Tamta

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

Background

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

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

Lakeside territory

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

Scorpion migration

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

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

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

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

Early political reforms

Arrival census

The Scorpions had counted their population as 5,383 enrolled members along with 738 children who had joined the journey west, mostly younger ones, who had chosen not to become Scorpions (earlier, the Scorpions had pledged that they would not take care of non-members, but many of these children were orphans so young that the Scorpions softened their pledge). There were only a handful of adult Scorpion members, nearly all men. They were joining a population of about 5,500 refugees, less than 1,000 of whom were enrolled in the Hardwood party, the only other legal party in Tāmta. Thus the Scorpions were about half of the population, and had a median age of 12 years old. They were about 60% boys.

Most of the refugees were not enrolled in any party, were transient, and mostly did not consider themselves citizens of the Scorpions' new nation or of any other nation; they accepted that so long as they chose to continue living in Tāmta, they would need to obey newly passed laws that they could not vote on. The Scorpions estimated that there were 4,000 of these living in Tāmta. Of these about 2,200 were children under age 18 (not 13 as was the usual reckoning age), but most of these people did not have stable employment and only lived in Tāmta because it was by the lake where there was a stable source of food. They were legally homeless because the Hardwoods reserved the structures they had built and maintained for their own kind, and therefore slept outdoors most of the time. But because Tāmta had such a cold climate, they were welcome to sleep in various large, unfurnished Hardwood buildings that protected them from the snow but offered sleepers little comfort.

The Hardwoods had only 422 children living with them, as they had mostly been in Tāmta longer than the others and had slowed down their family formation.

The Scorpions called the unenrolled people Nuŋipe because they went out on the lakeshore and lived mostly on fish.

Demographic concerns

As a refugee territory, the land the Scorpions now called Tāmta had been overcrowded even before the Scorpions had arrived, and they now planned to double the population. The Scorpions realized that most of the population was already homeless and sleeping outdoors most of the time, as the Scorpions had themselves done for most of the past year.

Assembly of parliament

The Scorpions in their tiny nation created a Parliament of 98 representatives, serving alongside a handful of at-large officials, all under the control of two overseers who in turn reported to a single head of state. This surprisingly large government was based on an ideal system the Scorpions had used in school, and also had very short terms; for example, the parliamentarians served only for six months.

The Scorpions awarded extra power to the adult Hardwood voters, saying that since the Scorpions vastly outnumbered the adults it would be unfair to run their elections based on raw vote totals.

Treasury

Within the government, the children created a treasury department, capable of levying taxes on the rest of the population and of certain other duties involving transfer of money.

The parliamentarians made up about 1% of the nation's population (100 out of a bit more than 10,000), and the Hardwoods who held much of the money in their nation made up about 12% of the population.

The tax system was modified to pay for the parliamentarians' salaries; the Scorpions announced that between this and the other new things the Scorpions needed to get around, the Hardwood taxpayers would be paying about 10% more than they had before the Scorpions arrived.

They decided to formalize this as a new 10% monthly tax (not a 10% increase) on the Hardwoods' monthly incomes, saying that most of it would be turned back to the state and therefore that the Hardwoods would not feel the hit so hard. The Scorpions' justification for the sudden change from a 10% increase to a 10% tax was that Hardwood society was so close-knit that they were in effect paying a 100% tax each month, with all Hardwood families being equally the payors and the recipients.

The Scorpions said that they would never need help with basic necessities of food, shelter, and clothing, but that because the new government offices required some of the Scorpions to devote their time to other things, these people really would need help with meeting basic needs, so their salaries would be higher than their occupation would otherwise merit.

The Scorpions then exempted themselves from the taxes, saying that they would re-distribute money among party members. Thus the new tax applied only to the Hardwoods. Since the Scorpions had not integrated fully into the cash economy, this changed little. The Scorpions also exempted the 4,000 non-Hardwood adults from the taxes, saying they were not physically capable of extracting payment from these people. Thus the Scorpions told the Hardwood minority that it would be their job alone to shoulder the tax burden for their new nation.

Plans for the future

As a majority, the Scorpions knew that they could not rely on the work of the small Hardwood minority and would need to do some work of their own, too. Yet they claimed that they were accustomed to a much lower standard of living than the Hardwoods, even though the Hardwoods were descended from refugees, and therefore that they would be able to live comfortably even if they were able to draw only a small amount of money from the Hardwoods' taxes.

Even so, the Scorpions planned to put some money aside to allow a few Scorpions to live without working in the wider economy. These children would then have the job of finding ways to extract more money from the Hardwoods and, if possible, also from the transient adults whom the Scorpions were not yet confident enough to confront. Thus the Hardwoods would be paying the Scorpions to take money from the Hardwoods.

Further changes to taxation system

The Scorpions soon interpreted their new 10% income tax as a wealth tax, saying that because the Hardwoods shared their belongings, all income was wealth and all wealth was income. Running the numbers, the Scorpions announced that they would therefore be transferring 70% of the Hardwoods' property to the Scorpions within the first year of their power. They gave the Hardwoods three semesters (18 months) to complete the full transfer of all property to the Scorpion treasurers, and the Scorpions promised that once they owned all of the property in the refugee colony they would open it up for communal use.

The Hardwoods realized that the Scorpions had never had a proper education in the field of economics because their parents' parties, chiefly the Cold Men, had always left the job of running the economy up to a small group of trained professionals rather than the entire population.

First elections in Tāmta

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

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

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

Term lengths

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

Opponents react

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

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

Impossible victories

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

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

Hardwood nomination process

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

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

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

Outcome of first elections

August 1, 4192

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

President

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

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

Protests begin

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

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

Proposal for reform

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

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

Electoral reform bill

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

Four-party system

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

Beetles

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

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

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

Top Riders

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

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

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

Gender split

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

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

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

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

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

Schedule

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

Hardwood reaction

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

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

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

First days in Parliament

The 100 new parliamentarians, fourteen committees of seven each plus two overseers, were paid by a 10% monthly wealth tax on the Hardwoods. Thus they were better off than most people in Tāmta.

Although many Hardwoods supported this system, saying that the young children were legitimately better educated about politics and therefore fit for the tax-supported government jobs they had assigned themselves, other Hardwoods complained that the new jobs had never been needed before and therefore still were not needed, and that the children had most likely created positions that they had remembered learning about in school when they were even younger, rather than positions that they themselves had needed when they were living independently. This would mean that the Scorpions would perform no important work in their new jobs and would not know how to perform the jobs adequately even if they were made to. Thus, the complainers stated, the 100 new Scorpion parliamentarians were being paid 10% of Tāmta's entire budget to do nothing, and yet, because they were in Parliament, the common people could do nothing to stop these payments, and the Scorpions could dispurse them however they wished, or even raise the taxes even higher to support the rest of the Scorpions.

Hardwood plans for the future

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

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

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

Views from the wider population

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

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

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

Treaty with Players

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

School system

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

Structure

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

Hardwood party reform and new election cycle

Until this point, the Hardwood party had had no internal structure, as they had not needed one (or indeed needed a party at all) until the Scorpions came to rule over them. The Hardwoods now decided amongst themselves to create a formal internal party structure, whose elections would be synchronized with those of Tāmta. Hardwood internal party leaders need not be those serving in the Parliament, but they did allow persons to hold both offices simultaneously, as holding two offices simultaneously had been permissible in many governments of their shared cultures for a long time.

Since the Hardwood party existed for the benefit of the Scorpions, the Hardwoods allowed the Scorpions to vote in the internal Hardwood party elections. Thus the Hardwoods became the only party in the known world, apart from some slave parties, in which non-members could choose who would lead the members. But they said that the Scorpions' votes would count much less than the Hardwoods' own votes, suggesting a 10:1 ratio. This meant that the Hardwoods could outweigh the Scorpions' votes, but only if enough Hardwoods cared enough about the election to show up to vote. Since the Hardwoods in general still lacked enthusiasm for politics, the Hardwood leaders figured this was fair: if a candidate could not drum up enough support among their own population to gain a significant vote total, they deserved to have their leaders picked by children.

Results

Since these new elections were less important than the ones for the nation of Tāmta as a whole, the Hardwoods suggested that they be held less frequently, but the Scorpion-led parliament insisted that they be held at the same time and every time as the national elections. The Scorpions also voted themselves a 1/6 voting weight in the Hardwoods' elections, rather than 1/10 as the Hardwoods had proposed. At this time, only 379 adult citizens of Tāmta were enrolled in the Hardwood party, meaning that the Scorpions could pick every single position in the Hardwood party if they chose to do so, and even if every single Hardwood member showed up to vote, they would not outweigh the Scorpions.

The Hardwoods accepted this, but reminded the Scorpions that the Hardwoods still had some strong counterweights. There were other adults in the area who were still disinterested in politics and had not enrolled in any party (separate from the Hardwoods who had agreed to join but were mostly not voting), and more refugees could arrive from areas outside Tāmta. The Hardwoods also had their own child population, though much smaller than the Scorpions, which would be enrolling as they became adults. The Hardwoods also said that they might allow children to vote in the Hardwood party internal elections but not in Tāmta's.

They also reminded the Scorpions that even if they lost to the Scorpions on all of these points, they could simply revoke their original agreement to let the Scorpions vote in the Hardwood internal elections. The entire Hardwood party apparatus had been intended for the Scorpions' convenience and could be withdrawn at any time, and the Hardwoods could secede from their own party and form another if they felt that the Scorpions were gaining too much power.

Effects of new party system

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

November 4192 election

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

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

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

Campaign begins

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

Four-party debates

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

Speakers on stage

October 17, 4192

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

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

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

Hardwoods prepare

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

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

First day of debates

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

The Hardwoods mentioned the ongoing Play-Lilypad war to test the children's opinions on what to do. The Hardwoods soon realized that the children were in denial, and had lost their sympathy for the Lilypads because to express sympathy would be to acknowledge that the war was real. This was an example of the Play concept of pitīpap kapuutu, the sympathy umbrella, where people who show sympathy for those in great pain show no sympathy for those in even greater pain because to acknowledge that such suffering can exist makes the sympathizer uncomfortable. This was an emotional reaction, not a logical one, and thus was separate from the Crystals' various statements of refusal of help to Crystals who were trapped in supposedly unwinnable wars (e.g. the Eggs who were invaded by men calling themselves Firestones).

The Hardwoods realized that the Scorpions had already stated at their founding meeting that they were neutral in the war and would not show sympathy for the weaker side purely because they were suffering more. Moreover, the Scorpion party constitution implied that boys and men both made good soldiers, implying that they did not see, or refused to admit, that any war in which adult male soldiers fought children would be grossly unfair to the children. But many Hardwoods believed that they could force the Scorpions' true emotions to the surface if they were gentle and subtle.

Final days of campaign

Orphans

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

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

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

Results of election

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

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

The Scorpions assigned the two highest-scoring children that had been defeated to comparable positions in the Scorpion party so that their talents would not be wasted. They pledged that from then on, all of their candidates would automatically win some position in every election, and moreover that even the losing candidates within their umbrella party (the Beetles and others) would get accessory positions where they would help the main losing candidate in their position despite belonging to a different political party.

Foreign policy platform

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

Contact with the Players

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

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

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

Outside reviews

To some outside diplomats, the lack of sympathy proved the children's claims: if the children were exaggerating, they would have at least one ally on their side looking to gain political capital from the children's accusations against the various adult powers around them, while knowing they would face no serious military resistance. But precisely because they were telling the truth, no allies had anything to gain by siding with them, and therefore they tried to deny the children's claims in order to escape responsibility for help.

Summer elections in Tāmta

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

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

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

The Hardwood party announced that they preferred not to have their candidates stand on the debate stage in the middle of the row of child candidates, as they felt it embarrassing and awkward. They did not specifically forbid their candidates from doing so, but suggested that they could better reach their audience if they held separate events in which the candidates of the other parties would field questions to the Hardwood candidate, so he could address them all at once rather than pretending to be one of them.

Hardwood reform proposal

Now some Hardwoods proposed having two nations in one place, as was the case further west in Erala. The Hardwoods would revert to their own self-government where they did very little, and the children's parties could have all the government officials they wanted without adult interference. The two governments would meet up in binational diplomatic committees so that they would not be at cross purposes. This meant that there would be Hardwood officials after all. The Scorpions considered this idea, but felt that it would weaken their power overall, since the Hardwoods might claim that their smaller population size no longer mattered, as they were a fully independent nation.

As a compromise, the Scorpions agreed to set up two parallel governments: they would retain their existing Tāmta government with the Hardwoods, and the Hardwoods would also be allowed a nation of their own in the same place, whose laws and taxes would apply only to the Hardwoods (unless they were able to pull in more citizens from outside), with minimal Scorpion oversight only to ensure safety. Then, the Hardwoods would be required to participate only minimally in the Tāmta government instead of running candidates against the children's parties for every open position. This system, though complex, had precedent in that some parties such as the Soap Bubbles had traditionally governed themselves through their party, obeying party laws and courts in addition to those of the nation they lived in.

What the Hardwoods objected most to was the expectation that they should run political campaigns against children; while they agreed to the new system they said that they would prefer to isolate their candidates to positions in which few if any children were interested, while running unopposed in the elections of their own coextensive nation.

Next election cycle

In August 4193, Tāmta held democratic elections again.

Handover of power

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

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

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

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

Crystals arrive in Tāmta

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

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

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

Linguistic differences

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

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

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

Attempts to impress Crystal politics on the Scorpions

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

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

Scorpions' reply

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

Five-party rule

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

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

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

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

Symbolic gestures

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

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

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

Nest War

Diplomatic isolation

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

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

Rise of Saltspring

January 19, 4194

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

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

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

Saltspring goes to war

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

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

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

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

The Spines promised to avenge the Crystals' nonviolent political humiliation of them with extreme violence, saying it was the natural response for a free-standing army in their situation.

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

Battle of Lanăra

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

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

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

After the massacre, the Sunspots went into hiding so that the Crystals would not find them. The Spine War (Play Pamiti Vapias) had begun, and the boys came to think of themselves as the Spine battalion of the Sunspot army. (This was the Spines' name for the war, because they initiated it, but it later came to be known as the Nest War as the peak of the fighting moved westward.) They stated that the refugee territory was fair game for fighting a war, but that refugees were not fair targets. Thus, they were targeting the Crystals because they believed Crystals could not be true refugees.

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

Explanation of attack

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

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

Political motivations

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

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

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

Wider reaction

Crystals

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

Leapers

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

Moonshine

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

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

Hardwoods

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

Grass Walkers

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

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

New election cycle

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

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

War in Pavaitaapu

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

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

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

Migration of Crystals from interior states

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

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

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

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

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

Crystals plead for peace

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

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

Other Cold Men arrive

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

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

New Cold census

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

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

New colonies in Tāmta

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

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

Fipapanu

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

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

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

Titapa

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

Many people here formed a close relationship with the district of Fipapanu. Titapa's people stated that they had found their ideal place to live and would not move.

Papayau Šeke

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

Pusuaani

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

Vauŋāmtu

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

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

Šanataŋūs

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

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

Tamataa

Soon, subdistricts (neighborhoods) were founded, such as Tamataa, which was founded by two six-year-old boys. These neighborhoods had their own governments, but the governments had very little power. (Note that in the Play syllabary, this name was not seen as particularly similar to Tāmta, having only one glyph in common; thus, it was not a pun and not much remarked upon.)

Because the two six-year-old boys were in charge, anyone moving to Tamataa was required to obey them, and they attracted few settlers. Most settlers were six years old or even younger.

Timing of elections

Positions served here had a minimum term length of just one month, much shorter than the Scorpions' six-month terms that they had inherited from their positions in school classrooms. These one-month terms were a custom they had picked up during their brief time in Nama.

Early events

The doctor

One boy was much sicker than the rest and could not meet his daily needs on his own. Although he could walk, the living situation was so dire that children needed to be able to run at high speed. The other children in Tamataa felt sympathy, and understood that older children outside the neighborhood might be able to help, but told him it was not safe to leave the neighborhood because the people outside, even the other Cold Men, could be dangerous. But the boy continued to grow sicker and the other children were unable to help. Finally in desperation he left the colony at night and sought help in the wider district of Šanataŋūs. An older boy understood what was wrong but the boy needed to stay in Šanataŋūs for several days because they were fully reliant on Moonshine's traders for medical supplies. After several days the Cold kids were able to nurse the boy back to health, and he thanked them by showing them his home in Tamataa, but the other children in Tamataa yelled at him to stay out, as the older children were not welcome there and therefore neither was he. The other children had posted signs in the colony showing men kidnapping small children and stated that even though the people who had helped him were children, they were older and were part of the wider adult world and thus could not be trusted. Thus Tamataa's people came to be called Cupbearers, the people who rejected help from the only people who wanted to help them.

Expelled by the Cupbearers, the boy moved back to the wider colony of Šanataŋūs and began discussing the need for the Cold Men to re-enter Tamataa since he knew that there were almost certainly more children struggling as he had, who might die if they were forced to rely on other small children for advice and for help. The Cold Men were unsure how to handle a political conflict against children half their age, and wondered if they could hire adults to simulate an invasion of Tamataa that would drive the small children back into Šanataŋūs out of desperation.

Border patrols

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

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

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

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

Early population growth

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

Tasataupu

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

May 4194 census

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

Cold-Scorpion conflicts

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

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

Problems in Šanataŋūs

Border guards

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

Debate about capital status

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

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

Children's missions

July 23, 4194

Samaupa's mission

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

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

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

Attempts to reach Xema

These kids were interested in Xema for other reasons. Xema was the home of the Unholy Alliance (UAO), an organization of twelve men leading thousands of slaves who themselves owned slaves, all claiming to be working in human trafficking particularly of children. Xema was also home to the Ring (ZDE), which had invaded and occupied much of Play territory eight years earlier at a time when the Players and Cold Men had briefly been allied to each other.

Both of these groups had always focused their efforts on invasions far outside their territory in Xema, and both had specialized in child abduction. But whereas the Unholy Alliance sought no alliances with other powers and admitted that they were evil, the Ring soldiers had attempted to impress their enemies by saying that their kidnappings were much better for the children they captured, who were largely orphans, than to leave them alone in the midst of such a deadly war. Almost nobody was convinced by the arguments of the Rings, and there were few adults who had been in contact with both groups. Thus the children in Tāmta were the first to propose a war against both the Ring and the Unholy Alliance.

The children believed that conquering Xema would be difficult, perhaps impossible, but that merely reaching Xema could bring the roving armies under control. Moreover they believed that no other outside army would oppose them, and that the various armies of Xema might not even defend each other, so even an army of children could win a war in Xema.

Other missions

Other young citizens at this time, such as Pūmfūmti, also went on missions to record and transcribe literature, mostly seeking Play literature that would be easy for them to understand but difficult to access. Anyone who completed such a mission was allowed to claim the work as their own, as they had no expectation of the Players voluntarily giving them access to hidden Play knowledge, but they were also expected to acknowledge that the knowledge they were transcribing was of traditional Play origin.

One Play state that the kids were interested in was Taŋaiva.

August 4194 elections

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

Cold Men's position

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

Scorpions attempt to gain vote share

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

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

Plans to further extend voting rights

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

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

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

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

Crystal men arrive in Clover territory

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

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

Offer of Soap party status

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

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

Worries about Soap Bubble collapse

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

Situation in the Nest

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

Last wave of migration

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

Cold-Scorpion treaty

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

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

Cold Men propose reforms

New politics

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

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

Cold majority appears

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

Resolution and new treaty

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

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

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

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

Scorpions attempt to retain control

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

Hardwoods' reaction

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

Baeba model

They proposed a aystsem that required cooperation between the various parties who had split the territory, and especially so in cases where territorial claims overlapped. Thus, offices such as governor could not exist in the traditional sense; there could only be a person who had direct control over their own party's citizens and indirect control (through a cooperative effort) of the other party's citizens. The new Play word vapitāsīa "administrator" was used to describe these one-party governors whose stated goal was cooperation rather than competition. Each vapitāsīa was appointed based on their party's election procedures, and had authority over those people only. The Lilypads believed that, as so often in the past, their rival party's officials would get along perfectly well, perhaps even better so than did traditional governors in multi-party states; and that their main problem would be with the adults whom they were just now inviting to join their system.

First year in the Blue Cocoon

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

Economic conflicts

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

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

Hygiene

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

Contact with the Clovers

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

Formation of the Slopes

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

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

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

Slopes react

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

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

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

Breakdown of law

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

Scorpions and Crystals change

Eastern politics

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

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

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

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

Commons protest incident

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

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

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

Crystal reaction

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

Scorpion reaction

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

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

Cold Men respond

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

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

Hardwoods speak out

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

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

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

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

Two-party stage

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

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

New role for Šanataŋūs

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

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

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

Birth of the Hipside Society

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

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

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

Pacifism and policing

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

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

Hardwoods' view

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

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

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

Hipside response

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

Denial of military obligations

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

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

Usurpation of Moonshine authority

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

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

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

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

Treaty of Lampanga

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

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

Promise of unpaid labor

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

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

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

North-south migration

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

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

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

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

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

Crystals object

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

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

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

Plans for further expansion

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

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

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

Treaty of Cooperation

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

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

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

Language policy

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

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

Vowel-only cipher

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

The letter L

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

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

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

Later history

See Tamta/4196, Tamta/Whirlpool, and Tamta/later history.