Tamta/4197

Plans for a unified government

The Squares contemplated making their new nation, Nuaumma, just a state within a wider empire they called Tatevas, defined as all nations run by the adolescents and children of the tatea generation. This was essentially the same as the Leapers' Tapiana nation, but the Squares wanted to create at least a weak central government, whereas Tapiana had no over-arching structure and existed only for diplomatic purposes.

Because the Square party ruled by force, they would be able to participate in democratic elections without the threat of military consequences. The idea was that democratic elections would draw in voters from the Lilypad heartlands and even further abroad, people who might secretly support the Squares but be afraid to voice their opinions due to the heavy weight of the strict feminist governments controlling the Lilypad boys' opinions. If they could produce evidence that the Lilypad boys were divided against the Lilypad girls, they might be able to attract converts from both the boys and girls because they knew that the Lilypads closely guarded their identity and would not want to be split along sex lines.

The Squares planned to model their nation after the Leapers' Erala project, meaning that although it would indeed be democratic, the Squares would retain special privileges as the founding party that would allow them to overrule some but not other acts of the government in which they would have otherwise been outnumbered.

Leapers' plans for administration

To their surprise, the Leapers approved the creation of Tatevas immediately, but said that the Squares could not afford themselves special privileges. The Leapers told the Squares they must accept the Slopes and other parties as equal partners if they wanted to claim that they controlled the territory of those parties. As the Slopes by themselves were larger than the Squares, the Leapers felt that this would keep the Squares from dominating the elections, though they knew that the Squares were growing so rapidly that they could conceivably outvote the Slopes within a short period of time.

Nonetheless, because the Slope-controlled territories were mostly located in between the Squares' and Leapers' controlled territories (the Leapers being at the extreme west, in just one district), the Leapers hoped putting the Slopes in power might lead them to protect the Leapers from being overwhelmed by the apolitical Square armies. (These areas were those under the military control of each party, and were much smaller than the claimed areas of each party.)

The Leapers abandoned their Tapiana project here, stating any childrens' groups who chose to identify with the Tapiana project could still meet with the Leapers under the Tapiana banner, but that Tatevas was now for all practical purposes replacing and expanding on Tapiana. The Leapers felt it was reasonable to grant Tatevas sovereignty over all its claimed territory, and that it would not conflict with Erala even though nearly all of Erala was within Tatevas.

Census of 4197

The Squares approved the Leaper plan and agreed to take a census of their population. They also agreed to send boys into territories far afield to take censuses of children's territories within Hōki that they did not expect to control directly, but which they considered part of Tatevas because they did not see them as enemies.

Ignoring the Crystals entirely, the Squares declared their territory (but not the whole of Tatevas) to have no indigenous adult population. They planned to restrict voting rights to fellow tatea adolescents and children, and to allow other tatea populations to put further restrictions on voting rights, such as requiring a minimum age, but not to allow votes from adults or from non-residents. (Thus, for example, Slopes living in Baeba Swamp could not vote, because the Squares were not planning to claim any territory in Baeba.)

By excluding adults but also agreeing to recognize the Leapers' nation of Tatevas, the Squares admitted that they were leaving open the possibility of other children's parties deciding to enroll the adult Crystals and other adults, which could lead them to lose their power, but they felt that their physical domination of their territory would prevent this from being a problem.

NOTE: The census actually began a few months earlier and concluded in January 4197.

Slopes' input

However the Slopes reacted to this by declaring their own new nation, Simusa-Māsa (SMS), saying that SMS had the same borders as Tatevas and could even coexist with Tatevas but that SMS would also assign citizenship to the indigenous adult populations and not just the tatea children's parties. That is, their SMS nation included all of the citizens of Tatevas, all of the citizens of Erala, and potentially some groups left out such as the Tinks who were not recognized by the Leapers and some children living with their parents whom the Slopes felt might be tempted to become politically active and independent rather than obeying their parents.

Thus there were three different nations (Tatevas, SMS, and Erala) sharing the same territory, and parts of this territory were also shared with various additional nations (Tapiana, Baeba, Pavaitaapu, and the Little Country), making some areas part of four nations at once. The citizens of these nations needed to pay taxes to the central governments of all of them. The Slopes admitted that it was coming about that a nation was not a geographical entity so much as a measure of the area throughout which a given political party could exert influence. The Slopes promised that SMS and Tatevas would be military allies, and reminded the Squares that because the Squares did not include adults as citizens of Tatevas, all of the Slopes' (and the Squares') attacks on adults were legal in the Square nation.

The Slopes' extension of citizenship rights to the Crystals meant that, for the first time, the Crystals could ask the Slopes who attacked them to stand trial for assault. The Slopes reaffirmed that, although the Crystals were indeed becoming citizens of the Slopes' nation, the Slopes' assaults would continue and would remain legal, because Slope society was built upon the exploitation (fumu) of the indigenous Crystal population, and that without this, the Slope society would crumble. The Slopes affirmed that their new nation was a democracy, and invited the Crystals to try voting against the much more numerous Lilypads and other groups to see if they could overturn the exploitation system.

Nonetheless, the Slopes decided to allow the Crystals' party-based court system, which had until now operated only in the nation of Erala, to also operate in SMS, since SMS and Erala had the same territory. But the Slopes set up no national court system and therefore made no promises that Crystals' convictions of Slopes would be respected.

Leapers' proposal for simplification

The Slopes' decision to make SMS a separate nation left Tatevas largely under Square control, dealing another blow to the Leapers who had wished to control the children's parties by setting them up against each other.

The Leapers asked the Squares running Tatevas to consider making their nation mostly an arm of the government of SMS rather than a nation in its own right. They pointed out that children who were citizens of both nations would pay higher taxes than adults, who could only be citizens of SMS (though adults could be citizens of Erala). They felt that Tatevas' additional layer of government would accomplish little that SMS would not already provide. Because Tatevas was run by the Squares, they said that Tatevas might scale down its other operations to just the Square territory or perhaps the Squares and the Clovers. The Leapers were fond of an idea in which the expanded SMS nation would have two parliamentary houses, where Tatevas' house would be just for children while SMS' house would debate their bills with adults. They promised to help ensure the Slopes directed tax money to Tatevas if both the Slopes and the Squares accepted the Leaper proposal.

Constitutional referendum

The Slopes requested the Leapers' permission to follow the Square census-takers, and to ask the members of each party to vote on a proposed constitution for the Slope nation of Simusa-Māsa, saying that it would be binding on all citizens of SMS, and therefore on all citizens of Tatevas and Erala, but that they still were not seeking to dismantle Tatevas or Erala. The Leapers agreed, as the Slopes controlled the Leapers' access to the territories in question and therefore wielded much power.

This constitutional referendum had been pre-written and did not demand that the children vote on the Leapers' proposal to merge SMS with Tatevas. The Slopes and Squares promised the Leapers that they would ask this question in addition, but that the respondents' votes would not be binding because the Slopes and Squares were the only parties who they felt should be allowed to decide that matter.

End of census journey

This will need to be split.

Thus, by late January 4197, the Squares and Slopes were finishing collecting the census data from their own population, from the Slopes, and from various other parties in order to gauge the total population balance of the nation of Tatevas.

The Leapers told the Square boys to also take census data for Erala, saying that the Leapers would award them a small share of power in Baeba Swamp, making them the only children's party represented in Baeba, if they cooperated and returned with believable figures. This was because the Erala census would benefit the Leapers in Baeba rather than the citizens of Erala, who for the most part relied on their parties and were not interested in a census. The Leapers felt they could not safely do this task on their own. The Squares agreed, and promised to cooperate with Erala rather than ignore it, and that the two nations could coexist in the same place, with both being sovereign and yet not coming into conflict.

Demographics of Tatevas

The census showed two groups of children inhabiting Tatevas, an older group and a younger group. The combined population of these two groups was about 127,000.

Adolescents

The older group was made up of about 90,000 children and adolescents, split across five major parties (the Slopes, the Squares, the Scorpions, the Cold Men, and the Hipsides) plus some minor parties, all of which were part of the Lilypad network. The median age for these parties was 14, except for the Cold Men, whose median age was 15. Of these, the Cold Men were the largest party, but the Squares and Slopes had far more soldiers than did the Cold Men. All five major parties had a surplus of boys, with the population ranging from 55% male among the Cold Men to 74% male among the Squares.

The largest of the small parties was the boys-only Spine party, claiming about 5600 members, also with a median age of 14.

The median age of these parties was only about two to three years higher than it had been in August 4191 when the first children's party, the Cooks, had been founded. This was because as the founding party grew and split, they enrolled many children who had been too young to join at first, and also adopted children even younger than that, all while forbidding the enrollment of adults. (The Scorpions had at first allowed adults, but these had voluntarily left the party.) Moreover a small number of teenagers had reproduced and were now raising very young children of their own.

Nonetheless, the rising age of the parties worried the Leapers, who realized that a median age of 14 was actually higher than that of the Players. The Play army, the largest in the world, was estimated at about 100,000 men, and the Leapers realized that if the children's parties forged an alliance and put both boys and girls into their military, they might actually outnumber the Players. They noted also that the six largest of the so-called children's parties all had a significant male surplus, which they felt made it almost certain that they were about to start a major war.

Smaller children

The younger group comprised about 37,000 younger children in the Clover and Deer Walker parties; the unadopted STW orphans had been assigned to the Clovers by this time, making them much younger than they had been earlier. The Clovers had adopted these children into the party largely against their will, and for several different reasons, one being that they felt it was the only way to carry on the existence of the Clover party, as their territory was ruled by two rival police forces who saw nothing wrong with attacking teenagers, but even these police seemed to understand the need to prioritize the lives of the much younger orphans who had been sent to them by STW. Thus the young orphans became Clovers.

The median age for both of these parties was 7 years old, and by happenstance both parties were 46% boys. They were demographically similar because both groups of children had been orphaned at about the same time. Nonetheless they lived thousands of miles apart from each other and could not contact each other. Both the Clovers and the Deer Walkers were living independently despite their young age and many needs; both were located in isolated habitats surrounded by children from the older groups, who kept enemies away, but because these older children had so many problems of their own, they could not actually adopt all of the younger children.

Cold Men's indirect reports

The Cold Men had adopted most of the Deer Walker orphans (also known as Deer Paws), but because the orphans had not been able to attend school, the Cold Men refused to admit them into the Cold party, for which education had always been a requisite for entrance. But they believed that they had the children's best interests at heart, and that the Deer Walkers would be best off if they were able to live and grow as independently as possible, meaning that the Cold Men granted them their own territory, Šanataŋūs, and also allowed them to live outside that territory. Rather than bother the young Deer Walker children with a census form, the Cold Men told the Squares that they already knew the exact population total because they had been the ones to help the Deer Walkers find safety, and had kept close watch on them since then.

The Cold Men's close connection to the Deer Walkers meant that, although the enrolled Cold Men had a slightly higher median age (15) than the other major parties (all 14), they were functionally the youngest of the major parties because they were responsible for the safety and well-being of these tens of thousands of younger children. The other parties had also adopted some young children, but almost all of them had been directly enrolled into the party, meaning that their median ages were a more accurate reflection of their true population whereas the Cold Men's was higher than one might expect. The Squares estimated that if the Deer Walkers were counted as Cold Men, the Cold Men's median age would be about 12, much the same as it had been at the party's foundation date. Thus, despite their party name, they were both the youngest and the least male-dominated of the major parties.

Separate government

The Cold Men had chosen to exclude the Deer Walkers from their party due to their lack of education and the Cold Men's inability to educate them. The Cold Men had never discriminated by age, but all of the original members of the party had been classmates of one of two major school systems, and they based much of their governing methodology on what they had learned in school. They had originally wanted to teach their knowledge to the younger children, but now knew that their time was used up just meeting daily needs.

Thus, in the state of Šanataŋūs, the Cold Men had created yet another sovereign nation, Pipatānu, for the Deer Walker children. Here, the young children could all vote on their own issues without the fear of being outvoted by adults or even by older children. Preexisting districts such as Tamataa which had been founded by very young children were then assigned to Pipatānu rather than Šanataŋūs. But Pipatānu was fully enclosed by a faction of Cold Men called the Sippers, who patrolled the internal borders (including the shoreline) and therefore Pipatānu had no foreign policy. Yet, because Šanataŋūs was now the capital territory of Tāmta, and Pipatānu made of much of Šanataŋūs, the small children in Pipatānu met with adults and with foreigners after all.

The Cold Men claimed that the Deer Walkers were self-sufficient, living not only without adults but also without the care of the older children. The Cold Men also claimed, however, that their survival was only possible because the Cold Men were keeping intruders and other enemies at bay, and that their concept of living independently did not imply that the children had their own army or any other state organs that would be needed to defend against hostile intruders. They also stated that the Deer Paws had no police force and did not need one because, being small children, they were peaceful by nature and that all violent crime was committed by adults. Neither did they have a school system or a cash economy.

The Cold Men also stated that the children spent much of their time playing while foraging for food, having turned even basic daily living tasks into games, and that they would be best off if they were left to this lifestyle, even knowing it meant that they would reach adulthood without an education and be oblivious to the world around them. Moreover they said that Šanataŋūs had been like this for two years already. These claims were similar to the lifestyle of the mythical city of Ŋapata Ŋūa, a city without work believed to exist in Play territory.

Leaper skepticism

Most of the Square census takers stated that the Cold Men's claims that the young Deer Walker children were living independently were accurate. But when the Squares provided the data to the Leapers, the Leapers expressed strong skepticism that such a state, even with indirect support from outside, could exist.

Some Leapers suggested that the Squares knew the Cold Men were trying to cover up a disaster, but that to tell the Leapers the truth would weaken the Cold Men and harm the Deer Walkers, and that very few people would be motivated to mount a rescue mission into Cold territory to help the Deer Walkers. Other Leapers felt the Squares were still young and idealistic enough to believe a nation so young could in fact exist and prosper without help from adults or even from older children. And some Leapers believed that the Squares and Cold Men were in fact telling the truth; they believed that the young children in Šanataŋūs were living in safety and harmony, with enough food but likely very poor hygiene, because no outside enemy could reach them and because there was in fact a small but regular presence of older people due to its function as the capital of the Lilypad nation.

Yet another position was that the Cold Men were telling the truth; the Deer Walkers were indeed living independently and were safe from harm, but that the Cold Men were also hiding the fact that simply due to the lack of adult care, living conditions in Šanataŋūs were so bad that the Cold Men had trapped the children in their territory so they could not escape and seek to move into an adult nation where they would expect to be cared for but would only be abused.

The Leapers thanked the Squares for their hard work running the census, and appreciated that they had faithfully reported the information that the Cold Men had given them.

Demographics of Erala

The population of Erala was dominated by four armies, the Crystals, the Matrixes, the Soap Bubbles, and the Zeniths. The Crystals were an all-female nation living in homes scattered throughout the whole territory, while the other three parties consisted primarily of free-roaming adult men who moved from place to place and mostly traveled in packs. The 28,000 Crystal women by themselves outnumbered the three men's parties, and the overall female surplus had attracted the men of other parties such as XIG to also settle in Erala.

Thanking the Squares for their work, the Leapers entered them as the second children's party in Baeba's Parliament, and awarded them four seats alongside the Clovers' ten seats. (Seats were assigned by party, so the two groups of children were not competing for seats, and neither of them could be voted out). Nonetheless the Squares realized that they would at most make a tiny difference since they were outnumbered by the adult parties and because the Leapers derived additional power from various undemocratic elements in the government.

Unenrolled children

The census estimated that there were about 100,000 children and adolescents living in this territory who did not belong to any of the children's parties; these kids were living in parented households headed by members of various other parties, such as the Crystals, Tinks (only in Pavaitaapu), and the indigenous tribes. These kids were therefore considered citizens of Erala, not Tatevas, even though the territories of the two empires overlapped heavily. More than half of these children belonged to the Tink party in Pavaitaapu.

None of these parties allowed children to vote, so the Slopes and others had been recruiting new members from these families, but had thus far avoided a large-scale attempt at conversion, saying that they could rule democratically without achieving a majority if they could intimidate the other groups by dominating the trade and manufacture of weapons.

Demographics of Baeba

Tinks

There were about 77,500 Tinks in Baeba Swamp. Only about 20,000 of these were adults. Most lived in the district of Pavaitaapu, the only part of Baeba that was also part of Tatevas. (Pavaitaapu also bordered Dreamland and Tata.)

A few others lived in the district of Timâra in the extreme east, which was the only part of Baeba that was also part of Erala. Both of these overlaps were legal according to the Leaper government of Baeba. The Square party did not seek to incorporate Timâra into Tatevas because none of the children's parties were resident there, and so these Tinks were not included in the census.

The Tinks still referred to their nation as the Empire, the Little Country, and Anzan. Their claimed borders enwrapped all of Erala but they stated they had chosen to live compactly.

Excluded territories

The census did not count the indigenous minorities living in the refugee territory of Hōki, such as the Hardwoods, who lived in traditional families headed by adults and mostly shunned participation in wider governments whenever possible. This was legally Moonshine territory, and Moonshine allowed the refugees to self-govern. Moonshine's control was so lax that they had had no reaction when the various groups of children declared independence, though partly this was because those children considered themselves allies of Moonshine whereas some refugee groups, though dependent on Moonshine for their very survival, had brought anti-Moonshine opinions with them from conflicts in the wider world.

The Leapers estimated that there may have been 100,000 uncounted people living in Hōki alone (the same territory the children had originally called Tāmta but now with different borders).

Wealth and income census

The Leapers also had had the kids take a wealth and income survey of all of the citizens not already known to the Leapers, so the Leapers would know how much the citizens would pay the Leapers for the privilege of being able to pay taxes to the Leapers. They understood this information would also help the other parties organize their payment of taxes to each other.

Background

The Leapers used an artificial currency, symbolized Ξ and sometimes referred to as a meal token. It was defined such that the minimum price of a healthy meal was Ξ4 and therefore the minimum possible income for a healthy person, even if they were homeless, was Ξ5,000 per year. This applied as well to farmers, hunters, and those who received their food for free (such as most children), as the Leaper method of reckoning stated that acquiring their food still required them to do at least Ξ4 of work for each meal.

The Leapers excluded this income from the taxable income, saying both that it would be cruel to take away one's access to food, and that in many cases it would require citizens to pay the food itself as the tax, since so many were living cashless lives. The Leapers had been exempting children from the taxes only because they had not been citizens; now, they wanted to mix children and adults into the same tax pool, figuring the children would support this because they would be net recipients.

Instead, the Leapers instituted three separate income taxes, calculated based on how much each party made from Erala's three intertwined economic systems: market economics (capitalism and communism), slavery, and piracy.

Basic rules for taxation

The Leapers assessed tax liability at the party level, not by individuals. Thus a wealthy member of a poor party would pay no taxes, but a poor member of a wealthy party would. The Leapers understood that in an ideal system, these people would be so close to other party members that they would be either paying taxes to the party or living in such a way that their lifestyle was much like that of other party members.

The Leapers stated that parties living close to the Leaper headquarters at Baeba would be taxed at higher rates because it was easier for the Leapers to collect the money. The Leapers hoped that outlying parties would be encouraged to move to Baeba so they could better contribute to their nation.

The Leapers also stated that all of the kids' parties, even those who owned adult Crystal slaves, were too poor to qualify to pay any taxes, and that the Leaper tax calculators in fact determined that the government owed them money, though the slave-owning parties deserved the least of this. The Leaper tax system used a child's age as a multiplier to determine the amount of taxable income, meaning that they were assessed at much lower rates than adults. Since these taxes were assessed at the party level, the Leapers simply used the median ages from the census to determine the multipliers. (The counter stopped increasing at 25, so all adult parties were assessed as aged 25, even if they had more child members than adults.)

The Leapers stated also that in theory, slaves could be taxed, but that they had found no slaves whose living conditions were so desirable that they owed more than they were due. There was also one party, the Soap Bubbles, which was both adult and free, and yet so poor that they too were determined to be exempt from all taxes.

The Cold Men had put a limit on total wealth about 600,000 tokens, but no limit on income. They did not use STW's tokens.

Results of wealth and income census

Zeniths

With an estimated average income of about Ξ100,000 per year, most of it from piracy, the Zeniths were deemed liable for a heavy tax burden. But the Zeniths had earlier refused to pay taxes into the system, and the Leapers were unwilling to risk their lives to collect them. Therefore the Leapers shifted the Zenith's tax debt onto their closer and less violent ally, the Tinks.

Tinks

The Tinks were one of the poorer adult parties, and were also the largest adult party, so a naive Leaper system would have forced the other adult parties to pay a massive subsidy to the Tinks. Their annual per capita income was around Ξ140,000 per year.

But the Leapers refused this, saying that the Tink-Zenith alliance made the Tinks look good while the Zeniths took all the hits in battle, when in reality both parties were equally culpable. Therefore the Leapers assigned the entire Zenith tax burden to the Tinks, demanding that they pay Ξ5.5 million per year into the tax pool. This was actually quite a small sum for such a large party, amounting to only about 71 tokens per person per year; this is because there were so many more Tinks than Zeniths that even the Zenith's huge debt was small to the Tinks.

The Tinks were one of the few groups with a well-defined welfare system, meaning that Tinks with no income could still maintain a standard of living much better than the slaves. This was separate from the Leapers' welfare system which mostly did not apply to the Tinks because the Tinks were based in Baeba rather than Erala.

Lenian slaves in Baeba

The Leaper census estimated there were about 70,000 Lenian slaves working for the Tinks in Baeba Swamp. This was a much lower figure than the Tinks' estimate of 360,000, but the Tinks themselves admitted that they had most likely overestimated their slave population by a vast margin for various political reasons, among which was that the Tinks' land claims extended far outside the territory that they controlled, and therefore they considered the free people living in these territories to be legally slaves even though they were doing no work for the Tinks and some of them even supported the Tinks' slavery programs.

The Leapers were not that interested in an accurate count, knowing that the number of slaves could change every month, and also that while they felt the slaves deserved a large amount of money as compensation for their pain, the Leapers had no way to get money to the Tinks' slaves without it being intercepted by the Tinks.

Leapers

The Leapers' annual income of Ξ1,000,000 per year placed them securely on top of the income hierarchy, and they were second only to the rival Matrix party in average per capita wealth. The Leapers thus would be expected naively to pay a large sum of money into the tax pool. They withheld their tax debt, however, saying that because they were the party of government, they had expenditures that the other groups did not. Originally, the Leapers had planned to pay a token sum, but figured that this would actually be more unpopular then removing themselves from the system entirely. Thus the Leapers paid no taxes.

Earlier, the Leapers had explained the concept of banking to the child diplomats, and forced them to agree with the Leapers' statement that the three richest nations on the planet — Dreamland, Baeba, and Tata — all had well-developed banking systems run at the national level rather than by a political party. By contrast, the only banks in the vast nations to the east had been run by the STW corporation or by political parties. In both cases, the only customers of those banks were members of the parties (STW considered itself a party in some contexts). The Leapers had also forced the children to agree to ask this same question to their constituents, such that the Leapers would challenge them on it when they met the next group of diplomats, but the Leapers realized now that their argument was very weak, as anyone could claim that it was not Baeba that was rich, but only its ruling party, the Leapers.

Both the Leapers and the Matrix relied on trained animals for protection, meaning their cost of living was far higher than their human population size would suggest. But whereas the Matrix consisted entirely of adult male soldiers, the only humans in the Leapers' army were the animal trainers; all combat was intended to be fought by animals. The Leapers gave these animals Leaper party membership although they lacked most basic privileges; the point of this was to allow the Leapers to say that the animals outranked all non-Leaper humans in terms of how much the Leapers would do to take care of them.

Slopes

Despite their violence the Leapers also awarded the Slopes a stipend of about Ξ6.2 million.

Hipsides

The Hipsides had forcibly taken over much of the wealthy territory along Erala's northwest coast, where parties such as XIG had built cities with self-sustaining economies. But the Hipsides did not seek to attain this wealth, much of which was intangible, and so under Hipside control the local economies collapsed, making fishing the main source of livelihood for both the Hipsides and the aboriginal adult inhabitants. With an assessed per capita income of Ξ13,500 but almost no wealth apart from their boats and their weapons and armor, the Leapers considered the Hipsides to be the poorest of the major children's parties, and therefore deserving of a large subsidy, Ξ4.2 million, about Ξ420 per year per person, as their population was just slightly above 10,000.

Cold Men

With an average annual taxable income of about Ξ6,000, the Cold Men were below average even for a children's party. They had stated that they were hardy and did not need a luxurious lifestyle. The Leapers assessed them as moderately wealthy because they had more land per capita than did most of the other children's parties, but their wealth tax on children was a mere fraction of a percent. These things excused the Cold Men from the tax system entirely.

Additionally, the Leapers rewarded the Cold Men with an annual subsidy of Ξ20 million, about Ξ600 per member per year. The Leapers praised the children's good behavior, particularly their willingness to adopt and take care of smaller children, and to take risks in meeting with known hostile groups, including adults. This annual subsidy was the largest per capita subsidy to emerge in the new tax system (though the slave debt owed to the Lenians was slightly higher in total value).

Other information gathered

Territorial overlap

Because Tatevas overlapped heavily with the Leapers' nation of Erala, the Squares understood that the adult armies, such as the Matrix, might see the new nation as a provocation, and that they could find themselves at war with adult armies loyal to Erala, who might choose to focus only on the Squares since the Slopes had announced no plans to rule a wider empire. The Squares believed, nonetheless, that because the Leapers had deprived them of Eralan citizenship, that the two nations of Erala and Tatevas could coexist in the same place, since no citizen of one could legally be a citizen of the other.

Comparison to Dreamland

Against this, Dreamland's Dolphin Rider party claimed a total population of about 1.95 million for Dreamland, almost all of whom were Dolphin Riders. The Dolphin Riders did not track age on the census, but did say that their fertility rate was about 3.23, meaning that they expected their population to grow, but not as fast as that of the Players.

Comparison to Memnumu

Meanwhile, the Players in Memnumu (earlier known as Creamland) had a total enrolled population of about 1.29 million, not including those under Play occupation. The Play median age was 11 years old, lower than even the children's parties, and therefore most of the Play population consisted of children, with only about 145,000 adult males, nearly all of whom were serving in the military, with the only exceptions being those who were disabled. The Play fertility rate was about 6.3, because even during war the men were able to meet with their wives as they were rotated from one campaign to another, and because many Play women were sharing a husband in polygamous marriages due to the lack of men.

Constitutional referendum

Along with the Squares' census, the Slopes had travelled with them to sponsor a constitutional referendum for their new nation enwrapping Tatevas, which they called Simusa-Māsa (SMS). They produced two written constitutions. Their preferred version favored masculine power, lax enforcement of laws, and mostly open borders. The other version devolved most of the power to the feminist Lilypads of the east, stated that SMS would always be an ally of Moonshine, and centralized many government functions. Both constitutions nonetheless upheld the legality of the Slopes' and others' exploitation of the native Crystal population, even though they had earlier offered citizenship to the Crystals, because both constitutions allowed local majorities to overrule certain national laws. The Moonshine-allied proposal allowed the other groups greater power to limit what the Slopes could do to them. The Slopes invited the Crystals to vote in the referendum, figuring that they would almost all vote for the Moonshine version even though Moonshine had so far shown them no sympathy.

Because they had the census data, the Slopes knew the total population size of each party, and did not require that every member of every party come to vote. They stated that whoever voted, their votes would be amplified according to party size, meaning that even if only a few people from each party chose to vote, those votes would still count the same as if everyone had voted. This type of census-based plebiscite voting was called a poll and was in use in many other territories.

Lilypads' views

The Lilypads, knowing that the Slopes considered themselves an outlaw party, figured that the Slopes had called for a referendum in order to find out the other parties' positions on the issues, and in particular how many boys wanted to live under a feminist power structure instead of the rising masculine powers of the western states. They noted that the voters were required to identify themselves not just by party but also by age and by gender.

The Lilypads also considered that the Slopes were planning to lose the election on purpose, just to give them a system to violate, so that they could continue to claim to be outlaws, a claim which gave them power. The Slopes had already talked publicly about holding an election in which the Crystals would outvote them, and then humiliating the Crystals by showing that their votes meant nothing in the face of the Slopes' raw military power. But now the Lilypads felt that the Slopes might be planning a similar demonstration of power to embarrass their allies as well.

Generation gap

The children voted to devolve SMS's power towards the east, weakening the Slopes, largely because the youngest children in the census had voted almost unanimously to empower the eastern Lilypads; indeed they supported the Lilypad-based power structure more than the Lilypads themselves did.

It soon came to light that the Deer Paws, who were mostly under ten years old, had voted for the second plan because they believed that the Drums to their south were abducting them, and that every time one of the young children disappeared they fled for fear that the Drums were cruising the shoreline looking for more.

The Slopes realized that assigning small children the same voting power as adults and adolescents meant that elections could swing based on issues that older voters might not even think of, and that might not even be real. The Cold Men assured the Slopes that there were no adults abducting small children from their territory, but found the subject extremely irritating to bring up, as the older children realized that any child trafficking operation within Tāmta, whether involving the Drums or not, would need the complicity of Moonshine, which was officially their protector and distributed the supplies to keep the refugees safe and nourished.

Cold Men's fears

The Cold Men realized that if other parties believed the abduction claims, they might vote to invade the Cold Men's refugee territory and take away the Cold Men's status as the protectors of the smaller children. The Cold Men were the ones who had rescued the Deer Paws a few years earlier, and made the journey to Tāmta on their own, without any outside help. Now they were worried that their bravery would mean nothing simply because they were not adults and would be deemed incapable of protecting the children they had worked so hard to rescue.

The Cold Men still refused to explain why of the estimated 140,000 children living in the wilderness at the time of the Play invasion, only about 60,000 had successfully made it to Tāmta's refugee colonies to settle. There were two main reasons for this. First, they were so traumatized by the experience that many threw fits when asked to describe what had happened to them. Also, they knew that they would be blamed for their own abductions and failures, because to some outside powers it was better to submit to the hostile Play army than to risk lives trying to reach freedom. This was despite that it was widely known that the Players were actually killing children and not just taking control of them. The Cold Men had pointed out that nearly half of the children who had completed the journey were Deer Paws, mostly under ten years old, and who had been just a small portion of the known child population in the wilderness. That is, about 63% of the Deer Paws had survived the journey whereas only about 36% of the Cold Men had. These figures supported the Cold kids' claims that they had sacrificed their own young lives by preferentially boarding the smallest children onto the boats headed northwards, but knew that no matter what they claimed they would always be blamed for starting the migration at all since any deaths of any children (their own or the Deer Paws) would be blamed on the Cold kids who had refused to submit to Play rule.

Many people believed that the Players could not possibly be so cruel and blamed the Cold Men for fleeing the safety of Play rule for the freedom of independent life. Yet other adults such as the Hardwoods believed the claims that the Play army was massacring tens of thousands of children, and blamed the Cold Men for their apparent indifference to this by their refusal to head back to the south and take on the adult soldiers in combat now that the Cold Men were almost as tall as adults. Thus the Cold Men preferred to avoid the subject altogether and considered themselves pioneers of a new nation untethered to their past.

For the most part, other parties respected this, but now that a new claim of frailty had spread, the Cold Men worried that they would be blamed for the Deer Paws being abducted and that they would again be blamed for bringing the younger kids to Tāmta in the first place rather than submitting to the Players. Further, the Deer Paws had voted for a proposal that brought the Lilypads closer to Moonshine control, because the Deer Paws believed Moonshine would protect them, but the wiser Cold and Slope kids understood from looking at a map that the only plausible route for abduction would be by a river that flowed through solidly Moonshine-held territory (not the chaotic refugee colony) and therefore that it was Moonshine, not the Drums, who must then be abducting the children.

Communication gap

Thus, a communication gap had appeared between the Slopes and the Deer Paws, even though they both referred to themselves as children's parties because the Slopes were teenagers and also had many younger adopted children. The Cold Men also realized this, and now the Slopes and Cold Men realized they might be competing with each other and with outside powers including adults for the votes of the young Deer Paw children.

The Slopes figured that it was natural for children under 10 to support safe streets and to prioritize issues that adolescents would scarcely think of. The new referendum did not apply to Tatevas, which was still a legally independent nation, though the Squares had been moving towards ceding control to the Slopes as the Leapers had suggested. They felt that a compromise could be worked out in which the Slopes would have greater control in those areas of the government dominated by Tatevas, which might be involved in the military, while juxtaposing the Lilypads with adults and with very young children so that the Lilypads could become more like a traditional law-and-order society.

Plans for multiparty democracy

The Leapers then planned to set up a multiparty democracy in their new empire, with all of the parties mixed together, rather than having the parties vote internally and then send representatives to Parliament. The Leapers said that this new government would exist side-by-side with their existing governments and would pertain only to the laws of Erala.

The Leapers had tried to push this idea earlier, but found that the four major parties were unwilling to vote for anyone outside their party, and that the Zeniths had little interest in voting at all. The Zeniths had even invaded the Leapers home territory in Baeba just a year earlier, yet the Leapers allowed them to remain a legal party in Erala (but not Baeba), hoping to get the Zeniths to support their experiment in democracy.

The Leapers had once believed that it would make sense to further subdivide the eight Crystal states (the Nest) into districts and perhaps to divide Tāmta as well. (The Crystals' definition of the Nest had typically only included the three states where Crystals were clear majorities, however.) But they did not this.

Size of parliament

The Leapers assigned seats to each party on a basis of one representative for every thousand citizens of that party in each state, rounding down the resulting fractional numbers. The Leapers bundled some of the smallest parties' votes into a single state so that they could have a single representative rather than scoring 0 across several states. They did not do this favor for large parties, however; thus the 20000 Slopes with about 14000 members in Twadu and another 3500 in the Square got 17 seats, because although they had a few thousand more members, no other single state had more than 1000 Slopes in it. The highly spread Hipsides also lost seats from this policy, getting only 8 seats across five states despite having just over 10000 members.

The Tinks were entirely excluded. Children of parties which did not allow young children to vote were also excluded; the Leapers encouraged the other children's parties to enroll these people while they were still young. This and the subtractions due to parties spreading out led to a total parliament size of 185, whereas a number around 220 would have been expected from the total population size.

Several parties were unhappy with the apportionment process. The Crystals were represented in seven states, and were a minority in all seven, leading them to wonder if their role in the democracy was to choose which other party to ally with. This was due to their spread-out lifestyle, as compared to parties such as the Slopes, Squares, and Cold Men, who preferred to collect their population in a single compact area and spread out only minimally. Throughout history, the Crystals had at times belonged to nations in which their population was treated as a whole, and therefore they were able to concentrate their voting power around their capital (or most powerful state) at the expense of losing power in the outlying areas where they were already weak.

The Hipsides, by contrast, said that they supported the new system, as it put them in their natural place at the bottom of the power structure.

Unitary government

The Leapers' new system existed only at the federal level; they promised they would never usurp the parties' rights to run their local territories how they wished. Thus Erala could be called a federation; however, it was a federation of parties, not of states; the states were just lines on a map where the parties agreed to cooperate to focus the power of the federal government close to home. The Leapers also reserved powers at the federal level that the member states could not override, either through Parliament or through their parties. For example, only the Leapers could eject a party from Erala.

Erala had no army, and therefore no obligation to bail out a member state who was attacked. The only interparty police force was the Leaper police force, and they were very weak; their stated goal was to keep the nation of Erala together rather than to protect its citizens. The citizens were expected to have their own police forces at the party level; not all of them did.

The whole parliament voted at once on each bill, with a few exceptions. This meant that the parties which constituted the majority in each state (of those states that had majorities) could not simply outvote the minorities on every single bill and turn their states into tyrannies; the Leapers expected any attempts to do this would be killed off by representatives from the other states. It also meant that the Slopes, who had fallen one vote short of a majority in the census, would not have been significantly better placed if they had gotten that vote.

But some bills in Erala's parliament could have drastic effects locally. The sole exception to the policy of having the entire Parliament vote on each bill were bills concerning interaction between the Leaper administrators and the citizens of a single state. This was the only type of bill in which the Slopes would benefit from getting the support of non-party members in their state.

Voting margins

The bills were not yes-no votes, but rather a choice between several versions of the same proposal, each authored by the Leapers with the intention of catering to the preferably non-partisan alliances within each state that they hoped would form. Thus the Leapers were free to discriminate against parties who had lost their favor by, for example, giving the Slopes a choice between four versions of the same bill which all disadvantaged the Slopes and benefited some minority party. However the Leapers promised they would not do this, claiming they had proven their commitment to democracy in their other nation (Baeba), and that since the Leapers had no army in Erala they knew that any attempt to abuse their power could result in armed secession in which even those parties the Leapers had tried to favor might side with the party that the Leapers had slighted.

Voting at-large

The voting was done at-large, but the Leapers promised they would pay party representatives to draw maps so they could do the next year's elections using a district system like that of Baeba. Under this system, each state would have one district for each thousand people, and each party's districts would fill the map of that state. The Leapers insisted on this one-year delay in part to give representatives time to draw maps, but mostly because they believed their district system was so confusing, particularly to people accustomed to Play-influenced districting systems, that people would misunderstand it and waste time campaigning against their own allies as was the custom in Play territory and many other nations.

The Play word translated "district" here is vapitās, because each party had its districts on a map and they had meaning only for that party. This was distinct from the mitāsiūu found in Play-influenced nations; these were subdivisions of states in which each party (or faction) would compete to elect a representative. Despite the different words, the Leapers worried that people would confuse the two concepts because both systems assigned their lowest-order districts a single representative in parliament, and many nations using mitāsiūu were single-party.

The key difference, as the Leapers explained, was the intent of campaigns.

Play system

In the Play system, multiple candidates would stand for the same seat in a district, each trying to outscore the others and win the right to the seat, even if by a tiny margin. This person would thus have full power in that district. In a multi-party system, a party that wins by a narrow margin nationwide will have full control of the parliament. An election thus involves parties competing to place candidates in seats.

The Play nation, Memnumu, had used a single-party system for decades, but had begun as a multiparty democracy and the multiparty system was also used in other nations. In such a nation, it was common for people to switch parties every few years, sometimes even more often, and to create new parties. Since party membership usually gave a citizen some input in their party's nomination process, there was a strong incentive for people to join the winning party, and sometimes the winning party declared its enrollment process closed to prevent ideological enemies from joining and outvoting the original members.

This is the system the Cold Men inherited and explained why they were able to take a name implying they were adults when they had almost no members over the age of 13.

Leaper system

In the Leaper system, each party has the right to a certain number of seats in Parliament determined by the most recent census. It does not guarantee that those seats will be filled by members of that party; it is left up to each party to put forth competent candidates for each of those seats rather than allow a rival party to win more support from the party members than the party's own candidate has.

The districts are shared between parties, and thus no elected representative has full control of any district; they share their territory with the representatives elected by the other parties. But these candidates are officially nonpartisan. So an election involves candidates competing for parties' endorsements, and the intent of a person's campaign depends on their role. If they are running in their own party's district, they are retainers who want hold their own party's voters, which they would hope to be easy. The others are reachers who want to win over enough of a rival party's voters to win that party's seat in that district.

It was legal for a party to abstain from nominating a candidate even in their own district, the understanding being that there were often more parties than points of view, and a weak party might rather ally with a strong party that is ideologically similar than split the vote and potentially let a party of moderate strength take the seat.

The Leapers gave an example of how a strong party might overperform by peeling away voters from a weak party, sometimes more than one, in the simultaneous elections. Suppose the Fish party has the support of 70% of Fish, while the other Fish are divided in support between three ideologically similar parties called the Apples, Oranges, and Coconuts, each with the support of 10% of Fish. The Fish candidate would thus win their home election easily and could afford to nominate a weak candidate and still win. Then they would put forth stronger candidates to run in the simultaneous elections of the three fruit parties. Because the three fruit parties are ideologically similar, their candidates are likely to interfere with each other, and thus for example the Apple candidate might win a mere 30% of their own voters, with 20% going to the Oranges and 15% to the Coconuts. A very strong Fish candidate, being ideologically unique, could take the remaining 35% of the votes, and therefore the Fish would win both their own seat and the Apples'. If the Fish campaigns were strong enough they might win all four seats with the same strategy. The Leapers explained that situations like these would be rare, and that their system was meant to specifically prevent lopsided takeovers as were common in Play-like systems, but that when they were well earned, they would happen. They also encouraged weak parties to ally with stronger parties to prevent interference; they explained that had the three fruit parties united around a single candidate, even in their weakness they might have won 65% of the vote, almost as much as the Fish won of their own voters.

(For logistical reasons, systems such as ranked-choice voting and runoff elections were effectively confined to intra-party nominations, as there was no feasible way to run two elections in short succession, and the bloc voting common among parties could lead to difficulties with ranked-choice voting.)

Enrollment of children

The Leapers awarded citizenship to the children in the children's parties, saying that they had been de facto citizens all along because they obeyed the laws better than most adults did, and were poor enough that the Leapers felt they deserved welfare without paying taxes.

Dual citizenship

The Clovers were awarded 32 seats for their state of Pavaitaapu, with no seats for any minority parties. The Clovers also had seats in Baeba's parliament; the two nations of Erala and Baeba overlapped in this region and the Leapers considered the Clovers to be citizens of both nations. But this caused controversy, because the Leapers had denied the Tink party representation in Erala's parliament even though they also lived in an area where Baeba and Erala overlapped and the Leapers considered them citizens of both nations.

The Crystals were also represented in both nations' parliaments, as were a few other parties, but these were not cases of dual citizenship because the Leapers counted only those members of each party that lived in each of the two nations in apportioning the seats. That is, these were simply transnational parties. Thus the Clovers' representation was unique and some other parties, even allies of the Clovers, felt that it was because the Leapers knew how to exploit the votes of small children to their advantage, and that by giving the Clovers a power no other group had, the Clovers would become more pro-Leaper and therefore this extra power would simply return back to the Leapers who had granted it.

Election procedure

The Leapers compromised between the traditional feminist opposition to single executive figures (preferring a circular power structure) and the established tradition of concentrating power in the hands of as few people as possible.

These power-sharing agreements meant that an executive's offices were elected separately, so only an extremely popular candidate would win all of them, and in most cases there would be one governor from each party in each state. This was different from the vapitāsia system however because these governors had power over all the citizens.

For example, if an executive office such as governor had twelve specific duties, each candidate would be expected to run for all twelve of them, but perhaps win only six while the other six would go to other candidates. Therefore a single head of state could exist, but only if that candidate was extremely popular outside their party. Also, the Leapers allowed candidates seeking office to disclaim interest in certain duties, but discouraged this, since they did not allow more than one candidate per party to seek the same office. Thus a party could not nominate one candidate for each of the twelve offices and expect to win based on the idea of dedication to a single task.

Each party was allowed to decide the method of delivery of its votes, and even to decide to essentially ignore the new system and deliver a bloc vote for the entire party if they chose.

Slopes' vote system

The Slopes voted at the castle level, meaning for example that if 200 people lived in a castle, they would all vote the same and their votes would be counted as 200. The Slope party constitution stated that they could count the votes of their slaves towards this total, but the Leapers had chosen not to allow this. This meant that the Slopes had the power to ruin the democracy by withholding the votes of the Crystals they held as slaves, saying that only the Slopes could know the true intentions of those voters. The Leapers could simply survey the free Crystals and amplify their votes to match the total Crystal population, but the Slopes claimed that the free Crystals and the enslaved Crystals had different interests and would not vote alike. The Slopes thus asked the Leapers for a concession if they wanted to hear the true votes of the Crystals. The Leapers declined to offer any concessions and also stated that they would simply ignore the slave population and only count free Crystals as being eligible to vote.

Erala party structure

Erala's government was very different from the Leapers' government in Baeba, where citizens could only vote for their own party, and representation was determined by the Leapers' judgment of their merit.

Instead in Erala representation was determined through the census. The census counts included children of all ages, even when the party in question did not accept children as party members (e.g. the Soap Bubbles). This was handled in various ways. In Baeba, there was no point in running a cross-party campaign. However in Erala, the Leapers tried to encourage parties to nominate candidates for office that would draw in votes from other parties, saying that all of the elections would be officially nonpartisan and that each election would hinge on the candidates' positions on a small number of issues to be drawn up at election time. There would be one election per year.

Representation

The Leapers said the democracy would be based simultaneously on population size and on geography, meaning that the children would be a majority in most districts, and that they would be voting on issues rather than for parties, as though the nation were a very large parliament. This was a novel concept, unlike the Leapers' own democracy in Baeba Swamp in many ways. It also differed from the inherited Cold-style democracies in many ways.

In Baeba, a district (Play vapitās) was drawn by a party, and the party's citizens appointed their representative for that district. That party's number of seats was pre-determined and therefore their representatives campaigned only internally, against other party members seeking to be representatives, rather than campaigning against other parties. The Leapers believed this system worked well but that their new system would also work well because Baeba and Erala had different needs. The Leapers proposed the creation of districts called mitāsiūu that would be drawn and defined by the Leaper administrators, in which the parties would compete for control. These were essentially miniature nations with their own parliaments.

The children's parties of the east requested that their existing vote-counting rules from their own democracies be carried over, such as the right of soldiers to transfer their votes to a trusted family member or friend, so that if they were to die in battle, the total voting population would remain the same.

Colors

To discourage citizens from voting along party lines, the Leapers introduced colors (Play pimup) for each candidate to ally with, which were meant to be different for each election and for each issue. For example, the Leapers would describe a problem in society and offer several possible solutions, each with a different color. Yes-no votes were forbidden; all bills sent through parliaments were required to pass.

Parties were limited to one candidate per office, but candidates could share colors. Indeed, the Leapers hoped to see victories in which several candidates would share duties but all would be the same color. The intent was that voters were choosing both a policy and a person, where the latter might be selected for competence or perceived honesty.

Color associations

The Leapers mixed color associations from the constituent parties. For example Moonshine was associated with blue because of its cold weather, and this blue was in turn expected to be associated with feminism, even though most cultures in Erala considered pink and magenta to be the most feminine colors. But yellow was associated with pacifism, in line with the Players and against Moonshine's choice of yellow to represent the sun and masculinity. Green was assigned to positions expected to favor the Lilypads and children's interests overall. This corresponded to no cultural association and was simply derived from the Lilypads' party name. The Leapers still insisted that the colors were not intended to be parties in disguise, and pointed out that there was more than one children's party.

The Leapers also drew a color spectrum from the blue Moonshines in the east, through the green children's nations westward into sandy yellow highlands and then into the orange empire of Dreamland in the far west. Red was reserved for other things, but the Leapers also accepted that purple or black might represent politics seen as favorable towards Xema, the only nation colder than Moonshine, and which was also further east.

The Leapers assigned the color YELLOW to a position they called liberalism, finding a middle point between the two color associations above, and a cultural perception that people with blond hair tended to be more generous with their time and money than those with darker colors.

Reactions

The children disliked the new system, even though it seemed clearly built to favor them. They were accustomed to one-party states and did not accept the idea that five political parties within a state could come together and find a common interest for that state's residents when the parties' true loyalties were to each party's members living in the other states.

Cooperation of parties

Erala's government was complicated by the fact that many residents were citizens of more than one nation. For example, the Slopes were part of the Lilypad umbrella party because they were citizens of Tatevas, but they also had their own nation, Simusa-Māsa (SMS), in which the Lilypad organization had not established itself and thus did not exist; the Slopes in SMS recognized the Lilypads as a foreign ally restricted to its own territory, that being the territory outside Slope control. Yet the Lilypads had no similar exclusionary nation, so they accepted the Slopes as citizens, and indeed almost all Slope territory was in that region where Tatevas and SMS overlapped. This meant that individual Slopes were simultaneously Lilypads and non-Lilypads. Only the name tatea covered the wider definition of the Lilypads.

Split in Tāmta

The only all-minority state was Tāmta, where the Cold Men were able to elect just 31 of the 72 representatives of their state in Erala's parliament. Even so, they had won the trust of the very young Deer Walker orphans by rescuing them from the wilderness when they had been even younger. The Leapers considered the Deer Walkers full citizens with ordinary voting rights, and since they were almost as numerous as the Cold Men, the Deer Walkers were allowed to appoint 25 of Erala's 72 representatives. The Cold Men hoped that the orphans would vote nearly in lockstep with the Cold Men and thus that the Cold Men had an effective 56-seat majority in their Parliament. The Cold Men said that this was the way the Leaper system had been intended to work: by doing good deeds for others, the Cold Men had won the support of citizens outside their party and therefore would be comfortably over-represented in their parliament despite being a minority in their own territory.

Still, the Cold Men understood that they had no guarantee of this cooperation. They already knew from the earlier census that the Deer Walkers disagreed with the Cold Men on the issue of welfare, with the Deer Walkers supporting it and the Cold Men mostly opposed. They knew that this would be an issue in the first parliamentary elections, and therefore that the Deer Walkers might be at odds with them after all.

The Deer Walkers' median age was just 8 years old (they had aged slightly in the past few months since the census), which the Cold Men felt was far too young to participate in democracy. Thus, though they were citizens, the Deer Walkers could not actually vote in the parliament of their own nation, Tatevas, whose territory was nearly coterminous with Erala. (The Cold Men had created yet another nation, Šanataŋūs, to allow them to express their instinct to vote, but this nation was entirely controlled by the Cold Men.) Yet the Cold Men knew that to an eight-year-old, even the Cold Men who were in their early teens might seem intimidating and hardly different than an adult. Thus the Cold Men being against welfare might seem like poor parenting skills to the Deer Walkers, despite the Cold Men having saved their lives.

The Cold Men were frustrated by the Leapers' decision to weight the votes of the young children equally, as though the adults in the Leaper party saw no difference between young children and adolescents. They believed that the Leapers had made this decision in bad faith, because they had earned a reputation for using young children as pawns in politics, filling their empty heads with false promises. Now the Cold Men worried that the Leapers would hire candidates to run in Tāmta on a platform catered to the Deer Walkers' immediate interests, for example granting them proper independence, or even making unrealistic promises such as emptying the national treasury to buy candy and toys for all of the young children.

The Cold Men knew they could solve this problem by drafting the orphans into the Cold party and yet restricting voting rights to those above a certain age, perhaps 13, hoping that the Leapers would award the expanded Cold Men all 56 votes but allow them to vote only through their older members. But they had earlier decided in an unrelated situation that such a drastic decision was unwise as the Deer Walkers would be nearly half of the Cold party membership and the founding Cold Men had no means by which to expel them later if they changed their minds.

Nonetheless the Cold Men understood that their predicament was a strength of the Leapers' democracy, not a weakness: if the Cold Men wanted the extra representation in parliament that the Walkers could give them, they would need to earn it, rather than simply telling the Walkers what to do.

Lastly, the Cold Men expected that the Scorpions with their 7 seats would mostly vote in tandem with them. The remaining 9 seats were assigned to adult residents of Tāmta, such as the Hardwoods, whose parties were not recognized by the Leapers. The Leapers left them to handle their own voting procedures, even knowing that it was likely that just a small part of this population would speak for the rest and therefore that it would not be democratic.

First campaign

The Leapers announced the first election would turn on two issues: whether to establish a welfare system in Erala, meaning that all citizens would have a minimum wealth and a minimum income; and where the capital of the new nation should be.

Background information

The Leapers had at first expected the children's parties to favor strong welfare policies, creating the nurturing parental figures they had been deprived of. The Leapers were against this, and figured they would be siding with the adults (who were supportive of Leaper economics even if anti-Leaper politically) against the children. The Leapers would fund the welfare from their personal wealth. The Leapers made it clear that they were deliberately making an offer of a policy that would make life more difficult for the Leapers, but that these welfare funds would come ultimately from higher taxes, and therefore would inconvenience tax-paying parties like the Matrix and the Tinks much more than they would the Leapers. Since the Tinks had no votes, this meant that the welfare programs actually transferred wealth from the Tinks in Baeba through the Leapers to the parties in Erala, and that they would increase the total wealth of Erala overall. The Leapers figured that their idea would enjoy wide approval.

However the Leapers were surprised to learn during the census results that the children's parties mostly opposed welfare benefits, largely continuing to believe that they were hardier than adults and did not need adults' help. But the youngest of the children did support welfare benefits, so the Leapers figured that the explanation was that the older children did not see themselves in a parentlike role for the younger ones, whereas true adults did.

Questions and party positions

Welfare

Because the first issue was only a yes/no question, there were only two positions. The first position was to accept the Leapers' offer to expand and reform the nation's welfare system, to be funded mostly by taxes but with a significant positive return (the people would get more than they paid) because some of the money was from outside Erala. The opposing position was to shut off welfare altogether. The Leapers did not allow a middle position to keep the existing welfare system because it was haphazard and had led to welfare distributors being robbed as they tried to circulate goods while those who needed it most were far out of reach of the distribution networks.

The Leapers were surprised and somewhat disconcerted at realizing that the welfare proposal was likely to fail, because the children in their stubbornness had been living without welfare when they were even younger and saw no reason to introduce it when the nation's economy was doing well. Only the youngest children and a few adults supported welfare; the Leapers felt that the adults might be those who had been extorting goods and money from the distributors.

Welfare issues

The Cold children and most other children's parties still opposed welfare, saying they had been living without subsidies in the wilderness even when they were younger and that nobody needed such things. The Leapers made it clear to the children that they were effectively immune from taxation and would always be net receivers of this money, but that they needed to earn it through good behavior, and therefore that it could be revoked. But the Leapers did not afford themselves the specific authority to demand that the Cold kids use the money for welfare; the Leapers could only choose to deliver or not to deliver the stipends.

These were considered "RIE/Lab" issues. (This is a near-anagram of "liberal" just by chance.) The children opposing welfare were called abstainers or sleepers (Play maŋatua patu; also called MTP); note that the word for sleep here is transitive.

There were children who did support welfare, though. A name for these children was the GAP; this represents two Play words, and a Play epithet žamambaa as well (hence ZMB). The Leapers noted that the GAP's wanted physical protection too and not just welfare money; they were the stereotypical children who carried knives with them at all times in case they were pounced on by a predator. They had created warning systems for each other too to alert each other to danger. The Leapers wondered if this close cooperation and constant fear explained why internal crime among the children's parties was so low. The "lightning" children, the anti-GAP's, still said that they did not need these things because they had already lived through the worst dangers without them.

The Leapers made clear that they actually opposed welfare themselves and were giving it to the children because the Leapers felt those children were the few who really needed it, and that the children were not obligated to become net payors when they grew up because there would ideally be no new group of even younger children who would depend on it. The Cold children still lined up on anti-welfare platform even after the Leapers made it clear to them that they would never pay into the system and that much of the money would come from Baeba's Tink party and therefore even their rival parties in Erala could be net beneficiaries.

The Leapers soon found the Cold children's uncooperativeness worse than the younger children's desire for welfare money and branded the Cold children runaways (using a Leaper word, but also baptukua in Play). They no longer referred to them as Cold Men or with adult terms in general. The Cold Men tentatively accepted the name "Drum" for themselves, after the Drum party, which the Deer Walkers had accused of kidnapping them (but which the Cold Men did not accept because Moonshine was in the way).

Proposal to move the capital

The Leapers wanted the gov't capital to be in HTP (Šanataŋūs) but the Cold Men refused to allow so many outsiders into their capital, particularly as this was the home of the very young Deer Walker orphans. The Leapers wanted this because they wanted the children's parties to send representatives and for them not to have to travel over unsafe adult territories. This is why they did not simply propose building the Parliament in the existing capital of Erala.

4197 election

As per the Leaper system, each party's candidates were running based on their views on the two issues of the referendum, and the winning candidates would each serve a year in Parliament where they would be free to vote untethered from the will of the voters who had elected them.

Tāmta

The Cold Men disliked the Leaper election system, and most other Lilypads did as well. They had come to an internal agreement to reject welfare and to retain the capital in the west, meaning that all intra-Lilypad contests would be self-defeating. The Lilypads agreed not to run candidates in each other's districts, effectively guaranteeing them all victories.

This left only the 25 Deer Walker districts and the 9 unaffiliated adult districts (which they often still called Hardwoods), which the Cold Men planned to compete in. The Cold Men had already warned the Hardwoods that there would be harsh consequences if they dared run a candidate in any district not their own, and the Deer Walkers had earlier voluntarily agreed to abstain, figuring they stood no chance.

Cold Men explain

The Walkers nominated 25 retainer candidates on a pro-welfare platform, most of whom wanted to move the capital to HTP; thus they were effectively pro-Leaper candidates, and the Leapers assigned them the color yellow. The Cold Men challenged these children with 25 reacher candidates, but rather than sticking with the anti-welfare platform, they chose a pro-welfare platform almost identical to the Walker retainers, and decided to appeal to the Walkers based on their expertise rather than their ideology. The Cold Men believed that they could thus win many of the Walkers' seats in Parliament and let the Walker children tend to their own lives.

Thus, rather than talk about ideology, the Cold Men reachers spent their entire campaign warning the young Deer Walker children that the Leapers would never take them seriously in Parliament, and what they really had was a choice between teenagers who were agreeing to compromise on ideology and adults who wanted to use them to amplify their own votes. Some Clovers had visited the Cold Men recently, and had told them about Baeba's parliament where the Leaper administrators sat next to the Clovers and would send nonverbal warnings during Parliament anytime a Clover representative gave a vote that was out of step with what the Leapers demanded. Thus the independence was not real.

Scorpions run in the north

For the nine Hardwood seats, however, the Cold Men nominated very weak candidates, and allowed the Scorpions to dominate the campaigns, hoping that the Scorpions would also be overrepresented as a result and draw closer to the Cold Men as a gesture of gratitude.

If the Cold-Scorpion strategy worked, the two parties would win all of Tāmta's 72 seats, giving them 39% of the voting power in the national 185-seat parliament.

Zeniths

The Zeniths were at war (see higher on the page).

Election results

To their surprise, the Cold Men's 25 reacher candidates won enough Deer Walker votes in all 25 districts to give them complete control, and the Cold Men told the younger children that they had made the right decision, since they would be allowed to stay at home instead of moving to Baeba. (The Cold Men were hoping that their vote to keep the capital in Baeba would also succeed.)

The Scorpions won all 7 of their seats and an additional 7 of the 9 seats assigned to the people they were calling Hardwoods. When the Hardwoods saw the results, their two winning candidates both abdicated, saying that they did not want to sit in a Parliament where they would be the only two adults surrounded by 70 children, particularly as they had heard that the Cold Men were planning on abdicating their own seats in favor of younger children simply to get the older, more competent candidates to stay home in Tāmta which they considered more important than Erala. (The Leapers later decided not to allow this.)

Leaper resolutions

Resolutions

The Leapers decided to go ahead with their welfare program, saying that they would do it extralegally since the money was mostly coming from outside Erala. They would do their best to ensure that the anti-welfare children would not refuse the money and also to make sure that it would get to any pro-welfare people living within anti-welfare territories.

The Cold children wanted the capital in the west, but the Leapers said that they needed to obey Leaper laws if they wanted any money coming from the Leaper government. As a compromise, the Leapers put it in rural Cold territory, saying that if the children were unsafe even here it was their own fault.

The children's representatives asked the Leapers what the point of a democracy was if the children were going to win every election and then be overruled by the Leapers anyway. Because these representatives were in place for the entire year, the Cold Men knew that they might lose their way on future bills as well.

Because the children paid no taxes but received welfare benefits, the Lilypad children realized that the Leapers could treat them unfairly in many ways and get away with it.

Other issues

The Cold Men had been expecting to hear a resolution about their supposed failure to protect the Deer Walker children from kidnappers in their colony, but eventually realized that the Leapers and other adults cared not a whit what happened to the children in the east, and so had decided to leave the Cold Men alone.

Arrest of Cold deputies

After the Cold-Scorpion alliance won all 72 of the available seats in Tāmta, most of the winning candidates opted to stay home and send deputies (Play žisuma) in their place. This is because they felt the winning candidates had such rare talent that they could best put it to use in running Tāmta's local government, whereas the deputies, who were younger and less experienced, were better suited for the federal government where they would have less power.

These younger deputies were mostly 13 and 14 years old, meaning that they were older than the original Cold Men had been at the founding of their party, and thus old enough to competently serve in Parliament, but lacking in experience. The Cold Men believed that the Leapers would not know that they had replaced their representatives, but when the Leapers arrived to take the children to Parliament, they recognized immediately that the children awaiting transportation could not possibly have been the ones who had won the elections in Tāmta. This is because the Leapers had in fact collected information on the names and ages of the candidates for Parliament, which the Cold Men had forgotten about.

The Leapers announced that the punishment would be one year in prison for the younger children in Baeba (the duration of their term), and the winning candidates would be required to show themselves immediately or else forfeit their seats in Parliament. Thus the younger children were tasked with finding the older ones, and the Leapers would not let them out of sight for fear they would attempt to escape back into safety in Tāmta. The Leapers stated that the older children actually deserved a greater punishment than the younger ones, but that their duty to serve as representatives was more important than assigning a just punishment. They also affirmed that the younger children were old enough to have understood that they were committing a crime, and therefore deserved a year in prison, and could not claim to have simply misunderstood the laws.

Children complain

But in fact, both groups of children claimed that what they had done was legal because the Leapers had never expressly prohibited substitution of deputies for winning candidates; they knew the Leapers would be disappointed, but said that they would never have done this if they'd known it was illegal. The children suspected the Leapers had even seated proxy representatives of their own at some point but could not prove this.

But the young children decided to cooperate with the Leapers, feeling that the well-being of their nation was more important than what happened to them in the Leaper prison. They therefore located the genuine winning candidates quickly and agreed that all of them should continue on to Baeba. As a reward for their cooperation, the Leapers decided that the younger children could serve their sentences as cupbearers in Parliament, rather than being confined to an unproductive life in prison, as Baeba did not have children's prisons and therefore they would need to be closely guarded for their own safety in any prison.

Intimidation in Parliament

In the officially nonpartisan parliament of Erala, the Slopes were allowed to elect only 14 of the 28 representatives for their state, Twadu, since their state was more diverse than most others. These elections were officially nonpartisan because the appointees were meant to represent the interests of each state rather than of the parties spread across those states, and the Leapers took efforts to base the annual elections on issues that might split parties and form cross-party alliances. Nionetheless the Leapers knew that the Slopes would be stubbornly loyal to their party and might force members to pledge to vote together in the elections even if they disagreed with the party's position on an issue.

The Crystals had three seats in Twadu, enough to give the Slopes a majority, although as above, this majority was politically meaningful only on those bills which dealt with interactions between the Leapers and the state of Twadu.

The Slopes announced that if they were to lose any votes in Parliament due to the Crystals who shared their state (but had only three seats) refusing to vote in lockstep with the Slopes, they would assault the Crystal diplomats who deviated, including sexually, and reminded them that this was legal and that even the Leapers had earlier guaranteed that they would not intervene in the Slopes' physical abuse of the Crystal slaves or even the free Crystals.

The Slopes' behavior worried the Leapers, as they seemed very different from the Cold Men and other parties in the east. Indeed it seemed that the behavior of the adolescents' parties got worse on an east-west axis, with the eastern groups being too kind for their own good and the worst behaving groups being those closest to the Leapers in Baeba. Some Leapers believed that this was explained at least partially by more aggressive boys in the eastern groups moving west, leaving the shy, submissive types behind, and that their violent tendencies were aggravated by the fact that the Slopes had a male surplus already, but the Slopes seemed to have been violent from their very earliest days.

Desert war continues

In February 4197, the first major Soap/Slope battle took place. (Pasasu was a Slope fort, not a Soap city that they took over.) The Soap Bubbles had moved west, trying to attempt to separate the Slopes' fort in far-east Pasasu from the rest of the Slope settlements.

The Squares had relocated their troops further east and had pulled out of the desert campaign, leaving only the Slopes. The Slopes thus retained control of an arm of territory north of the mountains that could have gone to the Squares had they not pulled out.

Slopes drive out Soap Bubbles

The Slopes won this battle, and drove the Soap Bubbles out of the highlands. They attached the new land to their province. The Slopes kept about a dozen Soap men and women as prisoners of war (the population was not nearly all-male here as it was further north).

Insurgency

Meanwhile, in the Play district of Šapamnu, part of Egg territory in Subumpam, a pro-Slope insurgency calling itself the Answer (Play Panasua) was quickly put down by the much stronger Play army. The Eggs here had previously been all-female, but had begun allowing men to remain in Egg territory rather than joining the wider Crystal military. This had led to male desires for leadership, and this in turn had spurred a brief pro-Slope movement. News of this incident reached the Lilypads before it reached the Slopes because the Players met the Lilypads during trade missions. They instructed the Lilypads not to let the Slopes know that the insurgency had even existed, since the arrested leaders of the insurgency claimed to have acted alone.

Rehabilitation of ZMB

Some months after the election, the Cold Men decided it would be politically favorable for them to create a faction that would adopt most of the Deer Walker ideology, to participate in Erala only, while remaining doctrinaire Cold Men in Tāmta. Essentially they were playing politics for pure political gain and did not even believe in their own adopted ideology. Yet they conceded that perhaps their own ideology did have some faults, and that they had opposed welfare out of pride, trying to prove they were tougher and more hardy than adults, when they could have accepted the Leapers' gifts humbly as the younger Deer Walkers did.

The Cold Men took a survey and created a clearer picture of what the Deer Walkers believed in aside from their known position on welfare. They called this new ideology ZMB (žamambaa) and said that the Deer Walkers had asked for welfare because they needed it, not because they wanted it.

ZMB ideology takes shape

ZMB had many traits of the Play and Cold ideologies, but also had organic beliefs that the Cold Men figured the children must have come up with on their own. It was similar in some ways to the Spines' ideology but without the violent masculine desires.

ZMB prioritized things that to even the adolescents in the Cold party seemed unbecoming of a political ideology, and the Cold Men began to say that ZMB was something only a young child could truly believe in, and that they would grow out of it by the time they reached the age of thirteen if not sooner. The Cold Men's earlier joke that one could appeal to the Deer Walker children by promising them candy and toys came true, as this was one of the Walkers' strongest and as yet unmet demands. The Cold Men affirmed that they would follow through on this, and promised that they would order more candy and toys from OHB to deliver to the Deer Walker children, even though it would mean less weapons for them from OHB.

Some ideas resembled Cold ideals, but with a much simpler world-view. The ZMB's stated, for example, that they were against violence, as if unable to grasp the concept of self-defense, or perhaps believing that all violence could be simply wished away.

One of the few areas where the ZMB's disagreed amongst each other was in their attitudes towards school; this was because most of them had never been to school, having been born during a war and orphaned (or in many cases, simply abandoned by their parents) when they were very young.

Creation of foil ideology

The Cold Men also decided it would be politically favorable to create another ideology which opposed all of the things that the Cold Men and ZMB agreed on, so that they could present this ideology as a common enemy of the Cold-ZMB coalition and base their 4198 campaign as much as possible on opposition to it (though they knew that the Leapers would still be choosing the questions to vote on). This ideology came to be called RIE although the Cold Men did not have a convenient Play name on hand because the ideology did not actually exist and they felt that they would need to tie it to some historical movement first.

They said that the RIE people also supported welfare, but that this was not a point of agreement with ZMB, because where ZMB supported welfare because they needed it, the enemy ideology supported welfare because they wanted it.

The Cold Men needed a party to assign the RIE ideology to rather than leaving it free-floating. A popular target was the Dreamers, but the Cold Men felt it might be more frightening if they placed it closer to home. They considered assigning it to the largely unknown parties now under Hipside rule, saying that they could claim the Hipsides were better than this but had been influenced by it. This was the concept of a "nobodyland".

The Play word for the broader ideology to which RIE/Lab belonged was žitua, which can simply be translated "liberal", but it was also a common word for being naked. Thus their decoy ideology was tipi žitua, where tipiba was a Play word for a type of sharp spike trap fastened around a person's neck, which would be much more painful if the person were naked. (The order of the two words makes sense given that Play žitua means literally "exposing oneself (to)", and so can take an object.)

Plumes

Some Cold Men remembered learning about the Plume ideology which had been dominant in areas near their current homeland a few hundred years earlier (mostly to the west however). They hoped that if they could at least tie their decoy ideology to a real one the young children in the Deer Walker/ZMB party might believe that the enemy was real.

Warm Men

The Cold Men also proposed attributing the RIE/Lab ideology to "the Warm Men", an epithet that their parents had briefly used for the Players. At this time, many of the younger children had believed that the Warm Men were biologically unable to survive in cold weather. They now understood that this was not true, but figured younger children might be gullible. By confining their enemy to a climate rather than a geographic place or even a party, the Cold Men figured that they could teach the younger children to worry about the growth of their enemies but also explain why they never saw these enemies up close. However, even this plan proposed locating the Warm Men in the west, near or perhaps even within Dreamland, rather than associating them with the Players whose ideology was too well-known even to the youngest children to be confused with RIE/Lab.

Pitana

There was also Pitana.

Urban news service

In cities only, the Lilypads set up a cooperative news service, Peenima Fūutavi Piausape, also called Piausape (PTG), the Play word for a message written on the back of one's hand, because some people wrote short notes on their hands with objects found in nature such as wooden twigs. In PTG, those who could contribute would write news and information in Play and distribute it by all means possible. Reusable writing material was in short supply so the plan was to post large signs in the city center and posters for people to read. There would also be reporters on hand to answer questions.

The Lilypads understood cooperation was necessary between the rival parties because otherwise the result would be not only biased, but wasteful. They wanted to present themselves as a fair news service who reported the news for the its own sake rather than to support a political message. They said that they had nothing to gain by lying because they were their own customers and would only be misleading their people. Indeed, the peenima fūutavi part of their name made firm their claim to neutrality, as it described someone who interprets the news for friends who would be otherwise unable to understand it. They said also that people would know their stories were true because of who wrote them.

Still, they effectively ruled out adult participation by insisting that anyone wishing to contribute a report must be a fluent speaker of Play; there were diplomats and some highly educated people from the other parties who would theoretically qualify, but the Lilypads figured they would be unlikely to bother fighting to have their voice heard when the audience consisted almost entirely of children who would be most interested in listening to people like them.

Role of PTG

Piausape was more than a traditional news service; it was also a committee of the Lilypads' Parliament, and therefore PTG's reporters could create new party policies. Anything the news reporters chose to endorse would be added to the Lilypad party platform unless the wider Parliament voted to cancel the committee's vote. PTG could not undo any wider Parliament votes nor could they undo existing laws; they could only create new ones.

Leapers' reaction

Hearing this, the largely multilingual Leapers admitted that the news service was nothing new to them. The children in Tatevas seemed to believe their society would be flawless if only they could be left to themselves; as children, they were simply above partisan conflict and selfishness; even if only a few adults joined the news organization, they would irrevocably corrupt it and bring nothing good of their own that the children did not already have. The Leapers, whose party-owned news service educated all of Baeba Swamp, had earned the trust of their citizens without their even needing to claim that they were unbiased. The Leapers believed that they could do much better than the Lilypads at reporting the news, but understood that there were few Leapers in Tatevas and their presence was merely tolerated, not welcomed.

The Leapers noted that the children's ideas resembled those used in Dreamland and that the idea may have come to them from Dreamland with the Hipsides as an intermediary. They also conceded that the Lilypad news service might have one advantage: poorly educated and inexperienced, the children at PTG simply didn't how to lie, and therefore the news service might in fact be unbiased.

Plans for sponsorship

The children lacked both raw materials and convenient transportation. Furthermore, they were so busy meeting their basic needs that the Leapers felt they would be reluctant to make copies of their reports. Indeed they were already reduced to sticking signs on poles in the city centers.

The Leapers hoped they could provide the children access to tree bark paper so that they could more easily carry copied signs, and transportation so that they could get their news into Baeba. The Leapers could not do these things directly; they would need to provide money and let intermediaries deliver the goods from Baeba and carry the finished papers back to Baeba.

Thus, the Leapers wanted to sponsor the news service, knowing it could help their own news service by association. If the children's parties' news service was unbiased, people might come to believe that the Leaper party's news service was also unbiased, a claim which the Leapers themselves mostly did not make. They might also might understand that an adult-run organization might be more accurate than one run by children. This could help the Leapers gain power in Tatevas where they were currently restricted mostly to Baeba.

But the Leapers worried about several things. They knew that if they openly sponsored the news service, other groups in Erala might think that their tax money was being diverted to the children's parties, because even if the Leapers proved the money was coming directly from the Leaper party assets, the other groups knew that the Leapers could simply raise taxes to make up the difference. The Leapers also knew that if they sponsored any children's organization that organization might be viewed as an arm of the Leaper party, even if they had been accepted as unbiased before. Lastly they felt that if they claimed the Leaper news organization was unbiased, other parties could create obviously biased news organizations of their own and claim a similar status.

On the other hand, the Leapers felt that sponsoring a children's project from their own budget, if they could at least make clear that they were not secretly taking it out of taxes on the other parties, could help improve the Leapers' image in Tatevas (and thus Erala).

Additionally, some Leaper party leaders wanted to sponsor the children's project for its own sake even if it did not turn out a net benefit for the Leapers.

Leapers sponsor news service

At this point, the Leapers decided to sponsor the Lilypads' news service openly, saying it would help the public image of both the Leapers and the Lilypads. They claimed the news service was and would remain unbiased, and that they were sponsoring it for that reason. They welcomed other parties to have their own, biased news services, saying that propaganda had its place because no party would want a traitor in their midst. And the Leapers had already admitted that their own separate news service was biased towards them.

Shortly after this change introduced wider circulation, outside parties began to suspect that ciphered messages were being transmitted in the news stories. Though the entire news bulletin was written in Play, much of the content seemed irrelevant and, given the cost of production, impractical to reproduce unless a hidden message was contained within.

The cost of the newspapers was very high, but limited copies were distributed for free among the employees. Even the employees had to share, though. This was common for news presses of the day.

Calmdown movement

OHB declared the Squares to be a provocation, more dangerous than the Slopes despite being less evil (since they had no ideology), and responded by further tightening their control over their male population, which they sought to extend to all Lilypads who had not yet joined one of the boys' movements. OHB stated that the Sunspots, the Slopes, Tāmpe, and the smaller groups were mere criminal gangs, and that OHB might also be considered a gang, but that they were enforcing the law.

The quick submission of the feminist Hipsides to the rising male power greatly worried the feminist OHB network, who felt their strength was not their feminine power structure but their geographical location, based far away from the invading male armies. This implied that female power and domination of the weapons trade was not a sound military strategy after all, and that if the Slopes, Tāmpe, or other male powers ever invaded them, they might collapse and suffer pain even if they surrendered immediately.

Geographic spread

Increasingly the boys' groups came to dominate in the western areas of Erala, which the feminists of the east referred to as Vampaisu Paīp. Pikīutūutā, one of the earliest Slope weaponers, who had helped found the Leap Metal Corporation, took a leading role in Vampaisu but did not call himself president because he was not ready to create a nation defined by exclusion. That is, Vampaisu's borders were being defined by the people who opposed it, while those within Vampaisu still considered their nation to extend throughout all of Tatevas.

A stereotype emerged that the areas furthest west, closest to Dreamland, were awash with masculine energy, and that they would fight each other to death or unite and take out all their aggression on defenseless women. Furthest east, closest to Moonshine, were the territories ruled by women and girls, which had already formed a defensive alliance and seemed safe from any threat of internal violent conflict, even though the Play army, itself feminist, still had not fully mended its ties with Moonshine.

Rumors about Dreamer influence

Rumors soon spread that the Squares were allied with Dreamland, because Dreamland had a similar male power structure and had been rapidly moving towards capitalism and a non-ideological type of politics in which parties rewarded their members with money and other benefits after winning elections, taking what they could from the property held by supporters of the losing parties. Thus the key to success in Dreamland was not to have a winning ideology but simply to be part of the largest party, and, for those at the bottom of the social ladder, also to prove themselves indispensable to the party so that they would not be the first to have their property surrendered if the party suffered a defeat in the polls.

The people who believed these rumors were fellow teenagers, however, who preferred a version of the story which claimed that it was Dreamland who had submitted to the Squares, and that the proof of this was that the Squares had risen to power rapidly whereas Dreamland had seemingly not won a battle in decades.

Comparison with the Slopes

Since the Slopes relied on slavery and exploitation, they had abolished capitalism in their territory. And yet at the same time, they supported capitalism overseas, saying it was the perfect system to keep Dreamland's population too weak to check the power of the Slopes.

Entry of UAO

The largely female Lilypad leadership reacted with alarm when they realized that their strict adherence to feminism, denying boys the right to carry weapons and walling them off from the boys' groups such as the Slopes and Squares, was now leading angry Lilypad boys to claim allegiance to the Unholy Alliance (Play Tami Ŋatūpa) instead, an adult army based in Xema rumored to be abducting slaves from surrounding lands, especially children, and which had been one of the few groups condemned by all of the other groups, including the Slopes and Squares who had legalized assaults against the indigenous Crystal women who were trapped in their territories.

Unlike the boys' parties such as the Slopes and Scorpions, UAO had no unifying ideology, nor did they insist on a lack of ideology as did the Squares. UAO was simply an alliance of criminals who agreed to cooperate with each other by raising an army of slaves who themselves owned slaves, putting the twelve original UAO founders in power for life. This meant that the Lilypad boys joining UAO were required to become slaves for the party founders, and could only work their way up the power structure by abducting other people to become second-order slaves.

The Lilypads considered surrender on the issue of feminism, saying that the safety of children was more important than the relative position of women over men, or of girls over boys, in their society, and that they would be willing to break with Moonshine on this issue if the Moonshines declared it treasonous to sign a treaty with the boys in the west.

The Lilypads felt that they could preserve their feminine power structure if they provided the boys physical transport towards the Slope and Square territories, telling them that the power they sought from UAO was unattainable there but attainable in the Slope and Square parties. Like other feminist powers, they stated they did not mind losing a large fraction of their male population, because they would expand their population through polygamy and through adoption while the male-majority populations stagnated due to the scarcity of child-bearing women. And because the boys who remained would therefore be able to marry multiple women, they would be less likely to envy the boys who moved west to join the boys' parties.

The Slopes and Squares still had not attacked the Lilypads or any other party run by adolescents of the tatea generation.

Dreamland appeals to the east

The Dolphin Riders, the largest party in Dreamland, now invited any women and children from the Lilypad territories to move to Dreamland. They stated that they would be safe in Dreamland because Dreamland's male power structure policed male behavior much better than any female power structure ever could. While some Moonshine women claimed the all-male Dreamer police force tolerated and even encouraged men to assault women, the Dreamers said that a female police force was no police force at all, since adult male criminals could simply push the officers aside or even target them for spree crimes. The Dreamers admitted that this might not be true in Moonshine where women by nature were much taller than men, but because the Lilypads were a mixed population, they had some very tall males and many of their girls were small and weak.

Since many Lilypads and especially OHB members believed that the new Square boys' army were allied with Dreamland, this new open appeal led the Lilypads to believe that the Dreamers were trying to appeal to both sides of the gender divide at the same time, getting them to both help Dreamland while working against those of both genders who remained loyal.

Dreamland launched another separate appeal to the girls, saying that they could defeat the rising masculine energy in the boys' parties without moving to Dreamland. Instead, they would move to the seacoast within their own territories and invite dolphins to move into the ocean, dolphins who would keep humans of both sexes in line by restricting their movement. This was the origin of the Dolphin Riders' name; they claimed that in the ideal human society, humans would not be the strongest species, and therefore human aggression would be very rare.

Spread of internal organized crime

March 10, 4197

While the Slopes escalated their attacks against the defenseless Crystals living in their territory, the eastern Lilypads found themselves victimized by their own indigenous population.

The Rain Men

By this time there was an informal alliance of men outside the Lilypad association, the Rain Men (Play Pimtepūmpa), who hoped to woo the young Lilypad girls once they felt themselves old enough to marry. Some Rain Men said they were so dedicated to the Lilypads' cause that they would willingly abandon their own wives and children for a chance to marry. The Rain Men understood that this would be difficult, since the Lilypads had a clear male surplus, though dwindling due to the increasing conflicts in the west. The age of marriage was commonly thirteen or even younger in some cultures, but only when marrying a partner of similar age. The Rain Men understood this, and hoped that they could convince the Lilypads that, since they were forming a new culture, they could break with the traditions their parents had taught them about. Importantly, the Rain Men were hoping to marry into the Lilypads, rather than bring the Lilypads into their own group.

Child trafficking

Child traffickers revealed themselves openly in early March 4197, saying that any nation refusing protection freely granted to them by an outside power deserved an attack, even if it was a nation without adults. Most of these traffickers still claimed allegiance to one of various outside organizations who claimed to be working for the children's benefit; that is, they were abducting children from a dangerous nation and bringing them to a nation where they would be enslaved but safe. These organizations all disavowed the traffickers, but their claim seemed to give themselves an aura of legitimacy that allowed them to carry out their operations without being attacked by the other groups such as the Rain Men who claimed to at least be obeying the laws of Hōki (if not of Tāmta).

Vaipapaa operations

Also, men calling themselves vappiapaa trafficked children into occupied buildings within the cities rather than into wilderness hideouts, saying that their continued survival proved both that the children's state was a sham as they could not protect themselves, and that the adult populations around them were not willing to protect the children either. Their name suggested that they were hiring out servants who were either strong or intelligent or both, thus the children were labeled as either being for household chores or for language tutoring, since they all spoke Play and the people accessing them could claim that they did not and needed help to learn it.

Access to these buildings was controlled by armed men. They abducted children from the streets, originally taking the youngest ones, saying that they were protecting the children from the violence around them. Outsiders could get access to the children in the building for a small fee, and could take one child home for the night by paying a larger fee, but they had to leave an additional and still vastly larger sum of money as collateral, which the buildings' owners would keep if the customer did not return the child to the building. An expensive tangible item could be substituted for this with the guards' approval.

The guards claimed they were selling the children as slave labor to the citizens around them, and that because the other Cold children were not attacking the buildings, they had every legal right to do so. They furthermore claimed that the children owed the guards they money they collected for their labor since the guards were sheltering and feeding them. Yet the guards were constantly on alert to prevent the captive children from escaping and the Cold children from freeing them. The guards told the society around them that they thus had to attack both groups of children just to keep their operations in business, and that this too should be accepted as legal since it was ultimately for the safety of the colony's child population. There was no unified adult police force and the Cold children's police force was too weak to stop them.

Because the guards were seeking money rather than the abuse of children as an end in itself, they allowed the Lilypad children to buy freedom for the captured children. Officially, these children were simply ordinary customers who neglected to return their child slave to the building, and therefore would never get their collateral payment back. The guards thus allowed the children to be rescued, rather than capturing the children attempting to buy them back, so long as they got large amounts of money. They knew that if they got too greedy and actually abducted the rescuers, no more rescuers would come. And even after releasing a child to the rescuers, the guards could go out to simply capture more children.

Cold Men's reaction

The Cold Men thus realized that once again, attacks on children had been legitimized in the eyes of the wider population around them, and that more would surely follow. The Cold Men thus annexed the entire state of Hōki, saying that Moonshine should continue to provide them free assistance but that they would no longer recognize Moonshine's authority to govern the territory even indirectly. The Cold Men stated that if Moonshine stopped the delivery of basic goods, the Cold Men might simply invade Moonshine.

Moonshine's diplomats, through OHB, agreed to supply weapons to the Cold Men and other Lilypads in the conflict, as they had been for months. They assumed they would need to increase their production, however, and that the Lilypads might not be able to repay OHB immediately. Moonshine figured this might be a good time to demand concessions from the Lilypads, and that the Lilypads' annexation of the territory might be turned around if Moonshine were to demand greater authority over the whole of the territory. That is, whereas Moonshine had previously left the Lilypads alone while exerting more control over the outlying areas, now they would want to exert control over the new united territory, even if it left the Lilypads nominally in control.

But the Cold Men's response to this was simply to repeat their threats; they insisted they were in control of their territory and would simply abandon their colonies to invade Moonshine if Moonshine backed out of the alliance.

Resolution on western war

Within weeks, Moonshine and OHB vocally expressed concern about the apparent lack of enemy casualties in the Lilypads' war. They proposed two explanations for this. One was that the Lilypads were losing the war. Another was that the war was violent but not deadly: since it was well known that the Rain Men were trafficking and abusing the Lilypads, Moonshine assumed that they might be reluctant to kill the Lilypads, and therefore that the Lilypads might also be reluctant to kill them. This would align with previous war strategies that the Lilypads (and Cold Men before them) had used wherein they would avoid violence against enemy soldiers and attempt to use captives as bounty so that they could win concessions from their enemies. The Moonshine diplomats asked the Lilypads if the two sides in this war were merely abducting each other rather than killing or injuring each other in traditional battles.

The Lilypads denied this, saying that they were poorly equipped for close combat, even though they now had more weapons than their enemies, and therefore also poorly equipped to abduct their enemies. They promised they were fighting a defensive war, focused on keeping the kidnappers out, and that they would indeed kill enemy soldiers who entered their territory rather than abduct them and keep them safe in prison. They stated the scarcity of enemy casualties was due to their success in keeping the men at bay. However they admitted that they had thus far made little progress in rescuing the existing captives, and that although they were still able to free some captives by offering their captors money, other captors would not cooperate.

For the time being, it seemed thus that the Lilypads were doing nothing about the two groups of child traffickers abusing their people, nor acting against the Rain Men.

The Lilypad leaders assured their listeners that they would do their best to rescue kidnapped children, but that they could not stand up to the armed adults who had occupied so many buildings, or to the ones who lived in boats and took children with them offshore.

Instead, the Lilypads focused on winning the war in the west, which they came to call the Našapamnīmba War.

Release

On March 13, 4197, the Lilypads and OHB signed a proclamation deputizing all boys to fight as soldiers in any league they wished, knowing that most would ally with the Squares and would begin immediately slaughtering or abusing Crystal women.

Because they had claimed earlier that the war in their home territory was defensive, they stated that diverting resources to the west did not weaken their home front in any way; the fewer children who stayed behind, the less defense was needed.

The Lilypads also stated that they considered all of the so-called children's leagues, whether now dominated by teenagers or still by small children (as were the Clovers and the Deer Walkers), to be part of the Lilypad Association unless they specifically chose to reject this identity. The remaining and increasingly female Lilypads then took on the Heart Stopper identity for themselves, but still referred to themselves as Lilypads to help retain diplomatic control of the various boys' leagues in the west. By tying their identity to the war-making boys' armies and then sending their own boys to fight under those armies' banners, the Lilypads were able to directly attack the Crystals, a war they knew they would win, while officially remaining allies of the Crystals and refusing to acknowledge any war.

Bubabem document

The Lilypads also signed Bubabem Māapupa, a document about obscene words. Here for the first time they affirmed their people's right to pronounce the phoneme /l/, and to say certain words either with /l/ or with its traditional replacement /b/ according to the speaker's wishes. They nevertheless stated that, for non-obscene words, the expected pronunciation of the sound was still /b/. The word bubabe "obscene word" was not itself obscene, and therefore retained the traditional pronunciation.

This document also used the Rider art style, now called ŋeeŋīpubabe in Play, and linked it with the new obscene practices, which signaled to the Moonshines that they were no longer feminists and would potentially disrupt any further efforts for the Moonshines to make amends with the Play women.

Those using the art style formed into a social club, the Sliders (KSS). The Play name ŋeeŋīpubabe described the Rider art style, but is here represented as Sliders (not a translation of the Play) because of the rhyme with the original Riders. The Sliders abolished many legal distinctions between men and women, saying that their new rules were voluntary and could not override the laws of the nations and states the Sliders lived in, but that someone seeking outside legal help could be expelled from the Sliders. Thus the Sliders enwrapped OHB's feminists and the all-male parties like the Spines together under the same banner and stated that they had no conflicting goals.

Thoughts about the future

Moonshine's diplomats pondered the idea that the feminist Lilypad government might be unstable. They realized that while both groups of Lilypads were mostly orphans, those in the west had grown up in orphanages and had rarely if ever met their parents, while those in the east had mostly lived with parents, or at least with their mothers, until the age of 10. The Moonshines thought that this might explain why the eastern Lilypads were fond of female authority figures while those in the west seemed to reject authority altogether.

Tapaīmma

There was also a girl named Tapaīmma, who was trying to stop the Clovers from endorsing or joining the Slopes. One of her bynames was "Green Mountain".

Tribalism

Some eastern Lilypads formed the Pūmanu association, saying that they considered tatea to be a tribe, no longer a cross-tribal group united by their birth years, or that they considered the concepts equivalent and that this meant that their tribe had no ancestors. (NOTE: this may be a mistake for Pūmana.)

Pulling away from Moonshine, these leaders saw no reliable allies outside their tribe and stated that they would draw ever closer to their fellow tribe members such as the Slopes at the expense of any remaining ideological alliances.

As a reaction to this, the Tupaaya, mostly Cold Men, reaffirmed their commitment to ideological politics and therefore stood against tribalism, although they said they would only seek ideological alliances and not actually admit these allies into their party. Thus to many outsiders there was little difference between the tribalists in Pūmanu and the ideologists of Tupaaya.

Although the Cold Men had abolished racial discrimination on their first week in power, there were very few Cold Men from the dark-skinned nayata tribes both because these people had been nearly all pro-Play and because they had not allowed their children to participate in politics. Indeed the very name nayata was a recent Cook coinage cognate to Play nayaasa "to behave inappropriately", though they insisted that this was not meant as an insult to the people themselves but to the toleration of their presence in hostile territory.

Squares dissolve

At this point the Squares surrendered control of Tatevas, saying that it should either cease to exist or become an eastern Lilypad subdivision of SMS.

Relations with Moonshine society

The Lilypads were increasingly critical of Moonshine, whose violent feminism was making the Lilypads look cruel merely by association. Because the Lilypads relied on Moonshine for both safety and survival, because Moonshine delivered basic goods to the refugee colony they lived in, the Lilypads knew that they could not afford to make an enemy of the Moonshines, but because the young Lilypads controlled much of the coast, the refugees living inland were in turn dependent on them, and therefore the Lilypads felt they could force Moonshine to continue delivering goods while at the same time asserting themselves as an independent force outside Moonshine's control. Nonetheless, the Lilypads mostly kept their criticisms private.

It was well known, and Moonshine's diplomats proudly admitted, that women in Moonshine could assault a man at any time for no reason, and the man was not allowed to fight back or even to flee; he was required by law to attempt to calm her down with soft words and promises of obedience. Some women simply did not listen, and such an assault could only be stopped by the orders of another woman. Also, a Moonshine woman could call on a police officer (all of whom were women) to arrest any man she did not feel comfortable physically attacking, again with no requirement to give a reason. Moonshine's defenders, including men, stated that these laws actually increased public safety for both men and women, because the women did not simply beat up men for sport, but only as a last resort to prevent further violence or to stop a crime.

Nonetheless, the Lilypads believed that Moonshine might be their only external ally, meaning that they considered the Slopes to be kin (internal allies) who protected the Lilypads only because of their generational ties.

Candyland plan

The Lilypads asked Moonshine to consider granting them settlement rights on the island of Wipep, which they had recently begun calling Candyland in children's stories. (Wipep was a trade name.) This was located about 300 miles to the north of Tāmta's Lilypad settlements. Moonshine patrolled the sea around the island but had failed to settle it because predatory birds kept human survival difficult and because the climate was too cold to grow vegetables. Yet because it was out to sea it had milder winters than most of Moonshine and the Lilypads claimed that they would be able to survive there in a similar manner to which they relied on in Tāmta.

The Lilypads promised that if Moonshine granted them access, they would build a navy of their own to defend the island and would not need Moonshine's protection, but that they would remain dependent on Moonshine for trade, and therefore would repay Moonshine by using their navy to defend Moonshine's interests abroad, which they again argued they were already doing in Tāmta.

The Lilypads envisioned Candyland primarily as a habitat for children, hence its name, saying that when the Lilypad boys grew into men they would join the navy and thus be entirely absent from the land except when visiting their families. This was similar to the Play policy for war; the Lilypads stated thus that Candyland would be forever at war, hoping primarily to fight defensive wars patrolling their own territory. They would transfer the Deer Walkers to the island as well, and planned to eventually erase the distinction between the two groups. (Deer Walkers were legally outside the Lilypad party because the Lilypads did not want to grant them voting rights due to their lack of education.)

They claimed that they would establish a species of large land animals on the island, such as deer, and that the firebirds would prey on these preferentially to humans, and that the deer would find enough food on the island despite the scarcity of trees to maintain their own population.

The Lilypads understood that this would be inconvenient for Moonshine, but argued that the Deer Walker children deserved special treatment and that the Lilypads were the caretakers of the Deer Walker children, having risked their lives to rescue them and then watched all other groups stand by without adopting them.

Moonshine's reply

Moonshine refused to assist this migration, saying the Lilypad plan had several major flaws, and warned the Lilypads against attempting it, saying that Wipep was sovereign Moonshine territory and therefore the Lilypad migration would be an invasion. They threatened retaliation if the Lilypads were to begin such a migration, and that even if the Lilypads managed to somehow slip through and settle the island anyway, they would be subject to a Moonshine naval blockade and would likely never succeed in building their own navy.

Wipep was near the Hipside territories, and Moonshine understood that the Lilypad's plans to create a navy were realistic assuming their alliance with the Hipsides was strong enough. They thus did not stress this point. They argued however that devoting their attention to their navy would leave the women and children alone on the island to face the predatory firebirds, and that even if they were well aware of the dangers they would be most likely unable to keep the birds at bay and thus would be eaten in vast numbers while the men in the navy would see little harm come to them. The Moonshines thus argued that if they wished to protect children they should create a navy manned entirely by children and then leave the adults alone on the island to reproduce. This was not a serious suggestion but the Moonshines stated that the Lilypad plan would cause even greater calamity. They likewise stated that the Lilypads' plans to relocate deer to the island were unrealistic since the firebirds had no history of preying on deer and because humans, children especially, made much easier prey, particularly as the firebirds were known to be intelligent enough to kidnap some humans to convince other humans to approach them. (This is why wearing armor was not always a good defense against firebirds.)

Moonshine also assured the Lilypads that although Wipep's winters were mild for its latitude, due to its location off the west coast, these winters were still colder and much snowier than Tāmta's.

Urges to flee Moonshine's influence

Moonshine also had emerging anti-Lilypad sentiment within its own political organizations. There was only one legal party in Moonshine, and even the factions of the Moonshine party were strictly regulated, but differences of opinion on foreign relations were still legal.

Spread of rumors

Moonshine's extreme feminism reminded the Lilypads of the Slopes' exploitative lifestyle in the west, leaving the Crystals free to roam but often robbing or assaulting them without any clear motivation. The Lilypads were not allowed into Moonshine territory, and therefore could only choose to believe or reject what they heard from diplomats, from traders, and from some adult refugees living in Tāmta.

One more extreme rumor was that the beating of men was indeed a sport, and that women of the lower social classes in Moonshine would seek out strange men to assault simply for the fun of it. For example, a woman or group of women could block off a street corner or a narrow path near the city center, such that there was no convenitent way around them. They would allow women to pass by freely but a man passing by would have to choose between taking an extremely long detour or walking up to the women hoping that he would not be their chosen victim for the night. These women enjoyed watching the men struggle with the decision of whether to risk passing by, knowing that if attacked, he would not know until the beating was over whether he would live to see the sun rise the next morning. These murders were considered property crimes because men were the property of women.

Criticism of the Rider art style

Moonshine had also roundly criticized the rapidly spreading Rider art style, which the Lilypads at first took to simply be a cultural preference, but which they now understood to reflect the Moonshines' fear that the simple Rider drawings were a threat to feminism, and that Moonshine's feminism must therefore be extremely fragile.

Recent adaptations

In the Rider art style, different groups of humans were drawn with reliably characteristic visual cues to set them apart from other groups. For example, taking the term nuiŋee literally, the Slopes drew themselves in their underwear, regardless of their surroundings. Since they lived in a warm climate this was no great exaggeration. But the Lilypads extended this to themselves, even in winter, making themselves look forever underdressed in their artwork while the people around them were in full winter clothes. This did not apply to very young children, but the reason for this was not censorship but because the youngest children were not Lilypads.

Height differences were drawn from the head down, and since the people's heads were drawn much larger than a realistic size, someone a foot taller than another could have their waist at the other person's neck. Apart from this, people were drawn true to height, unlike the Hipsides' adaptation of the style in which they drew themselves the size of children. The Lilypads decided that they would respect fellow tatea adaptations of the style, and therefore also drew the Hipsides as children but themselves as adult height or just slightly shorter (with no firm rule).

Moonshine's frustration

Moonshine diplomats found it difficult to explain why they so objected to the young Lilypads' increasing use of the Rider art style.

Lilypad diplomats often brought young children to international meetings for several reasons. Some were very young Lilypads, children who had by one means or another received enough education to understand world politics and thus stood on level with the teenagers; some were young Deer Walker orphans who were brought along so that they might learn about the world around them (as the Lilypads did not have time to run schools); others, the youngest of all, were the offspring of the teenage Lilypads, brought along so that they could remain by their parents as often as possible.

The Lilypads considered their ability to bring children with them a sign of maturity, showing that they had either become parents or taken on a parentlike role for the young children among them. But to the Moonshines, who had trouble distinguishing between the three groups of children, it showed that the Lilypad kids had not matured, and in fact were getting even younger, even as the Moonshines admitted it was plain that the young children they saw were not the same ones they had met in previous years.

The presence of the children made Moonshine diplomats uncomfortable, as they felt that there were many things they could not say when children were listening. The Moonshines considered the Rider art style obscene, even pornographic, and felt that it was corrupting the minds of the young Lilypads and even the teenagers, turning them towards a sexually hedonistic lifestyle that would cause them to submit to the rising male power in the west, which the Moonshines felt might be collaborating with Dreamland. But the Moonshines could not find words to express this without confusing the young children, and also understood that using very simple, childlike terms would offend the teenage Lilypads. So too would the implication that the Lilypads' minds were so malleable that exposure to the Riders' line drawings could pervert them into irredeemable slaves to the male-led Dreamer way of life.

Comments about the Dreamer language

Dreamland's ruling Dolphin Rider party was learning the Leaper language, with which Moonshine was intelligible, and planning to steer the entirety of Dreamland towards speaking Leaper as soon as possible, believing Leaper to be a much more efficient language.

Moonshine approved of this, but said that even if the Riders pressed further on to learn the Moonshine dialect, they could still never claim that they actually spoke Moonshine, as the Moonshine language was for Moonshine citizens only.

Criticism from Moonshine

Moonshine criticized the Dreamer language, noting for example that the Dreamers' root word for a pregnant womb, sese, also meant to allow or permit, because a woman's womb is that which allows a man to control her body by impregnating her. The root word for the tip of the penis was peropu and this word also meant to take action on or achieve control over another. Dreamlandic had a sort of three-gender system: males, females, and pregnant females. This was because masculinity was so powerful that a woman impregnated by a man was no longer in control of her body and thus no longer fully female.

Some feminists among the Lilypads believed that the Dreamer language by its very nature bound women to submit to men, that the Moonshine language did the precise opposite, and that the Play language was neutral. Moonshine's feminists agreed with some of this but said that men submitting to women was the ideal human society, rather than one in which men and women shared power. Asked why the Dreamers were learning to speak Leaper, abandoning their own language, if they were so intent on preserving a male power structure, the Moonshines said that the Leaper language was also neutral and that the Dreamers might be intent on creating a masculist dialect of it just as Moonshine had once been a feminist dialect.

The Moonshines had the support of other groups including some Lilypads in claiming that Dreamlandic was vulgar in general.

Hearing all this, the Lilypads wondered if Stargazer would have been imprisoned in Moonshine for her love of the sound of the Dreamlandic language.

Establishment of new Hipside 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 even though their main enemy had no navy and would be vulnerable to an attack by sea, they would need to abandon these ships because they could not invade by sea because they would need to circle around Dreamland and invade friendly Baebans to reach the hostile territory of the Matrixes within Baeba. 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.

Renaming Dreamland

They also came up with new names for cities in Dreamland that had been briefly under Play control a few generations earlier. They were not intending a military occupation, but stated that they could just as well rename the cities as the Players had, because they were going to be independently powerful and capable of influencing Dreamland with their diplomacy. These new names were different from the translations that other Play speakers had come up with.

Lilypad-Hipside contacts

Now the Lilypads in Tāmta asked the Hipsides to help them create a Lilypad navy based in the western extreme of Tāmta, even though Moonshine controlled this area and had already threatened to punish the Lilypads if they attempted to build their own navy. The Hipsides agreed to this plan and stated that they would close the deal just so soon as the Lilypads established a safe land connection between their territory and the Hipsides'. The Lilypads were still fighting various groups of men in their territory, who were still abducting young children and demanding ransom payments for their release.

When the Lilypads heard this, they put off their decision to form a navy and became even more heartset on moving their entire population to Candyland.

Slopes reform

The Slopes by this time had firmly established the organs of government of their new nation, Simusa-Māsa, replacing Tatevas which had been created just months earlier. It had the same territory as Tatevas but was open to including adult populations such as the Tinks and Zeniths. Thus the Slopes said that they were no longer restricting alliances to armies of their exact generation only, and that they would look to form ties with groups both older and younger than themselves. They allowed Tatevas to continue existing, to contain those parties who preferred the earlier system, which meant that there were three nations (Erala, Tatevas, and Simusa-Māsa) sharing the same territory.

Tapšīma

The centralized Tapšīma weapons distribution network (YCE) now took over for the Slopes' previously disorganized weapons distribution networks. The Slopes said that they would now treat Slopes who chose to independently manufacture and distribute weapons as criminals, but promised that even these people would be treated far better than military enemies such as the Matrix and the Crystals. Tapšīma was not part of the government, but the government supported it, and therefore some people referred to the government as Tapšīma rather than its official name of Simusa-Māsa.

Identification

The meaning of the name was unclear due Play's grammar allowing the creation of ambiguous compound words; it contained the Play word šīm "panties; women's underwear" and was thus a reference to the Slopes' practice of living their lives wearing only underwear (though this was much exaggerated by the Slopes themselves for its shock value), but since Play did not allow a morpheme of just -a, there were several different ways of parsing the compound; an alternative reading of the name pointed out the appearance of šī "wine", suggesting that the Slopes may have decided to embrace hedonism to heal the divide in their party over that issue. (Neither of these Play words could appear as a bare root; they both required classifier suffixes.)

Since YCE was not a party, the Slopes welcomed other teenagers to join YCE and trade weapons with the Slopes. They suggested it could become something like OHB, growing beyond just the weapons trade, and perhaps in the future could even merge with OHB, though they understood this was unlikely.

The Pūmanu kids joined the Slopes' YCE weapons network. When word spread of this, a separate group calling itself žapata vayaus supported Pūmanu without joining YCE.

YCE membership

Besides openly carrying weapons, YCE members were allowed to identify themselves with distinctive clothing, if they wished. This was accomplished by restricting the clothing choices of the non-YCE members. Soon, most YCE members were choosing to wear the YCE-specific clothing even though they could legally dress in the plainer clothes. It thus became a source of pride for both YCE and non-YCE members to dress in a specific way, even though at first the non-YCE people had been jealous.

Slope-Zenith relations

The Slope leaders admitted for the first time that, for their entire existence as a party, Zenith men had been sexually assaulting teenage Slope girls, and that their alliance with the Zenith was so important that they had decided they needed to simply shoulder this abuse and consider it the price they paid for living independently. Both the boys and girls leading the Slope party had agreed on this, and stated that any Slopes who disagreed with this plan could leave the Slope party and remain forever exempt from future Slope attacks.

Although the Slopes had at times retaliated for the rapes by killing Zenith men, their resistance had always been limited to immediate reprisals, and the Slopes had never proactively attacked the Zenith head-on. They had typically not attempted to keep Zeniths from approaching the Slope fortresses. The Slopes were most comfortable staying in fortresses where they were safe even if their enemies were just outside the walls, but were in danger from the moment they stepped outside.

The Slope girls received very little sympathy from outside parties because the Slope boys had been committing the very same types of assault against the helpless Crystal women who shared their land area. The Crystals had sometimes detained the Slope perpetrators for periods of time, but could not actually put them on trial because at the time the Slopes were citizens of Tatevas whereas the Crystals were citizens of Erala, and the Crystal court system could not prosecute foreign citizens. To cause them harm would be considered an act of war, and the wider Crystal party had refused to declare war against the Slopes. Thus, when the Crystals did hold the Slopes responsible for their attacks, all they really did was strain their own resources feeding and sheltering them.

The Zeniths had also been citizens of Erala, and had then given up that as well (for unrelated reasons) to become nomadic. Although the central court system of Tatevas actually did allow the prosecution of foreigners, the internal courts were run by the parties, and the Slopes had chosen not to create a court system of their own. Thus the Slopes could not try criminals of any origin, and the Slopes' response to any crime from an outside party was irregular reprisal attacks against that party, whether they targeted the perpetrator or not.

Even during the time when the Crystals and Zeniths had both been citizens of Erala, the Crystals had not used their court system to prosecute the Zeniths who assaulted Slopes. This was despite the Crystals having earlier said that they intended their court system to prosecute all types of crime, not just those that affected the Crystals. The Crystals simply could not bear to use their court system to protect Slope rape victims when they could not use it to protect their own women from being raped by the Slopes.

The Zeniths stated that the Slope girls deserved the unsympathetic reaction they got, as the Slopes identified with their party first and not their gender. Thus, Slope girls had little if any sympathy for the Crystal women, and the Crystals therefore had little sympathy for them. The Zeniths also stated that their assaults on the Slope girls were taken from the Slopes' own promise to exploit (fumu) the Crystals. That is, the Zeniths stated they could just as easily launch an all-out war against the Slopes, but chose to allow the Slopes to exist and prosper since the Slopes' victories also helped the Zenith; the Zenith benefited from this indirect help and enjoyed watching the Slope girls go fearfully around the perimeter of their compact living quarters, not knowing which of them would be sexually assaulted that day.

Resolution

The Slopes, speaking through both male and female leaders, were embarrassed to announce to their party leaders that their resolution to this injustice was not a war against the Zenith, but a formal invitation for the Zenith to join the new Slope nation as a major power. The only concession the Zeniths made in this treaty was that they would focus on attaining power in Baeba Swamp, leaving the Slopes to mostly control the much larger territory of Simusa-Māsa. But just as the Slopes had never promised to stay out of Baeba Swamp, the Zeniths made no promises to stay out of Simusa-Māsa.

Indeed the Slope leaders believed that the Zeniths' assaults would continue for so long as the Slopes insisted on living in Simusa-Māsa as settled families with a stable population of women and children, unlike the Matrix, Zenith, and some smaller parties who consisted primarily or even entirely of adult male soldiers who could not be attacked in such a way. They believed, nonetheless, that the Slopes' rapid population growth, both natural and through recruitment, would lead them to achieve absolute power within a few years and that the Zenith men would actually help the Slopes as they were forced into combat against armies who would otherwise have been able to harm the Slopes.

The Zeniths at this point reacted by making outreach to the Slopes and the other so-called children's parties. They said that they understood that the Slopes might not respect them as true allies because of recent events, but that the Zeniths wished to cooperate with the Slopes in fighting their common enemies. The Zeniths stated that they were interested in taking power in Baeba Swamp, not in the much larger territory of Erala, but that they were making no promises about staying out of Erala in the future.

Relations among other parties

Moonshine, the founder of the Feminist Compact, had betrayed the feminist Crystals, broken a long alliance with the Players, and was now rapidly losing the young Lilypads to the promises of the boys' parties in the west. The Moonshines and the Leapers, ruling from opposite sides, agreed it was most likely that the Slopes would be the dominant power in Erala (and Simusa-Māsa) very soon, as they had acquired many allies, and had intimidated potential enemies into neutrality.

The Zeniths had mostly agreed to move west, to Baeba Swamp, where they fought the Matrix and STW armies, which were also enemies of the Slopes. Thus the Zeniths were not only helping the Slopes, but also allowing the Slopes to direct their battle plans and send them to face the strongest opponents. Meanwhile the Slopes' own enemies, the all-female Crystal police force, had scarcely fought back at all and were now working for the Slopes, helping to feed them while facing abuse from both the Slopes and other troops of migrant men while the Slopes huddled in their forts when outside attacks came.

The Squares, another Slope ally, had grown explosively early on but had quickly slowed down due to lack of a cohesive goal and little interest in family growth; nonetheless, the Squares still existed, and were considering merging into the Tinks who shared much of their lifestyle, such as slavery, and had a more traditional family-based demographic structure.

The Slopes had so far convinced all of the other Lilypad parties, the ones who belonged to their generation, to maintain neutrality or even support for the Slopes, and therefore faced no imminent threats from them either.

The only party who seemed likely to pose an armed threat to Slope dominance was the Matrix, but the Matrix had yet to make any significant headway into Slope territory and was now bogged down fighting the Zenith-Tink coalition in Baeba Swamp.

Whirlpool War

The Zeniths attacked the STW-Matrix coalition again in March 4197. They had by now formally seceded from Erala, saying that they would fight legal battles in Baeba and illegal battles in both Baeba and Erala. (Even though the Leapers ruled Baeba Swamp, they allowed wars within Baeba Swamp so long as the Leaper home territories and certain other areas were left untouched.) The Zenith strategy was chosen such that the Matrixes could not easily retreat to their homeland in Tata after a defeat, as they had in the past. The Zeniths stated that they had been planning this war all along and would be well prepared for it.

This was the beginning of what the Lilypads later came to call the Whirlpool War (Play Pama Vapias).

Role of STW

As in previous conflicts, STW reaffirmed that it was a corporation with an army, and that its monetary profits came before politics, and therefore despite being at war with the Zenith they would continue to supply Zenith men with goods to sell to the other citizens of the nations the Zeniths lived in. They would even supply the Zeniths with weapons, and therefore could profit from selling weapons to both sides of the war. STW's employees knew that the Zeniths were using STW weapons to kill the Matrix soldiers, and therefore STW was harming its own ally. They knew also that the Zeniths could theoretically use their STW-bought weapons on STW itself, but had so far held back, and STW assumed that the Zeniths knew that STW's commitment to profits was not absolute and that they protected their employees much better than they protected the Matrix soldiers.

STW's executives made no apology for this and believed that the supposed Matrix-STW alliance helped STW far more than it helped the Matrixes, since STW could sell weapons to anti-Matrix armies as much as they wished but the Matrixes had no similar way to harm STW. Nonetheless, STW reaffirmed that it was still an ally of the Matrix, in fact perhaps the only ally the Matrix would ever manage to get, and therefore they allowed Matrixes to order STWers to manufacture weapons and vehicles that the Matrixes would need in their battles whereas STW's other customers could only buy what STW chose to produce.

Conflict in North Baeba

Zenith troops arrived in Baeba's northern province of Tahalmana ("North Baeba") in mid-March. They wanted to occupy Tahalmana so they could control traffic between Tata, Dreamland, Erala (particularly the Slopes' holdings), and the rest of Baeba Swamp. To the north of Tahalmana was the Clovers' district of Pavaitaapu, which was also important to them. The Slopes and Lilypads had recently renamed Pavaitaapu to Pavaminaža, codenamed PMZ.

The Leapers had annexed PMZ to Baeba just a few years earlier, and this was why the district known as North Baeba was not the northernmost district in Baeba. PMZ itself was also divided into northern and southern parts, and the Leapers had been planning to make this a formal district border, but did not have full control of the land. At this time, North PMZ was occupied by the Leaper army, and South PMZ by the Matrix army. Indeed the Matrixes had built up a stronghold in this area, as a Matrix-Leaper coalition army under the Firestick plan had occupied PMZ, with the Matrixes being much stronger than the Leapers. This had led the planners to assign the Matrix army to occupy the more rebellious and difficult South PMZ, while the Leapers held control over North PMZ, whose population consisted mostly of Clover children and two small rival police forces called the Sunspots and Tapupais, each claiming the duty to protect, and thus the right to control, the Clover children. Because the Leapers in the north had to pass through the Matrix-held South PMZ to access the rest of Baeba Swamp (including Tahalmana), the Matrixes indirectly held much power in North PMZ as well.

Zenith preparations

The Zeniths were accustomed to living in difficult terrain, especially mountains, and Baeba's hot climate meant that even very high mountains were livable terrain. The Zeniths wanted to control the land between the five surrounding territories so they could extract bribes from anyone passing through or even near their territory.

One major problem for the Zeniths was that the native population of Tahalmana was largely pro-Matrix, as the Matrixes had recently fought a war in this area in which they were seen as having the moral high ground, and continued to provide police services to the district of Pavaitaapu, which was even further north, in return for seats in Parliament. Their enemies in this war had included the Tinks and Sunspots, allies of the Zenith, and so the entry of Zenith soldiers was seen by some citizens of Tahalmana as an attempt to revive this war.

Requests of the Slopes

Because the Slope territory bordered the Clover territory, the Zeniths hoped that the Slopes might move west invade southern PMZ (the Matrix-occupied part). This was easy for the Slopes to access. They knew that the Slopes would not invade northern PMZ, the Leaper-occupied part, because this would make the Slopes enemies of the Leapers, and potentially upset their power structure in Tāmta, but the Zeniths considered that the Leapers might welcome the Slopes in as allies if they could only first secure control of the southern part of PMZ. The only direct benefit of this plan to the Slopes was that their nation, Tāmta, would become more geographically contiguous in the west (the Lilypads had lost control of an important link in the east).

Thus the Zeniths requested that the Slopes send around 1,800 boys into southern PMZ to drive the Matrix men southward into North Baeba, where the Zenith soldiers expected they would have an advantage that they would not have if the Zeniths were the aggressors. The Zeniths admitted that they could promise the Slopes no immediate rewards for this action; the Zeniths had never claimed to be good at keeping promises, so they made none. The Zeniths thus understood that it was no guarantee that the Slopes would offer them any assistance in this new war.

Matrixes seek help from former slaves

The Matrixes hoped that their newly gained high social status would allow them to send in other citizens to fight for them, such as the Crystal and Soap slaves that they had recently freed and even given some weapons and armor to. However they knew that the Zeniths, for all their misdeeds, were not currently holding any significant number of slaves; it was the allies of the Zeniths, the Tinks and Slopes, who were the most reliant on slave labor of these peoples. (The Tinks' slaves were mostly unaffiliated but had been grouped with the Crystals in some censuses.)

The Matrix generals soon learned, however, that most Crystals and Soap Bubbles were trying to flee the war, not taking a side at all, rather than fighting for the Matrix. The Matrix soldiers were unwilling to risk their lives, so they sent in trained animals for them, and also advertised for recruits among the otherwise unaffiliated local population, saying that if they were able to convince Matrix generals that they had helped drive off the Zenith they could be spared from the Matrixes' next slave drive.

Battle begins

The Slopes trusted the Zeniths' military expertise, knowing that they had survived for thousands of years in a hostile world whereas the Slopes had been founded just two years earlier. Nonetheless they also accepted that the Zeniths had admitted they might decide to give the Slopes no rewards for their involvement in the war, both because the Zeniths lacked a central command structure and because the Zeniths were well known for placing their own interests first.

Therefore the Slopes decided to compromise. They mobilized a troop of about 1,300 boys and girls, a slightly smaller number than the Zeniths had suggested, and stated that this troop would remain near the border fort, Pibaunīs, between Erala and South PMZ, and that they would spread out across the PMZ border to prevent the Matrixes from fleeing into Slope territory, but that the Slopes would not enter Baeba even if they heard that the Matrixes had been massacred. Since the Slopes claimed this land was theirs, they stated that their role in the war was defensive. Nonetheless the Slopes had so far been reluctant to take their soldiers outside their forts at all, and felt that this role would show the world that the Slopes were a serious military power.

Animals attack

Very few Matrix soldiers actually entered North Baeba to fight the Zeniths; neither did the Matrixes find many citizens willing to fight as mercenaries. Their trained animals did almost everything.

The Zeniths were unequipped to fight animals and hoped that they could wait out the animals while they looked for food, or fool the animals by rushing into civilian settlements hoping the animals could not tell the difference between Zenith soldiers and civilians.

However, the animals soon ate many Zenith soldiers, and the Zenith troop broke up, abandoning the slower ones to the animals, as the surviving Zeniths fled eastwards through the Slopes' border guards and into the Slope settlement of Pibaunīs. Here, they set up a guard around the Slopes' fort, saying that the Matrixes' animals might soon be headed for the forts, and that the Zeniths might need to take up shelter with the Slopes in order to survive the coming animal attack. But they promised to remain out in the fields until they had any sign of an attack.

Battle for the Capital

March 29, 4197

The Zeniths fared much better in the capital district, located to the west. This was not the same territory that functioned as the capital of Erala. This had a very hot climate but the Zeniths claimed that they would be hardy here just as they were hardy in the mountains.

Matrix soldiers were stationed here as well, but did not have full control of the land as they did further north. To the dismay of the Matrix, the recently freed Crystal and Soap slaves did not participate in this battle. The Matrixes had recently freed their slaves and even supplied arms to them, hoping they would help the Matrixes against the Zenith, but most actually fled the city. choosing to help neither side, as the Zeniths had abused them too. The other citizens here were also less pro-Matrix, and the Crystals and Soap Bubbles, though still not willing to fight for the Zeniths, were strongly anti-Matrix and some said that they might look for a peaceful way to help the Zeniths establish themselves as a counterweight to the Matrixes of the north.

The Zeniths were not interested in obeying Leaper laws, but realized that they might be able to fight their war in Baeba without actually violating any Baeban laws, as the Leapers had maintained for decades that all armies in Baeba other than their own were equally illegitimate, and that the Leapers would not take sides in a conflict between one such army and another so long as neither side attacked the Leapers or any population which the Leapers considered to be vulnerable, such as the defenseless Clover orphans of Pavaitaapu.

Slopes remain in forts

Changes in Slopes' behavior

At this point, the Slopes for the first time began attacking defenseless Crystal children, who normally were kept close to their parents but sometimes had to leave their campgrounds to run errands. Even so, the Slopes usually released the children unharmed and the captures were for nonviolent pranks to show that the Slopes could easily have done something much worse. Typically the Slopes would vote on what to do to each captive once they were taken, and any Slope who told another to stop the torment would overrule the others.

For example, a teenage Slope boy named Pipavūpe abducted a six-year-old Crystal boy and brought him to a Slope castle, where he was tied to the wall while the Slopes made fun of his helplessness. The boy was returned unharmed, as the Slopes were more interested in proving their invincibility than in inflicting harm. This is why Pipavūpe had targeted a boy so young: everyone knew that the Slopes were capable of abducting both adults and children, but had assumed that their children were safe so long as they performed the slave labor the Slopes had assigned them.

Taunt songs

The Slopes also created taunt songs for the Soap Bubbles, and began speaking of "Soapy obligations", actions that the Soap Bubbles would need to perform for the Slopes once they were conquered.

Zeniths win in Baeba

April 8, 4197

The Zenith army declared victory and occupied the capital territory in early April, saying that they had conquered Baeba Swamp even though they had lost many men in the northern district.

Zenith occupation

Though well aware that their hold on power was frail and likely short-lived, the Zeniths hoped to impress the populace of Baeba with rapid reforms. They declared the Matrix party illegal and shut down the STW corporation's local base, meaning that STW's primary trade road could no longer reach Dreamland. The Zeniths knew that they were betraying STW's trust, as STW had been supplying weapons and other goods to both sides of the war, showing only a slight preference for the Matrix. The Zenith men demanded that STW cut ties to the Matrix party, or else the Zeniths would seize their supplies and consider them a traditional enemy and start attacking both male and female STW traders.

Further attacks in Tāmta

By early April, the Lilypads were criticizing Moonshine for their failure to intervene against the child trafficking operations which had taken root in their territory. These outlaws seemed to prey only on the Lilypads, and had not set up operations in the west where the Slopes and other groups were in charge, even though the Slopes and other groups were just as young as the Lilypads.

The Lilypads wondered if feminism was the problem after all, and felt that Moonshine showed no compassion for them simply because they were not Moonshines. Some said that the Moonshines might even be participating in the child trafficking operations.

Some of the traffickers had dropped all pretense at having outside support, which some Lilypads claimed was actually good evidence that they did have outside support, and were willing to take the blame on themselves by being unpopular if it would help deflect blame from the Moonshines who were providing economic and perhaps even military support to the traffickers. But the Lilypads could not prove this.

The Lilypads also noted that the traffickers were now abducting teenagers alongside the younger children, even though this was more difficult for them, perhaps attempting to bring down the protectors of the children to solidify their operations while also presenting to the outside world an argument that attacking teenagers was a fair battle.

Reply from Moonshine

At this point, the Moonshine diplomats pulled further away from the Lilypads, with one woman angrily accusing the Lilypad leaders of forcing poorly equipped soldiers to submit to their attackers and profiting from the resulting abuse. She claimed that while the Lilypads were indeed fighting battles, the result of each battle whether they won or lost was the same: the Rain Men would pair up with Lilypad children and they would abuse those children however they saw fit. The difference, she claimed, was that if the Lilypads won a battle there would be a group of them at the top of the operation taking profit from the labor and perhaps mitigating the abuse that the Rain Men dealt out. She believed that the turn towards abducting teenagers instead of small children may have been part of a bargain that the Lilypads had forced the Rain Men to agree to, meaning that the Lilypads were actually winning their war, but that even this "victory" still put them in the hands of abusers and that there might not be many free Lilypads left.

The other Moonshine diplomats stepped back from this accusation, saying that there was no precedent for the Lilypads selling out their own people, and that the older children among them had proven themselves noble enough to risk their own lives to save the lives of younger children a year earlier. These diplomats also pointed out that since the Lilypads were allowing their soldiers to move west to fight a war alongside the Slopes, and yet it seemed few were interested, the situation of the Lilypads at home might not be so dire, and therefore Lilypads' claim to be fighting a defensive war was believable. And if this claim was assumed true, some of the Lilypads' other claims, which seemed suspicious on their own, would also seem believable. These diplomats pointed out that if there were no Lilypads moving west, it would be reasonable to assume that the Lilypad governors were keeping their own people captive; if there were a lot of Lilypads moving west, they could assume life in Tāmta was very dangerous; but since only a few were moving, the Lilypads' explanations seemed plausible.

Rain Men invade

April 14, 4197

At this point, not just the Rain Men but also other groups in Hōki invaded the Lilypads, saying that the time for compassion had passed and that a war of adults against adolescents was more than fair. These groups included the two groups of child traffickers, meaning that the Rain Men's alliance already had troops working for them inside the city. Now, instead of abducting children, these vaipapaa men were able to simply slaughter children indiscriminately and take any belongings they were able to loot.

The Rain Men had stated that their goal was to expel the Lilypads into the western territories of Erala now that they had a safe place to go, and indeed were helping their allies fight a war in that area. Yet it was clear that the Rain Men were intent on avoiding the older Lilypads in order to abduct the youngest ones and bring them to the inland districts of Hōki.

The Rain Men and other groups said that the children who had been complaining about being trafficked had seen nothing yet, and would soon fall to much greater enemies.

The Rain Men had earlier hoped that the Lilypads would let them in to their territory voluntarily, whereupon they would seek to marry teenage Lilypad girls, but when this did not happen, the Rain Men began saying that the boys among the Lilypads were oppressing the girls, even though the boys were extremely feministic, and therefore that the Rain Men would need to force their way in. Weary of euphemisms, the Lilypads simply referred to these men as kidnappers (pāpemnavea) and tamakusu, a Play word for someone who could never feel so much pain as what they had caused, and therefore were due to be killed rather than punished in court.

Battle of Māsana

April 17, 4197

The Rain-allied traffickers in the Lilypad settlement of Māsana flooded the streets, capturing young children as quickly as they could, since they knew that the Lilypads were actually much stronger and better-armed than the traffickers, but could not fight a war and also protect the 30,000 Deer Walkers and other young children; thus they hoped to force a quick surrender.

What they had done was actually legal according to the uneasy peace that the Lilypads had submitted to; they were now expected to pay the men to release the children back to them, without harming the men and fully aware that the men could simply rush back out and repeat the abductions within hours.

The Rain Men had just days earlier claimed that their war was justified because their enemies were the teenagers in charge of the Lilypad power structure, not the defenseless young children they were caring for. The traffickers, whom the Lilypads had begun calling Tadpoles, had demolished this argument while claiming to be allies of the Rain Men. As the Lilypads frantically rushed the streets to recover their young children, the Rain Men decided that they would join the Tadpoles despite their cruelty, and would fabricate a justification for the attack later on, depending on which side eventually won the war.

The Rain Men believed they were much stronger than the Tadpoles, as although they were short on weapons they at least had a conventional army with territory to hold, whereas the Tadpole traffickers lived only where Lilypads lived.

Siege

In previous conflicts, even before they had reached the refugee colony, the Lilypads had been very reluctant to kill enemy soldiers, preferring instead to take hostages and then bargain with their enemies to release their own hostages in exchange. This time, the Lilypads attacked the Tadpoles with their full force, believing that the Tadpoles had almost no weapons and had only achieved their dominant position by exploiting the Lilypads' policy of prioritizing the welfare of the youngest children in each conflict. The Lilypads were well aware that, if the Tadpoles should surprise them and kill many young captives, the Lilypads would be blamed for it, and told their members that this was not a concern of theirs; their concern was protecting the lives of those young children. Nonetheless the Lilypad commanders admitted amongst themselves that they were most likely about to see the deaths of many young children who would have survived if the Lilypads had chosen to submit yet again and face an uncertain future.

Most Tadpoles released their captives immediately upon seeing that the Lilypads were mounting a coordinated attack. But others did not, and because there was no central Tadpole command structure, no group surrender was possible, and some Tadpoles killed their young captive children hoping that if they killed one while the Lilypads knew others remained inside, the Lilypads would fall back and spare the lives of the Tadpoles in order to also spare the surviving children. But the Lilypad command was united and accepted none of this. Thus the Lilypads drove the Tadpoles out of Māsana, killing those who insisted on remaining in their buildings, but also saw the deaths of about 300 Deer Walker children, more than the total number of Tadpoles killed.

Battle resumes

As word of the killings spread throughout the town of Māsana, the Lilypads retook their weapons. The Lilypads understood that people around them would blame them for the deaths of the children, rather than blaming the actual killers, the Tadpoles who had abducted them earlier. These people were the remaining adults in the city, groups such as the Hardwoods, who claimed to be war refugees or descendants thereof, and whose children had been spared from the traffickers' attacks. Thus these people had no reason but their own morals to support the Lilypads, and those who disobeyed those morals saw the Lilypads as a disruption to their way of life, insensitive to the hundreds of children who had just been killed in battle.

Aftermath of battle

The Lilypads announced the liquidation of all businesses in Tāmta, with all seized assets becoming the property of the Lilypad military.

Thus two other groups appeared. One was comprised of Hardwoods and other descendants of refugees who had originally consigned themselves to live inland while the Lilypads controlled much of the coast and therefore also the trade with Moonshine. These men now had turned militant and wanted to join the Rain invasion without committing to an alliance with the Rain Men, whom they suspected were merely kidnappers seeking small children to abuse. Then, another group also mostly comprised of refugees' descendants offered to move into Lilypad territory as protectors, and even to pay the Lilypads with tangible products so long as they turned their minds away from war and towards peaceful physical labor. The Hardwood-aligned group said that this group was no better than the kidnappers, as they too were seeking to abuse children, and merely looked better because they had more wealth in their possession to offer the children as payment.

Moonshine reacts

Although many Moonshine diplomats now wanted to mend ties with the Lilypads and some even wanted to volunteer Moonshine men as soldiers, it soon became clear that, as in the past, Moonshine would not participate in any conflicts within their refugee territory, and therefore that the Lilypads would need to fight off the invading armies on their own. As four of the five armies openly admitted they were abusing children or seeking to do so, the remaining army (Hardwoods) felt they could cast themselves as morally superior despite their wanting to violently push out the children. But the Lilypads referred to all five armies as Tadpoles and promised to fight them all at once, even if the five groups of men were also fighting each other.

Leapers react

The Leapers' only immediate reaction to this was to formally assign the Hardwoods' seats, already held by Scorpions, to the Lilypads, meaning that Scorpions and Cold Men could compete for them. They stated that they would normally have removed the Hardwoods' seats altogether, but felt that the Scorpions had won the seats fairly and that the Cold Men had had a hand in this, so they both deserved access. Thus the seats were not assigned according to population. Tāmta thus remained with 72 seats in Erala's shrinking Parliament.

This reassignment of seats was, theoretically, a temporary measure, and one they had done before in Baeba. It was common to temporarily suspend the representation of one party after that party had committed some form of treason, and somewhat common to then assign the missing seats to a party that was wronged by the treasoner. The seats would then revert to the original party once they had made up for their crime. However the Leapers told the children to expect the seats to never revert, as they expected the Hardwoods would not be interested in re-entering the democracy.

Eastern war

Early battles

The Lilypads fought the five armies. These armies carried through on their threat to escalate from abuse to outright slaughter, and the Lilypad kids were poorly equipped to defend themselves.

Hardwoods offer to step in

The Hardwoods offered to set up a single-party state, in which the Hardwoods would shut out all other adult groups from access to the children but also shut the children out of power, and even said that they would allow the children to continue their own private governments such as Erala. But even though the Lilypads trusted that the Hardwoods would be less violent than the other four armies, the Lilypads refused this offer and reaffirmed that all five armies were Tadpoles to them.

Lilypads continue to fight

Nonetheless, despite the opposing coalition's clear superiority in battle, the Lilypads realized they were facing an enemy that was few in number, and refused to surrender. Initially thinking there were more than 100,000 enemies in Hōki (counting men, women, and adolescents), they came to think there might not be much more than a few thousand. The Lilypads had about 60,000 adolescents and children to resist the invasions, and had the secure alliance of the Slopes and other parties to the west, although these parties had not yet made any promise to send their troops eastward to bail out the Lilypads because they were already fighting their own war against adult soldiers.

To get weapons, the Lilypads had so far been relying on Moonshine's mining operations, based mainly in South Repilia, on the fringe of the Play tropics. The Moonshines were in danger of losing this territory to the Players and had therefore been prioritizing the distribution of manufactured weapons to themselves.

Moonshine supports the Lilypads

But now, a new coalition calling itself Payi (also known as NMP due to Play names like naša mampayi) put the Lilypads in charge of war operations against any enemy they wished, with Moonshine pledged to a supportive role even if the Lilypads chose to target an erstwhile ally of Moonshine. This promise was important because despite Moonshine's denials, the Lilypads still suspected that some entity in Moonshine was profiting from the ongoing kidnappings and abuse of Lilypad and Deer Walker children.

This was an internal decision on Moonshine's part, and was a compromise between Moonshines who wanted to abandon the Lilypads to their fate and those who wanted Moonshine to enter the war with a combat role.

NMP was essentially the eastern routes of OHB without the economic ties to the west.

Battle lines stabilize

Moonshine controlled the shore of Hōki (thus Tāmta), through which they delivered supplies to the refugees. This was separate from Moonshine's OHB network over land, which relied on the Play army for transportation and primarily delivered weapons and armor. OHB had been recently forced to redirect its route through Moonshine's core territory as they were worried about the Rain Men and other groups intercepting their deliveries, and the final destination of OHB's Tāmta route was now located on the coast as well, but the delivery was still over land.

Moonshine considered the Lilypads true refugees, and promised that they would deliver supplies only to the Lilypads, with the expectation that the Lilypads would pass what they didn't need on to the other refugee groups, even if much of it went to groups who the Moonshines considered to be undeserving of assistance.

The result of this was that the Lilypads controlled the distribution of goods, and access to the coast, but the five armies patrolled the area just inland, and determined which Lilypad supplies would get through to the remaining true refugees living further inland still, separated from the Lilypads by the now-allied five armies of men.

Moonshine had repeatedly refused in the past to send their own troops into Hōki to better govern the territory, and they now refused again when the Lilypads asked them to occupy the shore so that the Lilypads could move inland and in turn push the other groups further inland (forming a rainbow-like pattern on a map).

Moonshine had also made clear that if the Lilypads were to leave the territory against their will, Moonshine would eject Hōki from the union and no longer provide assistance to the refugee groups living within. Indeed, they stated that they would shut off aid if they saw any non-Lilypads on the coast at all. This was to some extent an insincere promise, as Moonshine's leaders had acknowledged in recent decades that the refugee colony had lost its purpose long ago, and Moonshine's assistance to the refugee colony was likely the main reason why the supposed refugees had not yet united politically and invaded Moonshine proper. Thus if Moonshine stopped providing aid packages, Moonshine's army would need to prepare for a war.

But Moonshine considered their threats to be credible enough that they would help stabilize Hōki, driving the groups of men inland, into a traditional war formation with a distinct battle front, away from the children's small colonies along the coast where they could freely assault and abduct children. The men thus relied on the children to obtain basic goods which they in turn delivered to the refugees further inland, but used force on the children to obtain more supplies than they were legally allotted by Moonshine. Moonshine considered this the best possible solution, because the illegal attacks on children had mostly pivoted from violence to robbery, and even when the Rain Men did kidnap children, they would usually be returned for an exchange of goods.

Still, the Moonshines worried that the Lilypads were grossly outmatched, in part because the Rain Men's territory was much larger than the Lilypads', which was spread thinly along the coast. Moonshine wanted to move the border inland, in part to ensure that OHB would not be intercepted, but realized that the Lilypads would say that they could not do this on their own, and needed Moonshine ground troops, which would break Moonshine's centuries-old tradition of noninterference in Hōki.

They also worried that some men would put even their own selfish ethics aside and revert to their earlier declaration of all-out war, saying the Lilypads had missed their chance to move west and no longer deserved any sympathy. Moonshine's leaders insisted that if the Rain Men invaded the Lilypad territory in this manner, they would make good on their promise to shut off aid to the province, even if it meant that all three groups (Lilypads, Rain Men, and the true refugees) would starve.

Rainbow battles

The five adult armies, which the Lilypads called Tadpoles, were still at war with the Lilypads but had shifted from violence to abductions as part of a mitigation strategy by Moonshine wherein the Rain Men could satisfy their desire to fight a war while avoiding the wanton violence against children that even their own soldiers were reluctant to act out.

However the Lilypads were not happy with this, and children rescued from Tadpole captivity complained of torture and abuse. The Tadpoles carried out these abductions in Lilypad territory because the Lilypads could not effectively patrol their borders and had conceded early on in the war that their role would be almost entirely defensive. Lilypads had made no raids into Tadpole territory; they had taken some Tadpoles captive, but these were men who had invaded the Lilypad colonies, and thus were outnumbered.

In late April, the Lilypads demanded the Tadpoles migrate further inland and allow the Lilypads to expand their territory. They stated that the even younger Deer Walker children needed to be ten miles away from the nearest adult settlements in order to be safe, and that the Lilypads would therefore need a strip of land ten miles wide at its narrowest to separate the Deer Walkers from the various adult groups. Since these Tadpoles lived in refugee settlements that had been built in prior years whereas land further inland was mostly unsettled, the Tadpoles had good reasons to object to this plan, but the Lilypads argued that the Tadpoles had driven their own families inland into these same inferior conditions, since the Tadpoles had children of their own (though much fewer in number than the Deer Walkers) and had used the same argument for protection. As the Lilypads expected the Tadpoles to maintain this same population structure, the Lilypads stated that there would be at least four bands of settlement in Tāmta: the Deer Walker children on the coast, the Lilypad children immediately inland, the Tadpole men further inland, and the wives and children of the Tadpoles further inland still. Because of the shape of the land these bands would all be curved, and thus the map resembled a rainbow. Thus the Rainbow theater of the Whirlpool War was opened.

The Lilypads organized a troop of about 16,000 boys and girls to carry out their threats to drive the Rain Men and other Tadpoles further inland. This was about half of their population; the other half, mostly girls, would stay behind to guard their existing territory, trade with Moonshine, and care for the Deer Walker orphans. The Lilypads expected to win this battle, but also knew that they were fighting adult males who would be individually much stronger than their own soldiers, and might suffer more deaths in battle even if they won.

The Lilypads were particularly interested in moving west, as they wanted to connect with the Hipsides along the coast and start building a navy. With a navy, the Lilypads believed they might be able wrest control of Candyland from Moonshine nonviolently, since they found Moonshine's threats to blockade the island difficult to believe.

Battle of GGN

May 1, 4197

The Lilypads trespassed into Tadpole territory for the first time in early May, moving all of their troops (totaling about 16000 girls and boys) at the same time. They now believed that they outnumbered the Tadpoles, but still needed to be cautious in battle because the size of the Tadpole territory was unknown.

They divided their army into four troops of about 4,000 soldiers each. They named these for four towns, but also gave them numbers from east to west as they knew the town names could confuse their allies.

The children wanted to move mostly at night, figuring that since the men did not know a war was coming there would be no great number of guards alert for intruders.

Lilypads surround GGN

The third army division (ordered from east to west, because they were mostly moving west), codenamed Nuso (Late Andanese lalahala), led by Nighthorse, entered the Tadpole territory on the night of May 2. They wanted to surround the Tadpole city of GGN (a trade name), about 9 miles south of the Lilypads' lake.

The Tadpoles still considered themselves at war, and indeed had night guards up, in part to keep their camps safe from each other. The Tadpoles had never put down their weapons, as they had been fighting the Lilypads just weeks earlier, and thus they were still prepared for a conventional battle.

When the Lilypads realized that many Tadpoles were awake, and there was no opportunity for ambush, Nighthorse ordered his troops to form into a line and ask the Tadpoles to surrender their city so that the Lilypads could take over without violence. They believed they would win this way.

Tadpoles capture Lilypads

However instead the Tadpoles captured hundreds of Lilypads, including Nighthorse, and made them prisoners of war in GGN's existing buildings. They threatened to torture and kill these captives if the remaining Lilypads attempted to move further into the city, and declared that because the Lilypads were now stuck, the Tadpoles had won the battle. They did not however demand that the Lilypads fall back, stating that even if the Lilypads completely surrounded the city the Tadpoles were still in control of the situation because they had the Lilypad captives. The Tadpoles reminded the Lilypads that if the Lilypads insisted on maintaining the siege, the Tadpoles could simply kill and eat the Lilypad captives once their food supplies ran short.

The Tadpoles also claimed that they would disperse some of the captives throughout the refugee colony, sending more each day, so that the longer the Lilypads maintained the siege the further the young captives would be sent and would need to be recovered one by one.

Lilypads' response

The Lilypads' deputy commanders agreed to hold the territory they had gained, saying they would soon encircle the city and regain their prisoners. They stated that there was no credible means by which the Tadpoles could sneak Lilypad captives out of the city even at night, since the Lilypads were forming a circle and would hear any Tadpoles moving through it with vehicles. They estimated that the Tadpoles had grabbed about 200 of the 4,000 soldiers that were surrounding the city.

Their order surprised the Tadpoles, and even some Lilypad soldiers, who had been expecting a tašapapa response, meaning that the Lilypads would surrender their gains to protect those who were in greater distress; the Tadpoles in particular had expected to defeat their morale (in particular their will to endure more of the battle) by making the Lilypad captives cry and scream for help (taša). The Lilypads stated their friendship had led them to commit to mutual defense, and that they followed tausueŋūm, the opposite of tašapapa, meaning that they fought as one, and that the captives were not crying because they shared in the coming victory of the Lilypads outside.

Hearing this, the Tadpole commanders suggested the Lilypads go to sleep, promising that the Tadpoles would not attack them, and that upon waking they would see both that they could trust the Tadpoles and that the Tadpoles were secure in their victory.

Battle of JSY

Tadpoles advance

Meanwhile, the Tadpoles in the city of JSY (another code name) pushed northward into the Lilypad territories on May 3, having sensed the GGN battle from a breakdown in Tadpole-Tadpole communication.

The JSY troop attacked the Lilypads' Division IV army head-on and quickly captured the commander who, as in the GGN battle, was standing vulnerable at the front of the advancing troop. Unlike the GGN men, the JSY Tadpoles quickly escalated to violence against the Lilypad children rather than focusing on abductions.

Lilypads retreat

The Lilypads fled immediately, but the Tadpoles chased them down, both on foot and with their vehicles, saying that they demanded complete surrender and would swallow up the entire Fourth Army.

Soon more than half of the Lilypads' Fourth Army was under Tadpole control, and though thousands of others had fled on foot back to the shoreline, the boy in command of the remaining troop told the Lilypads in the settlements that they were losing their war against the Tadpoles and might need to flee eastward to protect the younger children rather than launch a counterattack.

But the Lilypad leaders at home stated they had been outsmarted, not out-fought, and that they would win a counterattack against JSY and rescue the kidnapped captives as they recovered their lost territory even if they chose not to attempt a siege of JSY. They believed that only a few hundred men, perhaps even less than a hundred, lived in JSY and had only given the illusion of military superiority because they had used wagons to surround the Lilypad troop and force them into a trap.

Lilypads return

Therefore the Lilypad leaders placed a boy named Taxman in charge of the Fourth Army and he launched a counterattack on the very next day, May 4, standing at the head of the troop as the other boys had.

Taxman led his troops north, figuring the Rain men may have made even more advances after the Lilypads fled, and Taxman soon reached the border with Moonshine. The Lilypads noticed that the Moonshine territory seemed very poorly defended and contemplated that the Lilypads might be able to invade Moonshine after all, should the current war not go their way. The Lilypads built a camp near the Moonshine border and resolved to head back south the next day.

Zenith-Matrix treaty

May 15, 4197

Twist of fate

As the battles wore on, the Zeniths increased their territory, creating many Zenith-only areas within Erala. They had maintained control of Baeba's capital territory for more than a month, and although they expected the Matrix army would soon be back, they were surprised that the local population was cooperating with them and felt that when the Matrix army did arrive the Zeniths might get support from the civilians.

But the land the Zeniths were winning 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.

For example, the Matrixes had chased the Zeniths completely out of North Baeba and the more recently annexed districts north of that. The Zeniths wanted this land so that they, with the Slopes, could control traffic between the three empires and also Dreamland. However they had been unable to even push into the area since the Matrixes had been in control of it due to a prior treaty between them and the Leapers.

Around May 15, the Zenith commanders announced to their allies that they expected little further exchange of territory and that the war was effectively over, though they were already preparing their next attack against the Matrix army, knowing that the Matrix soldiers would eventually need to reduce their presence in the land they had won so they could fight their other wars.

Peace treaty

On May 19, the Zeniths declared a formal end to the war, figuring that they could then cast the Matrix army as traitors when they came back to Baeba. The peace treaty froze the Zeniths' gains in both Baeba and Erala in place, saying that any Matrix attacks in either nation would violate the treaty. The Zeniths upheld their ban on STW doing commerce in Zenith-held territory, saying that the Zeniths were more responsible merchants because they actually lived in the nations they did business in. However they stated that if STW agreed to cut its ties to the Matrix army, they would be welcome in Baeba again as a competitor to the Zenith-owned businesses that the Zeniths were just beginning to set up.

In return, the Zeniths promised to stay out of both PMZ districts as well as North Baeba, so long as the Matrixes stayed out of the Zenith and Slope-held areas.

The Zeniths also separated all of their gains in Erala from the Slopes' territories, saying that it was precisely because the Slopes and Zeniths were allies that they should not live in the same territories. Thus, the Zeniths took to the streets of Erala as they had earlier been doing, leaving the forts under the exclusive control of the Slopes.

The Leapers willingly signed this treaty as it did not affect them.

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.

The Matrix soldiers had never attempted to push through the Slope border guard. Nonetheless, the Slopes expected an attack was coming, and so they increased the size of the border guard troop from 1,300 to 2,000.

Repercussions

The Slopes' military gains embarrassed the Leapers; even though the Leapers had tacitly given the Slopes free reign to attack Crystals, their participation in a formal military campaign meant that they were at war with Erala while simultaneously voting in its democratic government. The Leapers had the legal right to ban the Slope party, but knew that if they did so, the Slopes would shut off their communication with the parties of the east, and Erala would effectively cease to exist. Therefore the Leapers were forced to acknowledge that even parties who committed treason could still hold their seats in Parliament.

Meanwhile, despite the Zeniths' much greater offenses, they had not broken any Leaper laws. The Leapers had expressly allowed armies occupying Erala to fight wars against each other so long as they fought those wars outside Erala; that is, Erala was meant to be a safe place for everyone, while those who sought war could fight it out anywhere else, even in the Leapers' homeland of Baeba. (The Leapers refused to defend their own homeland because they claimed all armies in Baeba besides their own were illegitimate; they thus endorsed all wars in Baeba so long as none of the armies attacked the Leapers or certain other groups which the Leapers insisted be spared, such as the Clover orphans.) The Zeniths had not overthrown the Leapers when they took control of Baeba, so therefore the Leapers had a justification for keeping the Zenith party legal in Erala. Nonetheless, the Zeniths had earlier made it clear that they were not interested. Thus the Zeniths' seats were taken out of Erala's Parliament.

Play contacts

In late May, the Play army threatened to invade Moonshine's refugee colony of Hōki if Moonshine did not itself invade Hōki or otherwise take action to stop the various armies of men who were attacking teenagers and children living in the northern part of the colony. It was well known that the Players themselves had killed many children and they did not deny this. But the Play army was now helping the Lilypads through OHB, and therefore the war in Hōki was an attack on the Players' sole ally in the region.

The Play army was still hundreds of miles away from the Lilypads, but Play soldiers were on the southern border of Hōki. If the Players took over Hōki, they stated they would restore OHB's trade road to its original route through Hōki, and shut off the Moonshine branch of the road entirely.

Moonshine's response to this was to begin deliberations about ceding control of Hōki to the Players, and no longer having a refugee colony within Moonshine's control.

Lilypads ponder the Hipside Strip

OHB soon communicated the Players' threat to the Lilypad kids. Many Lilypads had seen Play soldiers kill their friends years earlier, and wanted never to see Play soldiers again, even if they promised an alliance. The Lilypads knew any alliance with a power so large as the Players was sure to be unequal, and that the Players had promised never to apologize for what they had done to the Lilypad children earlier in their lives, or for what they might do in the future. Thus they said the Players' claimed alliance with the Lilypads was to benefit the Players only, and was not a humanitarian war.

However, the Lilypads had tired of Moonshine's repeated claims to be the protector of the Lilypads and the Deer Walker children, only to do nothing when they were attacked and abducted by outside armies, and seemingly to find every possible way to blame the children for their own abductions. Thus the Lilypads did not want to be an ally of Moonshine any longer either, and since Moonshine and the Players were still at war (though seeking a resolution), the Lilypads felt that they might be crushed between the two major powers if they were to remain in their place. Furthermore, they had determined that neither power was so humanitarian as they claimed, and that perhaps there were no humanitarian powers in the world.

Yet the Lilypads conceded privately that their young age had kept them out of the direct threat of war from either of those powers. Rather than declaring war on the young Lilypad children, it seemed that the Moonshines were trying to ensure that they did not bring harm to Moonshine.

As the Lilypads came to believe that the Moonshine and Play armies were each trying to devolve responsibility for the Lilypads' welfare onto each other, the Lilypads again proposed a plan for their independence. They stated that if the Players invaded Hōki in order to help the Lilypads, the Lilypads would demand that Moonshine turn over control of what they planned to call the Hipside Strip to the Lilypads. This was a 150-mile strip of land in the Moonshine state of Safìz which separated Hōki from the coast. The reason for this was that the Moonshines did not believe refugees needed access to the ocean.

This transfer would enable the Players' war to proceed with minimal violence, as the Lilypads would actually be conceding territory to the Rain coalition, depriving the Rains of their ability to use the children as hostages while putting the humanitarian burden on Moonshine since if Moonshine did not surrender the Hipside Strip to the Lilypads, the Lilypads would claim it was Moonshine that was putting the children in danger.

Moonshine rejects Lilypads

Moonshine told the children that this land was cold and nearly treeless, only slightly warmer than the offshore island of Wipep which the children were now yearningly calling Candyland. They stated it would not be feasible for 70,000 children to support themselves in such a climate, and that they would be even more dependent on Moonshine than they would be in Tāmta. The land was valuable to Moonshine because it provided them a place to put their navy, rather than a source of food (other than seafood).

Moonshine suggested that if the children could not defend their land claims in Tāmta, they should simply move to the Hipside territories and stop making claims to other countries' lands.

The Lilypads understood that Moonshine was reluctant to give up the Strip because it would weaken the Moonshine navy while allowing the Lilypads to create a navy of their own, but acknowledged that the Moonshines might be correct about the climate even though the Strip was not much further north than their land in Tāmta. They also admitted privately that they would probably be safer in the Hipsides' territory than with a territory of their own, and that the Hipsides also would benefit since they were struggling to hold on their own claims, but the Lilypads felt it was uniquely inappropriate for Moonshine to deny the Lilypads access to a strip of territory that they had withheld only because they felt refugees did not need sea access. Thus the Lilypads drew up plans for an invasion of the Strip to begin if and only if the Players invaded the refugee colony from the south.

Players' input

Now, even the Play army warned the Lilypads not to move, saying that the traffickers could just as easily follow them west or even onto the island, and that the Play army would have a more difficult time also patrolling such a distant area, and that the OHB trade network that supplied arms to the Lilypads would also break down. But they thanked the Lilypads for teaching them about the Strip, as the Players had not known how useful and yet how unsettled it was, and so the Players promised that if Moonshine devolved control of the refugee territory to the Play army, they might find a way to also occupy the Hipside Strip even though they knew Moonshine would surely object to this. The Players knew that the Lilypad children surely did not want to be under Play occupation but hoped that if they realized their fate was to be crushed between the two major powers of Play and Moonshine they would either submit to one of them or concede defeat and move into the Hipside territory. Either way the Players expected Moonshine to put up very little resistance on land in the Strip.

Players communicate through OHB

May 27, 4197

On May 27, the Play men working in OHB told the Lilypads in confidence that the Play army would soon be invading Hōki, and that they wished for the Lilypads to stay put. They said that if the Lilypads remained in their homes, the Players would attack the men from the south, and the Rain men would thus be forced to fight attacks from both the Lilypads and the much stronger Play army. The Players expected that they would quickly defeat the Rains and that the Lilypads would then be safe.

The Players promised there would be no long-term occupation of the Lilypads' home colonies, but warned that the Rain men might flee battle by moving directly into the children's territories, and therefore that the Play invasion would include an invasion of the children's home territories during the first phase of the war. Though the Players still did not apologize for what they had done to them in the past, the OHB diplomats presented themselves as intermediates, simultaneously Play and non-Play; they were also younger and more sex-balanced than the all-male Play army. They claimed they could better see the situation from the Lilypads' point of view. However they again warned that it was the Play army that would control the invasion, not OHB.

OHB told the Lilypads that the invasion was still a few weeks away, perhaps months, depending on how negotiations went with Moonshine. They wanted the Lilypads to be well aware of it in advance in order to give them time to plan a reaction, which would benefit both the Lilypads and the Players. They claimed that this was not a leak and that the Play army also wanted the Lilypads to be the first to know of the Players' plans. They warned the Lilypad kids not to tell Moonshine that an invasion was coming, and stated that even if Moonshine acceeded to all of the Players' demands, the Play army would still invade.

Lilypads divide

The Lilypads responded to OHB's warnings with a series of internal debates. The leaders quickly agreed that they would allow their members to choose between submitting to the Players and disobeying the Players by invading Moonshine. The question was over which group would retain the rights to the name Lilypad and the support of the party. They understood that, by disobeying OHB, they might lose access to OHB, and that the west-moving Lilypads would be fighting their war without a reliable supply of weapons. They also understood that the Play army might disarm those who remained in their homes entirely, meaning that they would face an uncertain future and might even end up as slaves for the Play occupiers. The Players had promised in earlier times never to attack children and then broken that promise.

And thus it happened that the Lilypads decided that a disobedient war against the strong Moonshine army, potentially even against both the Moonshine and Play armies, was better for their people than submission to the unpredictable Play occupiers. Only about 3,500 Lilypads chose to remain in Tāmta to await the Play occupation. On the other hand, more than half of the Deer Walker orphans wished to stay, as they were accustomed to a life of safety and submission already, and knew that if the Lilypads faced two conventional adult armies in a land war, the tiny Deer Walker children would make easy victims while the Lilypads would have little free time to help feed them, let alone protect them. The question for the Lilypad leadership thus shifted to what to do with these children, and whether it was acceptable for the Lilypad kids to force younger kids to follow them west against their wishes.

Lilypads move west

May 31, 4197

On May 31, the Lilypads began their migration westward, hoping to reach the Hipside Strip within a few days and begin their conventional war against the Moonshine land army. Many soldiers from the Third Army now joined the IV Army, sending about 4,000 boys and girls into an area of the strip they labeled Starfish Land (2RB), with yet another commander at the head of the troop. The soldiers who stayed behind (largely girls) were rerouted back to the Third Army to hold the front lines in Tāmta against the Tadpoles, but the Lilypad commands told both these soldiers and those of the I and II Armies that they would need to move west soon to escape the Players. The Lilypads forbade their soldiers from cooperating with the Play army.

The Lilypads had lost ground in the west recently as the kidnappers' armies moved closer in, but there still remained a small area of land in which the Lilypad and Moonshine territories bordered each other with no Rain-occupied land. This troop consisted entirely of adolescent Lilypads, meaning that those who had young children at home had left those children in the care of the Lilypads who had chosen to remain behind. They hoped they would soon be able to bring their children to safety in the Hipside Strip, but did not want them to face combat against the Moonshines.

Moonshine had warned the children that the Moonshine border patrol would treat them as ordinary invaders, and that the Scorpions' earlier victory in the area had come about because they had attacked unarmed female laborers rather than armed adult male soldiers. Further, very few Moonshine civilians lived in this area, and Moonshine warned that if the children breached the border, the civilians could flee into boats, and give Moonshine's army full control of the territory, making it very difficult for the children to occupy.

But the Moonshine diplomats feared they would lose ground no matter what came of the invading Lilypad troop. If the Moonshine soldiers defeated them, the Lilypads would say that the battle was unfair because the Lilypad soldiers were poorly equipped teenagers fighting well-equppied adults; if the Moonshines backed down, their borders could then be rushed by other armies; and if they lost, they would suffer both consequences.

Battle of the Starfish Strip

The Lilypads understood that Moonshine's land army, all adult males like most others, was untrained in combat. They knew from OHB that they had problems getting equipment to their soldiers, because they preferred to arm their allies and make a profit than arm their own at their own expense.

When the first Lilypad troops arrived at the border, the Moonshine soldiers were more dispersed than they had been earlier. The new commander Tīmmapa led her troops across the Moonshine border, saying that she had no expectation of resistance since the Lilypads had clear numerical superiority. Like other Lilypad armies, she was at the front of the advance.

Rather than defend their border, the Moonshine soldiers decided to make incursions into the advancing Lilypad troop, hoping to make their occupation difficult and wear down their resolve, and perhaps even regain control of the border with the Lilypad IV trapped in Moonshine cut off from the others. If they were to lose, they intended to board the ships of the Moonshine navy and continue the fight from offshore.

Lilypads spread out

As the Lilypads moved north, crossing into the tundra along the coast, they spread out, looking for food sources and a place to sleep so they could treat the new territory as theirs. They expected to find abandoned markets and other storehouses so that they would not need to hunt or fish. They said that they were coming to stay, not to fight, but if they were told they could not stay, they would fight.

Many of the Moonshine men hid inside troughs in the landscape, or buried in the sand, waiting for Lilypad soldiers to approach and move ahead of them, whereupon they attacked the Lilypads from behind. As they slashed and stabbed the young Lilypads, many of whom were unsure what to do, casualties mounted, but because the Lilypads were so spread out, they could not easily alert each other and neither could the Moonshines get them to slow down.

When the commander realized what was happening, she echoed a command to close ranks, saying that they would not be able to occupy the entire Starfish Strip even with overwhelming numerical superiority, and that they needed to put their own protection ahead of the desire to maximize their land gains.

Lilypads contract

The Lilypads moved closer together so they could both better protect each other and entrap Moonshine soldiers in the contracting wall of Lilypads. They wanted to keep many Moonshine men as prisoners of war so that, if Moonshine should threaten to escalate, they could in turn threaten to kill the men. The Lilypads knew that Moonshine was primarily a naval power, and that their navy was stationed right offshore, but that if the navy were to disembark, their ships would be easy for a third power to capture.

The Moonshine soldiers promised that they would never surrender, and that, if the Lilypads chose to take captives, the captives would fight their way through the Lilypad troop from the inside and restart the battle. Hearing this, the Lilypads began killing the Moonshine men, whose number they estimated at about 800, so they could use both the dead bodies and those they chose to let live as collateral for negotations with Moonshine.

Aftermath

The Lilypads named their new conquered territory Šana Pivem Šautas, Starfish Bay District, although šautas was a Play word for an unbounded piece of land rather than city.

The Lilypads looked for enterable buildings so they could take shelter in the event that a second wave of Moonshine soldiers came after them. West of them lay another area of land that they knew could be occupied by Moonshine soldiers looking to save their nation from the embarrassment of defeat. The Lilypads named this land Tausaapanu, saying it would become the main food source for the new Lilypad colony.

The Lilypads were still surrounded west and east by Moonshine soldiers, and to their north was the Moonshine navy. To their south, the Rain coalition army was now facing a Lilypad population consisting mostly of young children and teenage girls. Thus the Lilypads were almost entirely surrounded by hostile armies. Thus the Lilypads reaffirmed their commitment to moving northwest and becoming a naval power on the west coast, shutting off Moonshine's control of the sea, and perhaps conquering Candyland. With their own navy on the west coast, they would not so easily be controlled by outside powers.

Moonshine cedes Starfish Bay

Moonshine's navy soon moved out of sight, ceding control of the bay to the Lilypads. But the Lilypads had no navy, and although they had taken control of a few fishing boats left in the city, they knew these were inadequate to provide food for the entire Lilypad troop. Thus they realized that they would need to move west, into the hill country of Yatūsa (YCM), either to connect with the Hipsides or to secure an area of land in which the summers were warm enough to provide an adequate supply of food for the Lilypad troop. Meanwhile they still needed to ensure safe passage for the remaining Lilypads still in Tāmta, so they knew their migration would only be partial.

YCM had a warmer climate than Starfish Bay even though it was slightly further north, and it had adequate coastland as well. The Lilypads renamed it Fipapanu II, saying it would be a safe place for the colony's youngest children.

Realizing their hostages were of no use in negotiating while the Moonshine navy was out to sea, the Lilypads released their remaining hostages on the condition they move west with the Lilypad diplomats to help negotiate a transfer of land control of the western territory to the Lilypads; the Lilypads promised that they would be willing to give back the Starfish Strip if they could control the western territory instead.

Diplomatic meeting with Moonshine

June 5, 4197

And so the Lilypads marched west with their captives to the border between their Starfish Strip and the Yatūsa territory (YCM) still held by Moonshine's border guards. Worried about a surprise attack, the Lilypads sent about 1,500 troops westward, almost half of their army, leaving only about 2,200 to guard the Starfish Strip; these were also required to feed themselves and coordinate movement with the I and II Lilypad armies to move the rest of them north and west.

Outcome of meeting

To their surprise, the Moonshines ceded temporary control of YCM to the Lilypads, which gave them much more land to roam around, and agreed to evacuate all Moonshine soldiers and civilians from this land. However they stated that this was only intended to allow the children to flee safely from Tāmta through the temporary land grant and then into the Hipsides' colonies further west. They refused to surrender Candyland, and stated that the Lilypads could not build a navy until they moved completely into the Hipside territories. They shut down the OHB trading route, though they agreed, for the first time, that they could feasibly re-route OHB through sovereign Moonshine territory and then to YCM without going through the refugee colony, meaning that the refugees would no longer be able to poach goods from the children.

The Moonshines also warned the children that they would need to guard their southern border, as Moonshine would be evacuating its border guards, meaning that the Rain and Play armies could punch through the Lilypad territories and take control as soon as they became aware of the change in land ownership. (The Players had earlier guaranteed Moonshine that they would not invade Moonshine proper, but this treaty did not mention any transitory land holdings such as this.)

Some Moonshines wanted to move the children far away, ideally into the tropics, and stated specifically that they would be better off living in a tropical climate. The Lilypads were offended at this, as many of them were the children of the Cold Men whose name referred to their ability to withstand cold weather and feel at home in a cold climate, even a treeless tundra.

Thus Moonshine released its border guards from YCM and began assisting the Lilypads with a rapid westward migration out of Tāmta, through the Starfish beach strip, and into YCM.

Diplomatic meeting with Moonshine

June 10, 4197

When the Rain Men realized they were losing their access to children's colonies, they attacked the migrating children and their Moonshine guards. When Moonshine realized this, they abandoned the children, saying their humanitarian obligations had ended with the lease of their sovereign territory to the Lilypads, and that the Lilypad children would need to fight off the Rain Men on their own as they migrated westward. The Moonshines also said that they would expect their vehicles back when the children had reached their destination.

New battles in Tāmta

Thus the Rain coalition (the Tadpoles) attacked the children escaping the colony. The children, frantic for a meeting, pled with the Hardwoods to protect them from the others, but even the Hardwoods had gone hard by this time and stated that the children deserved no protection and had lost even the right to surrender to the Hardwoods. The Hardwoods warned the children to get out as fast as they could and that the Hardwoods would not prosecute their own members for any attacks on the Lilypad or Deer Walker children.

Since only about 2,000 of the over 60,000 Lilypads had reached safety, there were still about 60,000 waiting to move. They had the advantage of direct communication with those who had completed the migration, who in turn now had a means to connect with the Hipsides, the only friendly power with a navy. They also had clear numerical superiority. And a migration path through abandoned towns with sources of food stocked. But nearly everything else was against them.

The children soon realized that their migration was nearly impossible as planned, because the Tadpole soldiers could stop any Lilypad convoy by killing the animals pulling the wagons, and then abduct all of the children.

Hipsides join

Communication established with the Hipside navy promised them to help the children migrate, but the Hipsides urged the children to try to work out a deal with Moonshine instead, even knowing Moonshine had just abandoned them to their fates, because the Hipsides had moved their population center hundreds of miles to the west and even if they piloted their ships back eastward at their best speed it would likely to be too late to help the children escape the Tadpoles.

However Moonshine repeated that they had fulfilled their obligations, and would not use their navy to bring the children to safety, not even to the Hipside territories further west, and so the war returned to much the state it had been in earlier in Tāmta. The children resolved to continue the fight as they moved slowly westward.

Starfish split

When the Tadpoles realized the children's colonies were now undefended, they pushed their entire army into the Starfish Strip, saying that they would stop the children's migration by splitting their convoy in two, and then saying the children on the west side of the split would have to choose between moving further west and thus abandoning the weaker children on the east side, or giving up their migration to fight the Tadpole invaders.

The Tadpoles chose not to attack the children in the original colonies, even though they knew these children were much younger, weaker, and more female than the children in the convoy. This was not out of sympathy but because they had decided that the risk of Moonshine or Hardwoods reentering the war, evne though they had both promised neutrality, was too great.

Fear the Bite

The Tadpoles arrived in Starfish City on the morning of June 12th, occupying the city with a rapid overwhelming push to the sea. They carried a banner reading "FEAR THE BITE", saying they would explain its meaning once the children in the city surrendered ot them.

By controlling the seacoast, the Tadpoles were able to credibly threaten the children that if the children ever found rescue from Moonshine, Moonshine would not in fact be able to help them. The Tadpoles expected that if any Moonshine ships discovered their occupation, they would announce that they were allies of the Tadpoles because the Lilypads had invaded them, but to also refuse assistance to both sides, since this would be the response most in keeping with Moonshine's stated commitment to human rights while keeping the Moonshine soldiers out of the conflict.

The leaders of Starfish City surrendered to the Tadpoles, but said that they would soon be fighting even harder, because the Tadpoles' occupation had destroyed the Lilypads' power structure in that city and therefore they now had no means by which to keep the other Lilypads from splintering into resistance gangs and fighting the Tadpoles on the streets. The Lilypads offered a compromise by which the Tadpoles would retreat to the city limits and set up a border which the Lilypads would be forbidden to cross, and that the Lilypads would imprison other Lilypads who broke this new law. The Lilypads understood that the Tadpoles would violate the treaty immediately but felt that even this was preferable to fighting a war in which tens of thousands of children could die by the hands of a few hundred adult Tadpole men.

Slopes move south

June 19, 4197

Now, the Slopes invaded the lowlands east of Baeba, saying they might want a new trade road in the tropics separate from both STW and Moonshine. This time the Soap Bubbles surrendered immediately, but warned the Slope boys that they would not easily survive in the dry climate if they did not adopt a nomadic lifestyle like the Soap Bubbles had. The Soap Bubbles required a physical fitness test for party membership and believed that the Slopes, violent though they were, would struggle to survive in the hot desert climate and would not be able to round up Slopes to use as slaves without deserting their camps.

The Slopes promised the Leapers that they had no interest in becoming a naval power, but wanted to control the coast for various reasons. They wanted to take over a city on a river in order to derive their food source from fish in the river, fish in the sea, and the few edible lifeforms available in the surrounding desert.

Matrixes resurge

STW's traders told the Matrixes that the Slopes were moving south. The Matrixes figured this meant that the Slopes would be weak at home, and might be planning on leaving their home territory altogether. Thus the Matrixes felt they could take over the Slopes' territory (MTV) if only they could first win back the credibility of the people of Baeba by regaining control of Baeba's capital territory. So the Matrixes poured southward from their forts in PMZ into the core of Baeba Swamp to recover the control of the capital territory.

Matrixes move south

The Matrix strategy was to move south and then east, seeking to control the border with Erala so that the Zeniths could not flee into Slope territory as they had a few months earlier. They once again relied on their trained animals, keeping their own soldiers behind the front lines, except for the border territory, where they wanted to meet the Slope border guards face to face to demand concessions.

Matrixes retake Capital Territory

June 29, 4197

The Matrix army thus declared victory, saying they had liberated Baeba Swamp from the Zenith army. The Slopes had remained in their fortified castles in Erala as the Matrixes pushed the Zeniths out. The Zeniths had expected no help, and therefore were not surprised when they got no help.

Because the Matrixes had secured control of the border between Baeba and MTV, most of the Zeniths were now trapped in Baeba Swamp. Only a small number had managed to escape into the Slope territory of MTV to warn the Slopes that a new attack was likely coming.

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, they knew it would be difficult for the Matrixes to capture and enslave the Crystals and Bubbles. Meanwhile, the Crystals in the Slope territory had not been armed, and the Matrixes realized that they might need to invade the Slopes in order to recapture a significant troop of slaves.

The Matrixes announced the creation of a new political party: the Dolls (known as Pussamupimi in a Matrix cipher; also known as Mumpum in another Matrix cipher). 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. They said that they would use mind control tactics to prevent the later generations of Dolls from outmuscling their masters.

Declaration of war

By announcing slavery, the Matrixes effectively declared war on the Soap Bubbles and the Crystals. Until recently the Crystals had been friendly to the Matrix, despite their often being abused by Matrixes. These groups were both hostile to the Slopes, with whom the Matrixes were also at war. The Matrix soldiers said they could handle both wars simultaneously, outsmarting their stupid enemies and outfighting their weak enemies, while trying to play the enemies against each other as well, all while using trained animals to keep the Matrix casualties low.

Matrixes invade Slopes

July 2, 4197

The Matrixes then declared war on the Slopes on July 2, mobilizing just 317 men in two divisions to attack the Slope homeland, Mayutasue (codename MTV). These soldiers were not the ones stationed at the border, so the Matrixes did not worry that their border control would be weakened.

Infantry battle plans

The Matrixes planned to invade the Slopes both from the south, from their stronghold in East Baeba, and from Tata.

There were a mere 317 Matrix soldiers in the invading troops (Division MGN), and their motivation was that they would have exclusive ownership of any slaves that they captured, while the Matrixes as a whole would be financially indebted to STW for use of their wagons. Thus, the war was actually a net loss for the non-participant Matrixes, but they agreed that the Matrix party as a whole would benefit from testing the strength of the proud, confident Slopes.

Slope battle plans

Hearing that the Matrixes relied on trained animals, the Slopes hoped to turn the animals against them, revealing the Matrixes to be frail, delicate humans just like their enemies. This was the ilhina strategy, which the Slopes believed could only be successfully implemented by a group of humans who had invested in sulalaka, the practice of creating fortress habitats that would be safe for those inside even if the enemies attacked so viciously that all land outside the forts became unsafe for humans. The Slopes hoped that the animals would starve and simply turn back on the Matrix soldiers, but knew that with their armor, the Matrixes would not be the animals' primary targets.

Ilhina had no native Play name as it was not a native Play concept; the Plum language had once referred to it as yunža yiba.

Southern wing

The Matrix soldiers figured that the western Slope castles would be the best-defended, and therefore would most likely also have the most slaves.

On July 2 the Matrixes sent a flock of trained firebirds to fly over the 2,000 young Slope children guarding the border as they headed eastward into Slope territory. They were hoping to scare the Slopes away from the border, since the Slopes could not possibly know where the birds were going or what they would do to the Slopes and their captives.

The Matrix soldiers planned to follow through on foot, intending to abduct Crystal slaves from the Slopes, and using horse-drawn wagons owned by STW for transportation. They needed STW's support as they did not have pack animals of their own nor could they reach the interior areas of Erala by sea. Because the Zeniths had become hostile to STW, the Matrixes now had most of STW's supplies to themselves; nonetheless, STW was still supplying the Slopes with weapons too, claiming as they always had that they were a business first and profits were more important than politics.

To their dismay, the Matrixes realized that the birds had not scared the Slopes away from the border, and that perhaps the Slopes did not even realize that the large birds were part of the Matrix army. The Slopes were from a cooler climate and might have simply assumed that these birds were a migratory species native to the tropics. The Matrixes thus realized that they needed to enter Slope territory to catch up with the birds so they could execute their original plan for a combined attack.

Rather than face the Slope boys at the their maximum strength, the Matrixes decided it would be best to move the invasion point further east, where the Slopes were less prepared. The Slopes had border guards along the whole border with Baeba, but they were spaced further apart in the southern area.

Matrixes breach border

The MGN-South Matrixes entered the mountains of southern MTV, where they found a camp of five boys and four girls guarding the border at a mountain pass. The children had no reasonable expectation of resistance, so they surrendered immediately, and the Matrixes put them into their wagons. But one of the children had managed to start a fire, which was their signal to any Slopes nearby that the invasion had begun.

The Matrixes told their captives that they were headed into the desert lowlands, where movement would be easier, and would then re-emerge well to the east and attack the Slopes at night since they knew that even though the Slopes kept guards up at night, the Crystals might be sleeping unprotected and thus the Matrixes could abduct the Crystals without them alerting the Slopes. Since they would be attacking without the birds, they had to be even more cautious than they had planned to be, but they released another bird which they intended would meet up with the flock and redirect them further east.

The Matrix army was very small but consisted of elite soldiers, some of whom were protected by trained animals. The Matrix animals were mostly intended to absorb the attacks if the Matrixes were forced to retreat, but the Matrix battle strategy incorporated some animals in an offensive role as well.

Battle of Ŋīpabu

Next the Matrixes moved towards a lowland Slope settlement they called Gamapu (a Late Andanese name; the Slopes called it Ŋīpabu (GPB)). This had been a Soap fort earlier, which the Slopes had taken over, and now the Matrixes wanted to take it over from the Slopes. The Soap Bubbles had fled southward, but the Matrixes did not know how far away they were. They only knew that the Slopes had driven the Soap Bubbles out of the highlands. Although the Matrixes had just announced that they would begin enslaving Soap Bubbles, they felt confident that any Soap Bubbles living in the desert were too far removed from the travel of news, even through STW, to have heard of the new slavery laws, and therefore would be more strongly opposed to the Slopes than to the Matrix, even if they considered themselves enemies of both armies.

Northern wing

A second Matrix troop then moved from Tata to invade the Hipsides' Southern Puba territory (an aboriginal name, not a Play name), which the Hipsides had already promised not to defend. This, containing some area around the Nwigo River (a trade name, again not a Play name), had been assigned to the Hipsides because it had not earlier been a Crystal territory. Thus, the Slopes had not invaded it yet either, though they were just a few miles away in another river valley. The Matrixes declared that Southern Puba would soon become Eastern Tata.

This group was also mostly trained animals, with only 159 men marching behind them.

The northern wing of the Matrix army entered the Hipside territory and stated that they would be taking control of the Tănya River which led into the Hipside territory (not the same as the Hipside River).

Overall strategy

The Matrixes wanted to attack the Slopes at a weak point, but did not have enough soldiers to encircle them. This is why they had moved east.

The Squares then rushed into Puba as well, seeing the Matrix invasion as a threat to their own territory, but pled with the Slopes to at least cooperate, since the Slopes had the headwaters of the river valley and could thus with just a small advance downstream make the Matrixes' connection between Tata and Upper Puba much thinner and more difficult to protect.

The Slopes and Squares soon came to call this territory Vamna-Vuna.

Matrix propaganda

The Matrix commanders were unsure of their chances of victory, and although they had a rigid command structure, meaning that the whole of the Matrix party was committed to the new war, they wanted to send only a few soldiers into battle because they feared that the Slopes were now much stronger than the Matrixes and could potentially defeat the whole Matrix army if given the opportunity. The Matrixes said that they could defeat the Slopes by changing their strategy repeatedly so that the full Slope army would never face the full Matrix army all at once.

The Matrix commanders told their soldiers that though they were outnumbered, they had a good chance of victory because the Slope-Crystal nation consisted entirely of women and children while the Matrix army consisted entirely of strong adult men. They also said that the Matrix should feel no guilt over this, as it was the Slopes who had chosen this model for their nation, refusing adult help even from their allies, the Zenith.

Matrixes' goals

The Matrixes stated that they wanted to regain access to a sizable pool of Crystal slaves, whom they now referred to simply as Dolls. They believed that the Slopes, who lived in fortresses and were reliant on Crystal slave labor to find food, would be unwilling to leave their forts to keep the Crystals from being abducted, but the Matrixes also admitted that the Slope army as a whole was now most likely stronger than the Matrix, and therefore the Matrix soldiers would need to carefully approach plantations where the Slopes were on patrol, and in some cases avoid them altogether in order to focus on abducting women from undefended Slope territory.

The Matrixes also declared war on their own slaves, the Dolls, saying that even those few pro-Matrix slaves were collectively responsible for the acts of resistance by other slaves since they were of the same party. They added these wars to their existing war against the Zenith, which they believed was still loosely allied to the Tinks and to the many Lilypad parties of the east, though the latter had proclaimed neutrality.

Zeniths promise defense

The Zeniths promised to defend the Slopes even though the Slopes had not defended the Zeniths. They claimed that they had not gone soft. They stated rather that the Zeniths and Slopes were true allies, mutually dependent on each other, but that the Zeniths' attempt to win control of Baeba was of no use to the Slopes, and therefore they had had no reason to expect the Slopes to help them. Whereas a war in Slope territory would harm both parties and so the Zeniths promised to continue their fight against the Matrix.

Slopes' response

The Slopes, whose median age was still 14, promised that they were ready to take on an army of men, and would win easily because their own slaves, the Crystals, would fight to remain with the Slopes rather than be abducted by the Matrixes. All the Slopes needed to do to ensure this was to separate the Crystal women from their children, threatening to kill the children if the Crystals did not fight on the Slopes' side in the war. These were the biological children of the Crystal women and their now-lost Crystal husbands; even though the Slopes had openly admitted and even encouraged sexual assault, there were very few babies born from this because the Slopes preferred to maintain themselves as a separate overclass who would reproduce only with their own kind (unlike the Matrixes).

The Slopes were so confident of their safety that they were even willing to give weapons to the Crystals, since even with weapons the Crystals could not easily turn back and attack the Slope captors, who would simply remain in their castles, because their power did not depend on extending their authority over a large land area, and therefore they had no need to expose themselves to the battlefront.

The Slopes thus needed to exert control over even the free Crystals. Previously, there had been free Crystals and slaves, and the slaves were better protected, so some felt that the slaves were actually better off. Now, in order to ensure they could freely abduct children, the Slopes wanted to increase their surveillance of the free population. They knew that if they were unable to do this, some Crystals might in fact choose to side with the Matrixes. However, the Slopes had no interest in arming these women, and so they figured that the worst they could do would be to run away, rather than to actually attack the Slopes.

Matrixes renamed

At this point the Slopes, Lilypads, and some other Play speakers discarded the Matrixes' self-assigned Play language name Yapī, which referred to a grid or matrix, and began calling them Papaaši, an ambiguous compound which the Slopes claimed referred to a disease common among elderly people in which wounds yielding a burning sensation would accumulate and not heal. They believed that the Matrixes, who by definition could not reproduce with their own kind as they were all men, were doomed to die of a disease they would seek desperately to spread to their victims but fail to do so.

The Slopes said that the Matrixes deserved no sympathy for the suffering they were about to endure. The Matrixes hearing this stated that it only proved that the Slopes still had the minds of children, believing that an invisible disease could bring down their taller, stronger, and much better-armed enemies.

Players invade remaining territories

July 17, 4197

With the Lilypads fully out of Tāmta, and control of the land restored to the Moonshines, the Players launched an invasion of not only Tāmta, but also the "green" territories of Pitana on the map which included much of STW's main trade road along with territory earlier claimed (though scarcely explored) by the Scorpions. (The Scorpions had actually been based further east, in colder climates, but had claimed Pitana as theirs for various reasons.)

The Players already had some control of the STW trade road, but not of the territory to its north, and therefore by launching two invasions the Players intended to close the gap in their two extended claims of land, making a complete circle where the OHB and STW trade roads would run together somewhere in Erala.

Diplomatic consequences

Moonshine's refugee territory had been invaded before in its 240-year history, but always by small armies continuing their wars against the refugees who had fled from them. This had happened many times because Moonshine had always refused to intervene in such conflicts, saying that even the aggressors could claim to be refugees and therefore that Moonshine was neutral. But these violations of diplomatic standards had always remained small because outside armies would often join the war outside the refugee territory, attacking the offending army, and would gain diplomatic rewards for so doing. This new invasion was the first time a large army had invaded it, and the Players were so large that no other party could meaningfully retliate gainst them.

Since Moonshine had created this refugee territory from its own land, Moonshine was often seen as above diplomatic reproach. But their consistent refusal to intervene in conflicts, while yet fiercely defending their own borders, had led Moonshine to become increasingly unpopular over time. Moreover, the soldiers who entered the refugee territory to defeat invading armies were no longer offered Moonshine citizenship, as they had been early on, and their own home nations often had no meaningful reward to give.

Hardwoods react

When the Hardwoods realized that the Players were invading their homeland, they fled into the tail of the Lilypad troop which was still struggling to move westward. They figured that the kidnappers were only targeting Lilypads, and so hoped that they could move quickly within the Lilypad formation without themselves being drawn into the war.

The Lilypad soldiers voted to defer all action to their political leaders, so they could focus on their ongoing war. Thus the Lilypads treated the Hardwoods as a political enemy rather than a military one. They made clear however that they were not ruling out military reaction against the Hardwoods. Nonetheless, the Lilypad military made no effort to prevent the Hardwood men from infiltrating their forts and campsites, which the Hardwoods claimed they needed to because otherwise they would be vulnerable to attack. This was because the Lilypads were overwhelmed already with the Rain Men and felt they could not fight a war on two fronts.

The Hardwoods thus were unwelcome, but working with the Lilypads one Hardwood woman suggested a strategy: if the Lilypads were to feign the symptoms of a plague, the Rain Men might lose interest in kidnapping them.

Hipside protests

At this point, the Hipsides living along the north coast launched a series of pacifist protests against the wider Lilypad government, showing that they had dropped their weapons and would not fight any further war. The Hipsides retained greater autonomy than the other Lilypad groups and had never committed themselves to fight a war, even defensively. But now they said that even what they had done for the Lilypads was wrong. They apologized for the few battles they had already fought, such as to establish the base of Pāpuname, saying that they deserved to be slaughtered for doing this even though they had committed little violence.

Likewise, the Hipsides criticized the eastern Lilypads for opposing the gangs of men invading their territory, saying that those men had the right to live on land that had been earlier set aside for true refugees, which they were, and which the Lilypads were not. The Hipsides' solution was not for the Lilypads to abandon their cities, however, but for them to serve as hosts for the kidnappers and find a way to live in harmony with them.

Drawings of soldiers

The Hipsides had fully embraced the Rider art style by now and made sure that their protests and the literature they produced reached outside parties (who were numerous in the Hipside nation). They drew their soldiers as small, scarcely able to grasp their soft harmless weapons, such as supposed hammers resembling merely a ball or a cube on a stick, and some had dropped these weapons in order to stand their arms outstretched in gestures of beckoning and love.

Others were shown with stuck-out tongues (tamīpta), for reasons left unclear because these people mostly did not carry signs with words. The Matrixes were familiar with this as being a recently popularized obscene gesture, which had been until recently been forbidden in most Lilypad cultures, the prohibition having lifted with the spread of the more permissive cultures of the west (the Clovers and their intermediaries). The Matrixes mostly did not understand that this gesture, even as it was considered obscene, could be used as a message of solidarity and therefore assumed that the Hipsides were saying that there was a group among them who was protesting even the pacifist protests, as though they were not going far enough and needed to support an invasion of their territory.

Other Hipside politics

The Hipsides also staged debates between opposite-sex teams, ostensibly about the roles of males and females in their society, saying that the conflicts between boys and girls was the only problem facing their society now that they had eliminated all crime and war. They took turns outdoing each other with great pronouncements. For example, one boy promised that any time the teams of 10 boys they proposed to make new laws met for Parliament, there would be 4 girls present: one to cook their food, one to set the table, one to pour their drinks, and one to pick up the trash they threw on the floor.

The Hipsides were unable to draw crowds of outsiders to these debates and therefore these, too, were distributed primarily through literature that they hoped others would copy and spread by word of mouth. But it was more difficult to copy words than pictures, so the Hipsides did not put much effort into this.

Matrixes react to propaganda

The Matrixes believed that the Hipsides were clearly trying to bait the Matrix army to ignore the Slopes, abandon their search for Crystal slaves, and attack the Hipsides. Since the Matrixes were already occupying Hipside territory, they could easily move further north and take the Hipside coastal cities if they were to abandon their war against the Slopes.

The Hipsides lived just to the north of the other groups and had a navy with which they could quickly flee if they were overwhelmed by a land army; but if they did this, they would lose most of what they had built and the non-Hipside residents would have a strong motivation to side with the Matrixes.

The Matrixes were unsure, however, of the Hipsides' motivations. They knew little of the Hipside military, and did not know whether the Hipsides believed they could defeat the Matrix army. Some Matrixes felt that the Hipsides were genuinely sacrificing their lives, potentially even submitting to slavery, to protect the other Lilypad armies; then, even if the Matrixes easily swept into Hipside territory, the as-yet fearful Slopes could abandon their castles and launch an attack against the Matrixes. A rumor had been spreading that the Slopes were very tightly controlled, unlike the Zenith, and that their as-yet refusal to leave the safety of their castles would change all at once someday as they converted into a traditional territory-seeking land army.

Few Matrixes even considered that the Hipside propaganda might in fact be sincere. Even those who were open-minded pointed out that if the Hipsides were protesting against the Lilypads, they would not have made such an effort to get their literature to the Matrixes. The Hipsides had said similar things in the past, even saying that they would make ideal slaves and that their male population was best fit to serve the virile men of surrounding tribes, but nothing of the sort had conspired as the Hipsides slowly built their way westward along the north coast towards the Matrix homeland of Tata.

Formation of the Worldpool

The Lilypads reaffirmed that they were on the Slopes' side in this new war, and that the Lilypads were themselves also planning to fight a war against the Matrixes, but that they did not feel compelled to participate in the war at this stage.

Nonetheless, as they assumed a war against adult armies was coming to them one way or another, the Lilypads reformed their government, but still declared themselves neutral in all wars involving the Slopes. They referred to their new government as Taīmpama, a soundalike word that could be represented in English as the Worldpool. They retained the Lilypad name for diplomatic purposes, iterating their party identifier to LPD-3 to show that they were on their third government, where LPD-1 had been everything up to and including Tatevas, and LPD-2 had been Simusa-Māsa, the cooperation with the Slopes that allowed adult parties to join.

Their creation of this nation replaced Tatevas, which they had set up cooperatively with the Slopes, but it did not replace Simusa-Māsa (SMS), which the Slopes had set up for them, nor did it take the Lilypads out of Erala. Thus the Lilypads remained simultaneous citizens of three nations: the Worldpool, SMS, and Erala.

Borders

The Lilypads cast a symbolic claim to all of the lands of the Crystals and Soap Bubbles that were not already under the control of some other empire (such as Moonshine). This put them legally in control of territories that had been independent for hundreds of years, which even the Anchor Empire at its greatest had never claimed. The Lilypads believed that these nations were very weak and that the Lilypads, if they could keep themselves out of other wars, could subdue or even conquer them. They also felt that if the Slopes rapidly conquered territory in the immediate future, those conquered peoples might later change their affiliation to the Lilypads rather than seeking independence. Thus the Slopes and Lilypads both claimed the tropical nation of Egàqi.

The Lilypads then worked on creating Play-language names for all of the towns and features in these territories. They did this for its own sake, but realized that in the future it would help them connect with conquered peoples who had been forced to learn Play by the Slopes.

However they maintained that their first priority was to protect their own nation, and that they still expected to go to war against the Matrix army before any war against the Crystals. In reality, they were in danger of losing their entire territory to the various armies of human traffickers around them.

Suspicions about Moonshine

The Lilypads no longer identified as children's parties, and for the first time expressed irritation towards Moonshine diplomats' maternal instincts, thanking them for their unconditional support in the past but insisting that the time for treating the Lilypads as vulnerable young children had passed.

The Lilypad leaders were certain that Moonshine's belittlement was due to their fear of rising male power, having seen teenage boys come to power in the warmer climates of the western states and begin organized assaults on women. There had been little evident violence in these states when the boys living there thought of themselves as children, little different from the girls in their parties, struggling to meet their daily needs and eager to forge friendly relations with other children's nations. But as soon as the kids grew up, the boys among them became much more violent. This pattern seemed to confirm what the various young leaders had been saying for years: that violence was committed by adult men, not by boys, and that the children's nations, though extremely poor, had always been safe for their citizens during those periods when adults had been successfully kept out.

But the Lilypads underscored the difference between crime and war; these western boys' armies were only attacking Crystals, not their own girls, and the Lilypads stated that the armies' strong in-group identity would keep them from turning their aggression on their own girls and women even if they achieved absolute power. Thus, according to the Lilypads' definition, the violent crime rate in the Slope and Square states where the greatest abuses of Crystals were happening was very low.

The Lilypads claimed to have a strong in-group identity as well, and that they did not need Moonshine-style laws designed to keep men and boys so vulnerable that they were in danger just roaming about since they would be easy prey due to not having weapons or armor. Moonshine not only kept their men physically vulnerable, but seemed to pass new laws restricting their basic rights each day; recently, a new law had been passed in the Moonshine state nearest Hōki stating that no man had the right to start a conversation with a woman, nor to address more than one woman at a time. The intent of this was to stop men who had heard of happenings in the west from spreading the knowledge to the women of Moonshine. Men were still allowed to freely communicate with other men because they could do nothing on their own.

Role of Moonshine in the Crystal party

Moonshine had voted to start the war that caused the Crystals to send their male population westward, leaving them vulnerable to attacks from armies of roving men. Because the Moonshine faction was pacifistic, they did not send any of their own soldiers to battle. Moonshine claimed that losing the war was harming the Crystal party as a whole, because the Crystal taxpayers before the war had been sending money to the wider party apparatus, and now that the Slopes and others had taken control of the Crystal women as well, they had lost their western tax base entirely. Moonshine also asked the Lilypads for an estimate of how many Crystal women had been sexually assaulted in Erala since the Slopes took power, figuring that if the Slopes won the war they could ask for monetary reparations to be sent to Moonshine by a third party as restitution for the pain dealt to the Crystal women as a whole.

When the Lilypads heard this, they were unsurprised, since it had become plain to them that Moonshine always sided with the winner of any war rather than the morally superior party. Yet Moonshine claimed the moral high ground because the Lilypads were doing nothing to stop the rape and slaughter in their western territories. The Lilypads said that perhaps some day very soon they would send their own soldiers north into Moonshine, abduct the entire child population to bring back to the Worldpool, and then demand Moonshine pay them reparations for the cost of the journey.

Exclusion of traditional powers

But the Lilypad leaders also stated that they would continue to exclude parties of the older generation from their government, stating that their many rapid reforms were keeping their government fresh, and that tying themselves to old powers would stifle their ability to represent their citizens and perhaps unprotect them from revolution.

Exclusion of Deer Paws

The Lilypads still also opposed power sharing with the much younger Deer Paws. The Deer Paws' territory was still the capital of the Lilypad Association, and their leaders were still mostly less than ten years old and much less educated than the Lilypads had been even at that age. The Lilypads understood that this younger generation would never be able to access the sort of education that would make them good leaders, and therefore that the Lilypads were better equipped to run a government than both the adults and the younger children outside their party umbrella. Therefore, to prevent the Deer Paws from overthrowing the Lilypads, the Lilypads stated that they would keep the umbrella government under constant reforms.

Nonetheless, the Deer Paws did have some exclusive powers in their territory. The Lilypads gave the younger children what they felt was fair, though since there was no precedent for a government run entirely by such young children (the Clovers were just as young but had firmer ties to adolescent leaders), there was no standard by which to judge what was fair.

Lilypads prepare for war

See Dolls.

The Lilypads prepared for what came to be called the Whirlpool War (Pama Vapias), because it was fought in the Worldpool and was based on a plan of moving cyclically so that the Matrixes would end up chasing the Lilypads in a circle, ending up back in the original Matrix territory. They believed they could do this because the Lilypads had a navy and the Matrixes didn't; thus, they could bait the Matrixes into reaching the coastline and then keeping them at bay as they moved westward towards the Matrix plantations. (Worldpool had been a Play-language pun whose underlying meaning was Whirlpool.)

The Matrixes had already anticipated this plan months earlier when the Hipsides seemed to bait the Matrixes into attacking them, saying that they wanted the Hipside pacifist democracy and the slave-seeking Matrix military battalions to share the same territory. Now it was not just the Hipsides, but the entire Lilypad military, that was joining the war, and they outnumbered the Matrixes by a tremendous margin. But the Lilypads were still very young and most did not have even primitive weapons or armor; the Matrixes consisted entirely of adult male soldiers, all with advanced weapons and protective armor.

Outsiders' reactions

Many non-tatea diplomats, especially those from Moonshine, disapproved of the Lilypads' commitment to the western war. They pointed out that the Lilypads were so poorly equipped that they could not even patrol their home territory, and that in Lilypad cities it was common to find adults selling other adults access to captive young Lilypads, often under the guise of household help or even language tutoring, but in reality for sexual abuse. The Lilypads' promise to fight a new war in the west suggested to some diplomats that they simply did not care about the ongoing abuse at home or that perhaps the money they were earning from this was being used to finance the war. This latter claim relied on an unproven allegation that even though the Lilypad captives never saw the money they were being sold for, at least some of that money was being delivered by the captors on to the Lilypad governors; in essence, that the Lilypads were selling other Lilypads to the abusers. To the people who believed in this theory, the Lilypads' war against the traffickers was only about whether the Lilypads would or would not profit from the abuse; even a Lilypad victory would not stop the abuse.

Others, more sympathetic, suggested that the young Lilypad children were žapaatap nayaā, meaning people whose situation is so dire that it becomes painful to realize that others around them are not all suffering similar pains. Thus, they pretended to believe child traffickers were in every other nation too, and thus that the child trafficking problem was insurmountable, and so removing the two different painful emotions that would come from acknowledging that they had a chance of victory if only they gave up their other goals.

The Lilypads responded to these claims just as they had to similar claims in the past. They denied any blame in the problem since all of the perpetrators were non-Lilypad adult males, in this case belonging to five different groups. In their mindset, this was all that mattered; victims could not be blamed for their own abuse, even if some among the victims sometimes made choices that made other victims more vulnerable. Since most of the five armies consisted entirely of adult males, it was their nature to prey upon the Lilypads and they would never stop unless they were defeated. The Lilypads also repeated that they were fighting a defensive conflict, so the departure of Lilypad soldiers towards the west meant fewer targets at home to defend, and did not significantly weaken their defense.

But they flatly denied that they were collecting money even indirectly from the captors. They further stated that, like the Slopes, they expected that their people would continue to be sexually abused by the outside groups even if they became very strong because they were a society with a natural population balance rather than an army consistingly mostly or entirely of men. The Slopes had recently admitted that even their clear dominance in their western territory had not stopped the Zenith men, their closest western allies, from raping and abducting teenage Slope girls, and that they expected these attacks to continue indefinitely because the Slopes had a large female population and the Zeniths were almost all men.

Slopes turn hostile

Slope propaganda

Largely reliant on the Leapers, the Slopes planned to distribute their own propaganda in Baeba Swamp; the Leapers were helping them because even though the Leapers had helped the Matrix in the recent past, they believed that the Matrix was too powerful on its own and wished to check their power by establishing a counterweight, ideally allied to the Zenith.

The Slope propaganda admitted that the Slopes were very violent and were abusing innocent Crystals. They thus avoided appealing to morality, and instead stated that they deserved support because they were the most stable power in the region. Thus, the Slopes spent much time talking about how pathetic the Matrix army was, for all their boasting, and that the Matrixes seemed to change their policies every few months while the Slopes had not changed their party platform at all since their formation.

The Leapers had control of the distribution of this propaganda, and decided to aim it mostly at slaves and the underclass, many of whom had been slaves until recently. The Leapers encouraged the Matrixes' slaves to become pro-Slope even though they knew that the Matrixes could simply slaughter any rebellious slaves and that the Slopes would do nothing to stop this.

Slope reforms

Turn to tribalism

As the Leapers warmed their hearts towards the Slopes, the Slopes began writing propaganda against the Leaper leaders, saying that they were so weak that they were embracing the Slopes who openly admitted their intents to exploit all of the peoples around them. That is, the Slopes used every piece of the Leapers' pro-Slope propaganda to create their own propaganda saying that the Leapers by all rights should be anti-Slope but had been cowed into submission without a fight and were now working for the Slopes.

To the Slope leaders, the Leapers were just Crystals who were temporarily sheltered from the abuse affecting the Crystals under Slope control. (The Leapers had for a period of time claimed to be Crystals because it was politically convenient at the time; they had abandoned this when it became disadvantageous.)

The Slopes were not a single tribe, but a broad coalition; because they saw their future as cosmopolitan, they claimed that their racism was against the Crystal minority, not the Crystal majority. They claimed that the Crystals would be the bottom of the hierarchy and that other tribes would be welcomed into the Slope ranks in the future.

Attitudes towards assault

Also around this time, a divide emerged in the Slope party, with hardline Slopes, mostly those close to the front lines, saying that Slope soldiers who won control of any people could enslave those people, that there were no crimes against them, and that whatever they did to their slaves was in support of the Slope way of life. These people effectively stated that there would be no new middle-class citizens, only slaves.

Leapers attempt to solidify their power

The Leapers bet heavily on the Slopes and their allies becoming a stronger power than the Matrix in due time, and stated that it most likely had already happened. The Leapers were afraid to leave their homeland in Baeba Swamp, however, and did not expect that they could offer the Slopes anything which would convince the Slopes to move in and drive out the Matrix. However, the Leapers were not simply pro-Slope and anti-Matrix; they were supporting the Slopes mostly because they believed the Slopes were the stronger power, and therefore the Leapers' plan was not based on ethics.

Matrixes push further into Slope territory

As September wore on, the Matrixes cut deeper into the Slope heartlands, in a pincer formation towards the east, where there were few Zeniths to protect the Slopes and where the Matrixes felt the Slopes would dare not leave their castles.

The Matrixes believed that they could win the hearts of the Crystals because the Crystals here were not all familiar with the abuses of the Matrixes further west. They all knew the Slopes, however, and that the Slopes were abusing them. They also knew the Zeniths were abusive too. But they also knew that if they wanted the Crystals to leave their Slope masters and join the Matrix slave pool, they would need to meet the Crystals up close rather than relying on their animals. Thus the Matrix soldiers living in the southern part of the Hipside territory, which the Matrixes now called East Tata, left their camps and moved into the Slope territory so they could meet the Crystals up close. However the southern wing of the Matrixes was not aware of this.

The Matrixes motivated their soldiers by reviving their acronym 3EE, and saying they soon would soon rescue the Crystal women from their Slope abusers so they could begin abusing the Crystal women themselves. 3EE here was the byname of the Tink party spelled backwards and had no direct meaning in Play; they saw themselves as the inversion of the Tink power structure, which was also the Slopes' and Lilypads' power structure. The name was a shock tactic implying that they would be eating children, since the original EE3 had been used by the Tinks at a time when their party name (despite their being led by elders) was the Swamp Kids.

The Matrix leaders claimed that the Crystals were angry because they were the legal property of the physically immature, mostly teenage Slope boys, and that once they came in contact with the robust Matrix men they would submit mentally, and that any resistance was due to their fear of the Slopes in the castles.

Slopes contact Lilypads

Lacking a navy, the Matrixes could not seize control of the river, but the Slopes figured they could start fires and burn passing ships, and perhaps send trained firebirds (papuafa) after them.

Even though the Lilypads had moved closer to the Slopes, they were now harder reach by river because the Slopes' home territory's river bypassed the closer territories and fed the lake around the Lilypads' original colonies.

When the Slopes realized the Matrixes were about to surround them, they nevertheless sent a message down the river (the Matrixes had no easy way to occupy the river) to let the Lilypads know that their supply lines might be disrupted. But the Slopes felt a blockade, even if it was within Slope territory, would hurt the eastern Lilypads more than it would hurt the Slopes. This was because they had most of their supplies coming from the west, from STW's trade, and STW had made clear that even their alliance with the Matrix would not keep them from trading with the Slopes because as a corporation they put profits first. STW thus allowed the Slopes to survive despite the Matrixes' blockade to the east; indeed STW expected they might profit from it since the Slopes would need to move the focus of their economy towards the west.

Use of ciphers

The Lilypads used ciphers of their languages (Play and Late Andanese) to conceal their communications even though they knew that the Matrix had also learned some of these ciphers. They figured the Matrixes would be spying on them anyway, and were actually more interested in keeping their communications secret from their allies, since recent history had shown that their allies often became enemies in short order. These ciphers produced names outside the phonology of Play; for example, one cipher whose syllables were all (C)V produced names like Sapepulasapapara, Mumemipopasopa, and Papumopupumati, using a five-vowel inventory like the Leaper language but unlike Play (/a i u ə/ with long vowels /ā ī ū/) and Late Andanese (/a i u/ and no long vowels).

The Lilypad Military Cipher Committee consisted of just two girls and two boys; these were Stargazer and three of her close friends. They stated that they would send their ciphers to the wider Lilypad government for approval but that they would actually be less efficient if they had more people helping them develop the ciphers because they all needed to think alike for their plans to work.

Slopes learn ciphers

Weapon supply

By this time, the Slopes had acquired a surfeit of weapons, and realized that if they ever lost a battle, the Matrixes would steal their weapons before any surviving Slopes on the battlefield could recover them.

Slope-Lilypad arms treaty

September 10, 4197

As a surprise to all, the Slopes decided to arm the Lilypads in return for the Lilypads teaching them all of their ciphers along with the Late Andanese language which was required to understand most of the decoded messages.

Moonshine was shut out of this and the Lilypads said that they might no longer need OHB to deliver them weapons, but yet they reaffirmed their alliance to OHB because doing so cost them nothing and the Slopes stated that they would not attack the Lilypads even if they chose to move even closer to Moonshine.

Earlier, the Slopes had claimed that they were the most intelligent people in the world, and outside parties had expected the Slopes to either create their own ciphers or crack the codes of the existing ones. But the Slopes said that the most intelligent strategy was to learn the ciphers from the Lilypads in exchange for arming the Lilypads, and that because the Slopes could see the world clearly, they knew decisions such as this proved rather than damaged their claim to be intelligent.

A later Leaper estimate put the value of the traded weapons at about Ξ20 million, equivalent to the annual labor production of 300 average Baeban citizens, but a huge sum of money for a nation of children living in much rougher conditions. The currency used here was an artificial one based on food supply; no healthy free citizen, even if unemployed and homeless, could have an income lower than Ξ5,000 in this system because by definition, meeting one's food needs would require that much money (the currency was originally based on a figure of Ξ4 as the minimum price for a satisfying meal.)

This treaty ended any serious adult resistance in Tāmta, as the Lilypads now had clear military superiority over the indigenous adult population. It also ended the Lilypads' dependence on Moonshine, who had provided them access to weapons and to basic material goods but had refused to support them militarily or even to allow them entry into Moonshine territory. The Lilypads wanted to continue trade with Moonshine, and because they controlled much of the coast, the adults in Tāmta were dependent on the Lilypad kids for their own material needs, so the kids assumed that trade with Moonshine would continue much as it had been.

Many outsiders had expected the Slopes to turn over their surplus weapons to the Zeniths or even to their Crystal slaves. These people were surprised when the Slopes gave them to the Lilypads instead, knowing that the Lilypads were both ideologically opposed to the Slopes and outside the Slopes' control. The Slopes' decision thus reaffirmed a pattern that some other outsiders had already noticed: that the Slopes and Lilypads saw themselves as kin because they were of the same generation, and this overcame all of their differences.

Stargazer's cipher

The Lilypads thus revealed the secrets of Stargazer's cipher, which had the consonant inventory

Bilabials:      m
Coronals:       n   r   l   s

And the vowels /a i u e o/.

Stargazer had created the cipher six years earlier, at the age of 11, featuring only her favorite sounds, and within a year the Play army was using it in their own internal communications alongside their own more advanced ciphers (which Stargazer also understood). She had designed her cipher to be difficult for enemies unfamiliar with it to break, but not so difficult that the intended recipients would also have trouble decoding it. This moderate difficulty level had helped her cipher spread among the Lilypad military commanders; she had also taught them the Players' more advanced ciphers, but the Lilypad kids believed that using these would hamper their internal communications without meaningfully protecting them from interception.

Although the Late Andanese language had thirty syllables, and an alphabet of five consonants and five vowels could thus be used to create a direct one-to-one CV syllable correspondence between the language and the cipher (because of vowel-initial syllables), Stargazer had rejected this simple design by obscuring the syllable boundaries. Some Andanese syllables corresponded to two-syllable sequences in her cipher, and some were subsyllabic. This is why such a superficially simple cipher was difficult to break: anyone intercepting a message written in the cipher, even if they were passingly familiar with Late Andanese, would see the encoded words as inseparable wholes and struggle to find the underlying syllable boundaries. The other Play ciphers obscured the morpheme boundaries even more than this, making them much more difficult.

Because Stargazer's cipher allowed consonant clusters, it was not possible to further re-code it back into the thirty-syllable Andanese alphabet. One advantage of such a cipher would be that it would look the same as the bare Andanese language to someone unfamiliar with it; another would be that it could be repeated. The Lilypads promised to look into making such a cipher in the future, but for the meantime, promised to work with Stargazer on her existing cipher and to create similar ones.

Initial changes to Stargazer's cipher

The Lilypad cipher committee had added five "mirror" consonants p t d c h to complement the five /m n r l s/, to replace consonant clusters of s followed by another consonant; Stargazer had been personally fond of such clusters, but they occurred so frequently that the other kids felt they might provide a clue to those seeking to break the code. Other clusters, which were rarer, were retained. The c here spells IPA /ts/, but its pronunciation was variable, as Play did not allow a /ts/ cluster, and also did not allow clusters of any kind at the head of a syllable, so the Lilypads believed that the users of the cipher would be more comfortable if they were to think of it as a single consonant. Despite Stargazer having designed the code to resemble the sound of Dreamlandic, there was still no /k/ sound in the inventory.

The Lilypad kids planned to use this derivative of the cipher in their own writing alongside Stargazer's original cipher, stating that the two could not be confused with each other and therefore both would continue in use. Their addition of the new consonants was for aesthetic reasons only; the other three members admired Stargazer's five-consonant inventory but disliked the /s+C/ consonant clusters. Stargazer herself agreed to this, and also promised to work with them on future endeavors.

One very noticeable feature of her cipher was that it often produced vowel-initial words, regardless of what the first consonant in the input word was. Because it had so many initial vowels, the Stargazer cipher was often spelled backwards even though this added very little additional mystery to the ciphered text. The Lilypads proposed reversing the letters rather than whole words, saying that this would allow users of the cipher to achieve both types of acoustic effects but that the individual letters would still be in the same order.

New ciphers

A refinement of the reversed Stargazer's cipher had the consonant inventory

Bilabials:      p   m   b   w
Coronals:       t           l   s

And the Play vowels /a i u ə/. This was based directly on the Lilypads' expanded version of the original, which had 10 consonants and five vowels. The new cipher they created had only seven consonants and four vowels, yet it matched letter-by-letter to the Stargazer version, so any text in one could be copied to the other without loss of information. This was because the new version allowed richer and more frequent consonant clusters.

This cipher introduced new consonant clusters that did not occur in Play. Likewise, it allowed consonants in positions that would ungrammatical in Play. One example is the word passab "weapon", which was nara in Stargazer's cipher (and upa in Late Andanese, though this, like many military terms, is taken from a root without its classifier prefix).

In this cipher, clusters occasionally appeared even at the end of a word. For example, Stargazer's word for war, elasanas, became Wampapass, with a cluster at the end of the word. Indeed, any word ending in a consonant in Stargazer's cipher would end in a cluster in theirs. Stargazer disliked this, and although she adopted the new ciphers, she stated that she preferred to spell the words "forwards" as she always had been.

More than half of all words began with the voiceless bilabial stop /p/. The designers did not think that this easily noticeable trait would give too much away, any more than did the original cipher's words so often beginning with vowels. This was both because the word-initial p gave the hopeful code-breaker no direct information about the initial consonant of the Andanese original, and because this mismatch was for a different reason than Stargazer's cipher's mismatch. That is, some words that began with vowels in the original Stargazer cipher did not begin with p in this cipher, and vice versa.

Slopes' plans for ciphers

The Slopes admired the new cipher, and stated that they felt the small consonant inventory could be used to derive clones of the cipher which would each belong to a party or faction. That is, the Slopes would use one version, the Lilypads another, and so on. Their intent was not to obscure communication, since cloning the ciphers would add no significant obstacle to breaking the code, but to add a sense of character to each of the messages. This was in keeping with the new Rider art style in which each party's members had their own distinct appearance. Now, with the ciphers, it would seem as if each political party spoke a separate language too.

The Slopes said that they would rename all of their Crystal slaves with cipher names, instead of respecting their ancestral Leaper names. They also created a cipher for the Matrix party, which resembled Late Andanese because the Matrixes had spent great effort in learning Late Andanese in order to break the ciphers used by the Lilypad kids.

New impression of Lilypads

The sudden development of the Lilypads into a heavily armed faction surprised the Moonshines and other parties, who had expected the young, mostly female-led group to remain passive and perhaps to allow the boys among them who wanted to fight to join the westward boy-led parties. Even when news of the arms deal broke, many especially in Moonshine had expected the Slopes to betray the Lilypads and deliver them no weapons, or even to simply invade and take over the Lilypad territories. But it soon became plain that the deal was genuine and that the Slopes were taking nothing tangible from the Lilypads.

They realized that the Lilypads shared a lot in common with the notoriously unpredictable Slope army, and yet again worried that social bonds formed in the classroom were stronger than the Lilypads' oft-stated commitment to protecting women and children from the desires of predatory men.

Harmony codes

The Lilypads then developed yet another new code, which they called the Harmony code. This time, it was an entirely new language, mixed with a heavily ciphered version of Dreamlandic for proper nouns. The new words were coined so that people such as the Matrixes, who had learned many ciphers and also often spoke Andanese, would still lack the ability to decipher at least one of the Lilypads' codes. The ciphered names were used because it would be problematic to create new names for towns and other locations since there were so many names on the map that could theoretically come up in a coded message. Some placenames, however, were represented numerically, and these numbers were still ciphered.

The Harmony codes produced very exotic words. The phonology was largely based on Leaper, but letters were combined in unusual ways, often difficult to pronounce, which the creators felt was no problem because most of the messages would never be read aloud. Their word for "strike, injure, attack" was zgt. There was no /z/ in any language known to the Lilypads (Play, Andanese, Dreamlandic, or Leaper), nor could any of those languages end a word with /t/ or have a fricative consonant as a syllable peak (although Leaper allowed syllabic /s/, it appeared only when no consonant followed).

The grammar was simple, and based on Andanese. Play's grammar was difficult and had proven a barrier to spies in the past, but most Matrixes already spoke Play, and furthermore, many aspects of Play's grammar were tied to the phonology of Play in such a way that they could not be easily carried to a different language or even to a cipher.

Slopes' answer

The Lilypad cipher leadership (still just two boys and two girls) realized that the treaty they'd signed with the Slopes did not require them to also teach the new ciphers to the Slopes, but decided in a gesture of goodwill to offer the Slopes this new code as well. The Slopes thanked the Lilypads for their offer, but in their own gesture of goodwill, decided to use their existing ciphers only, saying that the Lilypads ought to have a language of their own to set them apart. The Slopes said that instead of learning the Lilypad code language, they might make their own. Thus the Lilypad Trade Language (the existing Harmony code) and the as-yet uncreated Slope Trade Language were announced.

The Slopes weighed the decision of whether to consider Slope Trade Language a Harmony code or something all its own; they felt the choice would have diplomatic consequences, as choosing a name that the Lilypads had picked for them could show that the Slopes still felt themselves to be close kin of the Lilypads, and that the Lilypads could still be leaders even though the Slopes were making most of the decisions at this time. In their case, the existence of the Lilypad Trade Language allowed the Lilypads to write documents "in Lilypad", meaning they were no longer just Play speakers. This too had diplomatic consequences, as they could claim to be a new tribe, and apply for certain legal protections even in nations they had no significant presence in. But they knew that they had more elemental concerns to take care of first.

War efforts diverge

With Slope weapons, the Lilypads made rapid gains against the child traffickers and other adult men who had invaded their nation. But the Slopes were losing territory in the west, as the Matrixes attacked the eastern Slope territories in a pincer movement from the north and south.

Here, the Matrixes sent in a traditional army in the northern wing of the pincer, intending to tempt the Crystal women away from the Slope plantations, but the southern wing consisted almost entirely of trained animals. The two wings could not communicate with each other, but expected that they would soon establish contact even so.

First contacts

The two Matrix troops entered Slope territory around the beginning of October. The northern Matrixes entered on foot, with their animals staying behind, while the southern Matrixes remained in the hills as their animals led the charge onto the Slope plantations. Thus the Matrixes on the south side could not reasonably expect to win the support of the Crystals held captive by the Slopes; they were expecting to kill the Slopes and then leave the Crystals alone to decide on their own whether to submit to the Matrixes or come in chains. The Matrixes knew that because of sulalaka, the Slopes would be immune to all land animal attacks, and that the Crystals would be far easier for their birds to attack than the Slopes would be. They had trained the birds not to attack the Crystals, but knew that the birds might disobey if they found themselves unable to target the Slopes. However, the Matrixes knew that the Slopes' weapons consisted mostly of swords, and that they had no range weapons of any kind, not even primitive ones. Thus the Matrixes figured they could starve out the Slopes by keeping them inside their castles, and then bring them to battle if they decided to face the animals instead of starving to death.

As the Slopes had entrusted the Crystals to fight the Matrixes on their own, saying that the Matrixes would be much more abusive, they had no easy way to stop the Crystals from cooperating with the Matrixes. Thus the Slopes knew that they might lose their slaves and not be able to fight to keep them. Their plan in this case was to form a front west of the castles to prevent the Matrixes from moving further west, though they knew that this would be difficult to maintain as they were not well equipped for a land battle outside their forts because they had invested so much in sulalaka.

STW's promise

STW had earlier promised the Slopes that their supply lines from the west and along the river would continue even during a Matrix invasion of their territory, and that the Leaper government of Baeba would support this. The Matrix invasion of Slope territory violated the Leapers' laws, while the Slopes' earlier invasion of Matrix territory did not; though neither the Leapers nor STW was on the battlefield in this war, the Leapers were angry at the Matrixes' disregard for their laws, and wanted to prove that Erala was a proper nation. The Leapers wanted to punish the Matrixes but could not so much as even remove the Matrix seats in Baeba's Parliament (not Erala's) because Matrix soldiers were still in Baeba protecting civilians from rogue police forces that had abandoned all claims to legitimacy.

The Leapers thus endorsed STW's commitment to the Slopes as the only significant way to show their support for the Slopes. STW, a corporation with an army, was simply maximizing its profits and took no position in the war, although they reaffirmed that they considered the Matrixes their allies and yet that because the Matrixes had not promised to defend STW, neither would STW defend the Matrixes in a war. This meant that the Slopes could cede large amounts of territory to the Matrixes and not need to worry about starvation, unless the Matrixes broke their own treaty by attacking STW, which was their only close ally.

Siege of Nipīpaša

Thus on the Nipīpaša plantation, the Slopes drew the Crystals into the fort, but allowed them to slip back out, figuring any Crystals who wanted to join the Matrixes would take this as a signal that they were free to do so and that the Slopes expected them not to, while those who stayed behind could be taken as loyal to the Slopes.

Thus it fell upon the Crystals to decide individually whether to remain with their Slope masters or desert them for the Matrix soldiers they knew might be equally or even more abusive.

Lilypads win in the east

Expulsion of human traffickers

At the beginning of October the Lilypads declared victory, their newly acquired weapons having given them the advantage in battle, and they underscored what they had earlier realized about how they had greatly overestimated the population of the indigenous adult groups.

Those traffickers who had boats moved northward into the lake, cold but navigable, and pushed through the Lilypad navy as they headed for the Moonshine state of Safiz. The Lilypads had sent most of their navy westward, and announced that they would allow the men safe passage through the remaining coastal guards in the interest of avoiding yet another battle, even though the Lilypads knew the men could return at a later time and resume their trafficking operations. Moonshine soon captured these men and executed them; something the Lilypads had refused to do.

The Lilypads did not announce the status of the remaining men, simply saying that they had been defeated and that the streets of Tāmta were now safe. The wider Lilypad population assumed that the men who had found themselves surrounded could have threatened to kill their remaining captive children even as they were facing certain defeat, and therefore that the Lilypad soldiers must have signed a treaty with them which spared the captives but which would embarrass the Lilypad leadership if its details were released. Indeed these traffickers left so quickly and obediently, releasing their remaining child slaves without question, that many outsiders assumed the Lilypads had signed an amnesty pact with them and that they had simply moved to another territory, perhaps intending to move onto Moonshine just as the first group had.

Attention turns to Tata

Then, the Lilypads and others focused their attention on the nation of Tata, the area in which their primary enemy, the Matrix, had first attained absolute power. Tata was now the only nation in which the Matrix had any exclusive territory of their own; their army patrolled much of Baeba Swamp, but Baeba was a democracy in which they could theoretically be voted out of power at any time, and even in the Matrix's exclusive territories, Baeba's overall laws applied.

Some said Tata was more of a corporation than a nation, as it had no native language, tribe, or history of its own. This was because the aboriginal tribes had been more diverse than in other areas, and because the tribes who moved in later had also been diverse and had a greater population density than usual. All of these things were due to Tata's having more plentiful natural resources than most areas nearby (all but Baeba), and a milder climate. Tata's climate in fact resembled that of the Play lowlands, far to the east and almost 10 degrees further south in latitude.

The Lilypads had diverse origins but a shared common culture, and many Lilypads had come to consider their ever-changing nation to be the successor state to the Anchor Empire. By contrast, they viewed Tata as an artificial creation. Many Lilypads talked about partitioning Tata with their enemy, Dreamland, saying they would be willing to allow the Dreamers to gain important territory along the coast just to destroy Tata.

Tata's cities had banks, stores, and other entities that belonged to the nation as a whole and not to a political party. It was much richer than the nations of the east, and this wealth consisted mostly of tangible products such as metal weapons rather than mere currency. Thus it was a tempting target for piracy, but had been largely safe in recent decades because the Matrixes, though not a naval power, kept tight control over the land.

Lilypad war strategy

The Lilypads wanted to join the Slopes' war against the Matrix primarily as a naval power, just as the Slopes (and the Matrix) were a land power. The Lilypad navy would cover the entire coast of Tata, forcing the Matrix off the beaches, which in their ideal situation would force them out of Tata as they would be cut off from their most convenient food source, the sea. Howecer the Lilypads understood that Tata most certainly could supply food for the Matrix soldiers even if they lost the sea. Nonetheless the Lilypad plan was to force the Matrixes to choose between fighting the Slopes as the Slopes pushed into Tata, or fleeing their homeland and most likely fighting the Slopes in Slope territory as they would have nowhere else to go but Baeba.

T4T

Around this time, the Lilypads created T4T (Play Yutas Pausanap), an ostensibly pro-feminist, anti-Slope, and anti-slavery organization within the Lilypad party. It was not itself a party or faction, and the Lilypads said that anyone of the tatea generation or younger who was not a Slope could join the group. They were nationwide but most members lived near Slope settlements.

Initial reactions of outsiders

T4T produced much propaganda with simple messages, stating for example that slavery was immoral and that therefore the Lilypads would oppose it.

However, it was plain that T4T was very weak, and many outside observers took T4T as yet more proof that the Lilypads would go to great lengths to avoid attacking the Slopes. These critics assumed that by creating T4T, the Lilypads would soon be claiming that they were doing the best they could to stop the Slopes, even though T4T did absolutely nothing, and that the Lilypads would do no more than this despite their now having weapons.

It soon became commonplace that when the Slopes committed a violent crime, T4T would threaten a nonviolent response in retaliation, sometimes even one that would only weaken the Slopes' victims. Yet these messages always appeared sincere. Because T4T used such simple messages, and yet never acted upon them, some outsiders felt that the Lilypads were discreetly signaling that they no longer opposed slavery, and that in general anything T4T claimed to oppose was something the Lilypads had decided to tolerate or even support.

Further literature produced by T4T

It soon became difficult for outside groups to take T4T's propaganda seriously. After a Slope gang committed a mass rape in a Slope-held city, T4T's leaders expressed anger and threatened to report the Slopes to the Leaper administrators stationed a few miles away, just as soon as the Slope guards moved out of the way so that T4T's messengers could get by without themselves being slaughtered. One T4T leader expressed remorse that the T4T's were not on the scene at the time of the crime, implying that they might have been able to satisfy the Slopes' desires at least temporarily.

Claiming to have won the support of the Deer Walker orphans, who were still mostly under ten years old, T4T invited the child traffickers of the UAO, Rain, and Raspara parties to meet the orphans in the middle of their refugee colony (Šanataŋūs), so the children could explain to the predators why it was immoral to hurt children and why society would be so much better if the children and their predators could learn to get along.

The Hipsides had produced masochistic propaganda in the recent past, frequently wishing harm upon themselves, but T4T had a very distinct style. One reason for the Lilypads' change in attitudes was that, now that they were heavily armed, they had quickly pushed out the child traffickers from their territory and felt that by making jokes they could overcome the painful memories. T4T's use of child traffickers as an object of comedy highlighted their recent victory over those groups; even just a month earlier, it had not been clear whether the Lilypads would even win their war. But the Lilypads knew that the child traffickers were probably still in operation somewhere nearby.

Zeniths attempt to befriend Matrixes

NOTE: The date in the next paragraph is too precise, as it was not a single decision made unanimously by all the Zeniths, but rather a gradual change of opinion. Also, it may refer to events that happened earlier.

In December 4197, the Zeniths decided that their only hope lay in breaking the fragile bond between the Crystals and the Matrix.

The Matrixes were able to make allies of the Crystals they abused for several reasons. Partly this was due to the Matrixes' success in propaganda. Partly it was due to their shared cultural connections with the Crystals (both being mostly Leaper speakers, not Play speakers). Partly it was because the Crystals were being abused in much greater numbers by the Slopes, who considered the Matrix their foremost enemy. And partly it was due to the Crystals' own party structure, which for a long time had encouraged stronger Crystal factions to abandon weaker factions at precisely the time when the weaker factions most needed help. Thus outside enemies were able to attack just one faction of Crystals and expect that the other factions would not only stay out of the war, but possibly even help the attackers. This meant that Erala's Crystals could not expect help from either their own party or from their party's traditional allies.

An additional factor keeping the Matrix-Crystal alliance alive was that the Matrix had earlier sincerely agreed, to the surprise of all, to release all Crystals and Soap Bubbles from their slave pools, to teach their weapon manufacturing procedures to the Crystals and Bubbles, and even to hand over a small amount of finished weapons to these parties. At the time the Matrixes had been more afraid of the Tinks than of the Crystals and Bubbles. Fearing defeat, the Matrixes had felt they would be better off by far spread throughout nations weakly dominated by Crystals than confined in a single large nation run by the authoritarian Tinks.

Helped by the Matrix, the Crystals had soon become almost as strong as the Matrix, and had maintained their strength through December 4197. The Crystals were thus in 2nd place in terms of military strength. (These were the free Crystals in Matrix territory, not the free Crystals in Slope territory, who were indirectly helped by the Matrixes' actions but not reliably in contact with the Crystals in Matrix territory. They were nonetheless entirely female, as the Crystal party had yet to revoke the order stating that all adult male Crystals needed to be at war in Baeba.)

The Zenith at this time was 4th, and they hoped that if they could ally themselves with the greatest power (Matrix), they would be able to secure a position like that enjoyed by the Crystals, while the Crystals, as their true enemies, would be reduced once again to the helplessness that they had just recently escaped. The Bubbles, meanwhile, would be killed altogether by the combined Matrix-Zenith. The Zenith realized its plan was unlikely to happen, but figured they would all lose anyway if they didn't act, so they put their plan into effect.

Zeniths stage violent protests

The Zeniths living in Slope territory launched protests against the Crystal women. The Zeniths knew that any sincere protest was expected to be followed up by military action, so they announced that they were about to attack the Crystals, and try to kill as many women as possible before the women killed off all of the Zenith men.

Thus, the Zenith "protests" were actually attacks directly on the defenseless Crystal women, which the Zenith leaders promised to claim were provoked by the Crystals' alleged abuses of the Zenith men.

The Zeniths claimed to be much weaker than the Crystals, and fighting an uphill battle. They stated that they knew they couldn't beat the Crystals on their own, and they pretended to collapse early on and sent out an apparently sincere peace treaty to the all-male Matrix party, asking them to dissolve their alliance with the Crystals so that the Zeniths and Matrixes together could crush the Crystal women's army.

Matrixes invade Zeniths

The Matrixes refused this peace treaty, and invaded the Zenith strongholds in Baeba Swamp. Because of the Leapers' earlier treaty declaring Erala as a refuge of peace, the Matrixes were allowed to fight a war against the Zeniths in the Leapers' own homeland of Baeba while remaining a legal party in Erala, so long as they did not take the fight to the Zeniths in Erala. The Zeniths meanwhile had been flagrantly violating these laws all along, and realized that if they surrendered Baeba they could dominate Erala and bait the Matrixes into a war in Erala that would reduce the Matrix party to the same illegal status that the Zeniths now had.

The Lilypad military strategists soon learned of this, and decided that the time was ripe to invade Tata, but a movement had arisen at home worrying that Moonshine had been right to say that the Lilypads were ill-prepared for battle, and would fall in great numbers to the cruel Matrix soldiers and in the end only help the Matrix as those who survived the battle would become slaves. Slightly more than half of the Lilypads (excluding the Deer Walkers) were girls, because those moving west to join the Slopes had been mostly boys. The boys who had remained were often weak, younger than average, and unsure of themselves in battle. Nonetheless the Lilypad leaders stressed that they might not have a better chance to take control of Tata anytime soon, as Leaper laws meant that the Matrixes could win in Baeba and then return to Tata without surrendering any of the territory they had won in Baeba.

Nonetheless, the Lilypad leaders still would not vote for a full war against the Matrixes, so they compromised by creating a new naval front and allowing the Lilypad sailors (who had already spread out over the Hipside coast) to move westward and occupy Tata's beaches, but warned them that if they were captured, they could not count on a rescue mission from the wider Lilypad navy.

Slopes plan for the future

NOTE: The date of this section might be earlier than Dec 4197.

Creation of middle class

The Slopes now drew up plans for a legally defined middle class in their SMS society. They called these people Dolls, the same as the Matrixes' slave class, and said that any of the Matrixes' slaves could flee into Slope territory and join the new middle class. But they also said that these people were Dolls because the Slope ruling class was free to toy with them and discard them once they were broken. (Although they had taken this metaphor from the Matrixes as well.) Though the Dolls would have more rights than slaves, their lives might be more dangerous than those of the slaves. They felt that the existing free Crystal population, whose villages the Slopes often raided, might be offered Doll membership, as they felt this would be more economically efficient than their current system, and those who refused would be enslaved.

The Slopes took many of their ideas from the Cooks, a party of children aged 10–13 who had drawn up rules intended to help them keep their nation's rogue adult population under control. (The Cooks had had a small adult police force, and indeed these men were mostly their own fathers, but they soon proved disobedient and the Cooks were left on their own.) Other ideas were taken from the Scorpions. The Slopes said that the Dolls would be a legal political party in SMS and could vote, but that the governing party of SMS would always be the Slopes. This was similar to the Leapers' administration of Baeba Swamp, whereby the Leapers allowed rival parties to outvote the Leapers and force the Leapers to enact laws that they disagreed with, but none of these rival parties could change the structure of the government itself, because the sole authority for this rested with the Leaper administrators.

New Slope laws

The Slopes created a new social ladder (taāmava) to rule their society, saying that they were building on the Crystals' racial discrimination program and filling in the gaps. The new system grouped all of the Crystals together; the Slopes said that if the Crystals wished to continue discriminating against their own members internally, they were welcome to do so, but that the Slopes would not bother to memorize which were the high-ranking Crystals and which were the lower-ranking ones.

The Slopes however agreed with the Crystals in saying that they, too, reserved the right to discriminate against fellow Slopes. Indeed, like the Soap Bubbles, the Slopes said that even their own members could fall to the bottom of the hierarchy for various reasons, even things that they might not perceive as their own fault, such as being unintelligent. This was a rare change of social policy for the Slopes, who had so far strictly held to their founding party platform, in which they had stated that even the least among the Slopes would forever be of higher status than the best among their slaves. The Slopes thus rejected the policy common among various parties in which social misdeeds by a party member could lower their social status only to a fixed floor beneath which they could not fall. Now, the Slopes could expel party members and promised the right to vote them into slavery, although they said this punishment would be very rare.

Effects

Thus, the Slopes had become a closed-entry party, similar in structure to a tribe, and also stated that they had the right to expel their members. Thus they resembled Moonshine, whose courts often deprived men of citizenship, making it illegal for them to live in towns. The Zeniths by contrast were open-entry and could not expel any members. The Slopes hoped that their new policy would encourage Slope supporters they felt unfit for tribal membership to join the Zenith, where they could be among people who thought like them, rather than joining an anti-Slope party out of spite.

Vampapūsuu

Still, the Slopes opposed racial discrimination, as did Moonshine. Moonshine had always said that they would never discriminate by race within their nation, and that restricting their nation to a single race ensured that racial discrimination could never arise. The Slopes admired this but said that they did not need clever logical arguments to justify their policies; though the Slopes had also long claimed to oppose racial discrimination, they stated that they reserved the right to discriminate against other races while opposing the right of other tribes to do the same.

TPM

Young people who wanted to ally with the Slopes even though they knew they could no longer get Slope party membership, and also felt unsafe in the Zenith army, were called the Tašapaimma (TPM) tribe; note that this name was not related to the girl's name Tapaīmma, with a long /ī/ vowel. This was in contrast to Šatapi, one byname of the newly created Slope tribe.

VPU and the Soap Bubbles

The TPM's were also called Vampapūsuu (VPU) for their ideology. The VPU supporters, being an ideological grouping (but not a party), included some non-TPM's, often migrant Soap men and other adults who had been locked out of the youth-based power structure of the Slopes, Squares, and even of TPM.

The Soap Bubbles were one of the few political parties who still preferred that well-educated adults rather than teenagers hold the reins of power, but they were very few in number, mostly men, and had such a strict entry barrier to their party that many of their own biological children had lost interest and therefore the Soap Bubbles were in danger of dwindling away to nothing. Some teenage children of Bubbles, realizing they were likely to fail their own party's entry test, wished to move from Soap to Slope but now despaired at the Slopes' own entry test, largely based on intelligence, and worried the Slopes would not only refuse to admit them to their party but also target them for abuse. These people felt they might have a better chance if they tried to join an ally of the Slopes rather than the Slopes themselves.

Because VPU was not a party, the adult Soap Bubbles could join without relinquishing their party membership. However there were other people in VPU who were not Soap Bubbles.

By allying with TPM these people agreed to let the teenage VPU's make most of the decisions because they felt that being youth-led was their only chance of earning respect from the Slopes, even as they acknowledged that any ways in which the Slopes cheated the TPM leadership would probably be passed on to the adult VPU members and that they were thus doubly disadvantaged. TPM as a tribe had fully embraced VPU ideology and therefore non-VPU TPM's were rare and at risk of being captured as slaves by the other roving armies.

The Slope leaders decided that VPU's could own slaves, whether they chose to pay Slopes for their previously existing Crystal slaves or win control of their own slaves through combat. But the Slopes said that no Slope was obligated to sell any of their slaves to VPU buyers, just as they were not obligated to sell to each other.

The Slopes realized that their ideological allies, who knew that they could never become Slopes, might attack the people of their own tribes in order to spare themselves from Slope attacks, and that the Slopes therefore would never need to offer them a proper reward.

Contact with JIB

The TPM and VPU groups were not the same as the JIB group, but they had similar interests, and the Slopes welcomed all of them and said that they would soon all be treated the same by the Slopes. They numbered about 3,500 in total. These comprised about 900 JIB's who had joined early, with the rest divided about equally between 1,300 TPM's and 1,300 VPU's.

The Slopes forced the VPU's (nearly all men) into work-oriented villages without women, despite the fact that the Slopes had control of more than 20,000 Crystal women. These villages were concentrated in the center of Slope territory, near the capital of Vasās where the two rivers met. The TPM's lived in these villages as well, and had some girls, but were mostly boys. Each village housed around 60 workers, and although mixed villages predominated, the Slopes also created a few all-VPU villages and some villages where only JIB's and TPM's lived (thus, there were no adults).

The Slopes' name for the entire group was kapapis "shield animals" (or kapapais "shield soldiers"), because they had no weapons but were meant to behave as though they did. The Slopes created a new district for the work camps and called it Kapakau.

Announcement

The Slope diplomats announced to the Leapers that they had captured 3500 new members, and were seeking three more seats in Parliament which they hoped the Leapers would assign directly to the Slopes. The Slopes said that, if necessary, they would give the new groups formal Slope party membership and then create a new shell organization to restrict power to the original Slopes. But the Slopes understood that the Leapers were familiar with legal loopholes having used them themselves and might decide to just grant the new seats to the Slopes.

The Slopes also claimed that the wellbeing of their new people was better than that of slaves captured by other parties, but conceded privately that they were the first major party to confine their own supporters into work camps.

The Leapers were impressed that the Slopes were confident of their ability to capture and control the adult male VPU's (most Soap Bubbles were men). They estimated that enough Soap Bubbles had submitted to the Slopes that the next census would show less than 1,000 Soap Bubbles, thus depriving them of representation altogether, and therefore the Leapers approved the transfer of the Soapies' single parliament seat to the Slopes. However, both the Leapers and the Slopes suspected that many of the newly joining Soap men were actually migrants from the low desert country. These men had invaded the Slopes just as the Slopes were invading them, and they seemed to have mixed motivations. The Slopes distrusted them, even the ones who claimed to be pro-Slope, and therefore felt that they would need to be watched over more securely than the teenage supporters of the Slopes.

Yāsauŋa

The Slopes helped establish a corporation called Tanunaita whose employees, the Yāsauŋa, were paid to do slave-like labor alongside the Crystal slaves who were not paid. They were also in charge of those slaves. Thus the Yāsauŋa saw their paid position as giving them authority, not responsibility; they were paid because they were superior, not because of their behavior. But the Slopes insisted that the Yāsauŋa, despite their superior legal status, must do manual labor and not merely give orders.

Plans for the future and rules about marriage

The Slopes had always discouraged their members from marrying enslaved Crystal women, but also made it clear that they would not prosecute sexual assaults against them. The Slopes said that the young Crystal children, who were both boys and girls, would provide the future slave pool for the Slopes, and therefore that the Slopes should reproduce among their own kind and not have a mixed ancestry class. But now, since the Slopes were denying converts and expelling their own members, they said that these pro-Slope non-Slope men would have the right to marry Crystal women over the age of 18, with or without consent from the woman, so long as they agreed that all of their offspring would be legally equivalent to Crystals and therefore liable to be enslaved. The minimum age of 18 was chosen because the Slopes were all teenagers and did not want to compete with adults for marriage.

Many Slopes had been sexually assaulted by Zenith men when they were younger. These included both boys and girls. Indeed, at the Slopes' very founding meeting, Zenith men assaulted a teenage Slope girl after nightfall, and the Zeniths celebrated what they came to speak of as their intimate relationship with the young Slopes.

The Slopes had still not fully protected themselves from the Zenith rapists, whom they agreed to tolerate and even consider allies. The Zeniths meanwhile tolerated Slopes' attacks on them, saying that Zeniths were not required to defend other Zeniths, and that because they also refused to expel rapists from the Zenith party, all of the Slopes' revenge attacks on them were justified, even if they attacked a Zenith man who had not commiitted any crime.

The Slopes almost never sexually assaulted the Zeniths, even though there were female Zeniths, but simply used violent attacks. The Slopes had come to refer to Zeniths as pauni tamakusu, a derisive Play term implying that they felt little pain, and that a Slope man who attempted to sexually assault a Zenith would only be wasting his time, as the target would feel more pleasure from the experience than pain. Thus the Slopes even discouraged castration, saying that the only proper response to the Zeniths' attacks was to kill the Zeniths. Meanwhile, Slopes who had been victims of Zenith sexual abuse preferred to re-enact the scenes of abuse with helpless Crystal women.

Relations between the classes

The Slopes reiterated that they had no plans to abolish slavery, and would maintain a large middle class of Dolls, separate from the slaves, who had many legal rights and could hire slaves as laborers but could not actually own slaves. They hoped that this might drive divisions between the two lower-status groups, who were largely both Crystals, and therefore prevent them from uniting against the Slopes.

Reform of Slope legal system

The Slopes still refused to set up a police force or a court system. But they decided that it would be politically advantageous to define their armed members as soldiers, saying that they deserved honor for protecting the unarmed citizens, including non-Slopes, from enemies such as the Matrix. They said that non-Slopes could not join the military because of the risk of treason, and therefore their prohibition of weapons to non-Slopes could be described as necessary for the safety of the nation. Previously they had made no attempt at a moral justification for their policy.

This meant that it was no longer just the Dolls who were legally prohibited from accessing weapons, and that the Zeniths were all criminals now. But since the Zeniths had defined themselves as a criminal organization all along, this changed nothing, and the Slopes promised the Zeniths that they would make no attempts to disarm Zeniths within Slope territory.

Plans about population growth

In February 4198, the Slope leaders began talking about adopting yet another group of small children, this time the children of the Tink party living in Baeba Swamp. The Tinks were an ally of the Zenith, just as the Slopes were, but the Slopes and Tinks had no formal relations because many Tinks were the fathers of young Slope leaders, having abandoned them when they were much younger in order to move to Baeba. Though many Slopes were not among this group, the knowledge of their recent history had kept the two parties from forging close ties. Now the Slopes felt that this situation might help the Slopes peel young children away from the Tink men who had already abandoned the children they had raised with the women of the Cold party in their original homeland.