baeba, but the ruling power in the Anchor Empire was a tribe in Paba calling itself the Paaapa, who belonged to a party called the Tinks.

The Battle of the Sexes

Less than a year after Anzan affirmed its role as the legally recognized guarantor of the Anchor Empire, a fifth civil war erupted. This time it came from women and girls who objected to the treatment they were given by the all-male government that the Tinkers had established. The Tinkers believed that feminism made men weak, and that weak, submissive men were responsible for the many humiliating invasions of their territory over the last 400 years. Although many men in Anzan considered themselves at peace with their wives, the Tinks actually set up meetings for men where the men who had not yet beaten their wives into complete submission would be beaten by those who had.

The feminist Andanese rebels were helpless to attack the Tinkers, but promised that they would win in the end because they knew that all babies, even boys, needed soft women to survive, and the more the Tinks oppressed them the less soft they would get. They drew depictions of themselves with all the curves of their bodies replaced by sharp corners, saying that, even though they were still female and thus still physically soft and weak, their minds were dangerous, and they would find a way to ensure, metaphorically, that any man who touched them would be cut by their firm, sharp bodies. They promised that there would soon be a Milk War (mama yas) in Anzan, and the winners of the war would be women.

Foundation of the Female Party

The women announced the creation of a new political party they called simply the Female Party (tuepas bisuap), and they began to refer to the Tinkers as the Male Party (nup tuepus bisuap). They said that because their nation was a democracy, they could seize power nonviolently simply by convincing all of the females in Anzan to vote for them, since in Anzan, females outnumbered males by a significant margin. They claimed that although they did not want to oppress males, the sex ratio in their nation meant that any just government would give females more power than males. As for their own membership, they welcomed males into their party, and told male members that young, single men who voted Female would be able to marry multiple Females at once and be sure that their wives would not cheat on them. Thus, the Females endorsed polygamy, but only if the husband was pro-Female.

Female Party Platform

The Females promised that they would govern their nation according to feminist principles, which to them included a pledge to resist using violence. Even though they lived in a very violent nation in the most violent time period the world had yet known, they said, they would achieve victory entirely by resisting that violence and uniting their people under the power of pacifism. They said that if members of the Male Party attacked them, they would not fight back, and said that they would be sure to achieve victory in the end because they would attract most of the female population into their movement, and they knew that the Males could not run a nation with no female population, or even one in which females were massively outnumbered by males, without facing a steep population decline.

Allegiance to the Crystals

In the end the Tinkers surrendered, thus violating their promise to never deviate from their original philosophy. The victorious all-female rebels renamed themselves the Crystals (Šinap), saying that all other parties were false and that only they were the true Crystals. (They did not know the ideology of Baeba's Rock party, but said that any Crystal party led by men was not really Crystal.) Thus the oppression of women stopped, and the entire government was opened up to the Crystal leaders.

Once the Crystals became a majority in the new government, they repudiated their parent party's pacifist platform, saying that their new allegiance to the Crystals had superseded their allegiance to the feministic principle of power through peace. They declared that the predicted Milk War had begun.

The Milk War

Immediately the Crystals ordered all Tink governors to kill themselves and turn over their weapons to the girls.

Facing death either way, enough Tinks complied with the Crystals' orders to put the power of authority firmly in their hands. The new Crystals were almost completely uneducated, and they had no plan for their government. Weeks later, they were attacked by the Tinks.

Third Anchor Empire

Immediately the Tinks ordered the killing of all "Crystals" and the return of absolute power to the Tinks. They did, however, allow the very few pro-Tink women to have some power in their new government, which they called the Third Anchor Empire. That is, the Tinks saw their internal government reforms as events equivalent to the violent overthrows of the much larger empires that had ruled their territory in the past.

Threats to eliminate males

But within a few weeks, the Crystals convinced the Tinks they had found a way to turn all babies into girls and thus deprive the nation of its entire male population. The Tinks realized they had been defeated once again, and swapped all their power to the Crystals.

Crystals regain power

The Crystals took power once again, but they could not understand exactly what it was they needed to do to keep the nation working. They had thought that the governors simply gave orders and watched their workers follow the orders. This had been true during parts of the Vaamūan era, when their empire had been richer, but it was true no longer. The Tink governors in fact had worked even harder than the workers themselves; the Crystals had mostly never had power. So they surrendered power to the Tinks, who granted them total control of "women's needs", and partial control over some of the rest of the roughly 150,000 people still surviving in Anzan. They even allowed the girls to have some ability in the newly founded Fourth Anchor Empire to recall the Tinks themselves, because they were afraid that a new revolt was about to happen anyway.

Fourth Anchor Empire

This time the Tinks wasted no time in getting their agenda accomplished. They were running out of weapons, but they figured they still had enough to kill off all of their enemies. They had planned to kill all non-Tinks in the entire country, except for the Crystals. But they had to settle for instead going after only the Crystals, which they immediately set forth to do. The Crystals protested that most of them were females, and if the Tinks killed all the Crystals, then they wouldn't have enough women left to marry. This confused the Tinks, and some of them protested the killing of the girls, but the other Tinks reassured them that what they were doing was right. The Tink commanders told their soldiers to kill their own wives and daughters, promising them that there would always remain enough women in their nation for all the men to start new families. The only women they promised to let live were those who pledged loyalty to the Tinks, and these women could only do so by agreeing to be carried off to a temporary slave camp operated by the male Tink leaders.

Because the Tinks valued obedience to authority even above loyalty to their families, the soldiers largely did as they were told, and killed their wives while they were asleep the next night. As for those who refused, they came home the day after the command had been issued and found that their wives and daughters had instead been killed by other Tinks. The massacre happened very quickly: because the girls were unarmed and could not defend themselves, nearly the entire population was killed within a single day, and the rest had been wounded and captured by the Tink leaders.

Soon, however, the Tink leaders realized that they had a population problem. Most of the men had killed their wives in this battle, and those who were unmarried had killed other men's wives. As they buried their dead, the Tinks realized they had made a dangerous mistake: They had killed so many women that their population was now mostly male. They thus realized that the Crystals had been correct all along that a nation needed a female population in order to survive; now that the Tinks had killed off all of their girls, they had nobody left to give birth to the next generation of Tinks. The Tink leaders apologized for killing all of the wives and daughters of their soldiers, and promised to find a solution to their population problem as soon as possible.

So the Tinks decided to start killing young boys; they wanted to completely wipe out the population of Anzan and start completely over again. So the Tinks, with virtually no opposition, attacked and killed all of the unarmed babies and young children that they could find. (They also killed some Raspara living in the wilderness that had been surviving by eating Andanese people.) One week later, only the Tink leaders, the captured female Crystals, and a small population of babies that they had decided to save remained alive in Anzan. At least the Tinks realized that they would have plenty of food for awhile, although there were virtually no workers left.

The Tinks realized they needed to increase their population madly to avoid an invasion. Some female Crystals had only been severely wounded, but not killed, in the battle, and some of these were still alive a few weeks later as the Tinks began to rethink their population policy. Soon, the Tinks established a power-sharing agreement with the wounded Crystals, and they came to call both the girls and themselves Crystals. "Breasts" (a wave pattern with dots in the center of each wave) were added to the flag to show that their new empire was run by both sides of the family.

Volcano War

The Zeniths did not see themselves as immoral. They claimed to be the only party that was willing to adopt the seemingly futile plan of placing Andanese land back into Repilian hands, as even the Repilians' traditional allies now were based in areas that had once been Repilian, and were unwilling to give away their own homelands to help mend the historical injustices of the many wars against the Repilians. Although ethnic conflicts had mostly stopped, and Repilians were thus welcomed as ethnic minorities nearly everywhere, the Repilians really wanted a state of their own, as they had had many experiences with supposedly cooperative societies in which they were inevitably abused and sometimes even killed by their supposed allies.

By contrast, the Zeniths had never had a nation of their own, and thus, if they won, the territories they were signing away to Repilian ownership would be those taken from the Zenith's enemies. Thus, the Zeniths had no reason to betray the Repilians. Even though the Zeniths believed in many ideas most Repilians did not support, and the Zenith leadership was transnational and thus mostly non-Repilian, they had the advantage of ethnic loyalty from the Repilians and believed that this power base would never betray them simply because they had nowhere else to go.

When the Raspara realized that the Swampies had surrendered to the Matrixes and Crystals in order to focus on the Zenith, they were relieved. They realized that they could, yet again, plan out a new war against the Swamp Kids from the comfort of the Swamp Kids' heartlands, surrounded in all directions by surprisingly poorly equipped Swampy battalions who were seemingly too afraid to attempt a squeeze attack. They considered an attack on the Swamp Kids purely to test just how weak the Swamp Kids were. If the Swamp army surrounding their illegal occupation army was paper-thin, the Raspara figured, they could start their new civil war immediately.

However, the Raspara were now quite weak, and were surviving mainly because they had built a series of forts in the wilderness which made them appear to be mostly intact despite the massive losses during the previous war. They no longer had a significant population of Swampy slaves in their forts. The commanders thus figured a war without waiting would be unwise. They contemplated mending their relations with the Matrix, as they had offended the Matrix leaders during their four-month occupation of Sala by giving the Matrix no power. But the Raspara leadership still believed that the Matrixes were incompetent, and refused to make an alliance, knowing that because the Matrixes were for the meantime actually far more powerful than the Raspara, the Matrixes would be in control of the alliance and could potentially waste the entire Raspara army in a useless battle.

Contact with the Soap

Since the Swamp Kids had needed the help of outside powers just to recover control of their own capital city, the other minority armies decided that the Swampy Empire might not last much longer, and decided to fight over pieces of Swamp land that had not yet been claimed by any other power. They thus were repeating yet again the destruction of Nama and of Paba, both of which had been large empires that were torn to pieces in their last days by much stronger outside armies. With the Raspara in hiding, and the Swamp Kids seemingly unable to assert their own interests, the four major players in the next phase of the war were the Crystals, the Soap Bubbles, the Matrixes, and the Zenith.

Soapy foreign policy

By this time, the Soap Bubbles had turned against their old allies, the Crystals, and because they had always maintained an independent military, they now sent out their army against the Crystals.

The new war was seen by many parties as a continuation of the Volcano War. The Zenith had not been invited to sign the Treaty of 4186, and had continued fighting as if nothing had happened.

The Raspara had signed the treaty, but considered it unfair. They promised that, as they had so many times in the past, they would respect that they had formally surrendered but were in reality simply moving to the wilderness to build up their army in preparation for their next battle. Their objective in the Pempsa War was the same as their objective in the Volcano War: to spill themselves all over the place, ruining everything they touched, and watching their enemies, even the Matrix, flee from them in all directions. But they realized that they were no longer a major player in the war.

The Swamp Kids also considered the treaty unfair, as it showed that they had yet again won a major war but been forced to immediately make humiliating concessions to the armies they had formally defeated. They too considered the war to be ongoing, partly because the Zenith had never stopped sniping at them, and partly because they wanted to once and for all free all of the Swamp Kids held as slaves by other armies, particularly the Matrix but also the Raspara.

Nevertheless, the Swamp Kids were no longer respected by the majority of their enemies, and even though Anzan was still officially governed entirely by the Swamp Kids, the major players in the Pempsa War decided to entirely ignore the helpless Swamp Kids and fight the war amongst themselves.

Failure of alliances

Throughout most of history, most wars had been fought between two opposing sides. With a large number of mutually hostile armies inhabiting and fighting over the same territory, military strategists in Anzan expected alliances to quickly form among these groups, thus creating a traditional a two-sided war, perhaps with the Matrixes on one side and all three others on the opposite side; or with the Matrixes and the Zenith crushing the opposing Crystals and Soap, then turning against each other; but paranoia was so widespread among these groups (with the partial exception of the Zenith) that any alliances formed were soon dissolved, and each group often was forced to choose which enemy to focus on in battle.

This was the first time in the Soap Bubbles' history of over 340 years that they had become a major independent player in a war. Previously, they had been famous for their nonviolence, although they were careful to avoid officially endorsing pacifism, knowing that too much pacifism had brought down the major empire of Paba. When they had been forced to fight, it had previously been in a coalition with another, larger army, usually the Crystals. Some Soapies had moved into Crystal territory in the past and had become well-respected there even though they were closely related to the hated Thunderers who had, in turn, later spawned the Raspara and the Matrix.

Some outside armies claimed that the only reason the Soap Bubbles had such a clean record is that they had never in their entire history ever achieved power; they were founded in 3842 during a time when they were not only losing a major war against Dreamland, but felt betrayed by even the majority of their own countrymen in the Thunder Empire because the mainstream Thunderers had signed a surrender treaty whereas the Soap Bubbles did not want to give up. Many Soap Bubbles actually moved into the territory of their previous oppressors, the Crystals, saying that they would rather be oppressed by Crystals than by Dreamers. The Crystals at this time had considered the Soap Bubbles and the Thunderers to be the same, as the only difference between the two was that one had surrendered to the Dreamers and the other had not, and therefore considered the Soap Bubbles an underclass.

However, they soon became allies and the Crystals increased the civil rights of the Bubbles living in Crystal-held territory. This caused most of the other Thunderers that had been living in Crystal land to also convert to the Soap party, washing their hands of their previous misdeeds and their long-standing feud with the Crystals. Many of these Soap Bubbles had descendants that were still living in Crystal territory 200 years later when most of it became part of Anzan. On the other hand, the Bubbles had been mostly destroyed in the areas of Anzan that had been their original homelands, since the mainstream Thunder party did not grant them any power in their government when they overthrew the Dreamers. Neither did the Raspara who descended from the Thunderers, nor the Matrixes who descended from the Raspara. Thus, the Soap Bubbles were strongest in the far west, in historically Crystal territory. Being a minority, they had always emphasized the need to prepare themselves for a war despite being traditionally nonviolent, and thus were actually, per capita, both better armed and better educated about military strategy than the Crystals. Thus, they were better soldiers than the Crystals. Nevertheless, the similarity in political ideals between the Soap and the Crystals led many Bubbles to convert to Crystalism over the years, and few the other way around, so the Crystals far outnumbered the Bubbles, and by 4186 both the Crystals and the Bubbles were quite weak.

Crystals make peace

The Crystals and the Soap, being weak, were frequent targets of both the larger groups and each other; but by late 4186, less than ten years after the chaotic "rectangle war" had coalesced, the Crystals announced they wanted to make peace with the Soap Bubbles and the Matrix so they could focus entirely on the Zenith. The Soap Bubbles agreed to the truce, thus restoring the original alliance they had made with the Crystals three hundred years earlier.

But the Matrixes grew suspicious and, despite the fact that they had also been focusing chiefly on the Zenith, they now turned against the Crystals as well. However, the Soapies responded to their treaty with the Crystals by offering to make one with the Matrix, and the Matrix agreed. So now, the Matrix was fighting the Crystals and the Zenith; the Crystals were fighting the Matrix and the Zenith; the Bubbles were fighting only the Zenith; and the Zenith was fighting everybody. The Matrix revoked their feud with the Crystals and pledged to help them against the Zenith, so now the Matrix, the Crystals, and the Soap were united against the Zenith. After about two years of more organized (but just as brutal) fighting, in 4188, the Zenith were driven into a position comparable to that the Crystals had occupied thirteen years before.

However, the Matrix then realized that the Crystals had in fact agreed to the truces only for their own sake; they had reaped nearly all the benefits, for they were well aware of the fact that the Matrixes would much rather support the Crystals than the Soap, and that any land the Zenith lost would likely go to the Crystals rather than the Soap, as there were far more Crystals than Soap Bubbles. (As the fighting against the Zenith continued, the Crystals were able to develop their weapons technology to the point where they were as strong, per capita, as the Bubbles. This was possible because in the truce they had implied that weapons secrets would be shared between the two groups so as to make them both stronger. Most Bubbles, however, at first dismissed rumors that the Crystals were being insincere in their truces.)

The Bubbles recoiled in shock as the Crystals, now second in power only to the Matrix, renounced all its peace treaties and focused on fighting all three groups once again. (They realized that all three groups would hate them, so they could not focus only on the Matrix (their most powerful enemy) and thus secure a stronghold as the dominant power, because the Soap Bubbles would come to rival them if they did not abrogate the peace treaty and refuse to share their technology with the Soap. Similarly, they could not pretend peace with the Matrix and try to gain their weapons technology because the suspicious Matrixes would reiterate that they refused to share their technology, which was still greater than that of any of the other three groups. Thus, the Crystals had choice between remaining in a delicate position as a junior ally of the Matrix and trying to gain the senior position themselves.)

Thus, the war suddenly shifted against the Crystals. The Matrix hated the Crystals and the Zenith about equally now, but they had become closer to the Crystals due to increased support for the Crystals living outside the shell of Anzan. (The Matrix also were active abroad, because they were so closely related to groups such as the powerful Neamakists in Aboa.)^{OR DREAMLAND!!!!} Thus, the Matrix agreed to sign a secret peace treaty with the Crystals wherein they would agree to make it seem as though they were still enemies, and still fight each other, but in reality they would be deliberately trying to make the casualties as few and far between as possible. In fact, they agreed that those who would die in Matrix v. Crystal battles would be those people who were the least valuable, whether it be because they were poor soldiers or because they were suspected dissenters or double agents.) This peace treaty was indeed unknown to the other two groups, and thus the Soap continued to focus its attacks far more on the Crystals than on the Matrix. The Zenith did likewise, and thus the Crystals, the weaker of the two groups, were forced to bear the brunt of the devastation in battle. However, the Matrix then made their secret treaty public and stopped attacking the Crystal altogether, so that they could focus more on the Zenith and the Bubbles. The Bubbles, meanwhile, flatly refused the Zenith's olive branch petition of early 4192, and focused their attacks more on the Bubbles^{typo for Zenith?!?!?!?} than the Crystal-Matrix. Thus, a three-sided war still existed; the Crystal and Matrix were united (for the time) on one side, but the Soap and the Zenith were still arch-enemies. In fact, the Soap stated they would sooner ally with the Crystal-Matrix than the Zenith. All in all, thus, the Zenith was still the worst off of the four groups.

Rapala

Life in Baeba

Over the next two years, the Swampies fought back against STW and the Matrixes for control of Rapala, but kept losing. Many Swamp Kids fled to Baeba Swamp and used Dolls as soldiers to gain protection from their enemies. But the Matrixes continued to win, and their society with its new milder slave labor was very productive, competitive even with STW.

The Zeniths, who had been thrown out of power in Baeba, signed an alliance with the Swamp Kids combining all their efforts in destroying the new STW-Matrix coalition government of Rapala. The Zeniths seceded from Rapala, and stopped paying taxes even though they still continued to use the nation's public services.

Lanīs and the richest of the people of Base 44 had moved to a new base, 257, in Baeba Swamp. The Zeniths owned the land that STW Base 257 relied on, so STW Base 257 was now almost completely cut off from its allies in Rapala, and they had little power there. The Zeniths were entirely against STW now, and they focused their attacks more on STW than on the Matrixes. Soon they had almost completely destroyed STW in Baeba, and only Base 257 (the strongest base) remained there. Lanīs realized Base 257 was in danger, so she suddenly fled with Base 257 and all of its members to the western part of Rapala. She rebuilt all the buildings in the wilderness. She also established forts in Lobexon, which was cooperating with STW. The Matrixes promised to defend STW during the war, because they knew that STW was largely responsible for their own existence. Base 257 also built a nation of its own in the rainforest, in case it might become necessary to flee Rapala altogether.

In spring 4197, the Zeniths defeated STW and the Matrixes. But, in an ironic twist of fate, they seemed to be unable to subdue their enemies. STW and the Matrixes emerged from the war even stronger than before, while the Zeniths were weakened by the war. Rapala continued to get richer each year until late 4197.

In late 4197, the Matrixes had secured power for themselves, and no longer had to fight off the Swamp Kids. The Matrixes made a truce with STW, promising that they would not attack each other. Once the Matrixes were safe, they became far more corrupt than had been the Swampies. They went back to true slave labor, saying that it was after all the superior system.

The Matrixes' only fear was slaves they could not control. They wanted to make sure that there was nothing anyone could do that the Matrixes could not. To make themselves feel safe among Rapala's population of "polluted" people, the Matrixes killed people that they felt were unclean, and they violently abused those who were clean.

The Matrixes merged their slave pools into a single group they called Mumpum. (They had planned to use the name Mampum, but they changed it to Mumpum.) The Mumpum were very easy to exploit and abuse in large numbers, and even STW captured a lot of Mumpum slaves and made them work for STW. Thus, the only people who were safe were the Matrixes and the people in STW, who had made a promise to attack only Mumpums, and never each other. (The Rasparas had almost completely disappeared by this time, although many Rasparas had joined STW or signed contracts with STW and thus stealthily caused STW to become mostly pro-Raspara.) Thus, every Matrix was guaranteed his own safety. Moonshine realized that the Swamp Kids had definitely been the lesser of the two evils. Moonshine got very angry at the Matrix for abandoning its promises and did not know what to do. They wanted to continue to send in more laborers to try to keep the Rapalan economy going, but realized that they could no longer support Rapala because of its corrupt government. Instead, they began to prepare their people for war against Rapala, hoping that with their own form of free labor they could overcome Rapala's military and restore Rapala to a less perverse system of government.

Zenith enters the war

The Zeniths decided that their only hope lay in breaking the fragile bond between the Crystals and the Matrix. The Matrix had sincerely agreed, to the surprise of all, to release all Crystals and Bubbles from its slave pools, and hand over its weapons secrets to the Crystals and Bubbles. They were afraid of the Swamp Kids, and they felt they would be better off by far in a world run by the Crystals than a world run by the Swamp Kids. Soon the Crystals became almost as strong as the Matrix. The Crystals were thus in 2nd place in terms of military strength. The Zenith was 4th, and they hoped that if they could ally themselves with the greatest power (Matrix), they would be able to secure a position like that enjoyed by the Crystals, while the Crystals, as their true enemies, would be reduced once again to the helplessness that they had just recently escaped. The Bubbles, meanwhile, would be killed altogether by the combined Matrix-Zenith. The Zenith realized its plan was unlikely to happen, but figured they would all lose anyway if they didn't act, so they put their plan into effect.

The first thing they did was to protest against the Crystals. In this grossly violent time, any sincere protest was expected to be followed up by military action, so the Zenith announced that they were going to attack the Crystals (not the Matrix), and try to kill as many of them as possible before they themselves were defeated. They stated that they knew they couldn't do it, and they pretended to collapse early on and sent out an apparently sincere peace treaty to the Matrixes, asking them to reject the Crystals and instead fight them. The Matrixes refused, and crushed the Zenith completely by December 4198. They retook Baeba, and STW Base 257 moved back into the Swamp.

Matrixes grow

Still, the situation improved gradually over the next two years. The Matrixes apologized for their misdeeds (their party was fragmented; kinder people got into power) and began to try to help the Crystals and Bubbles become stronger so that they would not have to always fear a takeover by the Matrix. But in late 4198, the Matrixes decided to abandon Moonshine and break their promises once again. This time, they passed a law stating that all people, no matter what race or league they belonged to, were to be seen simply as slaves for the Matrixes, who had declared themselves to be above all others. The Matrixes' new law also stated that they could do absolutely anything they wanted to with the slaves, so long as the Matrixes did not attack each other. They abused the slaves so badly that Moonshine began sending its people on very dangerous rescue missions to bring Dolls to safety in Moonshine. The Matrixes thus revived their war against the Crystals and Bubbles, but because they had just recently been helping the Crystals and Bubbles become stronger, their opponents were significantly tougher than they had been just a few years earlier, and the Matrixes were afraid that they might all be killed by the Dolls they were attempting to enslave. Many Matrixes began to switch parties in order to escape their coming doom. Most of these became Crystals. The Crystals exalted these people and protected them better than they protected their original members, but even so the Matrix army was eager to kill any defectors, and they often focused their energies especially on Matrix traitors.

Moonshine coalition army

In fall 4199, the pacifist empire of Moonshine declared war on the Matrix, and began sending their surprisingly powerful armies into Rapala to attack the Matrix. Their armies were so powerful because they had the help of many other nations, who were eager to destroy the Matrix's slave empire. However, the war actually created some allies for the Matrix, because these allies knew that if Moonshine won the war, then the Swamp Kids could later could re-emerge as a powerful threat to their nations.

Matrix-Raspara relations

Yet the Matrixes themselves revived many of the Swamp Kids' abusive policies, policies that the slaves of Rapala all hated and that Rasparas and STW members now hid from in fear. Life for Dolls got worse and worse until it improved slightly around Jan 4200 due to a truce that STW, which had begun winning battles, had forced the Matrix to sign. But in Jan 4200, the situation got much worse when the Matrixes took even another step downward and committed themselves to an alliance with the Rasparas. They legalized Rasparism in Baeba Swamp, and welcomed Rasparas who wanted to ally themselves with a winning power and still be able to practice Rasparism. But most Rasparas wanted nothing to do with the Matrix government; everyone was against them now.

Many Dolls tried to flee to Hōkī to escape what had become everyday life in Rapala. The Matrixes (who had been taken over by a group of Matrixes called Inca or Nenenhane) even admitted now that they didn't care at all how painful the lives of the Dolls they abused were; they cared only about each other, and securing a powerful future for their nation. They planned to have Rapala take over the world and extinguish all other nations. Then, they said, the world would be perfect, because by this time they would have perfected themselves and eliminated all pain. They saw that everyone else in the world, including Rapala's traditional allies, was against them, but they told each other that they were confident that they would overcome their enemies if only they forced their Dolls to work even harder building weapons.

The Matrixes now lived in buildings that had been built by the Dolls in recent decades, buildings that were not designed for Nenenhane people to live in. Still, the Matrixes recognized the signs of their cultural affiliation with the Dolls in the spacious design of their buildings. Their new home, Enasisira, was the largest building complex in the world. But they had invaded the buildings, and were not at home there. They survived only because they forced their Doll slaves to work as hard as possible at all times to keep them comfortable. The Matrixes had destroyed a lot of very valuable technical knowledge, so the Dolls were forced to do heavy manual labor that often injured them. This caused a lot of accidental deaths among the slaves, but the Matrixes had them reproducing so fast that they could not die fast enough to cause the Matrixes any alarm. The Dolls were taught that they were perfect, and that their job was to do their best to improve the lives of the Matrixes who controlled them, because the Matrixes claimed that they were morally perverse and in need of a lot of help from innocent, perfect people like the Mumpum Dolls. They also taught the Dolls that the worst thing they could do would be to kill a Matrix, and that they should never be violent in any way. They did this so that the Mumpum would not desire to eliminate the Matrixes completely so as to create what they thought would be a world of perfect people.

The Matrixes had pushed to an incredible extreme that cruel imbalance of justice that had long been the rule on planet Teppala: the Matrixes themselves lived a very luxurious, indulgent life because they each had hundreds of slaves to work hard for them to keep them alive. These slaves, called the Dolls (or Mumpum), were forced to work as hard as they could for the Matrixes, and any who refused were killed. But even the hardest-working Dolls had to deal with sexual and physical abuse from the Matrixes, who used their helpless slaves to satisfy their own sadistic desires. The Dolls were worked so hard that the leading cause of death, after diseases, was injury while working. The fact that most Mumpum people died young didn't upset the Matrixes, because they were forced to reproduce at such a rate that the Matrixes couldn't kill them fast enough to keep the population down.

In fact, the Matrixes knew that they could afford to kill one slave about every day because that was about the rate at which they were being delivered to each campsite. There was an incentive, however, for the Matrixes to not kill too many slaves: no matter how many they killed, slaves were delivered to the Matrixes at the same rate. Thus, a Matrix who took good care of his slaves would amass an ever larger army of slaves, whereas one who was careless and let them die could find himself virtually without slaves. Even without slaves, however, a Matrix was guaranteed support from other Matrixes, and did not have to worry about being attacked. Very rich Matrixes (those who had many thousands of slaves) often let some of the slaves work for the good of the Matrixes as a whole by developing technology, rather than by caring only for the immediate needs of their owner.

In Jan 4202, the Matrix defeated Moonshine in the Battle of Papilalapapi (named like the 49ers (jaral)), ending the war with a victory for the Matrix. Opposing armies were then driven out of Rapala, and the Matrixes attacked Hōkī in order to kill all the people living there. They invaded Hōkī, and killed many Hōkīans, but the remaining Hōkīan refugees eventually killed them. Then, Hōkī found a safe spot in the wilderness and became a powerful enemy of the Matrix government.

Matrixes regroup

The new Matrix government was based on a system of technology far more primitive than that used by the Swamp Kids. The only reason they still held power in their dying world was that they had signed a treaty with STW, and STW supported them enough to not object to what the Matrixes wanted to do with them. The Matrixes sought to prevent the assembly of another Swamp-style army by ruling over their slaves with extreme oppression, and forcing the entire population except themselves to work very hard for the Matrixes in order to keep their government stable. All of the world supported the Matrixes now, because they were not nearly as powerful as the Swampies had been just a few years earlier.

Restoration of child labor

The government lived up to the earlier Matrixes' promise of an era whose cruel injustices would make those of all preceding eras pale in comparison. The Matrixes still had a massive slave army of people they called Dolls. When the Dolls were born, they were immediately subjected to extreme abuse. The Dolls were forced to work extremely hard, doing all of the labor needed to keep the Matrixes alive and safe, and the rest of the time building weapons to make Rapala's technology surpass those of all rival nations in the world (at this time, Tata was the champion of weapons technology). Even the Raspara had mostly abandoned child labor by this time, not out of compassion, but because they believed it was inefficient. But now the Matrixes were putting enslaved Dolls into dangerous occupations as soon as they were able to walk.

Matrixes attack the Soap

Beginning in summer 4202, the Matrix focused on conquering the Soap Bubbles (there were still many Dolls that had not yet been captured). This turned out to be no easy task, as the Crystals immediately began to object. The Crystals demanded that the Bubbles be allowed to participate in a new coalition government to include the Matrix, the Crystals, and the Bubbles. The Crystals insincerely stated that the true evil had been the Zenith, and that the only reason there was any war in Rapala was because of the Zenith.

The Matrix responded by trying to compromise with the Crystals, saying they would agree to a coalition government if it was to be run without the Bubbles, in which case they would let the Bubbles live, but without substantial power. The Crystals, after a long period of debate, agreed to the plan, saying that the Bubbles were an insignificant minority group and that they would not matter much in the long run, anyway, because they likely would be outvoted by the Crystal-Matrix to such a point where they would be reduced to powerlessness even more absolute than what they faced here. Still, the Crystals secretly knew this was an excuse, and they wanted the Bubbles to have some power.

Crystal party split

By this time, the Crystals had changed their name to the Shields,^{Or maybe the Oysters?} hoping to escape the bad associations that went with their old name.

In the tropics, a pro-Raspara wing of the Crystals called the Phoenixes had recently arisen. The Phoenixes claimed to have improved and reshaped their movement to eliminate its errors. They abandoned the simplicity of the earlier Crystal movement and replaced it with "complex Crystalism", meaning applied Crystalism rather than Crystalism based solely on principles. It was meant for the real world rather than a utopia.

The Phoenixes also admitted publicly that they supported a form of slavery not greatly different from that which already existed. They said that the only way to stop the violence and problems in Rapala from getting even worse would be to kill all of the people who were causing the problems and replace them with slaves captured from the territories formerly under the control of the Swamp Kids, who would be disarmed and incapable even of protest.

Since the Phoenix army was weak, they early on decided to devote their energies to kidnapping soldiers from the other armies, and drafting them into their own, generally as slave labor rather than in units intended for combat. Even though the Phoenixes tried not to abuse the slaves they kidnapped, most of the other armies believed what they were doing was evil, and would not retaliate in kind. The Matrix was an exception, however — they recited a clause in their original constitution, written in 4177, which they now claimed transferred all of the rights the Raspara claimed to the Matrixes. Therefore, they now said that slaves that the Matrix captured had no rights at all.

Views on racial discrimination

The dark-skinned Phoenix tribes called for the abolition of the system of racial discrimination called anata. They claimed that Raspara philosophy had disproven anata, and that the Swamp Kids had resurrected it in the areas they controlled solely to preserve their image as being improved from the Raspara, who were again beginning to accumulate power. That is, even though the Raspara were parasites who had always thrived by enslaving the people they lived among, they had always opposed racial discrimination, and therefore the Swamp Kids had begun to claim that restoring racial discrimination would help rid their nation of the legacy of the abusive Raspara. The Swamp Kids' system of discrimination put themselves on top. The Matrixes were mostly anti-discrimination too, however, so people began to see the Phoenixes as Matrix sympathizers. Phoenixes responded by affirming their faith to the Rasparas.

By contrast, the Shields supported racial discrimination even though they knew that they, as the world's most racially diverse party, would generally be towards the bottom of the preference scale and at odds within their own group as some Shields would outrank others. They claimed that it was mere chance that the highest classes in anata were those with light skin, and that this was merely a consequence of geography: Baeba was easiest to invade from the north, where light-skinned people lived. The Shields further claimed that this was merely a happenstance reversal of a long-standing trend, because throughout most of recorded history, successful invasions had been south-to-north.

Because the Phoenixes were interested in capturing slaves from the former Little Country, most of their slaves were light-skinned people, and the Shields pointed out that the Phoenixes had no standing from which to criticize the Shields' racial discrimination program, as they were doing something considerably more cruel to their own lower-status tribes.

Shield reforms

The Shields called for a system of "oligarchy" — government by the few. These few would be filtered out from the population by a series of tests, which would determine their ability to govern well. Many Shield members had in the recent past made comments supportive of their ancient enemy, Dreamland, seeing the Dreamers as potential allies against the Matrix.

Phoenix-Raspara relations

Meanwhile, the Phoenixes struggled to convince the people that they genuinely opposed the Matrixes, as well as a new non-ideological alliance calling itself Gatotōl which supported reviving democracy in order to form a stable majority and then oppress all minorities. But to prove that they opposed Gatotōl and the Matrix, they had to admit that they supported the unpopular Raspara party, which seemed unlikely to give anything back to the Phoenixes in return for their support.

However, the new generation of Raspara leaders had reformed their philosophy and founded a new party named the Cold Kids. They chose this name to honor the Swamp Kids, and hoped that the Swamp Kids would soon form an alliance with them. The Cold Kids supported most tenets of Raspara ideology but promised to end slavery and, if necessary, declare war on the any Raspara members who refused to release their slaves. Like the Phoenixes, the Cold Kids considered the Matrix to be their foremost enemy.

So the Cold Kids and Phoenixes began to search for a way to make their two plans compatible, and to consider launching a war against the Shield party, which had many times submitted so easily to hostile powers that the Cold Kids considered protecting the Shields a greater military liability than fighting their actual enemies. The Cold Kids had not yet released their slaves, and many of these slaves were in fact Shield party members taken from STW who seemed to have no interest in fleeing their abusers.

Crystal-Swampy relations

STW declared war on 21 nations of escaped slaves. They started out facing just a few of the nations but were soon at war with all 21. Within five years they had conquered all the nations, and added this land to its own territory, Lindasia. But many escaped slaves spread out to even more nations in the wilderness, and soon there were hundreds of nations of escaped STW slaves, with a combined population even larger than STW's slavepool. These and many other Mampum slaves escaped control of STW and built up their own nation and army in an area that was inaccessible to STW and its military leader Piplap. Soon, the slaves turned around and attacked STW.

Religious imagery

In this war, even many STW leaders admitted they had long since lost the moral high ground. Piplap and other leaders declared that the escaped slaves were in Heaven, and that they had come to conquer Hell and free its remaining subjects. Piplap said that everything the slaves did was morally justified, and that they were incapable of evil, because a war against evil could not itself be evil. Yet Piplap reaffirmed his commitment to STW and promised he would defend STW against the armies of Heaven.

There were many small battles. For the most part, Piplap himself did not attack the soldiers here. Instead, he sent out enslaved Matrixes and others from Rapala to help him, or he sent animals. Piplap realized that to confront the slaves directly would be too dangerous, because he didn't know at all how strong the slaves were.

Phoenix-Cold relations

Meanwhile, by July 4205, the Phoenixes had finalized their link with the Cold Kids. The Cold Kids were a weak voice in Anzan, and most Anzanans preferred the Swamp Kids to the Cold Kids. Thus, aligning themselves with the Cold Kids did not help the Phoenixes become popular, but the Cold Kids offered them protection from the Swamp Kids, who were now targeting the Phoenixes even in majority-Phoenix territory.

The Cold Kids rejected the new Shield party, which had resurrected the name "Crystals" for itself. Since the Cold Kids had absorbed some Crystals, they claimed the right to the name, and prepared for war against the Shields. Meanwhile, the Swamp Kids refused the Cold Kids' offer of an alliance, and prepared for a simultaneous war against the Cold Kids, the Phoenixes, and the Shields.

But then, the Cold Kids, the Phoenixes, and the Shields suddenly merged into the Universal Crystal League, which renamed itself the Crystal party. Many subjects of the merging parties disliked the alliance, but most saw little hope in winning any war on their own.

However, some Cold Kids had been Rasparas a few years earlier, and having never fought a battle under the Crystal banner, the ex-Rasparas threatened to secede once again and apply to become Swamp Kids if the Crystals didn't bring the party ideology closer to Raspara ideals. But this was an idle threat because the ex-Rasparas had already been rejected by the Swamp Kids and knew that nothing had changed. Frustrated, the ex-Rasparas reaffirmed their commitment to the Crystal party.

This time the alliance dissolved when the Crystals ordered the ex-Rasparas to become Crystals themselves — the Rasparas refused to modify their philosophy, especially since the Shield platform had won out in most regards.

Further contacts

Despite this issue, a period of relative peace followed, with only the occasional Zenith uprising spoiling the calm. However, Crystals and Matrixes agreed that there should be no relaxing during this time of serenity; for they realized that the Zenith or the Bubbles were liable to rebel, or that a divorce between the Crystals and the Matrix themselves was liable to occur. So the Crystals and the Matrix continued building weapons in mutual symbiosis, each deliberately made dependent on the other so they could not attack without each other's support.

In secret, however, both groups were building whole arrays of weapons by themselves, and simultaneously preparing to attack each other. The reasons for this new conflict came from outside: Taboo the king of Dreamland, and the Freemen from the greater world hated each other, and as they were each much more powerful than their Rapalan counterparts, the Matrixes and the Crystals separately agreed to attack each other. However, the Crystal party experienced a lot of dissent while preparing to attack their newfound allies, who had brought them from such a lowly position as they had held for over a thousand years to being an equal ally of the most powerful group in Rapala. At the time, there still existed a major rift in the Crystal party — it was divided between the Freemen, who included the Crystals and all their alien counterparts, and the Phoenixes, a strictly local (to Lobexon) sect that rejected the treaties that brought the outside world into a peaceful era around 3950 after Adabawa's victory over Altotta. The Crystals threatened to further divide the once-united Crystal party by creating a third, pro-Matrix wing, and the Freemen were determined to meet this threat. So they ordered the Crystals to attack the Matrixes. Meanwhile, Taboo threatened to forsake the Matrixes when Rapala again became open if they did not attack the Crystals. The Matrix did not dare disobey Taboo, but they arranged meetings with top Crystal leaders to try to reach a compromise that would be satisfactory to both world parties. The Matrixes did not suspect that the Crystals were preparing to attack them, but the Crystals knew that Matrix leaders were ready to explode. The two parties reached a simple compromise: the two would simply merge into one party, called the Mirror, and try to force their outworld parent parties to merge as well.

This agreement was concluded without much dissent from the Rapalan party leaders, both of whom were desperate for peace, but the reaction of the outworld leaders was extremely hostile. Taboo threatened the Mirror with invasion, and the Phoenixes and Freemen threatened them with death. The Mirror sent ambassadors to their parent parties to explain their plans, but they seemed to be getting no sympathy from the people living in the safer parts of the world.

Then Taboo suddenly announced he would declare war on the two Crystal groups if they did not assimilate into the Tabooites, who were not inherently anti-Crystal but rather bent on sole world domination (Taboo was now forced to suppress a pro-Mirror movement sweeping through his party). The Matrix side of the Mirror coalition voiced support for this war, but the Crystals loudly condemned it. It was at this point that the rank and file of the Crystal army began to explode with rage. They condemned the Matrixes for Tabooist tactics and suppression of their party in earlier centuries. (The Matrixes were in fact an outgrowth of the viciously repressive Raspara party, and their near-absolute obedience to Taboo had worried the Crystals for some time, a fear that was scarcely allayed by the Matrixes' refusal to attack.) The Crystal leaders purged their army, despite the fact that they realized they would become much weaker after the purge. They expected the Matrix to do the same, but they were wrong. Although the Matrixes were in fact trying to be friendly to the Crystals, they were averse to the idea of attacking themselves, as they would rather have a country run entirely by themselves than a coalition including the Crystals anyway.

Three-way partition

At this point, the Crystals, Bubbles, and Matrixes agreed to a partition of the Empire into three regions with no overlap. The Matrixes had most of the territory. The Crystal territory was small, but included parts of Baeba Swamp. The Bubbles' area was much smaller still, but they did not complain, as they realized they were far better off with this setup than were any of the non-signatory parties.

The Crystals were disappointed when they realized that the Matrixes were now cooperating with the Dolphin Riders and that the Rider navy was patrolling Baeba's harbors to keep the Crystals trapped in Baeba and to extract bounties on all trade.

Bubbles dissipate

As the Bubbles began to drift closer to the Crystal side, the Crystals wondered if they might have a chance of overcoming the Matrix after all. They rapidly built up their army and the Bubble army, simultaneously forcing the Bubbles to assimilate completely. Meanwhile, the Zenith had risen again, and it was drafting in people who had escaped from the other parties (chiefly the Matrix). Now the Crystal leadership was unsure what to do. They still wanted to be at peace with the Matrix, but were unsure of the Matrix's own commitment to peace. They demanded that they be given a truly free territory to rule, so that both sides would be safe from attacks. The Matrixes refused, and immediately attacked the Crystals.

The Crystals responded to the attack by proclaiming peace to the Matrix once again, asking them to withdraw their troops, claiming they would allow the Matrixes to take their weapons and run the country if they would let the Crystals live peacefully. They believed they could not win against the Matrixes and hoped to cut their losses and survive by ceding their territory to the Matrix and agreeing to live among the Matrixes as a minority party. But the Matrixes would have none of this, and as they continued to attack the Crystals, the Crystals decided their best hope lay in trying to reduce the power of the Matrixes to the point where they could be overcome by the Zenith.

After the splitting of the Matrix-STW coalition government in September 4205, Rapala's new government employed its entire population.

Matrix splits

Matrix views on gender relations

The Matrix philosophy was unstable, as it created deep divisions among its followers. Matrixes restricted membership to adult males, and therefore, the entire female population of the Empire belonged to various enemy parties. The Matrixes were thus at war with their own wives, and saw no harm in abusing their wives or forgoing traditional marriage entirely to instead devote their time to their many captured female slaves. The Matrixes could not even award party membership to their own daughters, and as the children of the Matrix founders approached adulthood, many Matrix men became opposed to the idea of sending their daughters off to the care of other Matrix slaveowners.

Formal party split

Around 4208, more than two thirds of the Matrix leaders decided to renounce Matricism and dedicate themselves to destroying the Matrix. They thus aligned themselves with the Cold Kids, and said that they would be willing to kill the Matrixes' slaves in order to kill Matrixes too. In fact, some of these new Cold theorists said that the only way they could ever kill all of the Matrixes would be to kill all of the slaves, particularly the Crystals. The Matrixes claimed that the Crystals were incurably submissive, only capable of doing what they were told to do, and because their Matrix masters told them to fight the Cold Kids, they did.

Meanwhile, the Swamp Kids were considering joining up with the Cold Kids to form an even greater enemy for the Matrix. But for the meantime, they chose to agree to disagree, and work together to fight the Matrix but without merging into one single party.

The battles geared up again, with the Crystals doing surprisingly well. In fact, before long, the Matrix leaders were again looking for peace, despite loud objections from the rank and file. It then became clear to the Crystals that the Matrix was not nearly as well organized as they pretended to be. It was not world domination that the Matrix leaders wanted; they just wanted security in a strong, united army. The Crystals desired this too; but their party had already purged its dissenters. Now the Matrixes were in danger of splitting yet again into two mutually hostile armies: one was a pro-DPR wing, who believed that only they were correct, and that the other wing, like the Crystals, should be destroyed as they were wrong. Like DPR, they let nothing stand in the way of their world domination. This branch of the Matrixes called themselves the Matrix Minor.

The other branch (Matrix Major) wanted to make peace with the Crystals, and recognized that this could only happen if they once again declared war, this time on the Matrix Minor. So the Matrix Major merged into the Crystals, and began the first united attacks against the Matrix Minor, with experienced Crystals leading the charge.

These battles were vicious, as the two sides involved were more advanced in weapons technology than in the earlier battles due to the period of peace that had intervened. In fact, nearly 25% of the total population of the Empire was killed in the first few years of the war. Most casualties came from the Crystal side, although because of its much greater population, it was actually winning. Still, there were a lot of deaths on the Crystal side, particularly among the original Crystals. The Matrix was indeed proving to be a formidable enemy.

Soon the Matrix Minor joined with the dormant Zenith to form the Slopes. Some Zeniths objected, and were quickly killed by the new Slope leaders. The exponential growth of the Slopes' power troubled the Crystals, and the new converts from parties such as the Cold Kids definitively broke off relations with the outside parent organizations. The Slopes, meanwhile, hoped to establish outside connections of their own. Despite their increasing power, they realized they could not hold out for long against the Crystals, and hoped that the outside world would support them against the Crystals.

Seventh Gold Era

Slopes take action

By this point, the Slopes and the Crystals dominated the battlefields, as they had absorbed most of the smaller armies. The Slopes realized that full control was within their reach, but that they would need to withdraw some soldiers from their army to build walls, roads, and ships.

To fully control Rapala's trade routes, the Slopes needed to conquer the remaining Crystal resistance. Realizing this, the Crystal party at last became more hopeful about the future. Also at this time the conflict in Rapala was sending shock waves through the badly split Crystal Party in the outworld. The Freemen mended their ties with the Crystals, despite the fact that they still objected to their new platform. Then, the Crystals signed a treaty with Dreamland's king Taboo transforming the Crystals into the seventh incarnation of the Gold party and establishing a military alliance between the Gold party and Dreamland's ruling Dolphin Rider party against the Slopes. However, Taboo still refused to support the non-Gold Crystal branches, and they did not join the new Gold party.

The Gold party had won the Dolphin Riders' protection by agreeing to work on plantations, expecting that the 53,000 Dolphin Riders would be their owners and that they would be strict but protective. But the Riders were unwilling to invest themselves in the conflict, and soon, the Slopes swarmed in and abducted the Gold supporters as fast as they could. Soon they had torn away so many slaves that there were not enough left to stand up to the Slopes. Thus, the Gold party's early victory quickly turned into defeat. As a final insult, most of the conquering Slopes converted to the Gold party as well, and the Dolphin Riders agreed to see these ex-Slopes as allies.

A splinter wing of the Gold party calling itself the Ghosts of Comfort formed in this period; most of its early members were former Cold Kids who had converted to the Gold party and were then betrayed by the Slope-Dreamer coalition.

In early March 4206, the Slopes had agreed to launch a war against the Matrixes in Tata and eliminate them once and for all. But the Elasisians sent ambassadors back to Rapala explaining their theory that the Matrixes were no threat at all and that they wanted to be able to make a profit off of the Matrixes. The Rapalans strongly disapproved of what the Elasisians were doing, because Crystal slaves could work harder than Matrixes and produce more revenue, but the Elasisians were such brilliant masters of persuasion that they managed to get the Rapalans to cancel their war and return control of the helpless nation to the Elasisians.

Though the Ghosts of Comfort considered the Slopes their primary enemy, many would-be Ghosts chose to join the Slopes rather than fight the Slopes as part of the small, vulnerable Ghost army. Most of the slaves who had been tricked earlier were now denied Slope membership, but some sympathetic Slope masters agreed to free some of their slaves in order to increase their control over other slaves. Thus, the Ghosts grew slowly even though a large fraction of the enslaved Gold party was sympathetic. In mid-June 4206, the Gold party demoted some politically suspect members, allowing them to work only on making weapons.

Xema's further struggles

By 4268, Creamland had finally agreed to stop invading Nama. All of the nations were once again lined up against Xema, but Dada and its allies quit the war.