Tamta

Tāmta was a nation founded by the Scorpions and whose population by 4195 consisted mostly of young Cold Men. Both the Scorpions and the Cold Men were child refugees who had fled on their own into Moonshine's pre-existing refugee territory of Hōki.

Background

When the Thunder Empire signed a treaty with the Crystal Empire, together they formed the Lantern Empire. The Thunderers were the weaker of the two powers, and some Thunderers wanted to keep Crystals out of their side of the empire to protect them from being dominated. The state of Hōmoya was one Thunder state that allowed Crystal settlement, however.

When the empire collapsed, the state of Hōmoya became independent and was settled by Moonshine migrants fleeing their own defeat in a related war. Eventually, as Moonshine became a rising power, they incorporated Hōmoya into their empire, renaming it Hōki. It had retained its character, and the Moonshines declared that Hōki would become a safe state for refugees of all wars to flee into. They promised to protect Hōki's sovereignty, but made no promise to station Moonshine soldiers within Hōki; they warned refugees that they therefore could not prevent small-scale conflicts from erupting within Hōki if refugees from both sides of a war fled into Hōki and carried their battles with them.

Lakeside territory

The richest natural environment in Hōki was at the north end, the furthest from any foreign borders, where there was a very large lake, Tulip Lake. Newly arriving refugees here tended to settle in compact neighborhoods, with an entire nationality often confined to just a single street and a few avenues leading away from it. Over time, many of these newly arriving groups expected to marry into other groups and come to identify simply as citizens of Hōki; intermarriage tended to occur mostly among groups that had common cultural ties, even if they had come from opposite sides of a war. By contrast, language and cultural barriers often kept people apart in Hōki even if they had come from politically allied nations.

Scorpion migration

In April 4192, 5,000 Scorpions fled defeat and founded their own colony within Hōki. The Scorpions were mostly children between the ages of 10 and 14 years old, led by just a tiny number of adults, and these adults had delegated much of their power to the young members. There were also a few children even younger than this, most of whom had been abandoned by their parents just a few months earlier.

These Scorpions had recently moved in from a wilderness colony called Tāmta after a small but heavily armed group of adult men calling themselves the Leashes invaded their territory. The Leashes claimed to be friendly, and to share a common enemy with the Scorpions, but the Scorpions had insisted the men not trespass through their territory for two reasons: firstly, the Scorpions were afraid of the heavily armed Leash soldiers. Secondly, they worried that the Leash migration might draw their acknowledged common enemy, the Players, into Tamta since the Players could claim anything they did in Tamta was to protect themselves from the Leashes. The Leashes acknowledged that the children had a valid reason for keeping the Leashes out of their territory. Thus, when the Leash men decided to enter Scorpion territory anyway, the Scorpions realized the Leashes might break their other promises too, and so the children fled westward to seek a safe homeland even further from the battle fronts.

The Scorpions decided that because they had only one home, their new colony in Moonshine's refugee state of Hōki would also be called Tāmta. Young but well-educated, the Scorpions braved a difficult journey in which friendly adults protected them from traffickers, and having arrived, they pushed further into Hōki in order to select the best land. When they finally reached their destination, they set up a democratic government in which the indigenous population was invited to also participate.

The indigenous people also considered themselves refugees, though they were of diverse origins: some had been there for generations, and others had only just recently arrived. Most of these refugees were not interested in politics, as politics had driven them from their original homes. Nonetheless, the sight of an arriving population consisting almost entirely of children did not frighten them so, and so the refugees announced the formation of the Hardwood political party, dedicated to cooperation with the Scorpions, with disputes to be settled through debate rather than violence. The few adults among the Scorpions relinquished nearly all of their remaining powers at this time, leaving the children in control of the Scorpion party. Because the Hardwoods did not allow their own children to vote, the Scorpion/Hardwood party system was largely a generational division, and some Scorpions hoped that the children of the Hardwoods would therefore join the Scorpions as well. Nonetheless, they made little attempt to reach out to them, since they knew that the Hardwoods could simply eject themselves from the democracy if they felt the Scorpions were trying to loosen their family ties.

Early political reforms

Though there were only 5,000 Scorpions and just a few hundred Hardwoods, the new system called for a Parliament of 98 representatives, serving alongside a handful of at-large officials, all under the control of two overseers who in turn reported to a single head of state. This surprisingly large government was based on an ideal system the Scorpions had used in school, and also had very short terms; for example, the parliamentarians served only for six months.

The Scorpions awarded extra power to the adults, saying that since the Scorpions vastly outnumbered the adults it would be unfair to run their elections based on raw vote totals. But they amplified the adults' votes so much that in the election of August 4192 some Hardwood candidates defeated children who had obtained many more votes, and even some Hardwoods agreed that the system was too generous to them.

First elections in Tāmta

The Scorpions consolidated Tāmta into a single district, meaning that all elections were nationwide. Because the Scorpions were a majority and expected almost none of their members to vote for an opposition candidate, the Scorpion candidates would win every single election under the traditional direct-vote system that they had inherited from their fathers. Knowing that the opposition would see this as proof that Tāmta was not a true democracy, the Scorpions promised proportional representation, meaning that the most popular Hardwood candidates would defeat the least popular Scorpion candidates even if these Scorpion candidates received more votes.

The Scorpions said that the Hardwood candidates would win offices in proportion to the total Hardwood vote share, not the population share, meaning that if the Hardwoods showed little interest in the elections, they would not win any posts even with the amplification system.

There were no separate parliamentary elections. The officers of the executive branch were all to be enrolled in Parliament as well, serving on parliamentary committees related to their executive branch positions.

Term lengths

Each election was for a six-month term. The Scorpions were accustomed to short terms from their school system, where students were expected to rapidly advance and trade places, and therefore did not realize their term length was considered extremely short by the adult populations around them. The Scorpion leaders nonetheless believed that very short terms like this were ideal, as young children might change their interests as they grew and learned more about each position in their government.

Opponents react

The Scorpions were dismayed to realize that the pre-existing refugees were largely uninterested in their new plan, even with the concession they had made to amplify the votes of the adults to ensure some non-Scorpion victories. Many refugees stated that they did not need a new layer of government and would not respect their officials. Some said that they would not vote because they felt the new government offices were so frivolous that it would be a waste of time for any adult to accept such a post. The children realized that they might have to prop up their opponents just to get them interested in the new system, since if they had nobody to run against, they could not claim to have won a meaningful victory.

The Scorpion leaders told the children that the Hardwoods would start taking the children seriously only when the children won their elections and began enforcing their new laws, and stated that they might need to schedule a second election very soon after the first, once the people of Tāmta realized how the voting system worked.

Impossible victories

Although some Hardwoods did sign up for the various electable posts, the children were mostly running unopposed, and soon realized that the few Hardwood candidates might automatically win due to the proportional representation promise, meaning that the Scorpion candidates running against adults would have no chance of victory even if they won an overwhelmingly greater vote total. Thus, the Hardwoods could simply pick which offices they wanted and tell the Scorpion candidates to get by with what was left. This meant that there was no point in any candidates campaigning, as the results of each election would be chosen by the Hardwood candidates from the beginning.

The Scorpions were frustrated as they realized that the Hardwoods had not outsmarted them; it was their very lack of interest in democracy that assured the Hardwood candidates of victory. The Scorpions realized that backing down on their promise would ruin their authority, and so they did their best to find candidates to fill the list, even realizing the awkwardness of begging their opponents to run against them.

Hardwood nomination process

Once the Hardwoods realized that they would be automatically guaranteed victories so long as they held themselves to seeking a small number of positions, they began their internal party nomination process so that each candidate would accept that the office they were assigned was chosen fairly and not by an unaccountable authority. They did not know the exact number of offices they would win because they could not foresee how many Hardwood citizens would turn out to vote, but they estimated that their voter turnout would be considerably lower than their share of the population, which was about one seventh, and so they decided to nominate only ten candidates to run against the 100 Scorpion children. Even though the Hardwoods could have nominated twenty or thirty or even a hundred candidates of their own, and still been guaranteed the same number of wins, they decided internally that they wanted to ensure every single Hardwood candidate won their election. This was largely out of the desire to avoid the humiliation of losing an election against a very young candidate, but another motivating factor was the overall lack of enthusiasm among the Hardwoods, and the realization that if they fielded too many candidates, there was a good chance that the ones who won would be those who were the least interested in cooperating with the Scorpions, and that those few Hardwoods who actually believed in the new government would be deprived of their opportunity to make it work.

Two of the 100 positions open for election were more powerful than the rest, because the government was divided into fourteen committees of seven members each, plus two overseers. These overseers had overlapping powers, and were equal, and reported to the president rather than to each other. The Hardwoods, knowing that they could automatically win simply by running for these positions, were eager to do so, but decided internally that it was an unwise idea, as they would be forced to obey a young president who almost certainly would not want them there, and also face opposition from the angry children they were tasked with overseeing. Moreover, the two overseer positions only had single votes in Parliament, and had no special powers there. Therefore the Hardwoods forbade their members to run for the overseer positions, and instead chose ten positions in the lower-level committees.

The Hardwoods waited for the Scorpions to nominate their candidates, and then chose which ones they would knock off. The Hardwoods knew that they would automatically win because of the proportional representation system both parties had earlier agreed to. The children whom had been selected by the Hardwoods understood that they had no chance of victory, and most refused to run any sort of campaign, instead spending their time arguing that the system should be overturned.

Outcome of first elections

August 1, 4192

The elections played out as predicted, with adult Hardwood candidates pushing aside children who had obtained far higher vote totals; one boy was forced to concede defeat to a man whom he had beaten in votes by a ratio of more than 6 to 1. This candidate's low vote total was because even the Hardwoods showed little interest in him, but because the proportional representation system appointed candidates according to the total Hardwood vote share, the individual candidates' totals were irrelevant and he could have won the election with just a single vote.

President

The presidential election was handled differently. The Scorpions nominated several candidates, while the Hardwoods nominated only one; nevertheless, the Scorpions were assured of victory because the system they used, as inherited from their forebearers, first tallied the total number of votes for each party, then eliminated the losing parties, and then appointed the winner of the most votes in the one remaining party as the new president. The Hardwood candidate knew this and did not expect to win.

The Scorpions thus appointed a boy named the Knife (Play Mapaāpi, Late Andanese Kuuhupiku) as their new president.

Protests begin

Realizing that their democracy was deeply flawed, the losing Scorpion candidates staged a protest outside the Parliament building. The Hardwoods knew that they could simply force their way through the crowd of children, but also understood that they would greatly improve their social status if they chose instead to address the children on their own level instead of pushing through a crowd that could not push them back. The Hardwoods therefore stood in place, accepting for the moment that they were not allowed to enter the Parliament building. They believed that the other Scorpions did not support the protestors and would soon beckon the Hardwoods to enter the Parliament and humiliate the protestors, but this did not immediately happen. In the meantime, they addressed the protestors calmly and concisely.

The Hardwoods told the protestors that what they were asking for was a one-party state run entirely by the Scorpions, in which even the worst-performing Scorpion candidates would still win their elections, and that such a system was not at all what the Scorpion party as a whole had wanted to create. However, the Hardwoods knew that one reason why the Scorpions were trying to attract Hardwoods into Parliament was that they feared a violent civil war would erupt if the Hardwoods were denied a share of political power, and that the Scorpions probably secretly would prefer a one-party state.

Proposal for reform

As the other Scorpions gathered around the protestors, the protestors turned their attention from the Hardwoods to the Scorpions. They then demanded a new election, to be run with an amended system in which any Scorpions running unopposed would be able to appoint any citizen of Tāmta to run as an opponent, enrolled in the Hardwood party even if the Hardwoods would not accept such a candidate as one of their own. These candidates would therefore count as Hardwoods and would take away some of the seats assigned to the adults through proportionate representation.

The protestors said that if the Hardwoods would not agree to this, they would create a third party and a fourth party and however many more it took to drown out the Hardwood minority to such an extent that even with guaranteed proportional representation they would struggle to win elections against the young candidates in the decoy parties.

Electoral reform bill

On their first day in Parliament, the Scorpions argued for hours about not just the protestors' demands, but other complaints that had arisen among their members in the weeks leading up to the election.

Four-party system

First, they announced the creation of two new political parties: the Beetles (Vuvama) and the Top Riders (Vavāa). The Scorpion and Hardwood parties were to continue on as they had been.

Beetles

The Beetles (Play Vuvama) were to be a satellite party of the Scorpions, ideologically bound to agree with the Scorpions on all political points. They would run for elections in which a Hardwood candidate was also running. This was essentially what the protestors outside the building had demanded.

The Scorpions set the Beetle population equal to the Hardwoods', meaning that they would be granted proportional representation as well, but the Scorpions now said that the proportional representation quota would not be on a per-party basis, but by the division of the total population between the Scorpions as majority party, granted the seats their population share demanded, versus all of the minority parties counted together as one. Therefore, the number of non-Scorpion winning candidates was guaranteed to double from 10 to 20, since there were now twice as many non-Scorpions in the voting population. (They did not take a new census, assuming that even if new people had come and gone in just a few months, neither side would complain if they were slightly undercounted.)

The Scorpions stated that their new reform would potentially allow the Hardwoods to double their representation in Parliament even though their population had not changed, but that to do so, they would need to defeat each of the Beetle candidates who would be running against them. For each election that they lost, a Beetle candidate would accede to Parliament, and if the Hardwoods lost every single election, their proportional representation promise would no longer grant them any seats at all. The Scorpions claimed that this system was more than fair, and that the Hardwoods should not complain if they were defeated in the next elections.

Top Riders

Furthermore, the Scorpions created a new party called the Top Riders, ideologically untethered to the Scorpions. A Top Rider candidate would be required to run in every election, even if there was no Hardwood candidate running, in order to prove to the Hardwoods (and some skeptical Scorpions) that the Scorpions were not fielding poor candidates and then winning merely by default.

The Top Riders were outside the proportional representation system. The Scorpions said that the Top Riders would collect all the missed votes from the total voting population of the other parties; that is, any citizen who chose not to vote for a particular office would have their vote automatically assigned to the Top Rider candidate for that seat. If a citizen chose not to vote at all, they would be counted as having voted for the Riders on all seats up for election.

The Top Riders had no formal party structure or membership rolls, and the Scorpions admitted that they would be appointing the Top Rider candidates as well, but stated that they would choose dissenters among the Scorpions, people who had proven that they opposed the Scorpions and Hardwoods equally and were not merely decoy candidates intended to take away votes from the Hardwoods without affecting the Scorpions or Beetles.

Gender split

Even before the elections, the Scorpions had noticed that most of the candidates they were fielding were boys. Their population had a slight male surplus, but the candidates who had won the Scorpions' internal elections were overwhelmingly male, and the Scorpions, including boys, worried that their slight male majority was tipping the scales in the internal elections by pushing male candidates forward, even if they won the internal elections by just slight majorities, and depriving girls of their opportunity to serve in the government.

They had considered proportional representation for girls, and even splitting the Scorpions into Boy and Girl parties, but after hours of debate, the Scorpions came up with a different solution, one that at first seemed unlikely to solve the problem.

The new system would allow the party-internal nomination process to take place, except that the nomination would always produce two candidates for each seat: a boy and a girl. On the day of the final election, the boy and girl would be running against each other instead of just having one candidate win by default. Since all the seats were now contested by at least a Rider candidate along with possibly a Hardwood candidate, the Scorpions said that whichever of their two candidates got the most votes would then surrender their vote total to the other, just as in the presidential election system where four Scorpion kids had pooled their votes against the one Hardwood adult.

Because all elections would now be competitive up until the last day, and because the boy and girl candidates would be expected to mostly campaign against each other instead of against the other parties' candidates, the Scorpions said that the best candidates would win. If they still saw an overwhelming male majority in Parliament, they promised to again take up the possibility of proportional representation based on gender.

This gender split also applied to the new Beetle party, since the Beetles were ideologically bound to the Scorpions. Therefore, every seat would have a minimum of three candidates running for it, and if a Hardwood candidate joined the race, there would be a minimum of four (the Scorpions planned to field candidates for these seats as well, but would run quiet campaigns so that the Beetles would be assured the maximum vote share).

Schedule

The Scorpions told the protestors that they had been given all that they had asked for and more, but that it would be unwise to hold new elections immediately, as the winning candidates had won legitimately under the system they had been told to run for, including the Hardwoods. They therefore scheduled new elections for three months out, and stated that the new elections would be only for the seats that had been contested in the previous election, so that the uncontested winners would not need to run again to keep their seats. The other seats would continue with their normal six-month terms.

Hardwood reaction

The Scorpions passed their new reforms over the objections of the vastly outnumbered Hardwoods. Some Hardwood representatives lost their patience at being repeatedly outvoted, and one man told the Scorpions to drop the pretense and simply turn Tāmta into a one-party state run by the Scorpions with no rights for minority parties. But most of the Hardwoods who had won seats in Parliament were unusual among their kind in that they appreciated what little the Scorpions had given them, saying it was more than they deserved, and that they preferred to compete politically against the Scorpions rather than bringing their fights to the battlefield. Thus the Hardwoods accepted the reforms peacefully even as they suspected they would lose almost all of their seats to the next crop of children in the Beetle party.

The Hardwoods also realized that they no longer had any incentive to restrict themselves to just a few offices, since they could no longer be guaranteed of any victories in the campaigns they did run. This meant that they would need to recruit more candidates to run in the next election. This would in turn trigger Beetle candidates to also run, which they felt might frustrate the Scorpions.

The Hardwoods in Parliament knew, however, that their party membership was largely reluctant to even vote in the elections, much less run for office, and that the next crop of Hardwood candidates might be of poor quality.

First days in Parliament

The 100 new parliamentarians, fourteen committees of seven each plus two overseers, were paid by a 10% income tax levied on the nation's entire population, including children. Thus they were better off than most people in Tāmta.

Hardwood plans for the future

The winning Hardwood candidates realized they most likely had but three months to enjoy their power, as they would be then forced to run for re-election against five children — two Beetles, two Scorpions, and a Top Rider — in a nation whose population consisted primarily of children. Because of the new reforms, the Hardwood candidate would need to defeat the children not just on an individual level but also on a party level, since the two Beetle and two Scorpion candidates were running against each other within each party but would have their votes combined in the end.

In the meantime, they realized they were among the luckiest people in their nation, as they were paid handsomely by the government and yet had very little work to do. They had worried that the young Scorpions would struggle with basic tasks and require the Hardwoods to do both their jobs and the Scorpions', but the Hardwoods were happy to realize that the Scorpions were as well-educated as they had always claimed, and only required help from the Hardwoods for a few very basic tasks such as translating between Play and Leaper, which had nothing to do with age or experience. The Hardwoods thus hoped that even if they lost their re-election bids and came to live in an effectively one-party state (since the Beetles were ideologically bound to the Scorpions), they could acquire well-paid jobs as translators and continue making money from the taxpayers of Tāmta.

Some Hardwoods decided that the best way to stay in power would be to do their jobs as honestly and efficiently as possible, proving their claim that they were in the right place, and then ask the young children to re-elect them instead of voting for one of the five child candidates. Most Hardwoods believed that they would still lose, but then planned to run for election again six months later, saying that they had done a better job at their post during the first three months than the children had done over the succeeding six months.

Views from the wider population

The Hardwoods soon realized that their best friends, apart from each other, were the children serving alongside them in the government, as the general Hardwood populace believed that the new government was a sham, and that any adults who agreed to obey children must have impure motives. Some said that the Hardwood officials were both lazy and corrupt, but that simply because they were adults they would perform their jobs better than the hard-working children struggling to get from place to place, and that because the children were naive, they would not realize this and would think that the Hardwoods were in fact excellent officials. Others said that both parties were about equally harmful, and that the children in the Scorpion party had just now reached the age where they, too, were capable of corrupt behavior.

Since the Hardwoods were being paid well and doing very little work, the general population was now not only disdainful but also jealous of them, and so the Hardwoods got little respect from the rest of their population. The Hardwoods knew that they could never join the children's parties, and knew that they were in danger of losing their own population's votes, and so they considered the possibility of a Top Rider victory for at least some seats, figuring that few Hardwoods would vote in the next election, but that if the Hardwoods in office performed well, the children might split their votes as well.

The children in Parliament had similar jobs, and therefore were also paid handsomely. They worked harder than the Hardwoods only because the jobs were more difficult for them due to their lack of experience and knowledge, even though they were very well educated for their age. To some extent, they were also obstructed in their work by the adult population's strident refusal to acknowledge that the new child-led government had legitimate authority, but these same people now also rejected the Hardwood officials. This drew the children and the Hardwoods closer together, and the Hardwoods again hoped for some way to break out of the system and remain in power.

Treaty with Players

The Scorpions then passed a symbolic treaty declaring the nation of Tāmta to be an exclave of the Play state of Tanaanu, located more than a thousand miles away. The Scorpions understood that the Players, including those living in Tanaanu, wanted nothing to do with Scorpion politics, and that if the Scorpions ever sought refuge in Tanaanu they would certainly be imprisoned if not killed. But Tanaanu had been known for rebellious politics in the past, and the Scorpions admired their willingness to stand up against the Players, who even at that time were overwhelmingly more powerful.

School system

The Scorpions then created a school system financed by the government, the only tax-supported education system in any of the children's nations. There were no adults in the school, neither as teachers nor as students, and therefore the Hardwoods could not attend. The Hardwoods had their own informal schools, but they did not have government funds because they had never seen this as within the scope of the government when they were on their own. Thus the Hardwoods had to pay for the Scorpions' schools but could not send their own children there. The Scorpions still considered themselves a closed-entry party and so the Hardwoods' children could not switch parties either.

Structure

The Scorpion adults were too busy running the party machine to take teaching positions, so the children taught each other and rotated the teaching role from one student to another depending on who among each class had the best knowledge of whichever subject was in the curriculum that day. The students who were serving in Parliament did not attend school either.

Effects of new party system

Thus, the Scorpion party had split into three: the Scorpions, the Beetles, and the Top Riders (Vasuāvi). The intent of this was to make the parties more equal in size so that the amplified voting power given to the Hardwoods would no longer lead to such unfair results. Also, the Scorpions and Beetles had agreed to run two candidates for each post, always a boy and a girl, to see if their own voting population was being affected by an inherited cultural preference for male leaders. This meant that the Hardwood candidates were sometimes sharing a debate stage with five children whom they perceived as being far more closely tied to each other than any of them was to the Hardwood candidate. Some Hardwoods decided that the new political system was a parody and lost interest, but those who remained were the ones who took the system seriously, and the children's political parties respected and trusted the Hardwoods who continued to run against them.

November 4192 election

As the Play army slaughtered Lilypad children all over the countryside, the Scorpions reaffirmed their neutrality, and also stated that they considered themselves to be a rebellious faction within the Play nation, and not part of the Lilypad nation at all. Yet the Scorpions knew that the Play army was large enough that they could conceivably invade Moonshine's refugee state of Hōki, perhaps under the pretext that the supposedly pacifist Moonshines were harboring a political group who had openly declared their desire for war, and then launch a pointed attack against the Scorpions while sparing all of the other refugee groups.

By November, new elections were due in Tāmta, for the ten seats in Parliament that the Hardwoods had won. These candidates (eight men and two women) were each expected to stand for re-election against five children seeking the same office. These positions were intended for handling domestic issues such as taxation, but by this time, both the children and the adults were focused on the ongoing war to their south, and both parties agreed to put aside their differences on domestic issues to focus on the threat against their shared homeland.

Some people, especially among the Hardwoods, wanted to find any means possible to rescue Lilypad children before the Players could take full control. Many Hardwood men expressed interest in taking on the Players in direct combat, but others felt it would be futile to do so, as the Hardwoods did not have competent weaponry and the Players were far more numerous; most estimates put the Play army's total manpower at about a hundred times that of the Hardwoods; that is, roughly 100,000 to 1,000. There were actually less than 1,000 enrolled Hardwood men, but the Hardwood leaders attributed this to lack of interest in politics among the locals, some of whom had continued to live side by side with the enrolled Hardwoods, and therefore stated that their party's size was being underestimated. Nonetheless they knew they were greatly outnumbered and felt it would be best to join rescue missions instead. Some Scorpions were interested in these missions as well, but the Scorpion party determined its foreign relations by voting in party-internal elections, and therefore the election in Tāmta could not determine a new Scorpion foreign policy or start rescue missions.

Campaign begins

Thus, differences of opinion appeared, and as the Hardwood candidates realized that they were likely to lose their elections, they worried that the Scorpions might then order them to take to the front lines, as some Hardwoods had already committed to doing. Here, without adequate weapons, they would be doomed to die immediately on encountering the Play army without accomplishing their mission. Thus, the Hardwood candidates pushed ahead with their campaigns despite the shift in attention towards foreign policy.

Four-party debates

The four parties agreed to hold debates on current issues, and to take questions from the audience. Since there were ten offices up for election, there would be ten debates. Anyone was allowed to take time off from their duties to attend the debates, which were scheduled two weeks before the election, with five each day. But the candidates all agreed to set their expectations low and to expect only a hundred or perhaps even a few dozen citizens to show up to each debate, as anything much more would reduce the nation of Tāmta to a political machine with no economy whose only activity was electing its officials. The candidates left open the possibility of further debates in the last days before the election.

Speakers on stage

October 17, 4192

The candidates agreed to stand on a stage in the order of party formation, meaning that the two Scorpion candidates (a boy and a girl) would stand beside each other in either order, then the Hardwood candidate would stand to their right, and then the two Beetle candidates would stand further right, and lastly the Top Rider candidate would stand at the rightmost edge of the stage.

All four parties had agreed to this, as they all saw advantages in it. Since the speaking order was from left to right, the Scorpions felt that being first to speak would help them control the narrative on each question; the Hardwoods felt that standing near the center of the stage would draw attention to them and disrupt any attempts by the children to form a single group with identical opinions; the Beetles felt that speaking after the Hardwoods would help them get the better of the Hardwoods on each question; and the Top Rider candidates felt that going last would help them portray themselves as the better alternative to all of the others.

Additionally, they all agreed that the ordering would help the audience identify who belonged to each party. Because the Scorpions and Beetles were separated from each other by the visually distinct adult Hardwood candidate, they would not be mistaken for each other. Since everyone knew that the Scorpions were the original party, they knew to look for them on the left. Lastly, the Top Rider candidate would be on the end without a partner, as the Top Riders chose not to come to each election with a boy and a girl candidate.

Hardwoods prepare

In all ten of these elections, an adult Hardwood incumbent was facing a challenge from five children in the other three parties. Moreover the Hardwoods expected the audience at each debate to consist almost entirely of children, as the adult minority had by this time made it clear that they would either vote for a Hardwood candidate or not vote at all; most Hardwoods considered the idea of a nation run by children to be a sham, and for adults to participate in it to be even worse. Thus the Hardwoods could not count on their own people to vote for them, and had to win over the votes of the children in an election where all five of the competing candidates were children.

The Hardwoods knew that they faced a difficult challenge, but that if they were to skip the debate, they would be effectively forfeiting their election. They hoped, in fact, that it would be the other parties who would skip the debates and show themselves to be less interested in the welfare of Tāmta than the competing Hardwood candidates. They took heart in knowing that the children's parties had each separately agreed to the order of the candidates on the stage, meaning that the Hardwood candidate in each debate would be near the center. This meant that even if the children in the audience wanted to listen to only the younger candidates, they would need to walk past the Hardwood candidate even so, and would never be far away. Standing in the middle position also split the younger candidates into two groups so that they could not easily coalesce with each other and act as an anti-Hardwood bloc.

First day of debates

The five sets of candidates all gathered at the debate stage on the first day, as they all intended to watch the other candidates as well. The Hardwoods were surprised to find that a large number of Hardwood citizens had chosen to attend after all, and although there were still more children than adults in the audience, the Hardwoods realized that the adults would probably be the ones asking most of the questions and that those questions would be most likely intended to embarrass the Hardwood candidates.

The Hardwoods mentioned the ongoing Play-Lilypad war to test the children's opinions on what to do. The Hardwoods soon realized that the children were in denial, and had lost their sympathy for the Lilypads because to express sympathy would be to acknowledge that the war was real.

Final days of campaign

Orphans

In the final weeks of the campaign, diplomats from Moonshine expressed interest in adopting all of STW's remaining orphans without expecting compensation from STW. Most of these were children much younger than the Scorpions and other groups in Tāmta, with a great many of them being six years old. STW had been trying to find adoptive homes for them in Baeba Swamp, and stated that they would pay the adopting families, but that this money would be taken from the money that the Slimes owed STW for helping them find a home in Baeba in the first place. The Slimes denied the validity of this debt claim, saying that they owed nothing because STW's only wealth was that which had been taken from the forerunners of the Slimes. Therefore, any Slime family who adopted an orphan from STW was betraying the Slime party platform.

These orphans were now being called the Grass Walkers because many were barefoot, but they had not chosen that name and the Scorpions did not use that name either. The Scorpions called them instead paipa natuam, a term usually reserved for adolescents, implying that their hardships had so accelerated their childhood that they were grown adults as much as anyone else in Tāmta.

Moonshine's plan to adopt the orphans would take them through the refugee territory of Hōki where the Scorpions and Hardwoods lived. This was both because they felt the direct route over the ocean would be too dangerous for the children, and because a maritime journey would have only one endpoint, whereas a journey over land could see the children adopted into many different families along the way. But Moonshine worried that the Scorpions would be interested in adopting the children into Tāmta instead, as they knew that the Scorpions had a strong male surplus and that many of them would not be able to marry and raise children of their own.

Results of election

Although the ten seats up for election were those that had previously been allotted to the Hardwoods on the basis of proportional representation, the earlier children's protest had led to a compromise in which the repeat elections would be open-access, meaning that the Hardwoods were running against a slate of five children belonging to three parties, and the entire voting-eligible citizen population would be allowed to vote. Because 90% of the voting population consisted of children, the Hardwoods expected to lose all ten seats, and planned to stage a protest outside the Parliament building in which they would present the children with a list of demands, just like the protest that had taken place three months earlier. Some Hardwoods wanted to physically prevent the winning children from taking their seats, precisely because they knew the unfair physical manipulation tactic would send the children into a tantrum, perhaps even into tears, which would humiliate them so much that they might flee from the Parliament building and concede defeat.

Unexpectedly, however, two of the Hardwood candidates defeated all of the children running against them for their respective seats. They realized that to achieve victory in such a scenario, they must have gotten more votes from children than from adults, and therefore that perhaps their democracy was not such a sham after all. The two winning candidates, a man and a woman, belonged to separate committees and knew that they would rarely see each other as they served out their terms, but both said that they were honored to serve their nation and would not expect any special attention from being the only two adults among the 98 children in Parliament.

Foreign policy platform

Many voters had expected the winning candidates to be those who had expressed vocally their support for action against the Players. Nonetheless, the eight children who defeated the sitting adult candidates were those who chose to maintain the promise of neutrality even as evidence mounted for ever greater abuses being committed by the Players against the Lilypads. Many Hardwoods returned to political apathy after this election, saying that they had been better off before the Scorpions arrived but still respected their status as legitimate refugees. Meanwhile, those Hardwoods who insisted that the new democracy was a success began to speak of themselves as sumaamna, literally meaning bodyguards but also used to indicate adults who play children's games sincerely and with no handicaps. These people believed that they would survive in the Scorpion-dominated government long enough to take part in whatever government replaced it in the future, should the Scorpion party collapse as so many other recently founded parties had.

Contact with the Players

By this time, the Players had endorsed intimidation as their primary diplomatic strategy, proudly announcing that they had watched the Raspara slaughter a thousand young Lilypad children while the Lilypads were rescuing the Raspara's child slaves, only to ride into the campsite after the fighting was over and put both the Lilypads and the rescued slaves back into slavery on the same labor camps. They also declared that the Lilypads' rescue mission was a war crime, because it had led to many deaths, and that the Lilypad rescuers deserved not praise but punishment. The Players promised that they would make the Lilypads' lives even more painful than they already were, allowing the Play commanders free rein to use cruel tactics against the children that the Play army would never use against adult soldiers.

The Players assigned the task of diplomacy with children to their military, meaning that unlike all other diplomatic meetings, the children would be meeting with Play military generals instead of traditional diplomats, and the Play military's only goal was to win more territory for the Players. The traditional Play diplomats had always been women and had strongly believed that they could make peace with their enemies by appealing to common interests. The Players stated that the children had proven that they did not deserve to be treated with fairness, and that with any territory the Players took from the children's nations, however much blood was shed was irrelevant because the Players were taking control for the interests of the greater good.

The Players also announced a new war against the Scorpion children who had just signed a treaty of submission to the Players, where the children declared the new Scorpion territory of Tāmta to be within the Play nation, as part of the Play district of Tanaanu. The Scorpions had earlier considered themselves neutral and had so far responded to all military threats by fleeing ever further from their enemies. They had recently decided to take a side, saying that they actually considered themselves to be part of the Play nation. The Players responded to this treaty of friendship by adding the Scorpions to the list of nations that the Players would soon conquer and stand on. The Players promised that this new war applied only to Scorpions living outside the refugee territory, because the Players still respected Moonshine's territorial integrity, meaning that they would not be actually invading Tāmta, but warned that the Players would soon be massing soldiers on the borders of this territory, and because the refugee territory could not survive without trade, the Players would soon wield control over even the refugees.

Summer elections in Tāmta

By February 4193, the peak of summer on the common shared calendar, new elections for the entire Parliament were due in Tāmta, and this time the Hardwoods decided to field candidates for all 100 positions, including the two overseers. They still expected that they would lose most of their campaigns, but were encouraged by the fact that they had previously defeated children in a children's nation without cheating and without resorting to loopholes in the election laws.

Nonetheless, the children in the Scorpion-Beetle coalition were increasingly taking it for granted that they were smarter than the adults in the Hardwood party, and perhaps smarter than other groups of adults as well, but not smarter than the adults who still held a few reins of power in the Scorpion party.

The Hardwoods were of mixed backgrounds, and some were well-educated, but they had not grown up in a heavily political society. By now, the Hardwoods had conceded that the children were very smart and were not simply cheating their way into victory. But the Hardwoods who took the political system seriously held to the belief that if they obeyed the laws of their nation, they would be accepted as ordinary citizens eventually. Two men named Yàmu-Xʷētagʷa and Gaḳadànu ran for the two overseer positions. They also fielded a candidate for president but considered this race to be futile.

Next election cycle

In August 4193, Tāmta held democratic elections again.

Handover of power

After the election results, the Scorpions' remaining adult leaders resigned their positions, saying that the young Scorpions had so impressed the party founders that the founders had decided to hand over power four years earlier than they had promised to. This meant that not just the nation of Tāmta, but the Scorpion party itself, was entirely run by children, albeit with some of them now fifteen years old, having been Scorpions for nearly two years.

This handover of power was important because the Scorpions had always considered the well-being of their political party to be more important than what nation they lived in.

Many Scorpions believed that their duty was to eventually fight a war, although enthusiasm for battle had faltered after the Scorpions realized how many young children had died on the battlefield trying to protect themselves from the Players. Now, realizing that they would forever be few in number, the Scorpions debated openly whether their battle instincts should be nurtured or suppressed, but promised that they would not allow themselves to flee an invasion again.

The Scorpion leaders retained positions as advisers, but could not vote, and had no means to access the powers they had given up. Therefore, if the young Scorpions decided to go to war, the adults could no longer stop them, and moreover the adults knew they would likely be at the front lines of battle.

Crystals arrive in Tāmta

Late in 4193, the Crystals arrived at Tulip Lake, seeking to settle in the Scorpion kids' colony of Tāmta (still considered part of Hōki by the Crystals) and live side by side. The Crystals were led by women, and the migrants consisted of traditional families containing female leaders alongside their husbands and children.

The Crystals' migration continued a long Crystal tradition of settling in the nations of other groups and becoming an established minority. The Crystals had always considered themselves a transnational organization, and believed that they could recruit new members from the pre-existing traditional refugee populations along Tulip Lake, and perhaps even from the Scorpions.

They believed that the Scorpions shared a common interest but also understood that the Scorpions had purposefully isolated themselves from all other armies, even their supposed allies, and might not enjoy being colonized. The Crystals believed that they would nonetheless be capable of winning over the Scorpion leaders, saying that the Crystals would provide protection that the few Scorpion adults could not.

Linguistic differences

The Crystal diplomats, having learned to speak Play earlier in order to meet with earlier Play-speaking groups, had always felt the language was unfit for adults and of a different nature than their own language. Indeed, Play had so far contributed very few loanwords to the Crystals' languages, Middlesex and Leaper. Those few words that did exist were mostly terms for children's things, such as toys and candy, or were used ironically to imply the object being described was as out of place in Crystal society as the Play language as a whole would be.

Thus for example the Crystals sometimes used the Play loanword tiabataba for candy, even though they had two words of their own, and Play ŋaupupi did not mean "election", as in Play, but rather could mean either a sham election in which the result was pre-determined, or a more positive meaning indicating a group of children deciding amongst themselves how to play a game. Play words were almost never used for their literal meanings unless they referred to children's things. As in so many other cases, the various groups of Play-speaking children such as the Scorpions were unable to take offense at this situation because it was all they had ever known, and even Play-speaking adults typically cared little about how their language was viewed by outside groups, as native Play speakers took pride in their language's famously difficult grammar, saying that if Play was fit for children, the other languages must be fit for animals.

The Crystals also realized that Play lacked convenient terms of derision for children, apart from addressing children with terms for a different age group. Diminutives did not exist and the suffix -i was restricted to literal use. This suggested to the Crystals that the Players and their Play-speaking ancestors had been a child-focused culture for a very long time. Yet the most common word for adult, papapūapu, was derived from the word for wrinkle, while another common word (tatibumna) meant "out of control" and a third word simply meant "old".

Attempts to impress Crystal politics on the Scorpions

The Crystals supported an exclusively female power structure. Unlike most outside groups, they made little distinction between boys and men and did not see the Scorpions as deserving of any special sympathy simply because of their young age. Since the Scorpions had a male surplus, most of their leaders were boys. All female Scorpions were voluntary members who obeyed the democratically elected leadership and did not seek power of their own. The Crystals respected this, but also wanted to meet with female diplomats whenever possible, and for the Scorpions to respect the Crystals' own strongly feminist politics.

The Crystals also planned to impress on the young girls in the Scorpion population that they were better leaders than the boys. Since the Crystals were primarily female, they worried that the Scorpions would pay them unwanted attention as they grew into men, and perhaps even as adolescents. They believed that the only way to prevent this was to encourage the Scorpion boys to look to women and girls as role models, and to promote female leaders among the Scorpions even if they only held unofficial advisory roles. The Crystals wanted to police the boys' behavior directly, but understood that the task would be difficult.

Scorpions' reply

The Scorpions sent a team of young boys and girls to reply to the Crystals, showing that they spoke with one voice and did not have separate ideologies based on gender. These children told the Crystals that they endorsed feminism, just as the Crystals did, because in their short lives they had been attacked and invaded many times over by adult men, and never once had they been physically attacked by women. But they had never been attacked by boys either, and even though the Crystals seemed to think all boys had the instincts of animals, the grouping of thousands of young Scorpion boys and girls together in close quarters had yet to result in any significant in-group violence. This went strongly against the Crystal belief that boys were as violent as men, if not more so, and that any closely packed population of young boys would quickly result in the boys attacking both each other and anyone around them who made easy victims.

Five-party rule

The Scorpions told the Crystals that they were welcome in Tāmta, but that they would need to give up all pretense of being in charge, whether because they were women or because they were adults, and admit that they were fellow refugees who could not expect other refugees to stand aside for them.

The Scorpions sent their youngest enrolled boys as diplomats to meet with Crystals, who reminded the Crystals that the Scorpions had won the approval of the other refugee groups present, and that Moonshine (despite considering itself still a branch of the Crystals) had done nothing to oppose the Scorpions' takeover.

The Scorpions offered to recognize the Crystals as a legal political party in Tāmta, even allowing the possibility that the Crystals would accumulate more members from the other refugee groups and outvote the Scorpions. Thus the Scorpions enrolled the Crystals as their nation's fifth political party, alongside the Scorpions, the Beetles, the Hardwoods, and the Top Riders. But they said that any attempt to push the Scorpions around using force would lead the Scorpions to abandon their long plan to take revenge on the Players and instead finish off the Crystals. Even though the Scorpions were claiming they were still children and therefore too young to fight, they believed that they could easily defeat the Crystals, and therefore that it was no crime to send their boys to battle in such a conflict.

To any Crystals who did not wish to cooperate, the Scorpions offered the prospect of leaving Tāmta and settling in any of the many other areas of Hōki still open for settlement.

Symbolic gestures

The Scorpions were isolated by over a thousand miles from the Clovers, and by a smaller but just as uncrossable barrier from the rest of the Cold Men and from the Players who were invading the Cold Men. There was no trade road, even over hostile territory, connecting the Scorpions' hideout in Moonshine to either of the other territories, and the Scorpions assumed that the hostile Leash army would abduct anyone moving through the wilderness if the Players did not get there first.

Therefore the Scorpions signed a symbolic peace treaty with the Players, saying that if they ever met face to face, the Scorpions would give the Players anything they wanted except entry into the Scorpions' private territory. This was a further step away from their inherited ideology. Earlier, they had declared themselves to be part of Tanaanu, a historically rebellious area within Play territory located more than a thousand miles away. This was treasonous in itself according to the Cold ideology that the Scorpions had been taught in school, but now they were allying with the Play party as a whole, and not a rebellious faction that had arisen within it. The new treaty was especially important because the Players were now only a few hundred miles from the Scorpions, and the land that lay in between them was nearly undefended because it was the refugee colony of Hōki.

The Scorpions also signed an adoption treaty with STW, saying that they would adopt all of STW's remaining Grass Walker orphans (paipa natuam) at no charge, provided that they accept Scorpion party membership. The Scorpions said that they would be allowed to remain Clovers if they chose to claim that identity, as the Scorpions did not consider the Clovers a political party. Because they knew STW would have a difficult time reaching the Scorpions' territory in Moonshine, they did not expect STW's merchants to arrive with any significant number of orphans, but they promised that they would hold to their promise even if it meant adopting so many orphans that they could no longer be an army.

Nest War

Diplomatic isolation

The Scorpions were interested in adopting the Grass Walker orphans as a good deed in itself which needed no explanation, although they conceded that because their population was primarily male, adoption was the only means by which a good many of them would be able to raise families of their own. Since the Crystals had come to Tāmta from the west and still owned wagons that could carry them over land, the Scorpions realized that the Crystals might be able to help bring the orphans to Tāmta. If this were to happen, the Scorpions figured that the two parties' opinions of each other would both improve, as the Crystals would prove themselves a valuable ally when a third party was in distress, and the Scorpions would prove to the Crystals that they were of kind hearts despite their outwardly aggressive ideology and heated political campaigns.

However, when the Scorpions approached the Crystals to see if they could help transport the orphans eastward into Tāmta, some Crystal diplomats accused the Scorpions of planning to abuse the younger Grass Walker children, saying that adoption was simply a cover for their plan. Hearing this, the Scorpion children announced that they would no longer come to the Crystals seeking help.

Rise of Saltspring

January 19, 4194

A 13-year-old boy named Saltspring (Play Tana Mayafama) took the lead in repelling the Crystals' political advances, creating a new office that was below the president (named the Knife) but also independent of him. He had fought in close combat against the illegal Tadpole intruders in the Lilypad nation two years earlier and claimed to have saved the lives of other young Lilypads by scaring the men away. Some said that the Tadpoles had simply attacked other children, and that Saltspring's strategy was futile, but even these people acknowledged that Saltspring was a hero for bravely taking on the Tadpole men knowing he could easily have been killed.

The Crystals were reluctant to accept that the Scorpions admired this new leader, as he seemed to stand in the way of feminine power. Quickly the Crystals recognized Saltspring as their primary diplomatic enemy, saying that the Knife had appointed Saltspring to do the job that the Knife could not do on his own.

Realizing that the Crystals were afraid of a thirteen-year-old boy, whom they kept referring to with terms usually retained for adult men, the bystanders in the Hardwood party and other unaffiliated groups began to turn against the Crystals.

Saltspring goes to war

To the surprise of the president, the boy declared himself a Sunspot, even though the Sunspots were based a thousand miles to the west. He then promptly declared war against the Crystals. Saltspring said that he would rouse a second Sunspot army inside the refugee camp, whose members would be mostly Scorpions who objected to the Crystals' presence and supported the Sunspots' war against the Crystals in Pavaitaapu.

Saltspring's Sunspot troop consisted of only about fifty soldiers, all boys, but stated that they would vastly overperform their numbers and their young age because the Crystals were so weak. This was because just months earlier, when the Crystals had been concentrated in the Clover kingdom of Pavaitaapu, they had agreed to surrender all of their weapons to their long-time ally, the Soap Bubbles, who then promptly betrayed them. Indeed, the Soap Bubbles who slaughtered the Crystals in Pavaitaapu were those who belonged to the very same Sunspot army that Saltspring and his followers had just joined.

The Sunspot boys still did not have armor, but they had acquired weapons by various means. The Crystals, including their adult male soldiers, had neither armor nor weapons because they had not had time to recover or manufacture new weapons since their defeat in Pavaitaapu.

The boys called themselves Spines (Play Vavata Pamiti) to distinguish themselves from the other Sunspots. The metaphor here was a reference to spiny animals such as porcupines; although Saltspring's soldiers were not the strongest in the world, anyone who touched them would get hurt. This name had been used as a political party's name in the past, and Saltspring said that he would be willing to start a new political party if the Sunspots expelled him and his followers, but said that he would remain loyal to the Scorpions unless rejected by them.

The Crystals did not know of this sudden development and continued to believe that they were sharing their territory only with the Scorpions.

Battle of Lanăra

Because the Crystals did not know of the new war, they had made no preparations for defense. In the Crystal settlement of Lanăra, the Sunspots easily found a group of about 400 unarmed Crystal women who were working clustered together with no men or children nearby. Even though they were greatly outnumbered, the boys had swords and the women did not, so they rushed at the women intending to cut them all up as quickly as possible, with no worries about the women's ability to fight back.

In this battle, the Sunspots killed 63 of those women, while the others outran them. Their performance was uneven: Saltspring killed seven women just by himself, but most of the boys were too slow to catch up with any of them. Nonetheless the Crystals did not fight back at all, and therefore the Sunspots returned from their battle unharmed.

Among the dead women were Vapāa, Ŋaišassipa, and Tuvāpata, all of whom had been advocates for Crystal politics who had opposed the original Sunspots in the west. (Their birth names were in Leaper.) Most of the other women killed were apolitical but belonged to the wider Crystal movement.

After the massacre, the Sunspots went into hiding so that the Crystals would not find them. The Spine War (Play Pamis Vapap) had begun, and the boys came to think of themselves as the Spine battalion of the Sunspot army. (This was the Spines' name for the war, because they initiated it, but it later came to be known as the Nest War as the peak of the fighting moved westward.)

Because the Crystals had never learned of the boys' split from the Scorpion party, the Spines assumed that the Crystals would blame the Scorpions for the attack, launch a counterattack, and then trigger many Scorpions to either join the Spines or escalate into a full-scale war against the Crystals.

Explanation of attack

While the Spines remained in the wilderness to escape detection, they nonetheless figured they would eventually be discovered, most likely by the Scorpions. Together they wrote a defense of their attack on the Crystals, hoping to convince the other Scorpions to join their side or to at least cooperate with them in driving out the Crystals.

The Spines claimed allegiance to the Sunspots in the belief that the Sunspot men were also being threatened by the Crystals, and had attacked Crystals in self-defense. They noted that the Sunspots had preferred to drive out the Crystals rather than to kill them, and preferred to kill them rather than to capture and torture them. This set them apart from other all-male armies such as the Matrixes, who were well-known for torturing their victims, including women and children.

Political motivations

The Spines considered themselves boys, in part because the Crystals kept insisting that boys were no different than men. The Scorpions then promised that like other boys, they would never attack soldiers their age or younger, but would only target adults. They said however that the women they killed were adults just as much as any men, and that they were not targeting the Crystals simply because they felt women made easy victims; rather, since women were clearly in charge of Crystal society and had attempted to put women in charge of the Scorpions as well, it was women who were the enemies of the Spines.

In fact, many of the victims who died that day were quite young, but because the Crystals considered them to be adults, the older women made no special effort to protect the girls from the angry boys, and the boys attacked them indiscriminately. Even so, the boys agreed after the battle that they had not deliberately targeted the youngest ones and would not do so in the future. They also realized that the Crystals could not complain specifically about the deaths of the teenage girls without admitting that the Spines and the Scorpions were even younger than this, and therefore that the Crystals had been wrong earlier to treat the Scorpions as if they were adults.

The Spines stated privately that they hoped their attack would start a wider war between the Scorpions and the Crystals, that the Scorpions would forget about their long-term plans to invade the Players, and that the Players would remain neutral in the new war. The Players had earlier promised never to invade Moonshine, and that they would consider the refugee camps to be part of Moonshine. Thus the Spines realized that the only safe place to fight a war was inside the refugee state of Hōki where both the Scorpions and the Crystals had moved.

Wider reaction

Crystals

The Crystals reported the massacre to their leaders, not daring to report it to the Scorpions. The Crystal leaders prepared to launch a war against the Scorpion children in retaliation for the attack, but also worried that if they had fared so poorly in their first battle, they might not be able to win a war. Even the men were afraid to face down the Sunspot boys because the men would need to attack from a distance, throwing rocks and other objects, or else expose themselves to the boys' swords and spears. The Crystals realized that they might need to flee the Scorpion colony and find somewhere else to live.

Leapers

When outside parties such as the Leapers in Baeba Swamp heard about the unexpected turn of events, they stated that the Scorpions were full of rage because they had been repeatedly pushed from one territory to another, always by adults, and had seen many of their members kidnapped and abused by adults, and therefore the Spines simply took the first opportunity they had to take out their frustrations on another group of adults, even though their victims were both very weak and innocent of any involvement in the Scorpions' past troubles. The Leapers noted that the Scorpion territory had a large male surplus population, and predicted that the relatively small attack against the Crystals was only the beginning of a much wider war in which the Scorpions would attack anyone who got in their way, even if their victims claimed to be allies of the Scorpions.

Moonshine

Moonshine's Parliament received word of the attack after the wider Crystal party made contacts with them. The Moonshines reaffirmed their commitment to absolute pacifism, and that pacifism required that the strongest army take control of any territory they lived in. Because the Spines were stronger than the Crystals, they deserved to rule, and therefore the Crystals deserved to be slaughtered. Thus the Moonshines avoided making a commitment to rescue the Crystals.

It was only through Moonshine that the Scorpions finally learned what the Spines had done. The Scorpion leaders denied involvement in the massacre, but stated that some of their members had been missing for several weeks and that they could not track them down. The Scorpions nonetheless agreed with Moonshine that the strong had every right to abuse the weak, and that the Crystals deserved to be killed for putting their women in such a vulnerable position with no protection. Thereby the Moonshines and Scorpions forged an informal alliance, and the Scorpions contemplated a future invasion of Moonshine.

Hardwoods

The Hardwoods were the last to learn what had happened to the Crystal women. They realized that they were just as vulnerable as the Crystals, because they also had no armor and little access to weapons, and were living spread out through the children's territory such that they could not easily group together for protection. Some Hardwood families decided to flee Tāmta and seek refuge in other areas of Hōki, even knowing that living conditions were much worse elsewhere. They believed that Tāmta would soon be overwhelmed by violent crime as the Scorpions' male surplus adopted Spine-like behaviors and attacked weak victims regardless of ideology. Others decided to remain for various reasons.

Grass Walkers

The Scorpions reaffirmed their promise to adopt the Grass Walker orphans, even knowing that there was little chance of cooperation any longer with the Crystals who were best suited to transport the orphans eastward. Before the massacre, there had been a minority among the Crystals who believed in the Scorpions' sincerity, arguing that since the Scorpions were almost all orphans and runaways, they would make ideal caretakers for younger orphans. The Crystals had long practiced nontraditional parenting themselves, such as raising children in groups. The Crystals did not allow single men to take guardianship of children, but the Scorpions hoped that if they promised to raise the children in groups, their female members would satisfy the Crystals' definition of a mother figure and that the Crystals would assume those girls would be trustworthy enough to stop the abuses the Crystals claimed the boys would otherwise be prone to inflict on the younger children.

The Scorpions figured that their massacre of the Crystal women had no bearing on their suitability as caretakers for younger children, and that therefore the Crystals' positions should be unchanged, but realized that even if some Crystals still supported their plan, they had likely ruined their chances of cooperation by allowing the Spines to emerge and carry out their attack against the Crystal women.

New election cycle

In the wake of the massacre, another new election took place in Tāmta in February 4194, the first time that the Crystals were allowed to vote.

When the Scorpions realized that the Crystals were seeking revenge for the earlier massacre by attempting to peacefully vote the Scorpions out of power, the freshly appointed Scorpion party leaders came to more closely identify themselves with the perpetrators of the massacre, saying that pacifists were unnatural and deserved to die painfully, like prey animals, so that the Scorpions could grow stronger by feeding upon them.

War in Pavaitaapu

In 4194, the Crystals declared war on the Clover children's bodyguards (the Sunspots) and sent their entire adult male population back into Pavaitaapu, from which they had only recently just fled, to fight the war. Men who refused to fight gave up their Crystal party membership and joined other refugee groups. This meant that the adult Crystal population in Hōki was now entirely female, and the Crystals became even more suspicious now of the Scorpions and of the Cold Men who were now trickling in to the Scorpion settlements along Tulip Lake and Hipside River. By contrast, the other groups became disproportionately male because ex-Crystal men, but few women, were joining them.

To the Crystals' dismay, Moonshine recognized the Scorpions' claim to be a children's nation, as they had when the Scorpions had arrived just months earlier, and therefore Moonshine had no expectation that the Scorpions, including the adult leaders, would move west with the Crystals to fight the Sunspots.

Without their adult male population, the Crystals became ever more wary of living among the Scorpions. At the same time, the Scorpions relaxed.

Migration of Crystals from interior states

The war declaration also applied to the wider Crystal population living outside the refugee territory. The Crystals were the majority population in many states to the south and west, and in these territories, there were few men able to defect from the Crystals, as the only party that would be safe to join was the Soap Bubbles, into which entry was very difficult. This new declaration of war therefore was about to make vast areas of countryside almost entirely free of adult males.

Even though the order to war applied to the entire adult male Crystal population, the Crystal military strategy did not call for all of the men to attack at the same time, so some Crystal men remained behind to guard the Crystal nation's borders. It also did not apply to Crystals living in Moonshine or Play territory, which the mainstream Crystal party could not enter. Nonetheless, the inland areas of Crystal territory east of Baeba and south of Moonshine were considered unnecessary to guard, and therefore really did become devoid of adult males.

In total, about 25,000 men left their homes and joined the war in Baeba Swamp, and 12,000 more remained near the edges of Crystal territory, ready to join the rest in Baeba when they were called to do so. This was much larger than the Sunspot population of just a few thousand men, but the Crystals knew that the Sunspots were better-armed and that they would have allies among the civilians in Baeba.

The Crystal parliament's mobilization order created an interior zone within the Crystal territory called the Nest (Leaper Wāntàti) in which no adult males were allowed; here lived about 50,000 Crystal women, their children, and a very small number of Soap Bubbles. When word of this reached neighboring nations, men from territories such as Olansele decided to move south to help repopulate the Nest. There was no Crystal border guard between Olansele and the Crystal women's territory because they were officially allies. Yet, because these men were not Crystals, they were not subject to the mobilization order, and they felt the Crystal police force would be unwilling or unable to arrest them.

When the men from Olansele and other territories realized that the Crystal men had left the Nest and that the Crystal women were now entirely unprotected, they declared themselves to be Sunspots, making what had been a legal (though unwelcome) migration into a declaration of war. These men in some cases abandoned their own wives to move in with the Crystals, but most of the earliest migrants were unmarried.

Crystals plead for peace

The movement of Sunspot men into the Crystal women's interior zones upset the Crystals' plans to defeat the Sunspots in Baeba Swamp. The global Crystal parliament had approved this war, meaning that the Eggs in Play territory and the Moonshines in Moonshine territory had cast their votes in support, but because they did not send any soldiers to fight, their territories were still protected by loyal Crystal men. Now, the Crystals in the Nest wanted to pull some of their soldiers back home to protect them from the Sunspot men and others they predicted would soon arrive, but the global Crystal parliament stated that the war in Baeba was much more important than the well-being of the Crystals in the Nest, and that they would be willing to lose control of the Nest if it meant that the members of the other Crystal factions could move to Baeba after the war was over.

The Crystals in the Nest felt that the other Crystal factions, particularly the Eggs, might be angry at the Nesters because thirty years earlier, the ancestors of those in the Nest had voted to abandon the Eggs in a similar situation in which the Eggs' all-female colony was invaded by a troop of men calling themselves the Firestones, and those women soon gave birth to babies fathered by the Firestones. But the Crystals in the Nest had never harmed the Moonshines in any way, and yet they realized that the Moonshines seemed to make life difficult for them at every opportunity. Moonshine's diplomats explained this by saying that the Nest was not important because the Crystals living there were poor and rural, and that the Nest mostly existed as a buffer to keep enemy soldiers out of Moonshine. Nonetheless, the Crystals in the Nest reaffirmed their alliance with Moonshine, believing it to be the world's most successful Crystal empire, and deputized their all-female police force to fight off the invading Sunspot men with no help from outside.

Other Cold Men arrive

The Players had earlier told the children who were encircled by Play battalions that the time to flee had passed and that they would be forced to join the Play party as they grew up, and would be held under supervision so that they could not sabotage the new states the Players were building in the captured territories. The Players had many reasons for this.

But they held to their promise that anyone to the north of the Play battalions would be allowed to forever retreat further north, into the core of Moonshine territory, and that the Players would not invade them there. In the meantime, these children lived in a wilderness territory claimed by neither Moonshine nor the Players, as they had always wanted to. But they no longer felt safe, and so nearly all of the children in the wild moved north into Moonshine.

New Cold census

The number of Cold troops who arrived at Tāmta was far less than the 141,000 who had been living in free territory at the time of the treaty and had resolved to make their way to safety in Tāmta. The Cold children were not emotionally prepared to answer the question of what had happened to the many tens of thousands of children who had not been able to complete the journey. They knew that before their migration began, the Players had already captured 30,000 children in battle, and understood that these had most likely been enslaved rather than killed. They knew that the Players had attacked them from behind as they were retreating northward, and hoped that the many missing children were living in safety, if not in freedom, under Play control. (Even though the children had surrendered, the Players attacked them anyway, stating that they had not met the conditions of surrender, as the Players had demanded a direct transfer of power to the Play military. The Players had been inconsistent on this because they did not have full control of their military leaders.)

The Cold children took comfort, nonetheless, in the knowledge that the arriving children were on average younger than the general population. Nearly half of the population who had successfully completed the journey consisted of the so-called Deer Paws (nanuu pūu), children under 12 who had been abandoned by their parents. This was because the older children had taken care of the younger ones, protecting them from danger at their own expense, and staying behind so that younger children could go first. Many of the youngest children had been bunched together in a territory called Lypelpyp when the migrations began. This was more firmly controlled by STW than were other areas along the trade road, and in fact had a shorter route to safety than the East Bath migration route in the east; however, it required the children to pass through a river in Erala, which was dangerous and poorly governed territory. The children believed that STW must have taken it upon themselves to deliver the youngest children to safety along this route, and many of the youngest who had arrived stated that they had been hidden in cargo shipments, perhaps to hide them from the people at the many stops along the way.

New colonies in Tāmta

The Cold Men built new settlements in Tāmta, which they then declared to be for Cold Men only, and also independent of each other, though they still pledged allegiance to Tāmta and said that the five colonies were all ruled by Cold Men and so would have a unified military run by the Cold Men's existing command structure. Thus, they said that their military was more important than their nations.

Tāmta had consisted of a single district since its foundation two years earlier, but now the Cold Men wanted to bring their traditional system of government with them, in which people could concentrate themselves according to political ideology and live among their own kind. The Cold Men stated that their political party was still important, but that they had disagreements even with each other, and believed that the best way to get along was to divide themselves along political lines into districts while still remaining bound by the pledge to support the Cold party overall and serve in the military.

Fipapanu

The Land of Tomorrow, this district had many other names, such as Ŋumatūnu, Panu and Rasalu. This had been anticipated to be the capital, but the settlers soon declared that they wanted to live a life as far removed from politics as possible.

Many of the settlers here believed that they could start a new nation along the lakeshore. They still considered themselves Cold Men because of their promise of military allegiance, but stated that they would not form coalitions with the other Cold Men. As such, they allowed their people to create new factions of the Cold party with any ideology, or to become nonpolitical.

This meant that the people of Fipapanu were no longer bound by their promise to abstain from starting new families in their new territory, and therefore the people of Fipapanu declared that their territory was open to any Cold Men with young children. They expected to outgrow the other districts by this measure. There were still at this time very few people over the age of fifteen, but young marriage was traditional in their culture.

Titapa

A compact territory for Cold Men who preferred urban life, Titapa resolved itself to be otherwise apolitical and to cooperate with all of the other districts. There were buildings in this area that had been constructed long ago by previous inhabitants, even before it had become a refugee territory, but these were largely in ruins and the Cold Men knew that they would need to work hard if they wanted their territory to resemble a traditional city.

Many people here formed a close relationship with the district of Fipapanu.

Papayau Šeke

A sparsely populated area with few natural resources. In one corner of this territory, it bordered the much smaller district of Titapa. The people of Papayau Šeke wanted to experiment with a non-democratic government within the democracy of Tāmta, and stated therefore that they would elect a toparch (nenua) who would have absolute power within their territory but no power outside it. Thus the residents of Papayau Šeke would not need to bother with any internal political affairs. They hoped that they would still be allowed to vote in the Cold party elections and in Tāmta's governmental elections, but acknowledged that they might be ejected from the union for being non-democratic.

Pusuaani

This is the place also known as Imama-Hamapaa in Late Andanese, where the thematic syllables /ma/ and /pa/ were chosen artificially. The ordinary Andanese name would have been Yaa-Haalaa.

Vauŋāmtu

NOTE: This seems to have been partially confused with the island of Šanataŋūs.

This was the Cold Men's name for all of the islands within Tulip Lake, a place they felt would remain safe even if all of the remaining territory was lost. The food supplies were reliable but the Cold Men knew that they could not feed the entire Cold nation, and so they resolved to keep the population of Vauŋāmtu very low.

Šanataŋūs

Note: if this is on an island, it could not have three border patrols. It seems to have been partially confused with Vauŋāmtu.

Though its primary name was Šanataŋūs, this district had an alternate Play name Mišabami and was known in a cipher as 2-47. Located on a small island in the lake, which was nonetheless iced over for much of the year and therefore accessible. This district was intended to be a safe place for the most vulnerable in society, including those who did not feel safe even around the rest of the Cold Men. These people referred to themselves as nina, a Play word which could mean a toddler, someone with far-reaching plans for the future, or someone who makes a great mess. They were known in a trade language as bèd and began saying that bèd was an exact translation of the Play word and encompassed its full range of senses.

Border patrols

The Cold Men in Šanataŋūs broke the law when they appointed adult male guards to patrol the borders, which they referred to as The Door (Play tuma, a word earlier used in the name of the Cupbearer party) and said that they would not let anyone in, again applying this rule even to the other Cold Men. The wider Cold Men could not understand why the children in Šanataŋūs wanted adults to patrol their borders, even knowing that they had been betrayed and attacked time and again by various groups of adults and never by children. Unable to convince the new settlers to get rid of the adult guards, the non-Šanataŋūs Cold Men sent a team of young children to patrol the external border and attempt to prevent the adult guards from wandering off base and entering the wider Cold territory.

The children in Šanataŋūs responded to this by sending another team of children to patrol the internal border, and said that the children would not let any children leave or enter without authorization. This meant that the adult guards would be surrounded by two groups of children and that the district of Šanataŋūs would have three border patrol agencies: welcome children, welcome adults, and unwelcome children whom they hoped would give up or at least cooperate with the other two. The children on the inside were assigned to control of the movement of other children, and the children on the outside (who did not officially live in Šanataŋūs) were to do the same, while the adults in the middle were in control of the movement of adults (but were pledged to always deny entry).

The children in control of Šanataŋūs said that they were not setting up a trap; children would be allowed to leave and re-enter, but would require prior authorization from the children patrolling the perimeter, and that anyone seeking such a journey would need to show how it would benefit the district as a whole. Most of these were diplomatic missions, but one girl was sent on a mission shortly after the founding of the district to acquire any books she could find that were written in Late Andanese so that the children could learn the wisdom and medical knowledge of the lost Andanese civilization.

Figuring that any conflict between the three border patrols would almost certainly involve the trusted adult patrolmen attacking the young children out of pure spite, they assumed any such event would trigger the other Cold Men to invade Šanataŋūs and attack the men, and therefore predicted that none of the adult patrolmen would betray their nation in such a way. Thus the children in Šanataŋūs claimed that they would be safe precisely because they were so vulnerable. Other Cold children found this logic unacceptable, saying that they were all but inviting the adult guards to attack them, but the residents said that their guards were from the Hardwood population and had so far proven trustworthy, albeit somewhat difficult to get along with.

Early population growth

To the dismay of the wider Cold population, Šanataŋūs soon proved to be the most popular of the new districts, with people pledging to move there or else pool their votes to increase the representation of Šanataŋūs and therefore increase its effective population. When Fipapanu refused to become the capital, many settlers in Šanataŋūs felt that Šanataŋūs would be the next best choice, and that their people would be willing to host diplomatic meetings and other political functions even if they primarily served the interests of the non-Šanataŋūs Cold Men. Indeed, the other Cold Men were friendly to this idea, but realized that the border patrols might object, because it would mean that their jobs would be nearly the opposite of what they had originally intended if they were forced to nearly always allow people through in both directions.

Tasataupu

Here pine trees grew, and the Cold Men said that they would hide inside the tree trunks from their enemies. Thus it was called Tasataupu. In fact this was metaphorical, as they realized they could not actually hollow out the trees. Many of the settlers who chose Tasataupu were among the best-educated children, and these had created an informal and non-political group within the Cold Men who felt that they might someday be in charge of the whole party, and had pledged to stick together rather than dividing into factions.

May 4194 census

New Cold refugees continued to leave the wilderness until May 4194, by which time the wilderness was nearly empty. They knew that it would likely take them months, perhaps more than a year, to reach the colony of Tāmta. This was because they did not have the advantage of traveling in a large group, as the Scorpions had done.

Cold-Scorpion conflicts

For the first time, the Scorpions faced a political enemy party comprised of children their age, instead of adults or children controlled by adults. They had said time and again that children would never attack other children, and claimed that their history proved their case, but now, their adult enemies had receded into the background and were greatly outnumbered by the young Cold refugees, who seemed likely to soon outnumber the Scorpions as well.

The young leaders of the two groups of children nonetheless affirmed that war and violence were crimes of adults, and that they would resolve their conflict peacefully through politics rather than on the battlefield. Some adults, overhearing this, hoped that they might still have one last chance of seizing power in Tāmta by threats of violence, but knew that they would have very little time left to rule before the children matured into adults themselves.

Problems in Šanataŋūs

Border guards

The children in Šanataŋūs soon found themselves facing what to many of them was a familiar problem: the adult guards who had been assigned to patrol the district's border were now trapped between two children's territories, neither of which would let them pass through in either direction. Earlier, the adult guards had been expecting to be allowed limited freedom of movement in the southern territory, just outside the border of Šanataŋūs, saying that any such movement would be necessary to make sure invaders were not approaching. But when a troop of children arrived and said that they had been assigned to keep the adults out of the other districts, the adults found themselves confined to a thin strip of land around the border. They could not move north either because they had earlier signed an agreement with the children denying the guards the ability to trespass within Šanataŋūs. The guards realized that they would be wholly dependent on the two groups of children for their food and basic needs, and some wanted to re-negotiate the founding pact to give the guards a colony within the children's inner territory so that they would be self-sufficient and the children would not need to tie themselves down delivering food and other supplies to the guards.

Debate about capital status

Many Cold Men in Tāmta now wanted Šanataŋūs to be the capital of the Cold territories, and to define the Cold territories as a discontinuous autonomous nation within Tāmta, which would itself be defined as a wholly sovereign nation within the Moonshines' refugee territory of Hōkī. Hōkī was in turn just a state within the Moonshine Empire, so the children were placing a nation within a nation within a state within an empire, and this innermost nation was divided into autonomous districts. The Cold Men claimed legal jurisdiction over the Moonshine Empire since they had inherited the claims of their parents, and like their parents they understood that this was a diplomatic technicality, but they used this to help prop up the authority they claimed to redraw borders within the refugee territory.

For the most part, the people of Šanataŋūs accepted this, because they felt it would help ensure their safety, even if it meant that many people would be constantly arriving and leaving their territory, which had originally been intended to wall itself off from the rest of Cold society. Most people in Šanataŋūs still trusted the adult border guards and were more concerned with the outer rim of children who had arrived to patrol the adult guards.

Samaupa's mission

July 23, 4194

The leaders of the state of Šanataŋūs assigned a young girl named Samaupa-Name to discover the secrets of the lost Andanese civilization, whose language had been handed down to just a few of the kids' parents, and was almost entirely unknown to the young and growing kids in the refugee colony. They believed that if they could discover the Andanese wisdom, they could build a new society as prosperous as their original homeland had ever been, and no longer need to return to a warmer climate.

Samaupa knew that the Andanese were now extinct in their original homeland, which was now controlled by the Play party. She knew that some Andanese speakers had fled to Xema and had used military bases in Xema to wage war against not just the Players, but the whole of the wider world, as they sought to turn nations against each other and then invade those weakened by wars. Samaupa knew that whether she chose to explore Play territory (Memnumu) or Xema, she would be unwelcome there, and therefore that this was a dangerous mission.

Both of the territories in which Samaupa felt she might find relics of Andanese culture were adjacent to territory claimed by Moonshine, but choosing Xema afforded her the advantage of crossing only through Moonshine territory. Therefore she decided to seek out a mission to Xema, beginning by crossing on her own into the Moonshine state of Safiz across the lake from the refugee campground.

August 4194 elections

The Scorpions now held their first six-party elections, with the legal parties being the Scorpions, the Beetles, the Top Riders, the Hardwoods, the Crystals, and the Cold Men. The Scorpions had allowed the Beetles to continue as a separate party even though it no longer provided them any significant advantage in elections because they were facing so many other parties. Instead, they made the Beetles sign an agreement to be even more closely bound to the Scorpions, and allowing the Scorpions and Beetles to forfeit votes to each other, such that they competed effectively as a single party with four candidates in each election, two girls and two boys.

Cold Men's position

The Cold Men were much like the Scorpions, and declared that they would allow both boys and girls to vote in Tāmta, just as they always had in their internal party leadership elections. They had tended to elect mostly boys despite having a roughly even gender balance in their population, and saw no problem with this. They therefore said that they would field a single candidate for each election, not one boy and one girl for each seat.

Scorpions attempt to gain vote share

The ruling Scorpion party defined the Crystals as an all-female party with only adults allowed to vote. Recently, however, the Scorpions had suspended their traditional prohibition against other parties voting for them. They had created this rule because they did not want other parties to overwhelm the Scorpions and elect poor candidates on purpose in elections where a Scorpion victory was guaranteed. But now that there were so many other parties with viable candidates, the Scorpions realized they needed all the support they could get. The Scorpions still had full control of their internal party nomination process, and therefore believed that the possibility of poor candidates getting through buoyed by false support from hostile parties was no longer a realistic threat.

Likewise, the Scorpions identified the Hardwoods as adults, both male and female in about even proportions. Of the six parties in Tāmta, the Hardwoods were the only group that consisted primarily of traditional families with a husband, a wife, and children at home. The Scorpions claimed that Crystals' voting population must be entirely adult women because the Crystal party laws had sent their adult male population abroad to fight the war, and because they did not allow children to vote. Neither did the Hardwoods allow children to vote.

Plans to further extend voting rights

This meant that the child populations of both the Crystals and the Hardwoods could theoretically vote for one of the other four parties, because those other four parties consisted entirely of children, and now allowed children even of other parties to vote for them.

The Scorpions figured that if they passed a new law allowing all citizens age 5 and older to vote, it would not greatly affect their own campaigns, since the newly enfranchised young children would most likely vote nearly randomly. (The Deer Paws could not vote because they had not completed elementary education, and the Cold party required this for membership, irrespective of age. They had been promising to work out a way to admit the Deer Paws without formal schooling but so far most Deer Paws had been uninterested.) If they concentrated their votes into the Scorpion and allied parties, they could inflate the Scorpion vote totals and carry many Scorpions to victory; even if the children voted mostly for the weaker candidates in the pool, they would still help the Scorpions overall since the votes would be pooled.

Meanwhile, if the Hardwoods and Crystals decided to accept children's votes in order to keep up, the children would pollute the voter rolls of those two parties with their naive, uninformed worldviews, and force the adult parties to campaign on issues that meant nothing in the wider world or else risk losing the children's votes to the Scorpions.

To this end, the Scorpions wondered how best to attract the votes of children away from their parents, and whether it would be worth the effort.

Crystal men arrive in Clover territory

By January 4195, the male Crystal troop of about 25,000 soldiers was facing resistance in Baeba's northern district of Pavaitaapu, as they tried to take control of Clover territory to fight the police force called themselves Sunspots. The Crystal men had struggled to complete their journey; they no longer had control of the coast, and Moonshine denied them entry because they were not of the Moonshine faction of the Crystal party.

When they arrived in Pavaitaapu, they found that while the local police force was unpopular, most of the civilians wanted to have their territory run by Leapers, Matrixes, or some other local party, but not the Crystals.

Offer of Soap party status

The Soap Bubbles proposed admitting the male Crystal soldiers to their party all at once, telling them that they would be free from their obligations, and could choose whether to stay in Pavaitaapu or return home to the Nest. Many of these men were young and not actually married to Crystal women, so the Bubbles said that they might find new women in Clover territory if they chose to stay. Traditionally the Soap Bubbles had imposed very strict entry requirements, including a rigorous athletic test, but they stated firstly that the local faction of the Bubbles had not been doing this and secondly that, being soldiers, most of the Crystal men would likely pass the test if they chose to take it.

The Bubbles made it clear to the Crystal men that if they joined the Soap, they would need to immediately end all conflict with the Sunspots. The Sunspots were not a political party, and therefore the Soap Bubbles allowed their members to join the Sunspots without losing Soap party membership. Yet other Bubbles were not part of the Sunspots. This is why the Soap Bubbles and the Crystals still considered themselves allies despite the Sunspots and Crystals being at war. (In fact, the Soap Bubbles and Crystals were also at war, but only in Baeba Swamp, and the Soap (but not the Crystals) had said that any of their members who left Baeba would be free of their obligation to fight.)

Worries about Soap Bubble collapse

The Bubbles hoped that if the Crystals joined, they would retain their anti-Sunspot alignment, and free the Bubbles from dependency on the Sunspots, which had created an uncomfortable situation within the Soap Bubble military hierarchy. But the single troop of Crystals arriving in Baeba was vastly larger than the entire Soap Bubble army, which at the time had only 3269 soldiers, meaning that the expanded Soap army would be effectively run by the Crystal men. Thus they worried that the Crystals might free the Bubbles from dependency on the Sunspots, but then go further and require that the Bubbles expel their pro-Sunspot members or even declare war on the Sunspots. The Soap Bubble party leadership was not fully democratic, so the Crystals could not do these things by a simple vote, but since the ex-Crystals were so much more numerous, they would be able to threaten disobedience or civil war if they did not get their way. Still, the Soap Bubble soldiers were in much better shape, both physically and in terms of weapons and armor, than were the arriving Crystal men, who had lost many soldiers just trying to get to Baeba and seemed wholly unprepared to fight the war that they had actually been sent to fight.

Situation in the Nest

By this time the all-female police force in the Crystal's Nest home territory had banded into an army, stating that because their men were fighting a foreign war, the women would need to protect the homeland. They had already been invaded by thousands of men, who had declared allegiance to the Sunspots as they arrived, meaning that the army the Crystal men had expected to fight in Baeba Swamp had come after the Crystal women in their heartlands. The Crystal women outnumbered the men but were still losing most of their battles. Additionally, another army, the Matrixes, was talking about forcing their way into the Nest as well, but the Matrix military leadership still believed that there were better things to fight for in Baeba Swamp. The Soap military leaders did not know all of this, but told the Crystal men that Soap military planners were experts and that the proof of it was that they were living in the midst of a war and had not been defeated despite being outnumbered by several of the armies around them.

Last wave of migration

The new waves of Cold children migrated independently, and therefore at different speeds. New groups of Cold children continued to arrive into early 4195.

Cold-Scorpion treaty

Once in Hōki, these groups came to live as one, identify as Butterflies, and assert that they were also the only surviving Cold Men. They re-established the Blue Cocoon, which superseded the Scorpions' short-lived nation so that the Scorpions could continue on as a separate faction of the Cold party (they had earlier split from the Cold Men) and therefore vote in the elections of the wider Cold Men.

The Cold Men knew that by abolishing the Scorpions' nation of Tāmta they would trigger a conflict, but again promised that they would resolve the conflict without resorting to violence. Because they wanted their own states to remain legally distinct entities, the Cold Men allowed the Scorpions to also have their own states within the Blue Cocoon; previously the Scorpions had considered Tāmta to be a single entity with only one city and no subdivisions.

Cold Men propose reforms

New politics

The arriving Cold refugees were not happy with the Scorpions' decision to live side-by-side with the two groups of adult refugees, the Hardwoods and the Crystals. By this time the Cold Men outnumbered the Scorpions and warned that they would simply vote the entire adult population out of the nation if the Scorpions did not expel their own adults and then force the refugees living in traditional families to move to another refugee colony. This was illegal according to Moonshine law, as Moonshine did not give refugees the right to reject other refugees, but the young boys in the Cold population were growing stronger and braver every year and were now contemplating the feasibility of open rebellion against the very people who had kindly let them in.

The Cold Men understood that parents would certainly not abandon their children to the Cold-Scorpion coalition, and therefore that they would be able to take over the areas of the settlement where those families had lived. They hoped that most adult refugees would obey the demand to leave because they had previously cooperated with the Scorpions' short-lived multiparty democracy, but they also knew that they had never gotten along well with adults in the recent past.

Cold majority appears

The Cold Men outvoted the Scorpions as promised, but prepared for the frustration that they predicted would accompany a political victory they were too physically weak to enforce.

Resolution and new treaty

To the surprise of the Hardwoods and many others, the entire adult Scorpion population, including the women, agreed to leave the Cocoon and leave their children behind. They thus promised to join the wider society of Hōki, but ensured the young children that they would attempt to maintain intermittent contacts through the Cold Men's border patrols.

Then, the Cold Men declared that the Blue Cocoon was a sovereign nation owing nothing to Hōki or Moonshine, even as they assumed that they would be immediately invaded by yet another adult army seeking easy victims.

The Scorpion leaders assured their population that their previous stay in the wilderness had taught them survival skills that even adult veterans did not know, and that they would survive any imminent threat from outside. The Scorpions continued to insist that they had done the right thing by inviting the Cold Men to settle in the Cocoon and vote the Scorpions out of power democratically.

The Hardwoods and Crystals did not cooperate with the Cold Men's new order, and chose to remain in the children's territory. The Cold Men repeated that the Cocoon was off-limits for all adults, even those raising young children, and that they were required to leave so that there could once again be a refugee territory for children only. The Cold Men warned that they were planning to arrest adults for trespassing, and deputized their entire population to carry out these arrests so that there would not be a specific police force for the adults to target if they chose to escalate to violence. But the Cold Men knew that they were powerless without the Scorpions' cooperation, and that if they attempted to enforce their new law, the adults could attack or even kill young Cold police officers while driving the Scorpions into an alliance with those adults.

Scorpions attempt to retain control

Because the Cold Men had told the adult populations that they could never return, the Scorpions argued that the Cold Men's laws must apply to the areas where those adults now lived. This meant that the Cold Men were claiming jurisdiction over that territory, and by logical extension, that territory must still be part of the Blue Cocoon. Therefore the Scorpions considered the expelled adults to still be citizens. The Scorpions then annexed the territories the adult population had moved to, saying that they could continue to vote. Since they could not physically contact the adults to get their votes, the Scorpions decided to write in the adults' votes themselves.

Hardwoods' reaction

Many Hardwoods believed that the surprisingly low crime rate among the Scorpion population was due to potential Scorpion criminals being afraid of the adult male Hardwoods who shared the streets, despite their having repeated many times that they were not afraid of adults. The Hardwoods expected similar behavior from the Cold Men. Traditionally the Hardwoods had allowed limited violent behavior amongst their own children, seeing it as part of human nature, especially for boys; by adulthood, the Hardwoods expected their men to solve problems through discussion and compromise. The migrating Cold boys had thus surprised the Hardwoods by declaring violence to be an adult behavior that children should shun in favor of peaceful solutions, showing that their worldview was the precise opposite of the Hardwoods; the Hardwoods believed that violent boys grew into peaceful men, whereas the Cold children believed that children made peace and adults committed crimes and started wars. The Hardwoods understood that it would be very difficult to convince the Cold boys to change their minds, but believed strongly that doing so would make their nation stronger, as the Cold Men would inevitably become adults and, if they did not change their worldview, might be very violent adults and ones who would attack a very weak enemy.

First year in the Blue Cocoon

Most people in the Blue Cocoon believed that the primary political conflict would be the Cold Men's inability to physically remove the adult Hardwood and Crystal populations from their territory, and the Scorpions' unwillingness to help the democratically triumphant Cold police officers enforce their new law. Some Hardwoods worried that sooner or later, one of their own men would attack a child, and this incident would trigger both the Cold Men and the Scorpions to unite against the adults and push them out of the territory by pure force. But conflicts soon appeared that did not involve the two groups of adults, and the Hardwoods encouraged their people to remain uninvolved and let the children fight their battles nonviolently as they both had promised.

Economic conflicts

Considering themselves at peace, the Cold Men opened stores and offered their services in the traditional labor market, but found that the other groups, even the Scorpions, looked down on them and would only allow them to sell their products in special stores for merchandise made by the Cold Men. That is, instead of grocery stores, furniture stores, bookstores, and the like, there could only be "Cold stores" where everything was bunched together. One reason for this was that the Cold Men had refused to outlaw shoplifting. The average age in the Cold party was younger than the Scorpions' because the Cold Men had absorbed many thousands of young children whose parents had abandoned them, whereas the Scorpions had already seceded by this time. The Cold Men claimed that they were nearly self-sufficient, but that some among them still needed help to make ends meet. They believed that the best way to meet their needs was to steal from rival parties, including the Scorpions, rather than trying to set up a welfare system. The Cold Men argued that they had proven their good behavior and that each shoplifter knew precisely what they needed better than a middleman in welfare system could do. Thus, the Cold Men allowed their members to shoplift from stores owned by other groups, and stated that if they were physically harmed in the process, they would consider it to be assault. Lastly, the Cold Men believed that the other groups in the Cocoon were less needy and therefore did not allow the other groups to shoplift from the Cold stores.

Because of the layout of stores of the time, customer-facing merchandise was limited, so shoplifting of any but the most petty things required the customer to engage with a salesperson, and was much the same as robbery. It was much easier for a salesperson or distributor to steal from a store than for a customer. The Scorpions allowed their people to prohibit Cold kids from shopping at their stores, but believed it was unnecessary. Rather, by excluding the Cold Men from their distribution networks, the other groups could make a much greater difference in the amount of theft the Cold kids inflected on them.

Hygiene

The Cold Men insisted that all citizens of the Blue Cocoon obey strict hygiene laws, worried that the Scorpions' lifestyle of living close to nature would lead to a plague that would mostly hurt the Cold Men who were not accustomed to living in pestilential conditions. Both the Scorpions and the Cold Men considered humans to be a part of nature, but had different ideas about what this meant. The Scorpions' view on this issue was similar to that of the Players, saying that filth too was a part of nature, and could actually protect strong humans against disease while sickening the weak. By contrast the Cold Men believed that soap and bathing were a part of nature, and that humans needed to constantly clean their bodies in order to remain healthy; human anatomy was just such that humans were able to easily clean their entire bodies while bathing, unlike all other animals. The Cold Men said that to deny this was to deny human nature, and would make humans vulnerable to diseases that they were not meant to endure. The Cold Men's view on this was partly influenced by their alliance with the Soap Bubbles and the children in the Soap-influenced Clover dynasty, but also came from their having been attacked by the notoriously filthy Players.

Contact with the Clovers

By this time, the Clover children's nation of Pavaitaapu was overwhelmed by the war raging around them and no longer functioned as a sovereign territory. Some adults in the Clover nation wanted Baeba Swamp, still legally dominated by the Leapers, to annex Pavaitaapu and protect the Clover children by adopting the youngest ones into childless Leaper families and granting the older children control over neglected mountain areas that other armies would be unlikely to invade. By this time those few Clovers who had ever been armed had lost this, and the Clover nation was dominated by two groups of adults (the bodyguards and the police) who were fighting for control of the children. These two groups were not formally at war, but isolated incidents occurred in which members of each group attacked each other or attacked the children. The Cold Men had earlier established warm relations with the Clover king, the Golden Sun, but in March 4195 the Golden Sun's bodyguards fatally stabbed him and his younger brother during a party. The king of the Clovers was now a 13-year-old boy whose trade name was Silas.

Formation of the Slopes

There was a new renegade party called the Slopes which had also been founded by a boy; the Slopes held a celebration shortly after their founding, and adults who attended the party assaulted the young Slopes after nightfall. Many traumatized Slopes rejoined the Clovers after the assault, while others resolved to endure the abuse as they planned for a future in which they would make weapons and seize control of the unarmed and defenseless populations around them. Thus, the remaining Slopes were not merely criminals, but a minority among criminals who considered their drive for power so important that they would endure years of abuse from stronger criminals just to get access to weapons and power when they became adults.

The formation of the Slopes alarmed the adult populations of Pavaitaapu and news spread to those living far afield. The Slopes' party platform made clear that they expected they would be physically assaulted by adult men as part of everyday life, and that they neither expected nor welcomed any outside group's offer to protect them; they resolved to fight the adult criminals on their own despite their obvious physical disadvantages. This was because the Slopes had abolished the concept of crime, just like the Zenith party whom they so admired. The Slopes also leaked plans to help the Zeniths in the war involving the adult groups around them, expecting to win control of the land they fought for rather than allowing the Zeniths to push them onto the front lines and then steal control of the land after the war was over.

The Slopes in many ways resembled young Zeniths. Unlike the Zeniths, however, the Slopes sought to rapidly increase their population by natural reproduction and by adopting young children, particularly the young orphans in Mutanapana who had still not been rescued by the common people of Pavaitaapu or by any other outside party.

Slopes react

The Slopes were more communitarian than the Zeniths, meaning that individual members had relatively less freedom, and the Slopes as a whole had more power over each Slope party member. But whereas the Zeniths were mostly male and attracted people looking to live a life of self-reliance, many Slopes felt they had noplace else to go, and did not seek positions of leadership. This meant that individual Slopes seeking leadership positions could wield more power over their party than individual Zeniths did over theirs.

Soon, a young Slope leader named Sima-Kīsiba ("Window") declared war on the Crystal women without endorsing the Sunspots or any other group. Previously, Window had been a follower of a particular Zenith leader, but had quickly come to see himself as a leader in his own right and stated that he would pay no allegiance to the Zeniths either.

Another boy popular at this time was named Vamnape; his name was related to that of the Clovers' Tapupais police force which was just being assembled.

Breakdown of law

By this time, there was no single police force that had control over the Clover nation, and violent crimes against children increasingly went unpunished. The Clovers mostly accepted this, and stated that they would prefer to face unfair battles against traditional adult male armies rather than give up their sovereignty, but that they would not stop Clovers from fleeing to safety, and would even risk their own lives to help the youngest of the Clover orphans escape Pavaitaapu so long as they could trust that the children would be headed to a safe territory such as the Blue Cocoon rather than into the home of an abuser.

Scorpions and Crystals change

Eastern politics

It seemed to some that, while the traditional armies fought for control of Baeba Swamp, the various nations whose populations consisted entirely of teenagers and children might have the eastern rural hinterlands to themselves, as this land was much poorer and seemed untempting to the more powerful armies in the Swamp. Some young leaders in the east were open to diplomatic ties with the Slopes, who had promised to destroy all beautiful things, but not with the Zeniths or any other adult parties, even those who had never done them any harm. At the same time, they were openly critical of the Slopes. Thus, the young politicians seemed increasingly intent on building a new world run by their generation, and where the adults of the previous generation would become irrelevant.

Thus the leaders of parties like the Scorpions and Cold Men, who had always seen each other as allies, now became more brave about criticizing each other, and also spent less time criticizing the adults in parties such as the Hardwoods.

Likewise, the adult parties mostly ignored the children as they always had. The Crystals were one exception to this, but they had no adult male leaders in the region either, as their entire adult male population had decamped to Baeba.

The Slopes and Clovers were young but surrounded by adult armies. The leaders of the east were not sure whether the Slopes and Clovers would be interested in immigrating to the eastern wilderness if given the opportunity. For the Clovers, it would mean giving up vast amounts of wealth, but it seemed increasingly unlikely that the Clovers would ever inherit the wealth they were legally entitled to.

Commons protest incident

Many young Cold boys staged an anti-Scorpion protest at Vamīptau Tuaus, a public commons in the Scorpion village of Vasavavu, in the district of Pamtaipu, an area of Tāmta that had been recently created by the Cold Men to make the Scorpions' settlements politically similar to those of the Cold Men.

Because this protest was in Scorpion territory, the non-Scorpion Hardwood and Crystal populations were allowed in the commons as well. Some of them did not speak Play and did not understand what the children were so angry about, and merely stood and watched in amazement. Others did understand Play or asked others to translate for them. Near the center of the commons, nine boys carried protest signs while a tenth boy, Saummumi, stood in front of them and began yelling angry words.

After Saummumi started running towards the Scorpion boys, a Hardwood man attacked a different Cold boy who was standing in amidst the Scorpions; none of the boys were even addressing the man, but he mistook the situation for a threat and beat up the boy who was standing between him and Saummumi. Then he fled the scene.

Crystal reaction

The Crystals reacted to this by endorsing the Cold Men's plan to rid their territory of adult males, even though the Crystals were themselves illegal simply for being adult women and did not expect to be legally allowed back in. They only hoped that if they cooperated with the Cold plan, the Cold boys would recognize them as friendly, and even if they insisted the Crystals not be allowed citizenship they might allow the Crystals to remain physically present with a small autonomous territory of their own. The Crystals also stated that they were joining the alliance for their own protection, and not because they believed that the Hardwoods were invaders; the Hardwoods were the only group in the Blue Cocoon who consisted primarily of traditional families, and had been there before the others arrived; thus the Hardwoods described themselves as indigenous to the area while the children and the Crystal women were both sometimes described as refugees and sometimes as colonists (Play mašeta).

Scorpion reaction

Meanwhile, the Scorpions, who had previously been passive, now endorsed the original Cold plan to remove all adults by force, but stated that they would first target childless men, then childless women, and lastly men and women who had dependent children in their homes. This new plan ignored party membership, meaning that childless Hardwood women were considered equivalent to any childless women in the all-female Crystal party. Many Crystal women had children in their homes, but Crystal tradition had encouraged children, especially boys, to move out at even younger age than the Scorpions and Cold Men did, with boys traditionally moving out at age 10. The Scorpions counted these households as childless even if the boys had not actually moved out, and considered the boys to be prime targets for enrollment in the Scorpions or perhaps the Cold party.

The Scorpions were better armed than the Cold Men and thus better equipped to fight against adult men, but both the Cold Men and the Scorpions knew that the Hardwoods could quickly escalate the conflict into a war, and that in a war, there would be far more deaths among the Cold and Scorpion children than among the Hardwood adults. They also knew that the Crystals were not only unreliable allies, but very weak, as the Scorpion boys had actually attacked some Crystal women the previous year and the Crystals reacted by seeking outside protection instead of attempting to bring the boys to justice or even invading the boys to bring them under control.

Cold Men respond

The Cold Men were upset not just because one of their younger members had been beaten up by an adult, but because the man seemingly had no comprehension of what he was doing and was simply acting on instinct. And because this incident had occurred at a protest against the Scorpions, which the Scorpions had allowed and did not even involve the Hardwoods, the Cold Men wondered if it was no longer safe to protest, or even assemble, in their nation lest a rogue adult wander through the crowd and decide to attack children out of pure spite. Thus, the Cold Men compared the Hardwoods to wild animals, saying that they and the Scorpions were in danger just walking around their nation, always at risk of being attacked even without a trigger or background of hostility. They realized that if they were already in danger while officially at peace with the Hardwoods, they would be in much greater danger should the Hardwoods ever come up with a legitimately compelling reason to attack them.

The Cold Men knew that the Scorpions had been living with the Hardwoods and had not complained. Some Cold Men now suspected that the Hardwoods had been assaulting Scorpion children all along, but that the Scorpions were afraid to admit this because it would have made them look weak and ruined their public image. Now that the violence was undeniable, the Scorpions could no longer pretend that the Hardwoods were their friends, and so buckled quickly under pressure. But, noticing that it was not a Scorpion boy who was attacked, other Cold Men took it as a sign that the Scorpions were going out of their way to firm up their alliance with the Cold Men, even if they really did still believe deep down that the Hardwoods were mostly gentle towards the children around them.

Hardwoods speak out

The Hardwoods had little sympathy for the children, saying that the Hardwood police force (formerly the cover-all Tāmta police force) was too busy protecting the Hardwoods from the throngs of children around them to also protect those children from the Hardwood men. They claimed the Scorpions and Cold boys needed to start their own police forces if they felt they needed protection from the indigenous adult minority of their newly founded nation. They said that many Scorpions were now as tall and strong as some of the weaker Hardwood men, and although they admitted that this could not justify the attack on the much younger Cold boy who had posed no threat, they also stated that they no longer had any obligation to prosecute crimes against non-Hardwoods.

The Cold Men and Scorpions both insisted that there was no violent crime problem within their parties, and therefore Cold children as young as seven years old (the ones who had been abandoned by their parents) were allowed to live independently and walk around town without seeking protection from an older member of the party. The Cold Men insisted that they should not need to shelter these children because they would not be in any risk of danger were it not for the Hardwood criminals. They did not collect detailed crime statistics, but stated that Cold Men and Scorpions had committed only a negligible amount of violent crime and therefore proved that even the youngest children would be safe if they could only keep the Hardwoods out of their living areas.

The Cold Men insisting that they were not attacking each other found the men's other claim (that it was the Hardwoods who needed protection) even more frustrating to address. They asked the men to show them all the Hardwood victims of Cold and Scorpion criminals, and explain why they needed a police force for protection but the Cold and Scorpion children were able to live unprotected. The Hardwoods answered with familiar words: the Hardwoods were not attacking each other, and the only significant violent crime was between the rival parties, not within them. They refused to show the inquiring Cold Men the victims they had asked for, saying that the Cold Men would simply deny being the perpretrators since they had already refused to acknowledge that Cold Men could be violent.

Indeed, not only the Hardwoods refuse to apologize, but they also escalated their attacks against young Cold children, focusing on robbery of goods distributors. They said that they were only taking back what had been stolen from them, insisting that the Scorpions would be doing the same if they were only physically fit enough to outmuscle the Cold Men. The Hardwoods also began robbing Cold stores directly, physically forcing their way into the store's warehouse. The Cold Men had never specifically admitted to taking goods from the trading network that kept Tāmta supplied with goods, but had made clear that they would do so if they felt they needed to. Now that the Hardwood men were openly committing and promoting looting of Cold-owned goods and stores, the Cold Men felt pressure to retaliate by escalating their own thefts and specifically targeting Hardwood distributors. But in an internal vote, the Cold leadership decided they had had enough of being physically pushed around, and would do their best to eliminate the problem at its source.

Two-party stage

When the Cold Men realized that the Hardwoods had turned their peaceful children's society into a violent one by sheer physical force, they banned all adults from their territory and outlawed adult political parties. They stated that the only party with legitimate differences of opinion in their territory was the Scorpions, and therefore that all future political contests would involve only the Cold Men and Scorpions. The Crystals, who had brought no harm to either of the two children's parties, were ruled out of their nation just the same simply because they were adults. The Cold Men made no mention of the Slopes, and thus no endorsement of them, but did not outlaw the Slopes either.

Therefore the Scorpion and Cold children, agreeing to rule out all adults from their territory, created yet again a nation meant to be entirely without adults, whose leaders expected to face violent resistance from the adults who claimed they had as much right to live there as did the children.

New role for Šanataŋūs

Agreeing to enforce the new law, the Scorpion-Cold coalition abolished the adult male guards around the district of Šanataŋūs. They contemplated allowing the Crystals to take over the role, but reminded each other that the Crystals had admitted that protecting boys from men was not their priority, and that the Crystals were a transnational party whose interests superseded those of any nation they lived in. Therefore the children unprotected Šanataŋūs and said that the children living there would need to defend themselves. They also assured these children, however, that by removing adults there would no longer be a threat to them, and that when the Cold Men became adults themselves they would keep out of Šanataŋūs. Further, they recommended that the people of Šanataŋūs enforce this law against each other, meaning that they would all need to move out when they reached adulthood; this would make Šanataŋūs a perpetual territory for children only, always being refreshed by newly orphaned children or those who chose to run away from their families. As the young leaders hoped that both of these groups would dwindle in number as living conditions improved, they hoped that the population of Šanataŋūs would rapidly decline over time, but promised that it would remain open as a safe place for children who had no adults whom they could trust.

The Cold-Scorpion leaders knew, however, that there were still two obstacles in their way. First, the children of Šanataŋūs might draw the adult guards deeper into their territory, meaning that any attempt by the Cold police to remove them would lead to conflicts against the children; secondly, even if the children agreed to give up their guards, they were not obligated to obey the Cold boys' recommendation to apply the law to their own future adult selves, since the Cold government had specifically granted Šanataŋūs and other districts autonomy and the power to nullify laws such as these.

The assault in the commons had taken place just weeks after a policeman had kidnapped a young Clover boy for protesting against the police force; word of this did not reach the Blue Cocoon immediately, but when the Scorpions heard what had happened, even those who had been reluctant to follow the new strict policy mostly abandoned their remaining objections.

Birth of the Hipside Society

Hearing this, the Cold district of Fipapanu offered to absorb the adult refugees of both the Hardwoods and the Crystals, and recommended that they live together but insisted that they must live apart from the various groups of children in Fipapanu. Fipapanu's leaders were slightly older than the average in the Cocoon and promised that they would not fear or run from adults; they however insisted that because the potential entrants were not members of the Butterfly alliance and could not join it, they could not live together with the Cold Men.

Being older, Fipapanu's Cold Men had been more able to take care of the youngest children among them, and therefore Fipapanu's average age was about the same as the average for the Cocoon, but more spread out, with more older teenagers and more very young children than the other districts. They had also been the only ones to revoke their law against childbirth, and their plan was to remain in Fipapanu and reproduce to grow their population as quickly as possible regardless of the danger their children would be in due to the war around them. Reproducing made them legally adults, which made it illegal for them to leave Fipapanu even to visit other Cold territories, and therefore they hoped to also draw in other Cold couples looking to start new families.

But although they insisted they live apart from the Hardwoods and Crystals, they felt that once those groups entered Fipapanu, they would become loyal citizens of Fipapanu. They planned to further divide their district into neighborhoods, meaning that there would be sixth-order political divisions in their society: neighborhoods within a district within a nation within a nation within a refugee territory within an empire. The leaders of Fipapanu coined names in Leaper and Moonshine for their territories, and came to call Fipapanu Hipside after the trade name of the nearby Hipside River. Thus Moonshine diplomats referred to Fipapanu's Cold Men as Hipsiders, and they were the only group to have a trade name. (The Hipside River was actually on the other side of the Cocoon, but they named themselves after what had been for many of them their most important migration route).

Pacifism and policing

The Hipsides reaffirmed the inherited Cold doctrine that children were pacifists by nature, and that both war and violent crime were entirely the fault of adult men. They stated that war was not inherently bad, but violent crime was; they promised that their nation would never suffer from a crime wave because they would redirect their men's healthy urges towards warfare, most likely against the slave-seeking Matrix army in the west and any other armies that supported the Matrix soldiers. They also stated that even if the entire adult male population left Tāmta to fight a war and women were so tied down that children were left to roam free, they still would not suffer a violent crime wave because they knew that children were too gentle to do such a thing, and that children by nature always sought friendly relations with other children their age, even those caught on the opposite side of a war. Thus the Hipsides sought to adopt war orphans not only from the politically friendly Clover kingdom, but also from the groups who were fighting against the Clovers. They believed that they would prosper as a society if they were able to adopt tens of thousands of orphans into their homes, raising them alongside their own biological children, all while rejecting any offers of help from outside adult groups such as the Crystals. The Hipsides believed that a young nation was a healthy nation and that even an extremely young nation where adults were greatly outnumbered would remain prosperous so long as they were safe from outside invasion.

This belief went sharply against the beliefs of both the Crystals and the Hardwoods. The Crystals considered men and boys together, since to them childhood was a life stage and not an identity. They stated that war and violent crime were committed almost entirely by males, against both males and females, and that the age of the perpetrator made no difference to them. The Hipsides had little interest in the Crystals' opinions.

Hardwoods' view

Meanwhile the Hardwoods, along with many other groups of refugees in Hōki, believed that children were in fact far more violent than adults by nature, but were constrained by their even stronger fear of adult authority from actually committing the sorts of violent crimes that the Hipsides blamed on adults. The Hardwoods claimed that each of the societies in which the Hipsides claimed children had run a society entirely without adults were in fact inhabited by adults, whether helpful or harmful, and that both types of adults frightened the children so much that they were afraid to commit crimes for fear that their punishment would entail being handed over to the adult groups who would abuse them until they died of their injuries.

The Hardwoods believed that if the Hipsides were somehow able to rescue the orphans living in the Clover kingdom, Hipside territory would be immediately overcome by every known societal malady, from famine to plague to property theft, and that violent crime would include many incidents of children attacking younger children which the Hipsides would be unable to explain using their doctrine that young people were innocent by nature.

The Hardwoods also explained that while adults in general, including men, were gentle by nature and sought to protect the vulnerable children around them, the Hipsides had grown up in non-traditional societies where the adults they knew were mostly not their parents. The Hardwoods further stated that the sort of men who were most likely to seek to live in a children's nation were the very sort most likely to commit violent crimes, and that the Hipsides needed to realize that not all men were like the Tadpoles and other groups who had abused them in the past.

Hipside response

The Hipsides rejected these claims and again stated that they had proven their case by their mere existence; if a nation of children were destined to succumb to internal violence, the Hipsides would not have survived into adolescence. They explained that they had been attacked time and time again by adult males, both on the battlefield and in the streets, and that this proved that men, not boys or children, were responsible for both war and violent crime. They described the few incidents in which children had hit back, such as the Spines' recent attack on the Crystals, as being much like humans' attempts to communicate with wild animals, where what looked like a human attacking an animal actually did not hurt the animal in any way, and was simply the only way the animal would pay attention to the human.

Denial of military obligations

The Hipsides promised that they would create a strong police force but not an army. They accepted the Cold Men's insistence that all factions of the Cold Men must participate in a common military, and therefore that the Hipsides could not have their own private military outside the Cold Men's control. But they also stated that they would choose peace over party, and that if the Cold Men launched a war, the Hipsides would declare themselves an independent party with no obligation to join that war. The Hipsides also promised, nonetheless, that any among them who supported the war would be free to rejoin the Cold party and that the Hipsides would not stop them from joining the war, which they expected would take place in the west and pose little danger to the Hipside society.

Because the Hipsides were located in the western region of Hōki, and sought to expand their territory further, they knew that should the war turn around and the Matrixes begin an invasion of Hōki, their civilian population would be hit before the civilians of the Cold factions who had fought in the war. The Hipsides accepted this, and promised that their police force would protect the young children of the Hipside society against any invading army.

Usurpation of Moonshine authority

Four years had passed since the Cooks had taken their first steps towards emancipation from their parents; now the oldest Hipsiders were seventeen years old, though most were younger. The Hipside leaders believed that they had already waited too long to start raising families of their own, and that they needed to focus on reproduction to expand their population even if it meant that the first generation of children born in Hipside would be very poor. They also announced that they were the latest of several groups seeking to adopt the remaining STW orphans stranded in Clover territory, and would raise these children as Hipsides rather than allowing the adult populations around them to adopt and raise them into their own societies.

The Hipsiders stated that despite their youth, they were better educated than the adults around them, and deserved to be in control. They then stated that their authority extended to the other refugees in Hōkī as well, and that they would annex various adult territories around them, bringing them under their jurisdiction, so long as they judged it would be safe to do so and that most of the refugees they would be bringing in would either support the Hipsiders or be ambivalent. The Hipsiders nonetheless abolished voting rights for all other parties, saying democracy was incompatible with their form of government, because only the Hipsiders were bunaa, a Play word for teacher outside the context of a school, one who guides others and provides correct solutions to difficult problems.

The Hipsiders appointed diplomats to walk through the other areas of Hōkī, saying that the other refugee populations should support the Hipsiders instead of Moonshine, because while the Moonshines had provided the territory of Hōkī as a safe place for refugees of all nations, they had done little to protect the lives of people once they had arrived, whereas the Hipsiders would establish clear internal borders for their subpopulations and ensure their safety.

Thus the Hipsiders set themselves up as a rival refugee territory, on the same level as Hōkī, but promised they would continue to obey their military alliance with the Cold Men, and to respect the Cold Men's map which showed Hipside as a single much smaller district they called Fipapanu. Although the wider Cold party had inherited a deed to the land that the Hipsiders were now expanding into, they had not expected to wield authority over it, and so the Hipsiders believed that they could expand over this land without triggering a conflict against the other Cold Men.

Treaty of Lampanga

The Hipsides signed a pact with the landlocked refugee colony of Lampanġa to their south. This was a Leaper name, and most Lampanga people did not speak Play. The Lampanġa were primarily descendants of Yoy-speaking Andanic people from the southern territories on the edge of the tropics, thousands of miles away, that were now mostly controlled by the Egg party. They were genetically related to the Zeniths but had no political ties; the inhabitants had mostly stopped thinking about party politics, but after making contact with the Hipside kids the Lampanga leaders announced the revival of their ancient Square Tile party (Leaper Hamalōnta).

The Tiles had been driven out of their homeland much earlier by an unrelated conflict but were now largely anti-Egg, both because the Eggs were occupying their ancestral homeland and because the Lampanġa had originally been forced into hiding because they supported the Dreamers in a war which ended up giving the Dreamers control of much hostile territory. The Hipsides were politically opposed to the Tiles for this reason, and yet they still felt they could find friends in Lampanga and forge a stronger nation.

Promise of unpaid labor

The treaty stated that the Hipsides would work in Lampanga building roads and bridges for the people there, while teaching the Tiles to speak Play, and that they would do these things for free. In return, the Tiles would be encouraged to move to Hipside territory so that the population would be mixed in both territories. Nonetheless the Hipside kids reminded the Tiles that the Hipsides were a closed-entry party, and that the Tiles could achieve citizenship in the Hipside territory but would never be able to vote in the Hipsides' internal elections; since the Hipsides had set up a one-party government, these internal elections were the only elections that mattered.

The Hipside kids understood that most Tiles were not interested in politics and figured that they would not mind moving to a territory in which they could not vote because for all practical purposes they had not been able to vote in Lampanga either. Thus they emphasized that the treaty had two points, both favorable to the Tiles: the Hipsides would be working in Tile territory for free, and the Tiles would be able to live amongst the Hipsides. The treaty seemed so favorable taken at face value that the Hipsides were certain that the Tiles would accept it, as the only favor the Tiles were expected to do for the Hipsides was to move to the Hipside children's territory, which was on the lakeshore, and even this was optional. The Hipside leaders understood that they were cheating themselves in their new treaty, but explained that population growth was so important to them that they would seek to sign treaties that harmed their lifestyle and robbed them of their independence in order to achieve this goal.

The Hipsides insisted the Tiles live in compact neighborhoods with strictly delineated borders, and that this was due to party identification rather than age, so the segregation would continue even once most Hipsiders were adults, but the Hipside voting population worried that this was an empty promise and there would be no feasible means of enforcing it. By contrast, the Tiles believed in an integrated society and allowed the Hipsides to settle close to each other, but not to have an exclusive neighborhood to themselves.

North-south migration

The Hipsides established diplomatic settlements in the Tile towns of G̣ʷehanni and Lamàta-Gʷùṭa. Despite their promise to work in Lampanga doing unpaid heavy manual labor, the Hipsides sent mostly their younger members to start their outreach program, assigning them the task of finding Tiles who could speak Play, and finding Tiles who would be willing to move to the lakeshore, regardless of whether they spoke Play. They were saying that they needed to establish bilateral relations and find a common language before they could pursue further projects, and that they needed the stronger older boys to remain at home to build up their living quarters along the lake.

The Tiles sheltered the Hipside diplomats in or near their school buildings so that they would spend much of their time with other children, including younger ones, and perhaps in time help teach at least some of the children to speak Play. The Tiles promised to treat them delicately and ensure that their fresh new deal did not soon go sour. Even so, the Hipside travelers privately admitted that they felt uncomfortable and out of place in Lampanga, as they stood out sharply from the Tiles and could find almost none who spoke Play. The few Tiles who did speak Play listened the Hipsides' plans and mostly were supportive, and ensured the Hipsides that they would find many Tiles who would be willing to move to Hipside territory.

A small number of Scorpions also moved into Lampanga for various reasons; most agreed with the Hipsides in that building a stronger nation would help all parties.

Meanwhile, hundreds of Tile men accepted the Hipsides' invitation and moved north into the Hipside territory as expected, many stating that they wanted access to the lake so that they could establish a stable food supply for both the Hipsides and themselves. The earlier refugees such as the Hardwoods had not allowed them to do this; indeed, Moonshine had never officially allowed the refugees access to the lake, as it was part of Moonshine proper rather than the refugee colony, but had not aggressively policed the water in part because the previous non-refugee inhabitants of Hōki (when it had been called Hōmoya) had had access to the lake as a whole.

Relatively few of the Tiles were interested in non-physical jobs, and relatively few were women, children, or intact families. The Hipsides decided that it made sense for most Tiles to work with fishing and food preparation because they would be better able to handle the jobs than would the Hipsides, but the Tiles admitted that they did not have enough boats for their population and would have difficulty convincing other groups to sell or manufacture boats for them.

Crystals object

The Crystals had traditionally been enemies of the Tiles, even though the Tiles had mostly lived peaceably and had not identified with politics until the Hipside kids established friendly ties with them. This was because the Tiles were a male-led society, and because the Tiles had a land claim against the Eggs, a faction of the Crystals who were at the time occupying the Tiles' old homeland (though the Eggs had not been the ones to push out the Tiles). The Crystals claimed that the Hipsides were walking into a trap and that the Tiles had only agreed to the treaty because they felt they could exploit the Hipsides and perhaps even push them out of their refugee colony along the lake. The Crystals also claimed that the Tiles should not have access to the lake and that Moonshine's lack of objection was because the Tiles were hiding behind the guise of being part of a children's nation, against whom the Moonshines felt it would be cruel to enforce their trespassing laws.

The Crystals also realized, however, that the leaders of the Hipsides were well-educated in politics, and that perhaps the Hipsides felt that they could always count on the Crystals supporting them no matter what they did, knowing both that the Crystals had no other allies besides Moonshine and that the Crystals had already committed themselves to conflicts in the west.

The Crystals realized that if the Hipsides were motivated by genuine selflessness, believing that their duty was to stand aside and help other parties even if they got nothing back, their best means of achieving this goal would be to make an alliance with the Tiles, who would gladly accept the Hipsides' free gifts and build forts in Hipside territory from which they could launch attacks against the defenseless Crystal women. But the Crystals also realized that if the Hipsides had become very selfish, they would also stand to gain from an alliance with the Tiles, since the Tiles would almost certainly not attack the Hipsides, and also would not join the Hipsides' conflicts in the west, as the Tiles' only outstanding claim against another party was with the Crystals. Thus the strong men in the Tile army might help protect the Hipside homeland while the Hipsides sent their own army westward to fight the Matrix.

Plans for further expansion

Undeterred by objections, the Hipsides planned to expand even further, mostly to the west and south, by incorporating other refugee territories into their own, intending to follow the same plan of allowing unlimited migration of the other groups into Hipside territory so long as they promised to live in compact neighborhoods and accepted that they could not vote in Hipside elections. They also planned to write the next treaty on their own, without the Tiles' input, so that it would be two separate bilateral relations instead of a three-way alliance. They understood that the refugee groups had generally been able to get along in the past, without the Hipsides' support, but that they generally had not written formal treaties. Despite their desire to move west, the Hipsides then selected the eastern territory of Etatăni as their next target for a new treaty; here lived the descendants of the early rebel Mīžìpa and his supporters, who had slaughtered many Crystal women in the 3900s.

The people of Etatani belonged to a tribe called in Leaper Tahankʷ. They were strongly tribalistic and demanded better living conditions than other refugees. They had banned the Moonshines from visiting their colony even though Moonshine was supplying the refugees with food and basic needs; they survived by extracting tributes from the passing Moonshines, which they then used to buy supplies from the other groups. As they had turned against their early leader Mīžìpa, who had demanded a sober lifestyle, they had become rich by dominating the alcohol trade along the river and had fiercely defended their right to enjoy this wealth while still claiming refugee status. More politically savvy than other refugees, the Tahank suspected that the Hipsides were intending to start a war in the west, while the adult male populations of the Tahanks, the Tiles, and perhaps the Hardwoods would all be forced to fight while the Hipside men would stay home, either saying they were still too young to fight or that they needed to care for their young children at home and their pregnant wives.

The Tahanks thus demanded an even more unfair treaty than the one to which the Hipsides had earlier voluntarily written for the Tiles; the Tahanks wanted the right to come and go in Hipside territory as they pleased, so that they would not be bound to a war, and that they would never cross paths with the Tile party, to whom they were hostile even though they both had common enemies, and that Hipsides visiting Etatani territory would need to stay within certain areas and would not be treated as guests nor given free food or lodging. The Tahanks were also eager for war, but their preferred target was the Crystals, and they knew that a Hipside attack on the Crystals was unlikely because the Crystals were still supporting the Hipsides.

Treaty of Cooperation

The Cold Men and Scorpions signed a pact reinstating the Lilypad Association, a group including both parties along with the Clovers and any allies the Clovers had control of. They also declared that the Lilypads were now a political party, with the constituent parties being reduced to factions within it, and that the Lilypads would remain Lilypads as they became adults. The Lilypads excluded the Hipsides from their new party because the Hipsides had earlier chosen to secede from the party's common military, but the Hipsides promised to continue diplomacy and to allow their members to join the Lilypads even while remaining in Hipside territory.

This treaty also created a new party called the Sippers (Play Tappea) to rule the nation's capital territory, Šanataŋūs, and stated that Šanataŋūs would be a one-party state with no obligation to participate in the nationwide democracy so long as they remained pledged to the common military and allowed the entrance and exit of the Lilypads who had earlier chosen to place their capital city in Šanataŋūs. The Lilypads intended Šanataŋūs to be inhabited by children only, who would quickly move out as they reached the age of thirteen, but the Lilypads acknowledged that by awarding autonomy to Šanataŋūs they were specifically depriving themselves of the ability to enforce this, and that Šanataŋūs would in a few years likely become similar to Hipside as the adolescents would likely remain in Šanataŋūs and start raising families.

Lastly, the treaty abolished all restrictions on childbirth, meaning that Lilypads could begin raising children in their territories. They still worried that a war could reach them even in their refugee colonies, but stated that waiting any longer to begin reproducing would only harm their children, as the safest years they had ever known were upon them already and safer times were unlikely to follow.

Language policy

The new treaty continued the use of the Play and Late Andanese languages side by side, saying that Play was official and Andanese was secondary. By excluding the Hipsides, they did not need to learn or listen to the non-Play languages of the other refugees.

Previously, Late Andanese had been a military language valuable for secret communication. But in 4193, the Matrix army had begun to learn Late Andanese and some of the simpler Play ciphers, and also began writing their own. The Matrix ciphers were called Xap and were referred to with numbers. This name is a distortion of the name of Baeba Swamp.

Vowel-only cipher

The Matrixes created a vowel-only cipher, Xap 21, in which the thirty syllables of Andanese were represented by a sequence of two vowels; the first syllable had a seven-vowel inventory and the second had a four-vowel inventory; the remaining two syllables were represented by a silent vowel in each syllable. There were consonants in Xap 21, but they did not carry important semantic meanings, except in the rare cases where the Matrixes used the cipher two encode two messages of about the same length alongside each other.

The letter L

The Players and their forebearers had long considered the sound /l/ to be obscene, because it involved making one's tongue visible to the listener. Players were thus required to pronounce the /b/ sound instead even when speaking foreign languages. This policy did not apply to the Andanese people, who instead followed an opposite rule of replacing every b with an /l/ even when speaking Play or other languages with phonemic b. The Players had abolished the Andanese tribe in 4175 and took ownership of the Andanese language, claiming it was well-suited for their military. But they did not abolish the prohibition against /l/, nor did the other Play-speaking cultures, who agreed with the Players that the sound was obscene.

As the Lilypads and others had sat through many meetings with foreign diplomats, continuing to obey the traditional Play rule, they realized that the Leapers found their obedience alternately amusing and distressing, as they reliably obeyed a rule they had been taught in the nursery, even when no adults were around to enforce it, and even in the face of foreigners who openly defied and laughed at the rule.

For the first time, the Lilypad leaders now said that their people were free to pronounce the l sound whenever they wished, whether speaking Play, speaking Late Andanese, or just having fun with their tongues. They did not change the languages themselves, however, and expected Play speakers as a wider community would decide that both languages would continue on much as they were and that Play would not have an l sound in upcoming generations.

Entry into the western war

Mad Children

NOTE: This is a longstanding cultural trait, not something that only arose here.

The Crystals and Hardwoods gave Play its first and only derisive term for small children: kaunua, from a word meaning an insect larva. This word was also cognate to Play vanua "mess; dirty pile of filth". The people using this word believed that the newest crop of Lilypad kids were like insects, smaller but more aggressive than adults, hardier in some ways, and much more resistant to pain. They stated that they would retain these traits into adulthood, unlike other human populations, and therefore both children and adults were fair targets in a fight.

A similar concept was Play suma kaus, referring not to children specifically but to a population that reproduces very quickly, forever sending soldiers to the front lines, caring little for their fate, knowing that even with overwhelming body counts they would still outgrow their enemies.

Diplomatic contacts

The Zenith army had lost their legal standing in Baeba Swamp, but still held some land; this caused the Tinks to join their side, which meant that the Tinks were forced to formally declare war against the Lilypads and Hipsides in the Blue Cocoon, even though they knew that many Cocooners were their own biological children. The children believed that the Tinks would ignore their new war because they posed no threat and because the Tinks would likely not be interested in gaining territory in such a remote area. The Zeniths, likewise, did not want their new ally attacking children, both because they needed the Tinks for traditional warfare and because such an attack would almost certainly bring the children into the war as well. (The Zeniths did not specifically claim that a war of adults against children was immoral because they left moral judgments up to their own members.)

The Cold Men and other parties were still concerned about of the fate of the orphans living in the Clover territories, whom they still expected to number about 20,000. The Matrixes claimed these children belonged to them, and to the other groups, the Matrixes seemed less motivated by compassion than by the desire to wield absolute power over a large but highly vulnerable population. The Matrixes were just one of many groups who wanted to adopt the entire orphan population; the young Slopes were also seeking control, as were the Hipsides and the other young populations in Tāmta. As the Slopes were teenagers who had promised to dedicate their lives to crime, they were seen as the worst possible parents by most of the outside groups, but the Hipsides recognized the Slopes as close kin, and believed that the Slopes' own traumatic childhoods were precisely the reason why they would make good parents; they would never let their children suffer as they themselves had. Even so, the Hipsides preferred to adopt the entire orphan population rather than make a deal with the Slopes.

Hipsides move west

The Hipsides began spilling out of the refugee territory as they began their plans to reach the Clovers. This was not a migration so much as an expansion; they were planning to take new territories along the coast, and keep control of them as they grew to the west.

International contacts

A Clover girl named Lifeline (Play Ŋamatapai Mamnuaatata or Mamnuaa), who had served in the Clover government since she was eleven years old, now hoped to pull the Slope leaders such as Window back into the Clover party, and to forge closer ties between the Clovers and the children living further east. As the Hipsides moved westward along the coast, Lifeline dreamed of a single Lilypad nation containing the territories of the Clovers, the Hipsides, the Cold Men, the Scorpions, and any parties of their generation who were accepted by the founding parties.

New nation

The Hipsides declared the formation of the new nation of Titas-Mammep, also known as Mana and the Lifeline. They named their nation partly after the girl, although the word was not the same; they were also using the same womb metaphor that they had heard from the Matrix army earlier, saying that their homeland in the refugee colony of Tāmta, particularly the district of Titapa, was the Womb, and that they were stretching their umbilical cord (seeba) all the way to the Matrix homeland of Tata, from which they would invade the Matrix strongholds in Baeba.

Hipside-Crystal meetings

The Hipsides also occupied the border between the Crystal state of Olansele and the refugee territory of Hōki. They stated that this was for the protection of the refugees, and not a means to prevent Crystal women from fleeing abuse. But the Crystal women understood that their war had begun when the Crystals accused the Lilypad boys of planning to abduct orphans, and that the Crystals had never mended relations with any of the children's parties in the meantime. The sight of the young Hipside border guards made the Crystal women reflect on what they had done to bring their own party into this state, and though they did not blame themselves for the invasions they were now suffering, the Crystal women realized that if they fled into the refugee territory their husbands (if any survived) would have no families to come home to.

The Hipsides repeated prior words that rescuing the Crystal women, who had been abandoned by their party leadership, was not the obligation of the Hipsides, of the Lilypads, or of any other nation consisting of children or teenagers. But they stated that they would not prohibit Crystal women from using the 15-mile stretch of border that they were occupying, and that they would prevent Slopes from entering the refugee territory. Put another way, they said that the Crystals were invisible to them now as their world was focused on the conflicts of the various parties descended from Play children.

Hipside political imagery

The Hipsides knew that the Matrixes were planning an invasion as well, but figured that the Matrixes would not give up Baeba. Despite their plans for war, they considered themselves more appealing than the Matrixes; indeed, the slaveholding Matrix soldiers openly promoted their plans to sexually assault the female population of Moonshine, and they called Moonshine the Womb because it was female, passive, and easy to enter. Thus the Matrixes and the Hipsides were both connected to Moonshine's feminine power: the Matrixes through rape, and the Hipsides through love. The Hipsides promised that they would create a peaceful homeland along the coast for themselves, for the previous inhabitants, and for anyone who chose to immigrate there.

Medley art style

The Hipsides also introduced a controversial new art style called Rider Medley (Play vāvipiti) in their campaign literature, aimed at both their own party members and curious outsiders. In this new style, the Hipside artists depicted their people as physically small, very similar in appearance, and associated with soft and round things, while their allies in the traditional nations were much larger, more differentiated, and often drawn with sharp corners.

The new art style was not rigidly structured; sometimes male and female figures were identical in appearance, sometimes they were distinguished by shape, and sometimes they were distinguished by other characteristics. Sometimes faces were simply circles, but other times hair and basic facial features were included. The Hipsides often drew their tongues visible, as a sign of their commitment to the new policy of allowing their speakers to show their tongue in public and to pronounce the previously illegal l sound.

This was derived largely from the Dreamer political art style that had emerged a few decades earlier in Dreamland. The name implied a mix between the Dolphin Riders' style and that of the Lilypads, for which they chose the Top Rider faction to stand. Dreamland was an early enemy of the Play party that was ancestral to all of the Lilypads. The Dreamers' artwork had depicted the Players as unnaturally small, but often riding animals or in some way connected to something large and strong, often a natural object. By contrast, the Dreamers drew themselves as much taller, but also thin, soft-bodied, and often trapped between objects that were much larger than both types of humans.

Thus the Dreamers had drawn themselves as large but soft, and the Players as small but strong. The Hipsides united the two art styles and stated that they were going to draw themselves as small and soft, and the people of the nations around them as large and strong. They left it open to interpretation whether the Hipsides considered themselves to combine the two weakness of the Dreamers and Players, or the two strengths.

Inherited culture

The Hipsides identified themselves as soft people (Play fūta, Andanese kaaha), and felt that the strongest nation was one in which soft and hard people worked together, each doing what they did best while relying on the opposite partner to cover their weak spots. This was similar to the forerunners of the Players, who defined Play speakers as soft and Andanese speakers as hard; this led to Andanese becoming a military language and outliving the Andanese tribe.

The Hipsides did not believe in equality; they said that, as soft people, they were meant to bend without breaking; thus the hard people they planned to invite into their nation would shape the Hipsides as they saw fit, and the Hipsides would take roles in society that the newcomers were unable or unwilling to do.

Feminine identity

They also described their nation as a feminine power comparable to Moonshine, but stated that unlike Moonshine, they would thrive on the masculine energy of the colonists moving into their territory, and help the newcomers fill roles in Hipside society where they made a good fit.

The Hipsides stated that the world needed more feminine powers, and that feminine power was based on love and peace rather than military might. Instead of fighting the armies around them, the Hipsides invited those men to move to Hipside country and start new lives among the Hipsides. The Hipside boys refused to take on the aggressively masculine identities of the Matrixes and some other nations around them, saying that masculine power was by nature attracted to feminine power, and that since the Hipsides wanted to attract more masculine power into their nation, they needed to make themselves more feminine.

Criticism of Matrixes

The Hipside boys ridiculed the Matrixes' world view, which depended on Matrixes seeing themselves as more masculine than other men. The Hipsides assured the Matrixes that they accepted the need for male-dominated powers in their world. But the Hipsides claimed that their philosophy of balance proved that a male-only party could not function as an independent nation, and would only be able to survive if they conquered and enslaved a feminine power, as they were indeed planning to do to the Crystals. Likewise, the Hipsides sought strong men to live with them in order to bring their own feminine nature into balance.

The Hipsides felt that they would make ideal slaves for a masculine dominant power, as they were soft and flexible, willing to work hard, and capable of absorbing painful punishments for the slightest misdeeds. But while the Hipsides considered themselves good slaves, they claimed that the Matrixes made very poor masters, as they had no long-term interest but their own survival, and no distinction between military and civilian roles in society. The Hipsides challenged the Matrixes to prove their right to rule on the battlefield, whether they chose to attack the Hipsides, the Crystals, or the defenseless Lilypad children living further east. The Hipsides claimed that the Matrixes were just as soft as the people they intended to rule over, and therefore it was the destiny of the Matrixes to themselves become slaves.

The Hipsides claimed that the Matrixes were in fact quite soft, and challenged the Matrixes to explain why, despite many threats to abuse and enslave the Crystals, they had yet to attempt any invasion of the all-female Crystal homeland, which had no army to protect itself, while the Hipsides themselves were not only moving into Crystal territory, but in fact moving into the few parts of it that were not entirely female, where they expected to find resistance. The Hipsides knew that the Matrixes had in fact won impressive military battles in the recent past, but that since these battles had been mostly won by the fathers of the currently ruling Matrixes, it would only embarrass the Matrix rulers even more to remind them of their party's prior victories. The Hipsides reassured other nations that they were still intent on defeating the Matrixes in a conventional war, and that they would fight on their own rather than expecting male immigrants of so-called hard populations to fight for them. They stated that there was a difference between feminine power and masochism, and that masochism was the military strategy of the Crystals who had sent poorly armed male soldiers to battle in Baeba and then abandoned the unarmed female population to various groups of invading men who mostly had ill intents.

Formation of Ĕrala

Much of this will be moved off the page.

In 4177, Baeba's Leaper party had created Ĕrala as the successor state to the western half of the Anchor Empire, with the Tinks' Anzan containing the eastern half and a few outlying claims.

Erala was a multiparty democracy with a very weak federal government, intended to allow the many parties within Erala to govern themselves according to their own internal rules so long as they committed no violence against the other parties in Erala. Thus, in many ways, Erala was an alliance of several nations all sharing the same territory. However, the taxation systems were unified, so everyone with citizenship had to pay taxes to Erala's federal government.

Naming

Ĕrala was a Leaper name, because it was officially run by the Leapers and Leaper was the main language of diplomacy. The Leapers used a cognate name, Rapala, from a trade language in some contexts, such as describing citizenship, to better include non-Leaper speakers. The Leapers also coined the Play name Tava-Šammam, incorporating a cognate and what they believed to be a good Play translation. The unusual stress of the Leaper name (its expected cognate would have been Erăla) was due to a transmission error, as the Leapers were reviving a name that had not been used in the modern state of the language.

Exclusion of Baeba

Erala excluded all the territory of Baeba, and the Leaper-written constitution stated that they would abandon claims against any territory that they could not control. Because the Leapers had no army outside Baeba, by control they meant that the will of the people of Erala would keep the nation together. The constitution also made no attempts to prevent parties represented in the government of Erala from fighting wars outside Erala, including wars against each other.

Erala actually included a small area of Baeba where the two nations overlapped; this was the district of Timâra, which despite being located at the extreme western extremity of Erala was the capital of Erala. Thus the capital of Ĕrala was a small territory located at the edge of Baeba Swamp, at the very westernmost extremity of Erala's land claims. This was because because Baeba's ruling Leaper party insisted on having a hand in governing Erala despite not living anywhere within Erala's main territory. As Baeba was much richer than Erala, the various parties in Erala had agreed to this, and Baeba threatened to cut off tax revenue from any party who refused to obey Baeban proclamations. This was the Leapers' way of showing that the vast territory of Erala was just an accessory of Baeba Swamp to them.

Surrender of old land claims

By excluding territory the people of Erala could not control, they also excluded Play territory, and also said that they could not draw a southern border because the Play army was still constantly on the move.

Rejection of youth parties

Erala's Leaper party rejected all of the youth parties such as the Cold Men, Scorpions, Slopes, Clovers, and Hipsides, and disclaimed any territory that they dominated, and bundled their territory into a new nation called Tapiana in Play. This name meant nothing obvious in Play (though tapia na could mean "nectar land"); but upon hearing the name, many children recognized its similarity to Late Andanese tupiana "clover" and understood the intended meaning. The Leapers said any new land gained by the children's armies would go to Tapiana as well, even if the Leapers felt that they could easily take control back.

Most of Tapiana was in Tāmta, part of Moonshine's refugee colony of Hōki/Hupedikas, which the Leapers had excluded out of hand. However, a few children had spilled out of the refugee territory and into what the Leapers were now calling Erala proper, and the Leapers expected a vast out-migration was soon to come.

The Leapers said that the children had no obligation to accept the existence of Tapiana as a nation, since they already had their own nations, and that Tapiana's borders would be wherever the children's own national borders were. Nonetheless, for permission to interact diplomatically in Leaper-hosted meetings, the Leapers required all members of youth parties to come as one and to identify themselves as delegates from Tapiana rather than identifying with their smaller independent nations. This was not a measure of disrespect; the Leapers accepted that the children's nations were rising and falling on a much faster timescale than adult diplomats were used to, and that if they used the children's names and borders they might never meet with the same nation twice.

Attempts to draw Tapiana's borders

The Lilypad leaders in the east considered the Clovers to be fellow Lilypads, and therefore, according to the Leapers' reading of the children's political charter, the Clover territory in Baeba, Pavaitaapu, must also be part of the children's nation of Tapiana, despite its great distance from the rest. The Leapers worried this could present a political problem.

AlphaLeap had gotten its name from its geography: it was a discontiguous nation, a leap (most languages used the same word for hill and leap, so the term was translated rather than borrowed; Play's word was paīp). For example, though currently ruling from Baeba Swamp, AlphaLeap's home territory was far to the south, in the tropics. The Leapers had thousands of years of experience with such nations and knew that they could easily make the children's territory into a leap nation as well. However, they felt that if they did this, the children would expect to be able to travel from one territory to the other, but the Leapers were now claiming all of the vast land in between to be part of Erala, meaning the children would either need to go all the way around Erala or ask the Leapers to let them in. The Leapers had no problem with letting children enter Erala, but could not guarantee their safety, and worried that children merely trying to get to the other side of what they considered one nation would be easy prey for human traffickers living in Erala who would soon learn which routes the children preferred to take.

The Leapers pondered that it would be more politically favorable for them to split Erala in half and allow the children a corridor to pass through, but they realized this would be unpopular with the rest of the people of Erala, who would wonder why a children's nation was given priority over their own, and might decide that Erala was merely a means to contain the people until the children were old enough to take over and rule them all. Moreover, if the children had only a single route through which to pass, this would be an extremely vulnerable route, and they would be even less safe than they would be passing through Erala. The Leapers pondered having the children police the corridor themselves, figuring they could blame the children for their own abductions and say that if the children cried for help it was merely proof that they were not in fact capable of running a nation. Nonetheless the Leapers were against this idea as they felt it would make them unpopular with both adults and children.

The only way to construct a single contiguous Tapiana without splitting Erala would be to stretch Tapiana along the north coast, and encourage them to use sea travel both for speed and for safety. But this would mean giving the children sovereignty over the entire coastline between Tāmta and Baeba, a distance of over a thousand miles. Moreover, unless the Leapers chose a very inconvenient route, the children would have to go all the way to the border of Tata and then turn back east, only to turn west again to reach the Swamp.

Lastly, the Leapers considered a combination of solutions, whereby the children would be encouraged to use sea travel, but would not have a contiguous nation. In this situation, there were still some stretches of coastline which the Leapers knew for sure would need to actually be under the children's control, since they were not militarily defensible on their own. Likewise, the children would either need to somehow conquer western Tata on their own, or call in the Leapers to do so; the Leapers knew they could not do this.

Therefore, the Leapers excluded the Clover territory from the children's nation and declared it to be part of Baeba, and not part of either Erala or Tapiana. (The Clover territory had originally been part of southern Tata, but was joined to Baeba when the Clovers took power.) The Leapers promised that the Clovers could interact diplomatically and could consider themselves to be part of Tapiana, but they worried that the exclusion of Clover territory from Tapiana's borders would lead the children to reject the existence of Tapiana altogether and lose respect for the Leapers.

Nonetheless, the Leapers sometimes referred to Tapiana as "East Tapiana" and the Clover territory as "West Tapiana", stating that perhaps a children's map of the world might reject some nations that adults had created, and therefore the two realities could coincide.

Rejection of other parties

Tinks

The Tinks still claimed much of Erala's land lay within the Little Country; their country's name had been chosen because while they had a lot of land, they focused their attention on their capital city and were thus still small at heart.

Promises to youth leaders

The Leapers wanted to encourage children to leave their nations and move to Erala to live amongst the traditional societies, though they acknowledged the children had formed very close bonds and would likely prefer to stick together. They promised children could move to Erala if they felt safe. They said children in Erala who belonged to one of the youth parties could consider themselves citizens of Erala, and they would not be required to pay any taxes, but they also could not vote in any way, because their parties did not exist in Erala.

The Leapers felt the best way to deal with rising youth power was to have them join and take over the existing adult parties in the region, who they felt would be much more powerful in war and thus would outlast the weak, vulnerable youth movements.

The Leapers also figured that the youth parties agreed with each other on most issues, and saw each other as rivals rather than enemies. Thus they felt it possible that just one of the established parties would rebrand itself as the one and only youth party, and grow massively at the expense of the others.

Critics said that the Leapers disavowing children just as they were reaching adolescence only proved the earlier claim that the Leapers had been the ones propping up child leaders all along, that none of the children had never actually been in control of their nations, and that if the Leapers could not find new children to push around they might decide to provoke a war between the various groups that they had lost control of.

Outlying states

However, Erala claimed the Moonshine territory of Xema, asserting that Moonshine itself did not have control over this land, and that its population was composed of several groups of mostly sea-going nomads who had agreed to share the land and that none of these groups was actually loyal to Moonshine. The Leapers called Xema Hukuku and also revived an old trade name, Sopato. Hukuku was actually a land claim made by the Crystals a few decades earlier, but the Leapers applied it to the vastly larger territory of Xema, which extended more than a thousand miles north and east of the original Hukuku.

Demographics

The Leapers ran the government but had only a token population within Erala's borders, all of whom were living near Erala's border with Baeba in the extreme west.

The majority party was the Crystals, as they were the only ones not to have fled or suffered mass casualties in recent wars. But the only legal adult Crystal citizens were women, because they had sent their entire adult male population to Baeba to fight the war. This had led some male Crystals to defect to rival parties, none of whom had gone so far as to mobilize their entire adult male population.

Economy

Thus, the Zeniths, Matrixes, Crystals, and a small faction of the Soap Bubbles were all paying taxes into a common pool, which was redistributed to the various populations, who then directed the revenue into the armies who were fighting each other in Baeba Swamp. All of the parties represented in Erala's government had agreed that this was a reasonable solution allowing them to keep the fighting out of Erala, but this meant different things for each party, since some were much more militaristic than the others and therefore the tax revenue for the less militaristic parties was given primarily to defense, such as the Soap Bubbles, who were not expecting to win control of any significant amount of new territory in Baeba and therefore spent their money to protect their civilian population from the soldiers of the other armies.

Police and court system

The Leapers deputized a small police force to be made up of Leaper men and women, saying that none of the four major parties would trust a police officer from any of the other three, and that a police force staffed by a fifth party such as the Tinks would quickly turn into an army. The four major parties in Erala agreed this was fair. The Leaper police warned that their duty was to protect the safety of the society as a whole, and not the individual people within it. That is, they would ensure that stores could conduct business, shipments were reaching their destinations, and so on, but would not prosecute murderers or protect children from abusive parents. The individual parties were left to handle these matters on their own, and again all four parties agreed to this, even though all four parties knew that the Zeniths did not believe in the concept of crime and therefore would not prosecute any of their own kind who committed crimes against non-Zeniths nor assist in their arrest.

The Leapers allowed the four parties to create their own police forces and court systems. The Leapers stated that in cases of treason, they might want to try a criminal in Baeba Swamp, but that almost all other crimes, even the most severe, would be left up to the parties to try in their own court systems, if they chose to create any. The Leapers also stated that a criminal could face multiple trials if, for example, committing assault against both a Matrix and a Crystal citizen, as they would have broken two different laws in so doing. Lastly the Leapers allowed the individual parties to criminalize attacks against unenrolled people such as children, and that a criminal who attacks a child might also face multiple trials, as for example if both the Soap Bubbles and the Crystals declared their actions to be a crime, even if the victim did not belong to either party. The Leapers felt this system was ideal, as the most outrageous crimes would be the ones that would provoke multiple parties to demand the accused stand trial.

Zeniths

The Zeniths, as above, did not acknowledge the existence of crimes, and therefore created neither a court system nor an internal police force. Not only were outsiders allowed to attack Zeniths without legal consequence, but Zeniths were allowed to attack each other without legal consequence. Since most Zeniths were adult males and were heavily armed, the Zeniths had been able to follow this system of self-government for thousands of years without dying out; they had always relied on continuous recruitment for survival.

Matrixes

The all-male Matrix party stated that they would prosecute crimes only against other Matrixes, and not against Crystals, Zeniths, or unenrolled people. Moreover, they did not believe in courts, so there was no Matrix court system to process crimes against the Matrixes. However, they stated that a crime might exist if the Matrix party as a whole were harmed, even if none were harmed individually; since they had no court system, this declaration empowered Matrixes to take revenge on their own against other citizens, even for things that had not harmed them.

Crystals

The all-female Crystal party had a well-developed court system, and prosecuted crimes against both their own people and against others. They had been typically much more successful in controlling their own members' behavior than had the Matrixes or Zeniths, and they seldom committed violent crimes. The Crystals had traditionally had a moderately small police force, but when their male population was sent to war, the Crystal women were the only adults who remained in Erala, and they began seeking more weapons for their own protection. They considered enrolling the entire adult female population into the police force, as the Players had once done.

Soap Bubbles

The small Soap Bubble party was known for having the strictest behavior requirements of the four parties. They did not plan to build any physical courts in Erala because they traditionally handled crimes against their members internally through the party leadership. The Soap Bubbles saw little evidence of good will in the members of the other parties, even their traditional allies the Crystals, and therefore saw little purpose in bringing non-Bubbles to stand trial. They decided that they would see all such criminals as enemy soldiers, though acknowledging that they could not simply kill a non-member for committing a minor crime without risking a rapidly escalating revenge attack that would wipe out the Soap Bubble population.

Representation of small parties

The Raspara were still living in Erala, but had been nearly destroyed a few years earlier and had never recovered. The Tinks were likewise also invited to participate, but only those still living within Erala; most Tinks now lived in Baeba Swamp.

New parties

The Leapers registered two new movements, paana (popró) and Bèd. Both were based on a worldview in which humans were on par with other animals, not above them.

Popró said that humans were the world's most delicate creatures, and that the most human among human beings were those who were even more delicate. By depriving the most physically strong humans of political power, and empowering the weakest, popró supporters believed that they could amplify humans' moral and intellectual strengths and therefore build a society free from pollution by animal instincts.

The Bèd movement was led by a woman and supported a government based on the denial of human needs, saying that humans were by nature meant to feel pain and that through inflicting greater pain on her followers she could build the world's most powerful society.

Position of the Crystals

The Crystals outnumbered the other parties but were weak in many ways.

Views on racial discrimination and slavery

Adding to the Crystals' troubles was that many of them belonged to a faction that endorsed a type of racial discrimination known in Leaper as gāllana (and in a trade language as anata), even though many Crystals were at the bottom of the racial hierarchy they were setting up and had no hand in defining the policies. The Crystals were a transnational party, with members in many nations, but no longer held a majority vote in either Baeba or Erala. (The Leaper government assigned extra voting power to minority parties; therefore, even though the Crystals were more than half of Erala's population, they could not outvote the other parties on their own.) Therefore, they could not write new laws, but only choose which laws they supported. The reasons why many Crystals supported racial discrimination laws that mostly worked against them were complex.

Most of the enemy parties in the area were against racial discrimination, saying it was immoral, but the Crystals said this was an excuse to defend their slavery programs; if there was no racial hierarchy, all peoples could be enslaved. These Crystals saw no plausible political philosophy that rejected both slavery and racial discrimination, so the anti-racism faction, the Phoenixes, declared that they supported the continued practice of slavery, and the anti-slavery faction, the Shields, was forced to declare support for racial discrimination.

The Crystals' inability to reject both racial discrimination and slavery was in large part because the Crystals were an open-entry party, meaning that if they accepted all applicants and promised not to discriminate, they could easily be outvoted by insincere people whose only reason for joining was to destroy the Crystal leadership. The Crystals pointed out that most of the parties publicly opposing racial discrimination, including the Moonshine faction of the Crystal party itself, were closed-entry. Thus the Moonshines criticized the Crystals for their plans to institute a racial hierarchy, while the Moonshines themselves not only discriminated, but put to death anyone not of the Moonshine party who was found trespassing anywhere in Moonshine-held territory (they had two states that were exempt from this, but enforced it in their core territory).

Thus the Crystals supported racial discrimination as being preferable to slavery. Yet, because they did not actually control the government of Erala or any other nation, they could not rewrite the discrimination laws to put themselves at the top; the right to be on top was earned by demonstration of military superiority.

However, the parties who supported racial discrimination seemed unlikely to be good allies. These included the Tinks and the Leash; both were aggressively militaristic and led by male military leaders, although the Leash soldiers had so far only mobilized their army once, to invade a group of children named the Scorpions.

Phoenix plans for slave captures

The Phoenixes announced their plans to ignore the war in Baeba, and instead invade the territory of the northern Crystal faction, hoping to enrich their slave army by capturing non-Crystals living in Erala, including children. Since the northern Crystals were women, the Phoenixes hoped that as they attacked enemy soldiers in Erala, those soldiers would focus their counterattacks on the northern Crystal women, leaving the Phoenixes free to launch more attacks. They hoped that by the time the enemy soldiers had defeated all of the northern Crystal women the Phoenixes would have control of the territory and could enslave all of their enemies and perhaps even the surviving Crystal women.

Dual party membership

Yet another problem for the Crystals was that they were one of only a few parties who allowed dual party membership: some Crystals were also members of the Play party, belonging to the Egg faction, and lived in territory to which the rest of the Crystals were denied access. Three years earlier, the Eggs had voted for a new war which forced the northern Crystals (by now called the Shields) to send their entire adult male population into Baeba Swamp, while the Eggs sent none of their own men to battle. Almost immediately, the northern Crystals were invaded by men who had previously been no threat, but had chosen to declare allegiance to the Crystals' main enemy as soon as the Crystal male population was out of the way. The Eggs soon confirmed that they understood what was happening to the northern Crystals, and told them it was for the good of the party even though not all factions would benefit equally from the new war. Yet the Crystals still funded the Egg and Moonshine factions, just as they funded the Phoenixes and all other Crystals.

Hipside migration begins

In fall 4196, the oldest Hipsides migrated westward, abandoning the refugee territory for the adjacent state of Olansele along the coast. They avoided a much shorter and more convenient route to the coast that would have taken them directly through the Moonshine state of Safiz. The border between Safiz and the refugee territory in this area was just a few miles from the coast, but the Moonshines had chosen to keep the coastal strip within the territory of Safiz as they felt that the refugees did not need a coastline. The refugee territory was so close to the coast that it was within the jurisdiction of the Moonshine navy rather than its army. Thus, despite the lack of a serious border guard, the Hipsides avoided trespassing in Safiz for fear of being abducted by the Moonshine sailors.

The Hipsides were also rejecting a route that would have taken them through Crystal territory. The Crystals were all women, and poorly armed, and so would be unlikely to resist the Hipside migration. But their territory had been quickly invaded by men from outside parties, and the Hipsides felt that these men posed a greater danger to them than did the men living in traditional societies such as Olansele; further, they realized that Olansele's own men were the first to have invaded the Crystals.

Cultural contacts

Olansele's population was largely pro-Matrix, but were not actually party members, nor had they shared the spoils of any of the Matrix's recent military victories. Previously, the inland areas of Olansele had been mostly Crystals, but the male population of these areas was forced to flee, briefly making the interior an all-female territory (among adults). The pro-Matrix citizens along the coast responded to this by moving en masse into the women's section of the nation, knowing that the women were so weak that any man could wander around the women's zone unarrested. The Hipsides knew this, and figured that they would probably be safer building colonies in the women's zones than in the pro-Matrix territory along the northern coast. But the Hipsides also believed felt that the coastal inhabitants were hardly any stronger than the Crystal women, and would not be able to call in the Matrixes to repel the Hipside settlers. Moreover they hoped that the Crystals and other outside powers would recognize that the Hipsides were the bravest army in the conflict and had proven themselves by directly invading an enemy nation and holding their territory without help from any outside power. Even so, the Hipsides were poorly armed.

Like the Tahank tribe in the refugee territory, Olansele's northern population (XIG) profited from the distribution of alcohol even though the local climate was too cold to produce it onsite. Traditionally, Olansele had aligned themselves with parties in other nations who supported alcohol prohibition locally but not worldwide; because Olansele's shipping guild controlled the alcohol trade, they helped deliver alcohol products to areas where it was desired while keeping it away from areas where the party in power disapproved of alcohol consumption. This included the early Players. But the early Cold Men (when they were still led by adults) dedicated themselves to opposing alcohol consumption even outside their borders, and therefore Olansele had turned against the Cold Men and looked for other allies. They had not allied with STW because, although STW's economy-first ideology was compatible with Olansele's, STW was a corporation and therefore a competing interest by definition. This left Olansele without firm allies. They had already moved towards allying themselves with the Matrix, but for a reason unrelated to the alcohol trade.

Hipside-XIG diplomacy

The Hipsides occupied areas along the coast as they had planned. The local adult population was now largely female, because young men had left their homes, and in some cases even abandoned their marriages, in order to start new lives in the interior. Originally these men had hoped to woo young Crystal women who had not yet married or whose husbands were busy fighting in the war to the west, having left the women to raise their children alone. But the Crystal women had been unwilling partners, so within weeks, the migrating XIGs declared war and claimed that anything they did to the women was retribution for the women sending their men to fight the Clovers' bodyguards in Baeba Swamp.

Because the migrating Hipsides were also intent on war, three fourths of them were male, and some thought that they too could find women to marry in Olansele, be they Crystals, XIG members, or of some other group. The Hipside strategic command agreed to allow this, stating that keeping their soldiers happy was good for its own sake, and also that if they forged close ties with the locals, the locals might help them in their future war against the Matrix even if many of them had been originally pro-Matrix before the Hipside migration. The commanders nonetheless warned that the Hipsides were all within a very narrow age range, and that there would not be enough women for all of them unless they could find women willing to marry husbands much younger than themselves. The male Hipside migrants were already frustrated at being addressed as boys by both the Crystals and the XIGs. This was for several reasons: the XIGs had a higher cultural age of maturation than the Hipsides and other Play speakers were used to; the Crystals believed in early maturation yet often refused to distinguish between boys and men, especially for those who were unmarried. A third factor was the Hipsides' recent embrace of the Medley art style, in which they drew their people much smaller than the Crystals, XIGs, and the populations of other traditional nations. The Crystals were somewhat familiar with the Dreamers' similar art style, and knew that physical size was not intended to compart childishness, but wondered if the Hipsides themselves understood that.

Because the XIGs controlled the alcohol trade, some wanted to addict the Hipsides to alcohol, figuring that they could moot the Hipside military offensive and at the same time trigger a rebellion within the troop as the drunken boys would commit acts of violence against the girls whom they outnumbered three to one. But many XIGs were sympathetic to the Hipsides and considered switching to any party that would let them in without tying them to the war in the west. Hearing this, the Hipsides declared themselves a closed-entry party and reaffirmed their alliance to the Cold Men and Scorpions whom they had left behind in the refugee territory.

Hupodas treaty

The Hipsides signed a treaty with Moonshine, forming what was known in a trade language as the Hupodas alliance. This was the same word translated as fīs "filth" in Play. This treaty also renamed Moonshine's refugee territory of Hōki to Hupedikas and assigned it the Play name Fīsaye.

Filth fairy battalions

A female filth fairy was declared to be the leader of their army, and the migrating Hipside troop, now renamed Pamapauyafu ("bringing the fear of pain"), was deputized to spread plagues into any nation that was hostile to Moonshine.

Earlier, the Hipsides had complained that other parties saw their male leaders as mere boys, and had been unable to stop this. Now embracing their identity, the soldiers renamed themselves fītaā, "filth boys", not because they were claiming to be children again, but because they were promising to be obedient. (The gender-neutral Play word taā "child" is here glossed as "boy" to suggest a wider age range despite the troop being about one-fourth female.) By spreading plagues and having a mixed-gender military, the Hipsides admitted that they were behaving as children would be expected to, and therefore would most impress their enemies by focusing on what made them different from other armies, including their allies. However the Lilypads were now also referring to themselves as kids.

Plans for westward expansion

The Hipsides' ultimate goal was to reach Baeba Swamp and attack the Matrix there, but they planned to move slowly and peacefully westward along the coast so that they would have a safe territory to retreat into rather than being trapped a thousand miles from their original home in the refugee colony.

There was also the city of Hayāga-Xàma ("Top City"), which the Hipsides planned to rename Tašaba.

Lastly, just outside the border of Tata, in the state of Lumpaga, was the city of Lahakʷ-Mìti (a Leaper name; known in a trade language as Nieipi), which they planned to make their new capital city. The Hipsides heard the Leaper word mìti as the Play word miti "commons, park, public area" and therefore thought of their future capital as a city of great parklands. They thus proposed to rename it to Vaanā Miti, "Summer Park", when they conquered it, because they knew the climate on the west coast was much warmer than the climate of their old homeland in the interior, even in summer.

Leapers' reactions

The Leapers cheered the Hipside migrations, as it was exactly what the Leapers had earlier wanted to wish into being: a nation of children stretching along the coast, responsible for itself, and therefore with nobody to blame if anything went wrong. They were also glad to see that the locals were leaving their homes to move in with Crystal women in the Nest, and so there was no great opposition to the new sprawling Hipside nation either. The Leapers wished that the Hipsides would hurry up, but understood that the Hipside military planners knew what they were doing and that they were putting their own interests first, not those of the Leapers or even of the Clovers.

The Leapers noticed that the Hipside nation, the Lifeline, was not part of the Lilypad nation, and therefore that the connecting path between the two Lilypad territories would not itself be a Lilypad territory. This meant that there would still be no single contiguous Lilypad nation; the Leapers figured that this alone would not bother the Lilypads, as they had been functioning well in their current state, but that it was possible the Hipsides were trying to procure for themselves a role in diplomacy that no other power, not even the Leapers, would be able to rival.

Leapers investigate Hipside propaganda

Some Leaper strategists believed that the Hipsides were more clever than the other children's nations, and were well on their way to outsmarting the traditional powers around them. The recently adopted Medley art style, used by the Hipsides to communicate with foreign powers, seemed precisely tailored to depict the Hipsides as innocent and incapable of harm, without going too far. The Hipsides left their art style open to interpretation: though they drew themselves as small, they made clear the distinction between children and adults, both of whom were drawn much smaller than the children and adults of other peoples; many drawings showed the Hipside people with flowerlike bodies, whereas those of other people were drawn with broad chests and angular features. This suggested that the Hipsides would remain delicate and harmless even as adults. Because this same art style was familiar from the Dreamers, the Hipsides could explain that they were simply finding their place within an existing cultural trend rather than posing as bait to draw outsiders into a trap. The Leapers came to refer to the frail, flowerlike body forms the Hipsides chose for themselves as dolls (Leaper nĭḳo; Play fū).

The Leapers did not trust the Hipside internal census, but figured that there were too few of them to occupy the stretch of territory between the two Lilypad zones. This explained why they wanted the locals in their territory to remain and why they were trying to attract immigrants in addition. Since the Hipsides were intent on fighting a war against the Matrixes and knew that the locals in their Lifeline territory had historically been sympathetic to the Matrix, the Hipsides could dilute the pro-Matrix sentiment by inviting immigrants, particularly adult males, from nearby territories which were almost unanimously anti-Matrix. These men would not necessarily be expected to fight, but the combination of the two adult male populations in the same territory could lead both of them to refrain from getting involved, leading the Hipsides to fight the war on their own. This assumed that the pro- and anti-Matrix men would focus on each other and leave the Hipsides alone; recent happenings suggested that the Hipsides were taking a big risk here, but that even if the migrating men decided to put aside politics and dedicate themselves to disrupting the Hipside society, the Hipsides would still be saving other children's nations the trouble of dealing with those same men. Further, the Leapers suspected some men would in fact join the Hipside troop and fight the Matrix once the opportunity arose, while enough of the others would stay behind to stall any anti-Hipside uprising.

Political conflicts in Erala

Zenith secession

The government of Erala was supported by taxes paid by all of the represented parties. Since the childrens' parties were not given any representation, they did not have to pay taxes either. The Leapers believed that this system was ideal. The tax money, once collected, was dispursed back to the parties according to their population size; this excluded members outside Erala, so the Crystals were not entitled to extra payments for being a transnational party. The Leapers understood that most of the parties in Erala were interested in winning wars, and so would put the money into their military, but the parties also put some of their money into basic social services. Lastly, the Leapers themselves ran a basic welfare program in Erala that was open to members of all parties, and was funded by tax money collected from the adult parties but not returned to them. Children could collect these welfare payments despite not paying taxes. The Leapers said that they would even be willing to provide benefits to children living in Moonshine's refugee colony, now known as Hupedikas, but admitted that this was an unrealistic ideal, as to get tangible goods into Hupedikas would require Leapers or other trusted volunteers to enter territory where they would likely be attacked by the various groups of adult refugees who lived closer to the border.

Refusal of taxes

At this point, the Zenith party chose to stop paying taxes, saying that they would no longer expect to receive the money collected from taxes, but that they would still expect to make use of the nation's social services, since those were available to children who did not pay taxes either.

New currency

They also declared a new currency for Zeniths only, patterned after STW's asala coin. Because this currency could not be used by non-Zeniths, Zeniths could not buy anything with it in the national economy, and therefore the Zeniths declared themselves infinitely poor and stated they needed the most supremely generous welfare payments.

Plans to further cut ties

The Zeniths announced that if needed, they would formally secede from Erala, saying they wanted the same status as the children's parties, who seemed to consider themselves sovereign nations and yet were able to participate in Erala's welfare programs. The Zeniths admitted that they wanted welfare so they could devote their entire wealth to their military, and threatened immediate violence if they were refused social benefits.

Zeniths knew that if they formally seceded, they would no longer be bound by Erala's laws, and could even start a legal war inside Erala, saying that it was a traditional territorial conflict, all while continuing to benefit from Erala's well-developed social service programs because they were open to all people. The Zeniths also signed an alliance with the Tink party, hoping to draw the Tinks out of Baeba Swamp and into Erala so they could help the Zeniths massacre other Eralan citizens. The Zenith declared that their primary enemy was not the Leapers but rather the Matrix; both parties were very small but well-armed and politically powerful. Since the Matrixes were a men's party, the Zeniths knew that they would be difficult to beat in war.

Zenith leaders

At this point, the Zenith leaders Kʷonkʷa and Gūntàlani had accumulated much power. They still looked down on the Slopes and did not mind that Kīsiba now considered himself an independent personality. (Kīsiba was a teenage Slope boy who had risen to power by praising Kʷonkʷa.)

Leaper reaction

The Leapers knew that there was little they could do to stop the Zeniths from taking the tangible welfare benefits provided to all parties, since the Leapers had no manpower to enforce their laws in Erala and that Erala's stability rested on the cooperation of the various parties within it. These other parties could combine their forces and outmuscle the Zeniths, but the Leapers figured that these people would rather tolerate the Zeniths at home so they could focus on traditional warfare in Baeba and if necessary also at home. This meant that other parties could also stop paying taxes, and that Erala might soon collapse into anarchy.

The Leapers considered a plan to have small children drive the wagons delivering the tangible welfare benefits into Erala, figuring that the Zeniths would easily overpower them and get what they wanted, but would not kill the children because they would be of unknown party identification.

The Leapers voted to cut their taxes and also cut their benefits, leaving the Zeniths with less of an advantage over the law-abiding parties. Thus the Leapers hoped to convince the other groups to keep paying and to stave off anarchy. But the Leapers knew that if they cut too much, the other parties might decide that they were better off rejecting the Leapers anyway and the result would be the same. The Leapers tried to focus on strengthening their ties with the Crystal and Matrix parties, while hoping to connect with the youth parties who were rapidly gaining strength in the wilderness and in the far north.

Zeniths regroup

The Zeniths attacked the STW-Matrix coalition again in 4197. They formally seceded from Erala, saying that they would fight battles within Erala as well, so that the Matrixes could not simply retreat eastward to safety. This made them illegal and the Zeniths stated that they had been planning this war all along and would be well prepared for it.

By spring 4197 the Zeniths had increased their territory, creating many Zenith-only areas within Erala. But the land they had won in Erala was mostly useless to them, mostly due to expanding into weakly defended wilderness areas along with cities and offshore islands controlled by weak armies, and they lost further territory in Baeba Swamp.

Slope contributions

The Slopes had participated in this war, the only youth army to participate in front-line combat. The Slopes supported the Zenith but without joining them side by side in each battalion.

Whereas the Zeniths fought mostly against the Matrix and STW armies, the Slopes focused on moving eastward into Crystal territory. They wanted to live in less dangerous territory, even if they would be much poorer than the Zeniths and other armies.

The Slopes won exclusive control of some small areas of land in Erala, though far less than the Zeniths, despite the fact that the Slopes had fought very hard. The Slopes were not discouraged, though; their primary aim in the war was not to win large areas of land but to establish a power base in Erala so that they would not be so vulnerable to attack by the many armies fighting for control of Baeba Swamp.

New Slope platform

The Slopes declared themselves to be at once a party, an army, and a criminal organization. Like many other parties, they rejected the very concept of courts and criminal trials; they handled Slopes who committed serious crimes against fellow Slopes by expulsion from the party. This was unlike the Zeniths, who allowed even this, but similar to the Matrix, for whom the only acts seen as crimes were those against fellow Matrix members.

Protection clauses

The Slopes also dedicated their party to the protection of children's safety and to the concept of sulalaka (Play nuiŋee), the practice of working at home whenever possible for the sake of safety. This was relevant particularly in the poorer areas of Baeba Swamp where predatory animals lived side-by-side with humans whose dwellings were delicately constructed. Their dedication to sulalaka stood apart from the common belief that a large city, even in a tropical climate, provided a safe haven for humans to move about free from the fear of predatory animals, and that it was fellow humans who were the greatest threat to physical safety.

Indeed, the Slopes were very concerned about protecting their members from predatory animals. This was because they lived mostly in the poorer areas of Baeba, which though formally part of the city, consisted largely of swampland where some predators actually outnumbered humans. The Slopes explained that they were fighting for their lives, and that if they were able to drive the predators into the urban core in order to protect themselves, they would make no apologies to those who ended up facing the predators in turn.

The new Slope platform also specifically forbade their members to assault children, not because they felt it particularly cruel to do so, but because they saw all children as potential Slopes, and the Slope leaders' goal of rapidly expanding their party membership depended on both protecting and adopting as many young children as possible.

Personal fitness

Some Slopes believed in self-reliance and personal fitness, with a focus on intelligence rather than physical strength and endurance. These were individualists and a minority among Slopes; therefore this belief was not written into the Slope party platform, which allowed members to practice self-reliance but not to neglect basic duties to the community.

Support for slavery

The Slopes declared their support for slavery, and stated that weak, defenseless people made the best slaves. Because they considered childhood a lifestage rather than an identity, this belief did not contradict their support of protecting children's rights, but neither did their support for children's rights forbid the Slopes from keeping children as slaves. The Slope boys nonetheless said that they would be capturing adults, not children, and that any child slaves the Slopes had would be the offspring of those captured adults. The Slopes chose to preferentially target the all-female Crystals, saying that they made the weakest targets and that recent events had proven that their male population would not come to their defense.

Criticism of unpopular parties

The Slopes also criticized the Matrix and Dreamer parties.

Against the Matrix

The Slopes claimed that, by invading the Crystals, they were already doing what the Matrixes only wished they could do, as the Matrixes kept making threats of invading Moonshine from their territory in Baeba, yet had so far failed to make any significant eastward advances. The Slopes pointed out as well that the Matrixes seemed fixated on sexual imagery, saying that they would sexually assault the Crystal and Moonshine women and that that was their primary goal. By contrast the Slopes allowed their members to sexually assault the Crystals but did not make this their overarching goal, and the Slopes included female leaders in their movement whereas the Matrixes did not allow female members at all; thus they could only pass on Matrix party membership through contact with an enemy party's women.

Against Dreamland

The Slope leaders argued that Dreamland was busy turning itself into a corporation, whose employees were not allowed to have political opinions, and that because there was no way for the Dreamers to pursue their interests except economically, the Slopes would have an easy time exploiting the Dreamers just as they were exploiting the Crystals.

Against UAO

The Slopes also declared war against the Unholy Alliance (UAO), a group of outlaws living on the icecap of Xema, who had recently announced their intent to participate in child trafficking. Some members of outside parties had expected the Slopes to openly endorse child trafficking simply to frighten their enemies, but the Slopes promised they would always oppose UAO and child abuse in general.

New Slope leaders emerge

Weaponers gain

An alliance of four boys manufactured weapons and distributed them to other boys that they trusted to lead rebellions against the Crystals and others around them. This was part of the Slopes' practice of sulalaka, the doctrine of protecting one's home and remaining at home to do work whenever possible. Thus, the Slopes planned to create zones of open defiance, within which they were both self-sufficient and safe, and into which non-Slopes could not trespass. The Slopes promised never to wall off their zones from other Slopes, but said that allies of the Slopes such as Zeniths would not be guaranteed the right of entry, and that the Slopes would remain a closed-entry party.

Opponents of sulalaka had threatened to burn the Slopes' homes, saying that even if their own homes also burned, they were only losing a luxury, whereas the Slopes would be losing their very safety.

The weaponers each had their own dedicated followings:

1. Pikīutūutā: Known as Slimeboy, from western Play territory, near where Stargazer had lived.
2. Pis: This was a team of two boys. (The Pis in their team name is the same word as the initial /pi/ in Slimeboy's name but they were not affiliated with him.)
   1. Pisatu-Yuyau: Associated with tree nuts.
   2. Pisāptua: Known as the Dog.
3. Ŋais-Vīmmūs: Claimed to be more powerful than all others, but despite being known as a liar he had many supporters because he was faithful to the Slope party cause. The only military leader often seen with a girlfriend.

The boys being armed were mostly Slopes, but the weaponers also accepted some teenagers who claimed no party affiliation, and knew that some of them were even anti-Slopes. There were very few girls accepted by the weaponers as trusted military leaders, but they knew that girls would end up carrying the weapons eventually.

The boys, calling themselves Salamanders (Play Piupa), founded the Leap Metal Corporation (Play Paīpiva Manaba Vappimatu) dedicated to the capture of raw materials and the manufacture and distribution of weapons. Here, (vap)pimatu was the Play word for corporation, and was cognate to the leader Pisatu-Yuyau's name, but the company was not directly named after him (nor was the boy named for a company). The Play word paīp, here translated as "leap", signified any discontinous empire, not specifically one run by the Leapers, but because their territory was still officially run by the Leapers they taunted the Leapers by pretending to take control of the corporation away from them.

Weapons delivery

Some of the boys who received weapons were:

1. Kīsiba: formerly a close follower of the Zenith leader Kʷonkʷa, but became independent and gained followers of his own.
2. Vamnape.
3. Tāmpe-Vīu: known for associating with enemies of the Slopes, planning to build his own movement. He cooperated with trusted friends, but not with the Slopes as a whole.
4. Kanāmme: very aggressive, planning an attack on the Crystal women whether others would back him up or not.

Thus there was a stark division between the boys producing weapons and the boys receiving them, but they both cooperated, and because the Slopes now had territory within Erala into which no other armies (not even Zeniths) could enter, they were ready to fight a war within the territory of Erala.

The boys who produced weapons and those who received them came from wealthy families, but much of the weaponers' wealth was itself derived from weapons manufacture, so they were simply carrying on the family tradition. None of the boys in either group came from their societies' lower classes.

Leapers reject children

At this point, the Leaper parliament of Erala used its reserve powers to pass a law denying children the right to claim social benefits in Erala, and allowing the other parties to arrest them at will, stating that any children in Erala who moved about at their own will were violating Erala's territorial integrity even if they were orphans. The Leapers conceded that their new law would change little, since the Slopes had clearly dedicated themselves to a campaign of violence and were no longer pretending to be helpless young children. But before the new law, the Slopes had always been able to pose as members of other children's parties and therefore the welfare distribution centers could not deny them food or other benefits. In fact, few Slopes had attempted this, as the Slope leaders were quick to point out in their own media and diplomatic communications with the Leapers.

Lilypads' reaction

The Lilypads were also excluded from Erala's citizen pool by this new law. Though the Lilypads considered themselves allies of the Crystals, they strongly disapproved of the Crystals' military policies, saying that they seemed to make the worst possible decision in every situation and that any new male converts would likely be sent to the front lines in Baeba with no protective armor and possibly even no weapons. The Lilypads confirmed that their primary enemy was still the Matrix, and although they now added the Slopes to their list of enemies, they did not declare war against the Slopes and made clear that they would not send their young soldiers to protect the Crystal women who were now being invaded by not just the Slopes but by various small groups of adult men as well. Lastly, the Lilypads stated that any among them who decided to fight for the Crystals' territory despite their leaders' discouraging words would be allowed to claim areas of land in Erala for themselves without giving up membership in the Lilypad umbrella party.

The Lilypads decision to declare war against the Matrixes but not the Slopes, despite the Slopes being much closer to them geographically and greater in number, again led outside parties to believe that the various children's parties had decided to ignore their vast political differences so they could split control of the adult world between them.

Other new youth leaders

Some other young leaders emerged from the Slopes and from other parties. They were all nearly the same age, and outsiders wondered if the young leaders were about to draw together despite their wide ideological differences and form a unified movement that would oppose all the traditional adult armies at once.

Minor Slope leaders

Three new minor Slope leaders appeared at this point:

1. Mīvapūpa (Rage): A girl who supported a masculine power structure even within the Slope party, and was looking for a male leader to associate with.
2. Vāpatam (TC): A weak, unpopular boy who saw no future outside the Slope party and, acknowledging conflict from other Slopes, reaffirmed he would build a small army and protect his followers from both the enemies of the Slopes and the other Slopes.
3. Maanuama: An aggressive boy who feuded with Vāpatam and talked publicly about taking Vāpatam's followers away by defeating him in combat. The Slopes did not have any such provision in their party constitution, but some of Vāpatam's followers stated that they would agree to follow Maanuama if Vāpatam could not defend himself in a fair fight.

These leaders were independent and were passed over by the weaponers, meaning that they could not raise strong armies on their own and were forced to manufacture their own weapons using the materials they could find. Additionally, they had no strong ties to each other, as TC and DD demonstrated by publically feuding with each other over basic matters of policy such as who their enemies were. TC was blamed by the other leaders for this, and told that he was not only unfit to be a leader, but unfit to be a follower as well.

Wiper and Red Desert

Some Slope leaders met with a boy and a girl named Numāše ("Wiper") and Tamauvaa ("Red Desert"), who were not committed to the Slopes but agreed to cooperate with them. They had received weapons despite not being Slopes. They teamed up and announced their desire to fight in traditional combat roles despite their youth, and that they would be facing all-male armies rather than the Crystals. They actually wanted to find the all-male Crystal troop which had been sent to Clover territory but wondered if the Crystal men had been such poor soldiers that they had already been entirely eliminated. They said that if they could not find Crystal men to attack they would attack the Soap Bubbles, and that if they could not find Soap Bubbles they would claim a piece of land near Baeba and attack anyone who resisted their rule.

TPBM

Two Slope boys, Yašaimata and Pāuvačī, were seen as a pair because they both admitted to bodily hygiene problems typically associated with much younger children and did not seem ashamed of them. But they did not live near each other and did not coordinate their attacks on the Crystal society.

Tupaau

Another Slope leader was Tupaau, a rich boy who made fun of those living in poorer conditions, including other Slopes.

Yīuvas-Pīsa

A boy named Yīuvas-Pīsa declared himself a Crystal, saying that he was not of the Habit faction and therefore was not obliged to fight for the Crystals in Baeba. He supported the Crystals' program of racial discrimination and stated that his own faction, the Slopes, belonged at the top because the Slopes were the most powerful army in the world relative to their population size. The Slope faction of the Crystals held as it primary mission the infliction of extreme pain on the Habit faction.

Pīsa challenged the Crystals to work around his re-definition of the Slope party as a Crystal faction, knowing that the Leapers had done something similar several hundred years earlier and only abandoned it when it became a political liability to be a Crystal. Pīsa said that even this would not stop him, because if the Crystals voted him into a war or forced him to admit other factions into his territory, he would simply resign his party membership and become an ordinary Slope again. Likewise, Pīsa did not expect the Slopes to join him in pretending to be Crystals, nor did he need them to; his plan was merely a way to harass the Crystals, whose internal party structure had recently been shown to be deeply flawed.

The Crystals were obligated to send the boy money now that he had his own faction of Crystals, and he stated that he had 100,000 followers and would need a great deal of money to feed and arm them all. He promised to pay his fair share of taxes, but stated that all of his followers were extremely poor and could not afford to pay more than a tiny of sum of money, which they would deduct once they had received their dispursements from the wider Crystal tax pool.

The boy's intelligent maneuver led other leaders to think of the Crystals as inert, meaning that they could not act, they could only react; whatever the Crystals had done in the past was now available for their enemies to exploit.

Vuupīte

One of the few female Slope leaders was Vuupīte. Her name contained the Play verb pīte "to bite while apologizing", more commonly seen in the fuller form šapīte "to sin while apologizing", showing that she would never feel true remorse for the pain she caused.

Napama

Another Slope girl was named Napama; she was very wealthy.

Obligations

The Slopes selected the Crystals as their ideal victims. Some Slopes admitted they wanted to sexually assault the women, and to set up a society which would in most ways be an ordinary nation except that rape would be legal and the Crystal women would simply have to accept this as they went about their lives. The Slopes felt that a society set up like this would be more fun for them than one in which the women were enslaved, because they would enjoy seeing the women struggle to fight back.

Other Slopes said that this was not enough, and that they were planning to set up a slave operation in which the Slopes would abuse the Crystals in every possible way for generations to come. These two visions were compatible because the Slopes who kept Crystals physically confined would allow others to let Crystals roam free so long as the Crystals were incapable of meaningful self-defense.

In general, the Slopes' plans to abuse the Crystals harmed their image in the wider world. The Slopes reminded their enemies that at their very founding meeting they had declared war on all beautiful things, and that meant to them the female body. The Slopes' own female population had been aware of this from the beginning and generally did not feel threatened, as the Slopes were a very close-knit group who had been through troubled times together, and the general status of girls in the Slope party was much higher than in the similarly criminal-minded Zenith or Matrix parties (indeed the Matrixes did not even allow women to join). One other reason the Slope girls did not object to the boys' plans to abuse the Crystal women was that the Slope girls planned to also take part in it.

Exploitation statement

The Slopes announced that they were going to exploit (fumu) the Crystals. By this they meant that not only would the Crystals fail to oppose them, but that the Crystals would be made to assist the Slopes in every way of life, every structure of Crystal society being made into a power source for the Slopes and a source of pain for the Crystals. They said that only a population so passive and inert (nunapupi) could be so easily exploited by parasites such as the Slopes. The Slopes said that they would take breaks during their war in which they would live peacefully among the Crystals, observing that the Crystals still would not react or try to push them out of Crystal territory.

The Slopes wanted to create a society in which, by outward appearances, the Slopes and Crystals were living in peace, with both groups working side by side in the economy. Slavery would be allowed but most Crystals would be free. The Slopes promised, however, to allow their members to assault the Crystal women, including sexually, and to arrest any Crystals who attempted assaults against Slopes, whether the Crystals were attacking the perpetrators or not.

The Slopes' ideal society put themselves at top, with the Crystals doing most of the necessary work, but the Slopes were large enough in population that they knew they could not all be commanders, and therefore the Slopes promised that they would too do work, including dangerous tasks, but that they would be safe while doing so due to sulalaka, which they would not extend to the Crystals.

The Play word fumu was also used to describe cheating in sports or politics. The Slopes, rather than putting the Crystals in outright slavery, felt they could best thrive if the Crystal women were made to struggle to feed and clothe themselves, from which the Slopes would take whatever they wished. They believed this economy was much superior to slavery because slavery was too wasteful, providing some slaveowners with far more than they needed and others with nothing. Thus, the Slopes' dislike of slavery was not due to ethical concerns for the enslaved, and they promised to allow slavery to exist alongside the fumu economy so that those who believed slavery was more efficient would be allowed to prosper.

Pimayava statement

The Slope leaders produced the Pimayava document (Pimayava Pupa, the Book of the Source of Pleasure), declaring that they were the most intelligent people in the world, far smarter than the adult powers around them, and even smarter than the young children in the Lilypad nations. The Slopes announced they had discovered an economic and lifestyle-related plan that would bring about world peace, provide safety and a comfortable living standard for all human beings, and allow each individual human being the ability to feel happiness even without material comforts. The Slopes announced that they would reveal the secrets of Pimayava precisely when it became too late for them to be put into practice, showing that they could have at any time ended their enemies' suffering, but had chosen to prolong it out of spite.

Reaction of outside parties

The Zeniths reading the new Slope platform believed it proved that the Slopes, despite their promise to shock the world with their crimes against innocents around them, still saw themselves as a children's party, forever in need of protection from the outside world, and that they were too emotionally and even physically fragile to commit the crimes they promised would soon terrify the populations around them. The Zeniths were overwhelmingly male, and relied on the constant influx of criminals from outside parties to sustain their numbers. By contrast the Slopes, though also having a slight majority of male members, planned to rely on traditional reproduction and aggressive adoption and nursing programs to acquire and keep hold of additional young members from outside the party.

The Crystals took the Slopes' party platform more seriously, believing that they had already proven themselves to be hardened criminals, and that their lack of weapons and armor was the main obstacle holding them back from launching an unchecked crime spree. They believed that the Slopes' adoptions of orphans and other small children would in fact be abductions, and that their dedication to protecting humans' right to safety by working at home was actually a means for them to build compact communities where all of the Slopes would be heavily armed and non-Slopes needing to pass through would need to pay a tribute or risk being enslaved.

Some men in Moonshine were alarmed at the rise of male power in the west, and petitioned their female leaders to prepare for war; these men believed that they needed to invade proactively in order to protect Moonshine's female government. But the women would not allow them to speak, and reaffirmed that Moonshine's role in the war was to send unarmed humanitarian workers into the conflict zones so they could help wounded soldiers and civilians from all sides.

New allies for Slopes

Many boys (and some men) supported the Slopes' plans to exploit the Crystal women, and hoped to join in themselves, but knew that the Slopes would keep themselves in power and were a closed-entry party, unlike their allies, the Zenith. Very few females were interested in joining or fighting for the Slopes, but the Slopes' own female population had so far remained loyal, with the few defectors having left the Slopes early on and primarily because they felt the Slopes were too weak, not because of the Slopes' plans to abuse women. The strong female support suggested to outsiders that the Slopes were not a landless criminal gang seeking to make and break alliances at their pleasure, but a close-knit group well on their way to becoming a traditional nation with borders and an economy based on exploitation of the local Crystal population, whose wider party had abandoned them.

Thus, the Slopes had a healthy balance of boys and girls in their population, though with a noticeable surplus of boys. But their supporters outside the party were nearly all male.

Sunspot allies

Many of these aspiring rapists joined the Sunspots, whose base was in Clover territory. The Sunspots were bodyguards for the children in the Clover dynasty, but they had so far refused to reject supporters such as those Scorpions and XIGs who had seemingly declared allegiance to the Sunspots solely to assault the Crystals.

Clover rebel boys

Lastly, there were three boys from the Clover territory who were cut off from the happenings in the east but were eager to join in the coming war against the Crystals:

1. Paai-Pīpa, an older boy of Tink ancestry whose parents had invaded the Swamp several years earlier. When the Soap Bubbles later ruled the Tinks out of the Swamp, he fled his household and lived by himself in the wilderness before soon joining other boys who had done the same. (The expulsion was quickly proven unenforceable, but many boys remained and formed an unofficial army.)
2. Tavaisi, a follower of Pīpa.
3. Mapaimta, who stood alone.

Anti-Slope coalition forms in the east

The Queen

Far to the east, out of reach of the Slopes, a 16-year-old girl calling herself Pausa seceded from the Cold party and declared herself a weapons supplier like the Slope boys in the west. She had no easy access to manufacturing materials, and therefore her supplies were actually captured weapons from all around. Since there was no armed opposition in her area, she was able to convince her followers that she was strong and that they would be safe if they obeyed her. Many young children supported Pausa and others were delivered to her by sympathetic adults. Her interpretation of sulalaka stated that young children could be best protected by female leaders.

Thus, sulalaka was not an ideology, but a lifestyle.

Driver and others

Another girl who was closely tied to Pausa was Vušasi. A third pro-sulalaka girl was Tušamau, "the Bottle", whose name was an anagram of the Play word for a bottle of milk. Vušasi connected her with Pausa. Thus a female-run weapons network existed, counterbalancing the Slopes' male-dominated network in the west. But these girls did not consider it their duty to protect the all-female Crystals from the Slopes, or to mobilize for war at all, considering it all they could do to protect their own society from invasion, and to encourage converts to join them.

A female leader named the Driver (Play Nunuamifa) declared herself the leader of the anti-UAO program and stated that UAO was likely to invade Moonshine's refugee territory of Hupedikas, where many vulnerable young orphans lived.

The Driver was also at the front of the sulalaka movement. Many women and girls were skeptical of sulalaka, even though it was based on the desire to keep women and children safe, because they felt that in the home, men would be powerful at the expense of women and children by nature (among the Slopes, women were often the taller sex, but men were still considered more violent and pro-active, since it was in their nature to be expendable; thus male domination of the Slopes' paramilitary organizations was not reliant on their physical domination of women). The Slopes felt that this might spare them attacks from the Crystals, whose male army was currently struggling in Baeba Swamp but had won major wars in the past.

The fruit market

The OHB fruit market and trading guild (Play Vabapu Šasi Memnivap) joined the weapons trade as well, saying that because they had reliable transportation, they could not be shut out if they lost territory in Erala. OHB founded a company called Nūuni separate from the guild (but its trade name remained OHB) and supported the Cupbearers. OHB seemingly had nothing to gain by joining the war, but their leaders believed that the Slopes would soon take over much of the world if they were not stopped young fighting for the Slope-exclusive territory to raise an army in.

The founders of OHB had been Players of a previous generation, but because their trading network extended into the refugee territory (and traditionally also to Moonshine proper), they had hired many employees who were not members of the Play party. In recent years, some of these had been teenage girls from the refugee territories, who had been born into the Cold party, and thus were one of the Players' historical enemies. But the Players saw these girls as allies against the rising male-oriented powers of the west.

OHB called itself Pāmnata "Heart Stoppers", at once a humorous name meant to make them sound greedy (a pun on Play pamnata "spend money") and a reminder that they were selling fruit to raise money for war. They said that if they ever needed to form a political party separate from both their guild and their corporation, they would use the Heart Stopper name, because of their three names, this was the only one that they used to include their supporters and not just their employees.

OHB appealed to the female weapons trading network in the east, which had already decided not to fight for the Crystals in the west, saying that they deserved to die simply for having proven inept at warfare. As the Crystal casualties piled up, Moonshine again criticized the Crystals for supporting racial discrimination, and reminded the Crystals that they could not seek shelter in Moonshine because Moonshine citizenship was strictly hereditary. Moonshine decided to support OHB, saying it was a defensive alliance and that they would not be sending soldiers, male or female, to fight the Slopes in the west, or even to protect the refugees in Hupedikas.

The Heart Stoppers were traders, and therefore did not have homes; therefore they did not have a territory to call their own. Importantly, though, because they were authorized by the Players to trade with Erala, they had access to all of the trade roads along their way, including those within Play territory. This led the female military leaders such as the Driver to leave their refugee camp and enter the Play Empire, secure in the knowledge that the Players considered them useful allies against the youth leaders of the west and would not force them into unrelated conflicts.

Slopes attack again

Kanāmme led a troop of ten boys into a Crystal women's campsite and attacked the women indiscriminately. With the aid of their weapons, they subdued about forty Crystal women and made them into slaves. Later, a larger troop of Crystal women freed the captives and then put the Slope boys into a Crystal prison reserved for male criminals, mostly adults (the Crystals refused to distinguish between men and boys even in their criminal justice system). The Crystals promised that they would not kill the boys, but warned that if the Crystals were attacked by the Matrix, they would turn the boys over to the Matrix and that in Matrix captivity their lives would be much worse. The Crystals hoped that by being soft they might actually convince the boys to fight for the Crystals.

When the Slope leaders realized that they lost Kanāmme, some wanted to escalate the conflict by attacking the Crystals again, but others said that Kanāmme had been a fool to attack with so small an army and that he should have at the very least relied on his friends Vamnape and Tāmpevīu, whose armies were larger.

Fig day

A Lilypad boy named Tutunutavup ("Taxman") met with his former classmate, Paaāsa ("Baby Goat"), who had joined the Slopes, to discuss politics and the possibility of forming a symbolic alliance against Dreamland. The Lilypads were not at war with the Slopes, but the two groups of teenagers were on opposite sides of the conflict in Baeba. Dreamland had fought no wars during the boys' short lives, but had invaded the Players early in Play history, and all Play-speaking cultures were descended from the survivors of this war.

The Crystals worried that the two boys might be forming a tribal alliance in which all ideology would be discarded, sidelining the Crystals just when they were at their weakest, and also closing enrollment into any remaining open-entry parties of Play speakers. Even worse, they contemplated that the new alliance might be based on nothing other than having gone to the same school, in which case they believed the boys were rejecting politics altogether and would not be listening to arguments based on reason. They worried that the boys would resolve their conflicts, align their nations' foreign policies, and hand over all of the Crystals' remaining territories to the Slopes (since the Cold boys had promised not to fight for it).

The boys met in Crystal territory. The initial meeting was friendly but a fight erupted quickly as both boys had aggressive temperaments and had unresolved grudges from their days in school together.

The two boys could not come to an agreement, and Taxman considered starting a traditional war against the Slopes. But he was not the head of the Lilypad military and if he were to send his own soldiers against the Slopes he risked being expelled from the party and even being expelled from the Lilypad nation (although by attacking he would need to leave anyway or else be accused of treason).

Involvement of Dreamland

However, some unexpected political realignments came from this meeting. Taxman decided, claiming authority to speak for the whole Lilypad nation, that any territory the Slopes controlled would be considered part of Dreamland rather than Erala, and that the Lilypads had no land claims in Dreamland and would not fight to protect their own party members there. He did not have the authority to do this, but seeing him not making any other claims he could not enforce, the Crystals understood that the Lilypads might choose to obey Taxman and thus surrender all of Erala to the Slopes.

There was no land border between Dreamland and Erala because Tata and Baeba were in the way. Taxman figured it was unlikely, but hoped that if word of the new treaty spread to the Dreamers, the Dreamers would declare themselves allies of the Slopes and then fight their way through Tata to form a single contiguous Slope-Dreamer nation. If this happened, Taxman hoped that the Dreamers would take control and push the Slopes into an inferior position, which could then trigger a war between the two mostly male-led powers.

Battle of Hahénara

A Lilypad boy named Yakūsa invaded Crystal territory to attack the Slope leader Kīsiba's rebel hideout, but Kīsiba's army captured Yakūsa and his soldiers. The Slopes decided to spare the boys' lives, saying that the Crystals deserved to die but that Lilypads could still be their friends.

Lilypads investigate politics

The Lilypad leaders argued that the Crystal party apparatus was fundamentally flawed: a majority vote from the wider party was needed to start a war, but the factions voting in favor of the war did not need to send their own soldiers, since war plans were based on the advice of women who had risen in the ranks of the military and were not controlled by politics. Thus the Phoenixes, the Moonshines, and the Eggs had voted to start a new war against the Sunspots, but the men sent to battle were almost all taken from the Shield faction which was geographically closest. This left the Shields with no adult male population to protect them.

The Lilypad kids also considered themselves feminists, but were wary of the strict speech laws in the Moonshine Empire: in Moonshine, it was a crime for a man to simply suggest that men and women should have equal rights, and in some social situations it was also a crime for men to address any woman without first being spoken to. The Players had even tighter restrictions; Play men were required to obey any command given to them by a Play woman in any situation, and neither men nor women were allowed to criticize the Play party constitution.

Some Lilypad boys worried that they were being shut out of the OHB weapons distribution network, which had ties to the Play party, and that the girls in the Lilypad party would be setting up a heavily armed all-female police force much like that of the Play and Moonshine parties, while forcing boys to join the military with insufficient weapons and armor. Taxman had already been passed over for weapons distribution after the meeting with Baby Goat left the girls wondering whose side he was really on. Other Lilypad boys strongly supported feminism, however, and stated that an oppressive female police force would protect their nation from violent crime when the boys matured into men.

Abduction of Nayušipapa

A team of three Lilypad girls abducted a young male supporter named Nayušipapa and confiscated his weapons. Their names were Nimenave, Ŋūmueīsa, and Taŋamauma. They were known as QNO in trade.

Meanwhile the Slopes also formed a team of three girls, Yaptimāe, Masaba, and Yenīŋuvīm, known as ALR in trade. By this time, the Slope boys were telling each other to reject romantic attraction towards girls, saying that girls should be abused, not loved. Yet they still held to the promise they made on their founding day that they would neither attack each other nor allow others to attack them, and so the Slope girls rising to power did not object to the boys' plans.

A young girl named Vasayaya declared herself to be a Crystal, but stated that it was not safe for her to join the fighting. She felt however that she could not trust OHB because they had not committed themselves to defending the Crystals nor to attacking the Slopes. She stated that it was no longer safe to be a Crystal but would claim that party identity just to get the wider Crystal party to come after her to enforce their laws.

A Lilypad boy named Pāpaa threatened to either defect to the Sunspots or to found a new party for boys if the Lilypad girls did not stop abducting their own supporters and shutting them out of the weapons distribution network just because they were boys. He claimed it was unrealistic to expect boys to fight for girls if the girls were the better-armed and stronger of the two sexes.

Girls' private plans

Many of the OHB girls were confident they would never see combat. As a defensive alliance, their only objective was to keep the Slopes and other armies out of their territory, and they had no pretense of being able to rescue the Crystals or other groups of women and children whom they believed were being abused by various groups of roving men. They expected that these armies were unlikely to invade an armed feminist nation, since there were much easier targets available. They figured that if they were invaded even so, they would hand off their weapons to male soldiers and remain behind the front lines tending children and doing other noncombatant jobs.

However, none of the children's parties had yet passed any sort of law differentiating gender roles in their military; all of their armed forces so far had been mixed-gender, though most had male majorities, and this had yet to be challenged because these forces were all voluntary. The OHB girls thus worried that girls would be sent to the front lines alongside the boys and that their enemies would preferentially target girls knowing that they were the ones needed to carry their nations forward.

The leading OHB girls publicly promised that they themselves would indeed serve in combat if needed, since they were skilled with weapons and had decided to dedicate themselves to military training for the foreseeable future, but they encouraged their supporters to stick to conventional gender roles because women would be needed as mothers to raise children in order to expand their populations. Because OHB was still not a party of its own, this was an open message aimed at anyone willing to listen, including boys. With this statement, the OHB girls admitted that even in their private army, there would likely be more boys than girls carrying weapons, and that the Play and Moonshine parties might question what made them different from their enemies, the Slopes.

Dolphin Rider treaty

Now the Lilypads wrote a symbolic treaty declaring themselves allies of the Dolphin Riders, the one party that every other army, even those mutually hostile to each other, refused to defend, as they were the descendants of the Dreamers who had invaded them all. They presented this treaty to the Leapers, as only the Leapers would be able to deliver it to the Dolphin Riders (the Riders were illegal even in Baeba, but the Leapers had been meeting with them intermittently). The Leapers told the children that if they wished to live like Riders, they would be rejecting both male and female leaders and would be trapped in their habitats by wild animals, as this was the origin of the Dolphin Riders' name and their claimed source of military security. The Leapers agreed to deliver the peace treaty to the Riders, but wondered if the Lilypads were serious about establishing relations, or if this was merely a test to see whether the Leapers took the Lilypads seriously as a nation.

OHB treaty

At this point the Players signed a treaty with their enemy, the Leapers, authorizing the Players to invade and control any nation both groups identified as a children's nation, even the Slopes. The Leapers promised to stay out of any such conflict, and also promised that if the Players managed to reach all the way to Slope territory, the Leapers would hand over control of the whole of Erala to the Play army as well. With this treaty the Leapers planned to write off the existence of children's nations altogether, saying that they were just districts of the Play nation, Memnumu, and that Memnumu had a non-traditional demographic profile. This underscored a recent proclamation made by the Leapers in which children had been denied the right to collect welfare benefits in Erala, even if they were orphans, but adults were allowed to collect benefits with no need to prove their need.

The Leapers also promised to allow the Players to send the traders of the OHB corporation, which delivered Play fruits and other crops into colder climates, to pass through any areas of Erala in which they felt safe, and even to sell to groups such as the Zeniths and Slopes who were trying to destroy Erala. The Leapers allowed the OHB soldiers to enter Erala heavily armed, but did not promise their safety, because the Leapers stated that Erala was now run largely by rebels who were also heavily armed. It was understood by both parties that while OHB would continue to be a fruit trading corporation, they were also providing weapons manufactured by the Players to young rebel leaders, mostly girls, whom the Players supported and expected would soon be fighting a war.

Thus both points of the treaty favored the Players, and the Leapers did not expect anything in return. The Leapers hoped that they would not lose too much, however, and saw potential bright points in the future for them. For example, OHB was a corporation, and had recently dedicated itself to arming young female leaders such as Pausa, who were anti-Slope and thus indirectly pro-Erala and pro-Leaper. They also hoped that the Players might be underrated as an economic power, and could bring prosperity to the now rapidly depreciating economy of Erala even though they were still much poorer than Erala.

Play-Moonshine diplomatic relations

The Players were still officially in a state of war with Moonshine for various reasons, but the two sides had never met on the battlefield. They had no common border, and so the likeliest conflict zones would be inhabited by people who might oppose both sides. The only actual combat in this war had been between the Players and the Counters, with the Players coming to a quick and easy victory. Once the Counters surrendered, however, Moonshine maintained its declaration of war, stating that they had joined the war to stop the rapid expansion of the Play nation and that the Players had not yet defeated Moonshine.

Many diplomats on both sides were looking to not only end the war, but form a strong alliance between the two feminist powers. The Moonshines, seeing the Players sign an economic treaty with a power which had always been hostile to them, wondered if an economic treaty might be the way to mend relations with the Players and bring an end to their war. But it was economics that had sparked the war in the first place; Play and Moonshine relations had been friendly for most of their shared history, but the Players had been offended by Moonshine's humiliating plans for reform of the Play economy, which had made it clear that the Moonshines saw themselves as a natural upper class who would be better able to control the Play nation than could the Players themselves.

Thus, despite the OHB treaty providing arms to the teenagers living in Moonshine's refugee state of Hōki, Moonshine was not invited to help write or to sign the new treaty.

Moonshine had continued trading with the Players indirectly during the new war, since Moonshine was the supplier of goods and services to the refugee territory of Hōki, and Hōki carried on limited trade with the Players. But this was much less trade than they had previously relied on; when they had been at peace, the vast majority of trade between Moonshine and the Players had gone through a river which was much more conveniently located than OHB's trade route. The Moonshines believed that the economies of both the Play and Moonshine nations were being harmed by this change, though privately they admitted that it was Moonshine who was being hurt the most, since the Players had shown the world that they would never have trouble finding trading partners.

Shared opposition to Dreamland

The Moonshines felt they might have a chance of reconcile with the Players based on their shared and longstanding hatred of Dreamland. Dreamland had invaded the Players unprovoked in 4132, and all of the derivative Play-speaking parties, even those that had long been enemies of the Players, had retained their strong opposition to Dreamland. Often, a Play-speaking nation declaring war would add Dreamland to the list of nations they wished to defeat, with no intent to carry this through. Likewise, verbal attacks against Dreamland had long been common in political speeches about seemingly unrelated topics. Just months earlier, a female political leader named the Driver had gleefully denounced Dreamland in a speech where she predicted that an outlaw army calling itself the Unholy Alliance was planning an attack on Tāmta in order to kidnap and abuse young orphans. The only connection between Dreamland and the Unholy Alliance was that they both had entirely masculine power structures.

Dreamland was also a stated enemy of parties such as the Crystals and Soap Bubbles who had no Play ancestry and had not been greatly affected by recent events. The only major party of the east who had briefly formed an alliance with Dreamland was the Matrix, a slaveholding power who was also hated by nearly every other party; even after Dreamland and the Matrix soon became hostile again, the enemies of the Matrix considered themselves enemies of Dreamland as well.

Part of the reason for the widespread hatred of Dreamland even by powers who were quick to make amends with other enemies was economic. Depending on analysis, either Dreamland or Baeba Swamp was the richest nation in the world, and other powers did not even come close. Moreover Dreamland emerged as the clear winner when looking at the easternmost areas of Dreamland only, which were the ones that interacted most with the nations to the east. Yet, despite their vast wealth, Dreamers suffered from basic material problems for various reasons, among which was that they seemed to take little notice of such things. For example, while nearly every other nation placed their primary settlements near food sources, Dreamland's cities seemed to be located wherever the weather and scenery was best, with great distances between settlements and little regard for the cost of shipping food to locations which had been chosen for their beauty but had few natural resources.

Thus opposition to Dreamland by itself would not unite two quarreling powers. The Moonshines felt they might have a better chance if they based their opposition on feminism: Dreamland was the world's most masculine power, the only nation in which men were dominant in all spheres of life and had a secure grip on this power because the Dreamers were composed of tribes in which men were reliably the taller sex. Many nations to the east, such as Moonshine and the Players, were securely feminine in the very same way: Moonshine women were much taller than their men and their men dared not even speak an impolite word in the presence of a woman since every woman was deputized to punish a man, whether a stranger or an acquaintance, and she could only be brought to heel by another woman (usually the man's wife). The Players were biologically more variable but yet women had just as strong a grip on power in the Play nation. Meanwhile, though progress was slow, the other nations of the east seemed to be slowly turning from masculine powers into feminine ones, whereas there was no nation that was turning from feminine into masculine. The Dreamers had so far been almost entirely unaffected by this, and had become increasingly accepting of violence against women, even in their own nation, whereas previously the Dreamers had defended their male power structure by saying only a strict male power structure could protect women from other men.

Moonshine women join OHB

Unable to rework national-scale politics on their own, some Moonshine women left their nation to join OHB. One of these women was from Kagaḳal. Moonshine's laws typically emancipated their girls at age 13, so younger girls were also able to join, but they tended to be less interested in the politics of the teenage Lilypads than were the Moonshine adult women.

There were also some women from the highlands of Nama and from Tarwas, both of which were now within Play territory, but which had long histories of independence.

Immediate effects of new shipments

The core of the OHB fruit traders were married Play men, and their shipments were under the purview of the Play military command, meaning that the women in the Play capital of Pūpepas chose the objectives of each mission, but the men in charge of the soldiers chose the strategy. Many of these men had recent combat experience winning battles against small children; they knew that they could not hide this, and that no apology for these combat missions would be big enough to win back the children's trust. Therefore the Players knew that the only way to make a deal with the children was to respect their sovereignty, explaining that the Players had fought wars against children only as a last resort, and only because they saw those children as equal partners, not as hapless victims. Therefore, despite the Leapers having awarded the Players sovereignty over all of the children's nations, the Players continued their tradition of party-based diplomacy, ignoring the question of where the borders lay to focus on the extant political conflicts and the new alliance that could come from resolving them.

The Players agreed that arming the Lilypad teenagers was in the best interests of the Play nation, though many felt that it was a minor issue, since the much larger adult Play army could fight much better than the teenagers if only Moonshine allowed the Players to breach the borders of the Moonshine refugee territory into which the teenagers had been given permission to flee in case of emergency.

The Players were dismayed when they realized that the OHB girls were writing messages of love to the Play men they worked alongside, thanking them for helping them start the Orange War (Play Tamapu Vapias), naming their battalions after fruits, and adopting the Rider Medley art style which had come to them from Dreamland. Though Dreamland was not a participant in this war, nor a stop on the long road that the traders took to reach the northern forests, the Players had long suspected that Dreamland was looking for ways to weaken resistance among the many peoples of the interior who opposed them, and that since the Dreamers could not win a war on the battlefield, they were now trying to soften up the military leaders of the youngest generation by subtly spreading their decadent lifestyle and getting them to associate war with soft, playful things.

The Players were unable to express their suspicions in words because they were worried about offending the OHB girls, who they knew had adopted the new art style from the Hipsides, fellow teenagers living further west, and might not know that the Hipsides had in turn gotten it from the hated Dreamers.

Establishment of cities

Battle of Pāpuname

The Hipside boys settled a coastal city in their new Lifeline territory, and decided to call it Pāpuname since it provided them a good fishing spot and a place to dock ships (Play pāpuna "wharf" + me "goal, investment"). They told the locals that they wanted to live side-by-side in the city, but that they must allow the Hipsides to access all areas of the city, because they needed it as a temporary capital and operations base.

The Hipsides wanted to build a small navy so that they could move more quickly at sea, but knew that since their main enemy had no navy, they would need to abandon these ships. Therefore they sought the help of the locals, figuring that they could buy ships for short-term use from them and then sell them back when they no longer needed them.

Bayside War

The Zenith took over Baeba Swamp at one point in 4197, and to the dismay of the Matrix, the recently freed Crystal and Soap slaves did not participate in this battle, and some actually fled the city since they weren't sure that the Zenith was a reliable ally. Nevertheless, the Matrix army retook Baeba Swamp within a few months.

Creation of the Dolls

Shortly after the Matrixes had fended off the Zeniths, they reinstituted slavery, and declared that all Moonshines living in their territory would be enslaved. At this time, many Moonshine humanitarian workers were still living in Baeba Swamp, watching the heavily armed soldiers of the Matrix-STW coalition battle the heavily armed soldiers of the Zenith-Tink coalition. The Moonshines themselves did not have weapons and did not want them; they hoped if that they appeared harmless, other soldiers wouldn't kill them as much. For the most part, the soldiers had respected the Moonshines' wishes to remain unarmed, although both sides had forced the Moonshines to work for their respective militaries in noncombatant roles, when they had originally come in the hopes of improving the economy.

The Matrixes also announced the enslavement of all Crystals and Soap Bubbles. However, because they had just recently freed these people and given them weapons in the hopes that they would be pro-Matrix, it was much more difficult for the Matrixes to capture and enslave the Crystals and Bubbles.

The Matrixes announced the creation of a new political party: the Dolls (Mumpum). This was an involuntary party similar to the various Tadpole parties that had existed in previous years; all Dolls would be slaves and these slaves would be the exclusive property of the Matrix. The Matrixes said that they would focus on gaining Dolls from physically small tribes since they would be easier to control, but also said that they would breed with their slaves to establish family ties, even as they knew that future generations of Dolls would therefore become physically stronger.

Moonshine-Matrix war

Though avoiding a formal declaration of war for the time being, the Matrixes realized that by enslaving the Moonshine humanitarian rescue workers, they would likely soon face retaliation from Moonshine. They prepared their army to launch an invasion, as they preferred to be the aggressor in this war rather than the defender.

Matrix propaganda

The Matrixes used propaganda to improve their troops' confidence, as the Matrix soldiers knew that they were having difficulty even staying in power in their home city, and many thought that invading a foreign empire, even a pacifistic one, would be unwise.

The Matrixes identified themselves with male power, and they predicted that their traditional male-led army would be victorious over the female-led Moonshines by forcing its way into Moonshine territory and attacking the Moonshine capital city of Wōm. They claimed that although Moonshine's army was largely male, it was run by females, and would likely take a feministic approach to the war by allowing the Matrix army to slice its way deep into Moonshine territory and focus on trying to absorb the Matrixes rather than fighting them.

They pointed out that Moonshine was so exploitable that its own army, which consisted of enslaved humanitarian workers, was actually helping the Matrixes even while the Matrixes drew up plans for a war against them.

However, the Matrix generals felt that it would be wise to hold off on actually invading Moonshine for the time being, because they thought they could win an even greater victory against Moonshine if they were able to trigger Moonshine into being the aggressor. To do this, they made a formal declaration of war, but did not send out their army. Instead, they stated that they would treat the Moonshine humanitarian workers as prisoners of war and torture them in every way possible.

The new STW-Matrix coalition government announced their war by sending a team of diplomats into Moonshine territory to announce what they were doing in Baeba. The Matrixes told the Moonshines that they were now extending the demand for slave labor even to children. They openly announced to Moonshine that they were raping the Moonshine population held captive in Baeba, and that they would not stop, nor would they seek to punish any of the rapists. They declared that there could be no possible revenge for Moonshine here, and that the Matrixes would soon have their way with the Moonshine women even in Moonshine. The Matrixes declared that they preferred to enslave pacifistic people because they could rape the women without worrying about revenge attacks from the men.

When Moonshine's leaders heard that the Matrixes were raping and abusing Moonshine people in Baeba, they sent another troop of humanitarian workers into Baeba. The Matrixes were happy to see them and quickly put them into labor camps alongside the slaves that had been captured several years earlier. Moonshine had been hoping to rescue both the enslaved Moonshines and the wives and daughters of the Matrixes, who were also victims of abuse.

Matrix battle plans

Moonshine's avoidance of violence encouraged the Matrixes to invade preemptively after all, figuring that they would face little or no resistance even when they reached the Moonshine capital. In order to invade Moonshine, the Matrixes in Baeba Swamp would need to climb the very steep mountain range that marked Baeba's outer borders. This was easy, as even the Matrixes' enemies in the Swamp were concentrated in the lowlands.

But Baeba Swamp did not border Moonshine directly. Trade was possible because of a pair of conveniently located rivers, but both rivers required the cooperation of a third nation. Once they crossed the mountain range, they could sail down either the Nyufan (southern) or the Tănya (northern) River in order to reach Moonshine territory. Choosing the Tănya River would put them in Tata, their old homeland, in which they no longer had any power. Choosing the Nyufan would send them instead through Anzan, which was nominally under the control of the Swamp Kids but in fact had no secure government at all, as the Swamp Kids' historical enemies had overpowered them and begun to fight each other. Both nations were hostile to the Matrixes and friendly towards Moonshine, but the Matrixes believed that both nations would be no threat to their soldiers as they quickly passed through.

There were actually three separate states in Anzan that the Matrixes would have to cross through. The first was Tʷădu, the second Yīspʷilinâ, and the third Mikagu (Poise). Of these three, Yīspʷilinâ was the most racially diverse, meaning that there was a sizable minority of light-skinned people living there, whereas the other two states were composed almost entirely of dark-skinned people. The Matrixes thus figured they would have the best opportunity to set up forts in Yīspʷilinâ without being attacked, as they could pretend to be natives.

Once inside Moonshine, they would start heading uphill again, as Moonshine's capital city had been deliberately founded in a sheltered location. Since they would need to abandon their boats in order to proceed uphill, the Matrixes considered avoiding the rivers entirely and entering Moonshine territory on land. But using the rivers would give them the advantage of being able to prey on fish and other animals as they went, whereas they did not expect to find abundant wildlife in the forests. They realized that they could even prey on people, as any trading ships they happened to pass along the way would be either unarmed or very lightly armed, and therefore easily taken over.

Despite the relatively small distance between their two nations, the climates of Baeba and Wōm differed markedly. Baeba was tropical, and Wōm was snowbound for more than half of the year. The Matrixes did not want to attack in winter, as they realized they would be out of their element. However, they told their troops that their war, even in the best possible scenario, would likely last more than one year, and that the troops would need to learn how to survive in cold weather even so.

Lilypads invade

In August 4199, having reached adulthood, the Lilypads marched westward and joined the war against the Matrix-STW coalition, seeking revenge for what had been done to them as children.

The Lilypads left their entire child population behind, saying that the Blue Cocoon would return to its original purpose as a safe colony for small children. Many of these children were less than five years old. However, although many young women had joined the coalition army, others stayed behind to care for the children, so the children were not as helpless as had been the Third and Fourth Classroom orphans.

The Lilypad army identified itself as the Tippers (Play Vaunas Pava) and stated that if the female Lilypads ever voted to stop the war, the Tippers would secede and become a sovereign nation of their own without children. They also began to state that the Lilypad name properly belonged to the young children only. The Tippers were still interested in adopting the Fourth Classroom orphans, who were intermediate in age, but believed that their primary goal was to stop them from being captured by the Matrix slavers, which would be even worse than orphanhood.

The Tipper army contained both men and women, but was predominantly male, as they felt most armies should be. The women had joined the army because they felt that winning the war was their nation's only goal, and that enough women had stayed behind to care for and protect the young Lilypad children. The Tippers thus resembled the Hipsides by sending women into a combat role, although they did not feel that they would be preyed upon for this reason as the many civilians caught in the battle were far more vulnerable.

Matrix invasion of Wōm

In fall 4199, the Matrix army began their long-planned invasion of Moonshine. They did not know that the Lilypads were at the very same time invading them, and the two groups had taken different routes, since it was easier for the Matrixes to go inland and easier for the Lilypads to hug the coast. Yet the Matrixes' route took them into the Lilypad territory of Tamta before they reached Moonshine proper; since their route did not intersect the Lilypad army's route, they had a clear path into Moonshine with no hostile armies in the way.

The Matrixes sailed down the Nyufan river and entered the Andanese state of Tʷădu. The government of Tʷadu had signed a treaty with Moonshine stating that the Tʷaduans would help Moonshine if they were invaded, but at this time Tʷadu's ruling party had no power over their own people and could not fend off the Matrix. The Matrixes, for their part, did not want Tʷadu to participate in the war and they tried to press through Tʷadu as quickly as possible. Within a few days, they had moved through Tʷadu and entered the state of Yīspʷilinâ.

In Yīspʷilinâ, they also found hostility, and realized that they would likely not be able to set up fortresses in Yīspʷilinâ's territory, as they had hoped to do. They thus quickly moved on to a state whose trade name was Mikagu (and whose native name was Poise). They planned to reach Moonshine territory so quickly that they could fight their war entirely within Moonshine, rather than needing to defend a battle front that was within Anzan. Even though Moonshine was more hostile towards the Matrixes than was Anzan, the Matrixes preferred to fight in Moonshine territory both because they believed that the Moonshine army was extremely weak and because they hoped that if they stayed out of Anzan, Anzan would stay out of the war.

Matrixes enter Lilypad territory

Then the Matrixes made it into Lilypad territory for the first time.

Matrixes enter Moonshine

Within weeks, the Matrixes cut through the Lilypad homelands and headed towards the Moonshine capital city of Wōm. However, in response, Moonshine finally attacked the Matrix troops with a traditional army rather than sending unarmed humanitarians to rescue wounded soldiers even of the Matrixes. The war began to turn in Moonshine's favor, but this was mostly due to outside help rather than because of Moonshine's temporary suspension of absolute pacifism. A coalition army formed in Tʷădu, and another one formed in Poise. The first army attacked the Matrix-STW coalition in Baeba Swamp while the second army moved north to help protect Moonshine.

Matrix war strategy

Because of mikagu's counterattack, the Matrix soldiers were surrounded on all sides, and had no hope spread into of establishing contact with baeban2matrixes. .

The Matrixes used propaganda extensively to improve their soldiers' resolve. They stated that there were no men in Moonshine; Moonshine women were very feminine and Moonshine men were even more so. Many Matrix soldiers in this war had also participated in an earlier war against the Swamp Kids where similar propaganda was used. Although the Swamp Kids had won that war, they had sustained a far higher body count than the Matrixes did, and only began to win once they secured the help of many allies.

The Matrix generals promised their soldiers that, once they had eliminated most of Moonshine's traditional male army, they would be facing an entirely female nation, and that despite their strongly feministic belief system, the Moonshine women would be so enraptured by the sight of a strong man that they would forgive the Matrixes for invading and submit themselves completely to Matrix rule.

Privately, though, the Matrixes envied both the Moonshines and the Swamp Kids. The Matrixes noticed that men in Moonshine seemed to readily admit that they were weak, and identified themselves with smallness and other childlike attributes, leaving their women to stand tall as the true picture of their society. Moonshine women, meanwhile, were proud of their femininity; the stereotypical Moonshine woman had large breasts and wide hips, a body type that was seen as embarrassing by the women of the Matrixes. Moonshine men even went so far as to boast of their own feminine attributes, though admitting that they were much less noticeable than those of their women. In essence, all Moonshines were feminine: the women were extremely feminine, and the men were somewhat less feminine, but both sexes were on the same side of the divide.

Meanwhile, the Matrixes were jealous of the Swamp Kids for a similar reason. The Swamp Kids had a very masculine culture, but their men were physically small and they referred to themselves as "boys" rather than men, and did not seem to be ashamed of this, nor envious of the more robust figures of the men of the Matrixes. Thus, the Matrixes had a difficult time intimidating the Swamp Kids, and attempts to befriend their women proved fruitless.

Final battles

The Matrixes defeated the young soldiers by January 4202, at the Battle of Papilalapapi (an Andanese name, not a Play name). Then they launched the War of the Sexes by invading the women who had stayed behind in the refugee colony of Hoki. The Matrixes promised to kill many women, enslave the rest, and then invade Moonshine to continue their war.

By January 4202, the Matrixes had won their war against Moonshine, meaning that Moonshine could no longer rescue the humanitarian aid workers trapped in Baeba's territory. The Matrixes still had other enemies to fight off in Baeba, but Moonshine had been driven out and would not return for hundreds of years.

The Matrixes took control of all of the land between Baeba Swamp and the Moonshine border, and they signed a treaty with STW and the Swamp Kids declaring that the Matrix army was the legal owner of all of the land in Anzan, Tata, and Dreamland. This was more than 90% of the land in the world, and the Matrixes were not planning to actually spread out over all of this land; they merely wanted legal recognition that any non-Matrix army in any of the four countries would be considered an illegal uprising. (Anzan included Lobexon, and was now also referred to as Erala, Rapala, or Paptubia.) However, the Matrixes did execute a genuine occupation of Tata, which had been their former base of power, and was in a convenient location which the Matrixes felt they might need to use if they were pushed out of Baeba.

The Matrixes signed a peace treaty with Moonshine promising to never again invade their territory, and decided to celebrate their treaty by invading deeper into Moonshine territory. They told their soldiers that their dream had finally come true; they had violated and subdued a nation run entirely by women, and those women were now their property. The Matrixes had killed and abducted so many Moonshine males that the remaining able-bodied adult population was almost entirely female, many of whom only learned from the Matrixes that their husbands had died.

However, the Matrixes were now more interested in dominating the refugee safehouse of Xómeye, into which many escaped slaves had fled, than in dominating Wōm. The Matrixes won at first, but later on, the other inhabitants of Xómeye stopped stabbing each other and united as one to kick out the Matrix. Once the Matrix had been chased out, the people of Xómeye started killing each other again. Another peace treaty was signed, with both sides expecting another war would soon erupt.

Matrixes in Moonshine territory

The Matrixes wanted to establish parasitic colonies in rural Moonshine territory. They had adopted this idea from the Raspara party, which had parasitically colonized the empire of the Swamp Kids a few generations earlier. However, the Matrix plan was more difficult than the Raspara plan for several reasons:

1. The Swamp Kids had always welcomed minorities in their empire, and in much of their territory, the Swamp Kids were a minority. Thus, the Swamp Kids could not tell apart a citizen from an invader on sight. By contrast, outside of the state of Xómeye, Moonshine territory was entirely walled off to all non-Moonshines; outsiders could not even visit Moonshine territory unless accompanied by Moonshine officials. The Matrixes, despite being a political party whose members came from diverse racial types, did not physically resemble the Moonshines, and could not disguise themselves as Moonshines.
2. The Raspara party was able to exploit the fact that the Swamp Kids were physically small and frail people, even to the point of calling their adult males "boys" and forcing the Swamp Kids to address Raspara men with separate adult-male pronouns. Often, an entire room of Swamp Kids would stop talking if just a single Raspara male entered their company, as they were all afraid they were about to be kidnapped. By contrast, the Moonshine people were only slightly more frail than the Matrixes, and had no fear of the Matrixes.
3. The Matrixes were in perpetual danger of being pushed out of power in their own territory, and could not afford to waste valuable manpower on an invasion of Moonshine when they needed their military to keep them in power at home. However, the Matrix leaders promised that if they were indeed thrown out of power in Baeba Swamp, they would invade Moonshine rather than trying to win back Baeba Swamp.

Relations with STW

At this point, Baeba was governed by a coalition of the Matrixes and STW, with the Matrixes in control. However, STW had an independent army, and this army sometimes fought battles against its enemies without asking for help from the Matrix. Moonshine hoped that in the future, STW might become the stronger partner of the coalition, and force the Matrixes to back down from their brutal slavery operations. However, it seemed that as STW grew, its own slavery operations were becoming more and more like those of the Matrix, and in some cases were even worse.

Further relations with the Matrixes

However, a surprising turn of events brightened the situation for Moonshine beginning in the summer of 4202. The Crystals had worked out a peace treaty with the Matrixes which gave them very little but the promise that the Matrixes wouldn't simply kill them off. This treaty was of a type that had traditionally meant the creation of a coalition government, but the Matrixes gave the Crystals no power and did not even free their slaves. Their only promise was that the Crystals would be allowed to live. This meant that Moonshine humanitarian workers could once again move to Baeba Swamp and help people there without being killed on sight.

Crystal party split

At this point, an unrelated internal struggle split Baeba's Crystal party into two mutually hostile entities: FILTER and the Phoenixes. FILTER was named after a feminist organization, FILTER, that had existed long ago in nearby areas, but was not actually derived from it. FILTER soon declared itself to be the true Crystal party and its members began calling themselves Crystals.

In response, the Phoenixes signed an alliance with the Rasparas, who were members of a party that had lived parasitically in Swampy territory for about 50 years, toying with Swampy politicians and soldiers at their will, before being defeated and forced into minor party status. The Rasparas admired the idea of a female-led party that shared its political enemies.

The other Crystals were afraid to sign an agreement with men, particularly men of a group that had historically oppressed outside groups and declared that the adult males of their oppressed people were merely boys and not men.

They also pointed out that the Rasparas were close cousins of the Matrixes, who were famous for their use of offensive sexual imagery, such as firing arrows at women's breasts for target practice. The Matrixes did not even allow females to identify as Matrixes, as they felt that only men should have opinions on politics. The Matrixes killed their wives when they became too old to bear children, and said that it was sometimes allowable for a man to kill a woman who was disfigured by an injury and no longer attractive. Moreover the Matrixes had in 4188, just a few years earlier, betrayed their ally, the Swamp Kids, by signing a military peace treaty and then invading the Swampies' army from behind. However, the Phoenixes insisted that the Raspara were not as evil as the Matrixes.

Because the Matrixes consisted entirely of males, whereas the Moonshines allowed only women to hold power, all meetings between Matrix and Moonshine diplomats were contests of males against females. The Matrixes believed that casual violence against women was acceptable, and told the Moonshine diplomats that the Matrix diplomats might assault the visiting Moonshines to help win a difficult argument.

4202 war

Moonshine's pacifist war council declared that it was impossible for a war to erupt in a refugee colony and therefore that the Matrixes' invasion could be handled by the Lilypad women's police force.

Šapei Napabapei

Both the Cold Men and the Leashes still existed in 4206, as did the Scorpions. It was only at this point that the Cold Men banned the Leash party and created the Šapei Napabapei school system, which promised children to re-enter the war against the Players as they still considered Play territory their only true homeland.

At this point the Cold Men (or the Leashes) declared that they had "no country" left.

The Clover tribe

At the dawn of the Cosmopolitan Age, many of the Cold soldiers remained in the west and joined a tribe calling itself the Clovers. These people had named themselves after the children who had ruled the Clover kingdom, and some were direct descendants, but these Clovers were a traditional ethnic group ruled by adults and self-sufficient within their small mountain territory.

A small number of Cold Men moved back to the east to live in the wilderness, and soon lost their political identity along with any concept of a unitary nation-state. Thus, they too became a tribe, and over time this tribe became a collection of tribes.