Tamta/4196

Entry into the western war

Mad Children

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

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

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

Diplomatic contacts

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

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

Hipsides move west

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

International contacts

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

New nation

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

Hipside-Crystal meetings

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

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

Plans to take over cities

The Hipsides wanted to take over the existing cities along the coast. Much of the adult male population of these cities had recently moved inland to attack the Crystal women, and the Hipsides expected little resistance. They were particularly interested in winning control of the westernmost city, which they planned to rename Napa, a Play word for shelter. Napa was just a few miles east of the Matrix homeland of Tata, and because the Matrix lacked a navy, control of Napa would give the Hipsides control of much of Tata's seashore as well.

Establishment of new Hipside cities

Battle of Pāpuname

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

The Hipsides wanted to build a small navy so that they could move more quickly at sea, but knew that even though their main enemy had no navy and would be vulnerable to an attack by sea, they would need to abandon these ships because they could not invade by sea because they would need to circle around Dreamland and invade friendly Baebans to reach the hostile territory of the Matrixes within Baeba. Therefore they sought the help of the locals, figuring that they could buy ships for short-term use from them and then sell them back when they no longer needed them.

Renaming Dreamland

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

Hipside political imagery

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

Medley art style

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

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

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

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

Inherited culture

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

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

Feminine identity

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

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

Criticism of Matrixes

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

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

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

Formation of Ĕrala

Much of this will be moved off the page.

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

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

Naming

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

Exclusion of Baeba

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

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

Surrender of old land claims

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

Rejection of youth parties

Erala's Leaper party rejected all of the youth parties such as the Cold Men, Scorpions, Slopes, Clovers, and Hipsides, and disclaimed any territory that they dominated, and bundled their territory into a new nation called Tapiana in Play. This name meant nothing obvious in Play (though tapia na could mean "nectar land"); but upon hearing the name, many children recognized its similarity to Late Andanese tupiana "clover" and understood the intended meaning. The Leapers said any new land gained by the children's armies would go to Tapiana as well, even if the Leapers felt that they could easily take control back. Thus the Leapers implied that if the children invaded Erala, the Leapers would stay out of the conflict, meaning that they would neither support the children nor their enemies.

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

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

Attempts to draw Tapiana's borders

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rejection of other parties

Tinks

The Tinks still claimed much of Erala's land lay within the Little Country; their country's name had been chosen because while they had a lot of land, they focused their attention on their capital city and were thus still small at heart. Essentially, the Tinks had only one nation, whose borders overlapped those of Baeba and Erala. The Leapers had assigned this nation to Baeba, and given them autonomy, meaning that they accepted the Tinks' claims to control a nation and that this did not violate Baeba's territorial integrity so long as they obeyed the laws of Baeba. The Leapers however stated that since all Tinks were citizens of Baeba, they could not also be citizens of Erala. This meant that those Tinks living in Eralan territory (who had not been counted in either Baeba's or Erala's census) were unrecognized by the Leapers. The Leapers stated that to solve this problem, they could simply move to Baeba.

Promises to youth leaders

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

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

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

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

Outlying states

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

Because the Leapers had no reliable means by which to take a census of Hukuku, let alone collect taxes from the people there, they awarded Hukuku no seats in the Parliament. But they said that Erala's citizens were free to move there, and if a reliable trade route could be established, they could enjoy the full benefits of citizenship even if they were thousands of miles from the capital.

Demographics

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

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

Economy

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

Police and court system

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

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

Zeniths

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

Matrixes

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

Crystals

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

Soap Bubbles

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

Representation of small parties

The Raspara were still living in Erala, but had been nearly destroyed a few years earlier and had never recovered.

New parties

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

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

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

Position of the Crystals

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

Views on racial discrimination and slavery

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

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

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

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

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

Phoenix plans for slave captures

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

Dual party membership

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

Final boundaries

The Leapers canceled an earlier plan to subdivide the Nest states, leaving Erala with 12 states and therefore also 12 districts. They gave the new states Play names. They announced a census expected to be completed by early 4197.

Tāmta

The easternmost state, home to the Lilypads and many refugees. The only state that was within the nation of Moonshine.

The Leapers chose not to split Tāmta, even though it was by far the most populous state. The Leapers said that its many constituent districts such as Fipapanu and Šanataŋūs were only recognized by children and many of them had no meaningful internal governments.

Bear Trap (Māppipunu)

The Crystals' Mikagu, the only state wholly unoccupied by a tatea army, though even here the Squares controlled both rivers feeding into it. The Leapers stated that it would be the only state whose Parliament would seat only adults, and that these would only be of the Crystal and XIG parties, which were almost equivalent to women and men. The Leapers had already begun referring to the Crystals as the Female Party (a name used by one offshoot briefly), and to the other parties as male parties although there was not just one of them.

(Yispwilina)

The Square.

(Twadu)

The Slopes' homeland, though their borders did not coincide well with the preexisting borders, whiuch had been drawn in peacier times.

Capital territory

The capital territory of Timâra was disenfranchised because it was also part of Baeba and its citizens could thus vote in Baeba's elections. Such overlapping territories were not always disenfranchised, however.

Pavaitaapu

The Clovers were represented both in Baeba's Parliament and in Erala's, even though the Leapers had denied this to the Tinks.

Puba, Feyusi, Padisil, Bupufa, Olansele

Now controlled mostly by the Hipsides.

Xema

No votes were expected from Xema.

Hipside migration begins

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

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

Cultural contacts

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

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

Hipside-XIG diplomacy

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

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

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

Hupodas treaty

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

Filth fairy battalions

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

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

Plans for westward expansion

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

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

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

Leapers' reactions

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

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

Leapers investigate Hipside propaganda

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

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

Political conflicts in Erala

Zenith secession

The government of Erala was supported by taxes paid by all of the represented parties. Since the childrens' parties were not given any representation, they did not have to pay taxes either. The Leapers believed that this system was ideal. The tax money, once collected, was dispursed back to the parties according to their population size; this excluded members outside Erala, so the Crystals were not entitled to extra payments for being a transnational party. The Leapers understood that most of the parties in Erala were interested in winning wars, and so would put the money into their military, but the parties also put some of their money into basic social services.

Lastly, the Leapers themselves ran a basic welfare program in Erala that was open to members of all parties, and was funded by tax money collected from the adult parties but not returned to them. This was intended to entirely eliminate poverty, the Leapers saying that the only truly poor people in Erala would be those who could not physically reach the welfare distribution centers in the cities and who would thus be capable of refusing to pay taxes as well.

Children could collect these welfare payments despite not paying taxes. The Leapers said that they would even be willing to provide benefits to children living in Moonshine's refugee colony, now known as Hupedikas, but admitted that this was an unrealistic ideal, as to get tangible goods into Hupedikas would require Leapers or other trusted volunteers to enter territory where they would likely be attacked by the various groups of adult refugees who lived closer to the border.

Refusal of taxes

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

New currency

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

Plans to further cut ties

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

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

Zenith leaders

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

Leaper reaction

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

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

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

New Slope platform

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

Protection clauses

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

The name sulalaka, from a trade language, meant "children of Su", a legendary military leader who protected her followers and thought of them as children. The Play name nuiŋee, on the other hand, meant "home underwear", where the second morpheme was metonymic for ŋeeŋīp "work done willingly", implying that it could be done with little protective clothing on. Thus nuiŋee was work that could be done safely, willingly, and comfortably at home.

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

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

Personal fitness

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

Nonetheless, even though these people were few, the Slopes began work on an intelligence test, saying it would be a prerequisite for future applicants to the Slope party, but would not apply to the children of existing members nor to children the Slopes rescued from outside parties. The Slopes planned to write the test in such a way that children of any age would have an equal chance of passing the test, as it would rely on thinking ability rather than accumulated knowledge. This was somewhat like the Soap Bubbles' athletics test, required for admission, which tested endurance, balance, and resistance to bleeding, rather than muscular strength.

Support for slavery

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

Criticism of unpopular parties

The Slopes also criticized the Matrix and Dreamer parties.

Against the Matrix

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

Against Dreamland

The Slope leaders argued that Dreamland was moving away from politics and towards a struggle between corporations, whose employees were not allowed to have political opinions, and that because there was no way for the Dreamers to pursue their interests except economically, the Slopes would have an easy time exploiting the Dreamers just as they were exploiting the Crystals.

The largest corporation in Dreamland was known as Teenprop.

Another Dreamer corporation was called Gatotōl (a Leaper name, not a Dreamer or Play name, because they considered themselves transnational). Gatotōl stated that its leaders had no political opinions, and that their only duty was to return profit to their members. Unlike STW, Gatotōl had members who were not also employees, and to do this, Gatotōl registered in Dreamland as a political party. But because they specifically promised not to engage in politics, every share of power that Gatotōl gained in the Dreamer parliament took away the right of others to express political opinions. However, Gatotōl's power was already waning as Teenprop grew.

Against UAO

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

New Slope leaders emerge

The Slopes used a network of roads called Maišipa, the Handspan, to communicate with the Lilypads and others. The name was a reference to the early name of the children's colony, the Blue Cocoon.

Weaponers gain

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

These discreetly made weapons were called yešiba.

Two opposition movements

Some opponents of sulalaka had threatened to burn the Slopes' homes, saying that even if their own homes also burned, they were only losing a luxury, whereas the Slopes would be losing their very safety. These people were largely homeless, nomadic Raspara men who had lost their territory, slaves, and wealth in the battle against the children of the Lilypad army several years prior. Others were locals who had joined the group for political reasons. These people, Raspara or otherwise, were known as Vatiaya in Play, which was their name for one of the Raspara tribes, and this was a native Play word describing someone who refused to work indoors.

Another opposition to sulalaka was focused on the idea that it would make women more vulnerable.

Thus, the first group said that sulalaka was wrong because it was so weak to rely on the stability of a house when houses could be so easily destroyed. They thus said sulalaka was bad because it would not succeed. The second group said that sulalaka was wrong because it made women more vulnerable. Thus they said sulalaka was bad because it would likely succeed.

Followers

The weaponers each had their own dedicated followings:

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

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

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

Weapons delivery

The Leap Metal boys chose to distribute weapons in large amounts to very few people. They chose boys that they trusted, and said that these boys as the second step in the chain would choose who among the rest of the population would receive a fraction of what they had been given. Thus, the Leap Metal boys had a very small social circle.

Some of the boys who received weapons were:

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

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

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

Leapers reject children

Hearing that the Slope boys were arming themselves in preparation for a war in Erala, the Leaper parliament of Erala used its reserve powers to pass a law denying children the right to claim social benefits in Erala, and allowing the other parties to arrest them at will, stating that any children in Erala who moved about at their own will were violating Erala's territorial integrity even if they were orphans. This was a non-democratic action and thus did not require approval from the other parties.

The Leapers conceded that their new law would change little, since the Slopes had clearly dedicated themselves to a campaign of violence and were no longer pretending to be helpless young children. But before the new law, the Slopes had always been able to pose as members of other children's parties and therefore the welfare distribution centers could not deny them food or other benefits. In fact, few Slopes had attempted this, as the Slope leaders were quick to point out in their own media and diplomatic communications with the Leapers.

The Leapers nonetheless promised to continue diplomacy with the Slopes outside the context of Erala, and said that because they would not be meeting with them as Eralans, they could continue to meet with the Leapers even while at war, so long as they did not extend the war to Baeba, which was the Leapers' home base.

Lilypads' reaction

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

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

Other new youth leaders

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

Minor Slope leaders

Three new minor Slope leaders appeared at this point:

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

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

Wiper and Red Desert

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

TPBM

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

The Slope leaders rarely mentioned these boys except when praising members who had done great things, mostly feats of intelligence. Because both boys were intelligent and mostly self-educated, they had the qualities the Slopes valued most.

Tupaau

Another Slope leader was Tupaau, a rich boy who made fun of those living in poorer conditions, including other Slopes. He was descended from lower-class parents who were ancestrally from Thaoa, a nation with a poor reputation. In previous generations it was common to believe that anyone from Thaoa who ever accumulated wealth would soon spend it foolishly, and that it was better for Thaoans to never become wealthy in the first place. Tupaau's new Slope identity helped him transcend the inherited bias against Thaoa, as ancestry was rarely noticed or recognized among the party's most fervent believers.

Yīuvas-Pīsa

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

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

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

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

Vuupīte

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

Napama

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

Nīpimayava

A 16-year-old boy named Nīpimayava claimed to be very intelligent and said that he would sell his services as a military strategist to the Slope leaders rather than take a conventional military role; if they would not pay him, he promised to still remain a Slope and use his brain rather than engage in combat.

Obligations

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

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

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

Exploitation statement

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

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

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

Further plans

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

Likewise, the Slopes soon began talking about setting up a Gold-style democracy in the Nest, with the Crystals and Slopes as the only legal parties, and voting rights assigned to individuals who were enrolled in either party. This would mean that the Slopes and Crystals could choose their own lower age limits for voting rights. The Slopes knew that the Crystals greatly outnumbered them, and in any fair democracy (even a Gold-style one where minority parties' votes were amplified) could simply vote themselves into power and then vote to expel or even enslave the Slopes. The Slopes' plan was to hold a democratic election, let the Crystals win handily, and then stage a coup to put the Slopes into power even more securely than before, just to humiliate the Crystals by showing how naive they were to think that the Slopes had ever considered them to be equals.

Pimayava statement

The Slope leaders produced the Pimayava document (Pimayava Pupa, the Book of the Source of Pleasure), authored by a group of Slopes including a boy named Nīpimayava.

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

Reaction of outside parties

From the Zeniths

The Zeniths reading the new Slope platform believed it proved that the Slopes, despite their promise to shock the world with their crimes against innocents around them, still saw themselves as a children's party, forever in need of protection from the outside world, and that they were too emotionally and even physically fragile to commit the crimes they promised would soon terrify the populations around them.

The Zeniths knew from close contact with the Slopes that the Slopes governed their compact hideouts with strict discipline; all Slopes were instructed to be in bed at an early hour and to sleep long hours staying by the youngest children. This excluded the guards, who were awake at night to protect the forts, but these guards also slept long hours during the day.

The Zeniths were overwhelmingly male, and relied on the constant influx of criminals from outside parties to sustain their numbers. By contrast the Slopes, though also having a slight majority of male members, planned to rely on traditional reproduction and aggressive adoption and nursing programs to acquire and keep hold of additional young members from outside the party.

From the Crystals

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

From Moonshine

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

From the Lilypads

Ŋamaimmi

Ŋamaimmi was a Lilypad girl who supported sulalaka even though she agreed it would lower the social status of women.

Reformists

A few Lilypads, mostly girls, instead created a Slope-like movement within the Lilypad nation aimed at pursuing a lifestyle similar to the Slopes, but politically bound to the Lilypads and to feminine power. These people were called navāpi. They wanted to feminize sulalaka so that it would put men and boys at the feet of women without significantly weakening the nation's overall power.

There were many boys in the navāpi movement; these boys wanted to be ruled by women, believing their society would be safe from spree crimes; this was the typical Moonshine male position. But they were nationalists, meaning that they rejected Moonshine's support of a transnational alliance of feminine nations, and fearing that Moonshine would send them to war without weapons against the Slopes. Therefore the navāpi boys supported the Lilypads, and were leaning towards supporting the Slopes.

New allies for Slopes

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

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

Sunspot allies

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

Clover rebel boys

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

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

These boys popularized a mushroom-like helmet and mushroom imagery in general as a symbol of masculinity. They also used a flower that had a long projection from the center of the flower, and was considered to look masculine. They believed in the extension of male power over women, and that violence against women was necessary to bring them in line. Mapaimta in particular stated that he did not believe women could be victims of crimes, and that any violence against women would instead be a crime against the man who had legal power over her. In his view, therefore, women were slaves.

Because they had been educated by STW, they had basic carpentry skills, which many other children also had, but which the now held as a talent they could use to protect themselves, both by building homes and by building weapons and armor. The weapons being traded in the east were made of metal, and thus much stronger, but were not an easily renewable resource. These boys hoped that although they were weak, they would never run out of trees from which to build weapons and armor.

These boys considered themselves Clovers but stated if expelled by the Clovers they would rebrand as Carpenters (Play Nāša Vayu) rather than seek entry into the Slopes, the Sunspots, or any other party. They did not trust the Slopes for various reasons, and believed that the Slopes understood these reasons as well, and would prefer to have the Carpenters as allies rather than as members. They also did not trust the Sunspots, and their reasons for this were completely different. They worried that they might be attacked by the Sunspots if they could not get out of Baeba and into Crystal territory quickly, but believed that the Slopes would see them as members of the same generation and not attack.

Shields as weapons

A Slope girl named Samaupa-Vunuami refined the art of kapaŋuapi, the practice of using a shield as a weapon, so she could inflict injury even while disarmed, and in a hypothetical future battle where the supply of swords and other armor-piercing weapons had run out.

Anti-Slope coalition forms in the east

The Queen

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

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

Driver and others

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

An adult woman named the Driver (Play Nunuamifa) declared herself the leader of the anti-UAO program and stated that UAO was likely to invade Tāmta (in Moonshine's refugee territory of Hōki (Hupedikas)), where many vulnerable young orphans lived, so they could target young children.

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

The teenagers accepted the Driver's guidance, and stated that they would now begin seeking advice from adult leaders rather than relying entirely on their own minds, but that they still would not accept adults as members of their movement, let alone as leaders. Thus did not award her any formal position of authority and stated that if they ever went to war they would not expect any help from Driver or other adults allied with Moonshine.

Stargazer, still alive and living in safety in the northern wilderness, now also joined the anti-Slope coalition and became a strong supporter of feminist sulalaka, but continued to focus on her brain power and not on gathering weapons.

The fruit market

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

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

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

Moonshines' reaction

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

Moonshine also created a new argument that they themselves did not believe in, but which they stated could defeat the Crystals' argument. They stated that if the Crystals believed in a racial hierarchy based on military strength, the Moonshines surely outranked the Crystals, as the Moonshines were so far competently defending their borders whereas the Crystals were not. Therefore, by the Crystals' own logic, they should not expect to be welcomed in Moonshine territory. But in reality, the Moonshine position was complex: they supported allowing tribes who had won on the battlefield the right to rule over their enemies, and claimed that this was pacifism, and also stated that Moonshine was a closed-entry party and therefore foreigners could not join or even enter Moonshine territory without Moonshine chaperones, but they opposed racial discrimination outside their territory.

Skilled diplomats understood that while Moonshine was a single-party empire, internal disputes existed, and not all Moonshines were so cold and cruel to the Crystals. Moonshine was still funding humanitarian operations aiming to protect the Crystals from harm, even though these humanitarian workers were officially neutral and would also help the enemies of the Crystals. Likewise, even those Moonshines who most strongly opposed the Crystal women were talking about adopting the children of the Crystals, saying that by making them all childless they would rapidly accelerate the destruction of the Crystal nation, and that the adopted children would grow up thankful for the Moonshines' rescuing of them.

Variable migrations

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

Slopes attack again

In late 4196,Kanāmme led a troop of ten boys into a Crystal women's campsite and attacked the women indiscriminately. With the aid of their weapons, they subdued about forty Crystal women and made them into slaves. Later, a larger troop of Crystal women freed the captives and then put the Slope boys into a Crystal prison reserved for male criminals, mostly adults (the Crystals refused to distinguish between men and boys even in their criminal justice system). The Crystals promised that they would not kill the boys, but warned that if the Crystals were attacked by the Matrix, they would turn the boys over to the Matrix and that in Matrix captivity their lives would be much worse. The Crystals hoped that by being soft they might actually convince the boys to fight for the Crystals.

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

Fig day

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

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

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

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

Involvement of Dreamland

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

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

Battle of Hahénara

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

Slopes regroup

Prowlers

The Slopes strictly adhered to sulalaka, meaning that they would stay inside their homes for protection and not claim large amounts of land. They would rule from their forts by intimidation rather than walking the streets as Zeniths did. They referred to the Zeniths as prowlers (Play panapaa "dog-people"), saying that while the Zeniths were indeed very strong, they terrified the populations they ruled over by being "out" whereas the Slopes would stay "in". Thus a Slope-Zenith cooperative nation was possible, and the Slopes said that they would be willing to share territory with Zeniths so long as the Zeniths and Slopes never came into conflict. But because the Zeniths had such loose rules, the Slopes figured that some Zeniths would attack the Slope forts anyway, and not be punished by other Zeniths even if an alliance existed. Thus the Slopes knew they needed to be very powerful for their own protection.

Cradlers

The Slopes hiding out at a fort they called Nečinutī Vaivās, who called themselves the Cradlers, posted signs in various areas of the western part of Erala, saying that they would soon be attacking the Crystals in a coordinated attack, using much greater force than they had done before. They were warning the Zeniths and others to get out of their territory, not aiming their literature at the Crystals. The Slopes believed the Crystals were now incapable of resistance, even with warnings well in advance, and that announcing the attack to the Crystals well ahead of time would only humiliate them as they would spend the next few months trembling in fear waiting for the Slopes to finally attack.

The Cradlers promised to kill, enslave, or drive out about 10,000 Crystals from their territory, and then adopt all of their children. They considered adopting children the ultimate display of power, laughing at the Zeniths and Matrixes, who believed that raising someone else's children was the ultimate display of submission. The Slopes challenged the Zeniths and Matrixes to explain how their parties would grow if they could not reproduce. The Zeniths did have some natural families, but their membership was mostly adult males and therefore they grew primarily by attracting other adult males; the Matrixes were a closed-entry party which restricted membership to adult males by definition.

The Zeniths were a very old party who had long kept their population stable by continued recruitment of surrounding parties, focusing on adult male criminals. The Slopes claimed that they would cut off the Zeniths' recruitment stream by enrolling these people while they were still too young to be Zeniths, and therefore starve out the Zeniths' presence in Erala and perhaps in Baeba Swamp. The Slopes also claimed that the Matrix party, which had only been founded in 4177, was already past its peak and had survived only through child abductions; the Slopes stated that their practice of adopting children and treating them well would quickly prove more beneficial to party growth than the Matrixes' strategy based on abduction and abuse. The Slopes said that this was not a claim to moral superiority, but that it was simple fact that the young children they were raising would grow up to be loyal Slopes and that the abused children captured by the Matrixes would almost certainly defect from the Matrix party.

The Slopes said that they would double their population in a year, and that the adopted children would grow up more loyally bound to the Slopes than any converts ever were to the Zeniths or Matrixes. Moreover they believed that they would starve the other two parties of their converts, as even though the Slopes were closed-entry, they were still signing up new members every month and believed that they were much more attractive to outsiders than were the other two parties.

Hedonism

The Slopes split on the issue of hedonism. Because they arose from the Clovers, at the far western extreme of STW's trade road, they were out of reach of the Cold culture which prohibited alcohol for both children and adults. Thus they had grown up with alcohol. But the Sunspots had begun claiming that they had defeated the Clovers by addicting them to alcohol, as they had slain the young king at a drinking party when he and his friends were mostly asleep from drinking too much of the sweet candy-like palm wine that the Sunspots had taken control of from STW. The "Shoe" faction of Slopes endorsed the sober evil (taka vamapūm buni) and said that they would get greater pleasure from avoiding alcohol and recreational substances because they would be much stronger. Further, some said that true rage would only come from a life of sobriety, and they could therefore inflict far greater pain on the Crystals if their desires were not muted by alcohol consumption. Because they claimed their dedication to sobriety was actually evil, not good, they were Shoes (Play piaipa pāupaus) to the others.

The Shoes also extended this to sexual intercourse, saying they would not form any romantic attachments to the Crystal women or any others, and would not pursue rape as an end in itself, but only something the Crystals would need to live in fear of, since it would go unpunished. The Shoes said that they would continue to abuse the Crystals even if the Shoes no longer derived pleasure from it, since the infliction of pain was a goal in and of itself. The Shoes resolved to live in harmony with the hedonistic Slopes, because they believed they would grow quickly stronger, and therefore no conflict was needed.

A faction within the Shoes however argued that the Slopes were becoming addicted to abusing the Crystals, and therefore needed to kill all of the Crystals in order to free themselves of their addiction.

Meanwhile those who wanted to pair with the Crystals were called šaumīp, a word for a boy who seeks girls at an unusually young age, while their classmates are still pursuing childish pleasures.

Unwilling supporters

There were some teenagers who became Slopes because they supported the Lilypads (and Moonshine) ideologically, but opposed them because of their inaction and their unwillingness to prevent the Slopes from abusing the Crystals. They thus embraced their enemies, the Slopes, so they could tether themselves to the strongest power, even as they expected they would get no love from the Slopes. These people were called JIBs (Play Tutapa Vana) and the Slopes said that they would be the ideal prey when the Slopes became strong enough to turn against them and abuse their own supporters.

Youth wing

As the Slopes were led by teenagers, they created a separate group for younger children who wanted to help the party, and potentially participate in combat, but felt uneasy joining the ever-shifting power struggles between the older teenage boys who had accumulated most of the weapons and political power. These children were called North Slopes (Play Šavāuna), because they were in the shadow of the other Slopes.

The new laws

The Slopes' constitution at this time resembled those of the traditional nations to the west, but still incorporated youthful concepts such as nipa ŋem, similar culturally to a monster lurking under the bed, and reminded members that they would rule tāipam "on the playground" as well as on their plantations. These playgrounds were the areas outside their forts but before the slave plantations. This is because unlike some other parties, the Slopes considered the children they had adopted and given birth to to already be Slopes, not just Slopes-in-waiting or members of a different group altogether. Likewise they set rules for Crystal children who wished to visit the playhouses the Slopes had built for their children. But this last new law also showed that the Slopes differentiated the teenage leaders from the younger children they had adopted and given birth to.

Slopes still had no court system and did not want one. The ability to expel members helped tamp down the desire to punish those who attacked other Slopes. The Slopes considered these people criminals but until now had simply allowed other Slopes to take vengeance on them, but these Slopes could themselves be punished by other Slopes. Now, the worst of them were expelled instead, cast outside the Slope tribe and therefore having no guarantees of protection.

At this time the Slopes increasingly described their members as panūtās, belonging to the panūpi, the Play word for a gang existing for its own benefit and which was closed to new entrants.

Marriage and related issues

Despite their male surplus, many of the boys in the Slope army were so young they simply weren't interested in abusing the female captives, and so there were enough women to go around and the girls in the Tāmpe armies did not worry that they would be abused as well.

The Slope leaders stated that marriage was not an expectation in their society, and discouraged marriages with the captive Crystal women, and that if anyone did marry, the children of the marriage would not be admitted as Slopes. The oldest boys in the army were in their mid-teen years and these were the ones most likely to be interested in a formal marriage, as they were already above the usual marriage age for the ancestral Play society (but not of some other societies).

Slopes build cities

The Slope boys had encountered great unexpected difficulties getting their Crystal slaves to build them castles and roads, and had mostly decided to accept that the Crystal women were not skilled architects. They nevertheless were able to get the Crystals to put up defensive fortifications that the Crystals themselves could not enter without the Slopes' permission, and the Slopes referred to these as forts, and sometimes even considered them castles after all, since they felt they could live in harsher conditions than their enemies and still be comfortable.

The Slopes also took over ruined cities with empty buildings whenever possible. They founded the city of Vasās, in the district of Mayutasue, and intended to make it their capital city with a population of 50,000 people, though they stated that the upcoming war would go best if there were enough room for this many Slopes but that the Slopes would not all live there at once, because they would be easy to attack if they were all in one place. Thus 50,000 was an intended peacetime maximum population. The Slopes' total population at this time was only about 20,000, but they were growing and expected to adopt and reproduce rapidly.

Settlement of Vasās

The Slopes moved into Vasās quickly because the ruined buildings meant they did not need to construct anything new, and they were hardy enough to make use of what remained. Some said that a ruined city was fit for a group like the Slopes who thrived in chaos. The city would be difficult to siege as well. The Slopes also compared Vasās to the mythical city of Ŋapata Ŋūa, a city without work, believed by some to exist in southern Play territory.

Desert campaign

The Slopes also expanded to the south, into the low desert country.

Move to the south

Further east at the fringe of Slope territory they built another city called Pasasu (Pasašanu), in the new province of Našatua, again in the ruins of a previously existing city. Unlike all other Slope settlements, Pasasu was in historically Soap territory and faced the southern desert with no outlet to the sea. However the Soap Bubbles no longer lived in this area in large numbers. Therefore the Slopes planned to make the ruined city their own and fortify it so they could launch an attack on the surviving Soap settlements at the even lower elevations further south and west.

The Soap Bubbles, traditionally fair-skinned and often with blond hair and blue eyes, ruled the desert, including the dark-skinned tribes who had lived there for hundreds of years. Neither claimed to be aboriginal, but the Soap Bubbles were in charge for various reasons. One reason was that they used an admission test and thus were difficult to join, and this test required immunity to sunburn and the Soap Bubbles were suspicious of blushing; because the dark-skinned tribes could not visibly blush or be sunburned, the Soap Bubbles considered them deceptive rather than assuming that they would all pass the test. The Soap Bubbles officially had no racial barrier to entry and they often married the dark-skinned people, but the children of these marriages, like other Bubble children, still had to pass the admission test as adolescents and therefore anyone marrying outside the tribe often shed their own tribal allegiance and therefore these people were not Soap Bubbles. The dark-skinned tribespeople had (many of them) been Crystals but they had shed this as well because the Crystals near Baeba had gone to war and these people largely did not support that war. Thus the Soap Bubbles were in control.

It had been sometimes claimed that the Soap Bubbles were not capable of racial discrimination or racism, for various reasons. One reason was that because of their admission test, many of the people they were discriminating against were their own children, and they seemed to have no favor towards these people as compared to the aboriginals. Another was that they readily married with the aboriginals, even though the children of these marriages and often the parents usually ended up leaving the Soap party. Thirdly, the Soap Bubbles were considered to be of high moral stature broadly stated, in part due to their admission test, even though the admission test was based on physical stamina. Also, because Bubble society had been so calm, outsiders assumed that there must not be any great conflicts, even nonviolent ones such as racial discrimination programs. Therefore the Slopes moving into Soap territory accepted that they would be the ones blamed for anything the Soap Bubbles did against the aboriginals.

Plans for future conquests

As the Slopes moved south, some said that they should eventually rule the entire desert. The native tribes here were dark-skinned, apart from the Soap Bubbles who ruled the land. Thus, the Slopes pondered appealing to the native tribes, saying that they could release them from the Soap's control. But they figured that their reputation for violence had preceded them and that the native tribes would be strongly pro-Soap.

The Slopes declared war even on distant nations like Egàqi, saying that once they had won the desert they would fight for control of the tropics too. This was all legal because these nations were not part of Erala.

The Slopes planned to use whips on their captured Soap Bubble slaves, tormenting them by showing that their skin was as weak as the Slopes', despite the Soap Bubble pledge that their skin would resist wood splinters and similar injuries.

Soap men move north

At this point, some Soap men moved north into the territory of the Slopes who were invading them. They were heavily armed, saying that the Slopes did not frighten them, and that they wanted to come in peace and live in the Slope nation. They said it made no difference whether or not they were at war; the Soap Bubbles were used to living in rough conditions, and the many young Slope boys around them were no more threats than any wild animals could be. They also said that they had no intention of protecting the other Soap Bubbles, and that the Slopes were free to do as they wished in the desert, whose harsh climate they felt would wear down the violent Slopes and lead them to make peace with the indigenous ruling Soap class. The Soap men told the Slope boys that many more of their troop would soon come to live among the Slopes.

The Slope leaders admitted with some embarrassment that because they lived only in cities, they could not stop enemy soldiers from freely roaming around the countryside of their nation. They reassured the people in their forts that the roaming Soap men were no more a threat to their safety than the roaming Zenith men who had been there for years, and that the Soap Bubbles might become a nuisance but would not be a military threat. They claimed that the Soap leaders' promise to be peaceful was proof that the Soap knew that they could not actually capture any Slope forts.

The Slopes realized however that the Leaper-made laws of Erala stated that any violent conflict taking place outside Erala's borders was legal, and that the Slopes' war in the desert was also legal (because they were not planning to add their conquered land to Erala), but that the Soap invasion of Slope territory, if it were to turn violent, would not be legal according to the Leapers, even if the Slopes had committed far worse violence against the Soap. The Soap Bubbles knew this and simply had little interest in the Leapers' Erala project. Thus the Slopes understood that the Soap Bubbles were simply doing what they were legally expected to do — claim nonviolent goals — and also that it was unlikely that the Zeniths would help protect them from the Soap Bubbles if the Bubbles launched a surprise attack against the Slopes.

Soap Bubbles' plans for diplomacy

The Soap Bubbles knew that they generally had the moral high ground in any conflict, because they were the only party who promised to obey the laws of the nations they lived in before applying their own; other transnational groups openly flouted the laws of all nations but their own (if they had one), saying that their own tribal loyalty was more important than the welfare of the nations they lived in.

But the Soap Bubbles also knew that the Leapers were known for their amoral politics, and would not easily be swayed by moral arguments, and yet that the Leapers were so skilled in propaganda that they had positioned themselves as moral judges even so, leading other outside powers to ask the Leapers' opinions on issues rather than come up with their own. Since the Soap Bubbles were adults and the Slopes were teenagers, the Bubble soldiers worried that the question of who had the moral high ground in this new war might not even come up, as all the armies would simply side with the Slopes, making them even stronger. Yet the Soap Bubbles pushed on, confident that they were doing the right thing, and that so long as they did not directly attack the Slopes they were not violating any of the laws of Erala.

Lilypads investigate politics

The Lilypad leaders argued that the Crystal party apparatus was fundamentally flawed: a majority vote from the wider party was needed to start a war, but the factions voting in favor of the war did not need to send their own soldiers, since war plans were based on the advice of women who had risen in the ranks of the military and were not controlled by politics. Thus the Phoenixes, the Moonshines, and the Eggs had voted to start a new war against the Sunspots, but the men sent to battle were almost all taken from the Shield faction which was geographically closest. This left the Shields with no adult male population to protect them. (A similar situation had occurred in Dreamland when the Baywatch states was left alone fighting a war against the Players after all of Dreamland's other states had voted themselves out of the war; Baywatch was the easternmost Dreamer state and thus the one which suffered most from the Play invasion.)

Questions about feminism

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

Some Lilypad boys worried that they were being shut out of the OHB weapons distribution network, which had ties to the Play party, and that the girls in the Lilypad party would be setting up a heavily armed all-female police force much like that of the Play and Moonshine parties, while forcing boys to join the military with insufficient weapons and armor. Taxman had already been passed over for weapons distribution after the meeting with Baby Goat left the girls wondering whose side he was really on. Other Lilypad boys strongly supported feminism, however, and stated that an oppressive female police force would protect their nation from violent crime when the boys matured into men. That is, these boys feared other boys more than they feared girls, even if the girls were actually more powerful as a whole. This sentiment was common in feminist nations like Moonshine and the Play Empire, whose men believed they were better off under the yoke of feminism than they would be in a nation where men could roam freely.

Agreeing with this sentiment, Lilypad girls who had received supplies of weapons were reluctant to hand them over to male followers, saying that boys would by nature be tempted to attack other boys they saw nearby, seeing them as competition, irrespective of politics. By contrast, they pointed to the circular power structure in nations such as Moonshine as proof that women and girls would make good team players.

Leadership roles

Some Lilypads began to recite a saying: Tata fatusup manita, pi tama bīyatu. It meant "girls make the laws, and boys obey them". This was a derivative of a saying that some Lilypads had learned about from a few generations earlier, when the Tinks were saying "men make the rules, and boys obey them".

Internal conflicts

The boys noticed that their female leadership often broke up into factions over temporary disputes, whereupon they would attack both each other and innocent boys who had no way of defending themselves, and then mend their ties without apologizing to the boys. It often came about that the boys suffered physical injuries while the girls only suffered property damage, but even when girls did physically attack each other, they tended to pick fair fights and restrain their impulses. Sometimes after the fight was over a girl from the losing side would attack a defenseless boy with no armor, even if he had been on her side.

Abduction of Nayušipapa

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

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

Independent Crystals

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

Pāpaa gets angry

A Lilypad boy named Pāpaa threatened to either defect to the Sunspots or to found a new party for boys if the Lilypad girls did not stop abducting their own supporters and shutting them out of the weapons distribution network just because they were boys. He claimed it was unrealistic to expect boys to fight for girls if the girls were the better-armed and stronger of the two sexes. But he could not prove, and his fellow Lilypads did not believe, that the girls actually had more weapons than did the boys.

Details about assignments

OHB agreed to arm a 9-year-old girl, Yeŋita, but not her older brother. Some Lilypad boys began to wonder if OHB, like the Crystals, was exploitable in the sense that they followed strict rules and would be unable to respond effectively if their enemies "exploited" them (Play fumu) by turning their very protections into weapons against OHB. That is, the boys wondered if Yeŋita was really in control, or if her older brother, aged 13, was actually the one who would be controlling the weapons, giving orders through his much younger sister because she was a girl and therefore considered more trustworthy by OHB.

But the Lilypad boys did not want to exploit the Lilypad girls, as they believed the inherent conflict would tear their nation apart. They wanted the boys and girls together to exploit the works of other nations instead.

Now many Lilypad boys, and some girls, wanted to break free from the weapons distribution network. They supported feminism and were comfortable living in a society where girls told boys what to do, just as women would tell men what to do once they grew up. But they felt that OHB's system was designed to turn boys against girls within their own society, because the only way the boys would be safe is if they exploited the girls. They said that to truly be strong the girls and boys needed to resolve all such conflicts, and develop a Play-like system where males were freely armed but were moved around physically within their territory so that they could not fight each other.

Strong supporters of a close alliance between boys and girls were young girls such as Yeŋita, who felt uncomfortable wielding power on their own, and those who had been just as young at the time, such as Žavapūvīu who had been put into power as a diplomat four years earlier when she was nine years old.

Pepitava's revolt

A twelve-year-old girl calling herself Pepitava then started a rebellion against any Lilypads who collaborated with the Slopes, saying she would kill boys who attempted to defect or even complain about the Lilypad feminist leadership's program. But she did not have weapons and the Lilypads ruled her out of OHB, saying that she did not understand feminism and merely wanted an excuse to beat up defenseless young boys.

Girls' private plans

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

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

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

The Pool

Since they had a finite supply of weapons, OHB's female leaders argued that distributing weapons to boys would weaken girls and not increase the total military power of the group in any way. They believed that if they could control the weapons supply in their strongholds, they did not need male members at all, since even if the entire male population turned against them they would all be unarmed and thus very weak.

However, they stated that they would best be able to control boys if they separated them into two groups, one forced to support girls and one allowed to oppose them, with the girls withholding power from both while making them enemies of each other. OHB's male members would be the group that was required to support female power, and they would be told that their enemies, the only ones they were allowed to criticize, were local boys and men who were not members of OHB.

Further, the girls knew that if they ever came to war, they would need boys on the front lines so the girls could focus on protecting each other and the younger children, and that if they had no male supporters at all, they would have nobody to send but each other. Therefore OHB knew that they were stronger with boys than without, even if the boys had no access to weapons.

Then OHB passed a resolution saying that boys were welcome as supporters, but that girls would be able to kill these boys with or without explanation and not face a penalty. They said this was the proof that they were loyal feminists, and anything less would corrupt their power structure. They abducted all of the boys who they believed were holding weapons using the name of a sister or other female relative, saying that boys exploiting loopholes in the laws only meant that the boys were misreading the laws, since girls were not using those same loopholes.

Dolphin Rider treaty

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

Even as they praised the Dolphin Riders, the Lilypads insisted they were stronger and could reject the Riders at any point. Rumors spread that the adult male Dolphin Rider soldiers obeyed strict hygiene laws that governed where and when they could urinate, and carried out their patrols constantly hiding from nature, aware that their very environment could injure them. Meanwhile the young Lilypads roamed the wilderness invincibly, always traveling in crowds for their protection, but never fearing wild animals let alone sharp thorny plants, and had been doing so since they were very young.

OHB treaty

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

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

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

Play-Moonshine diplomatic relations

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

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

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

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

Shared opposition to Dreamland

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

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

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

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

Moonshine women join OHB

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

Players join OHB

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

Some Players themselves also joined, mostly from mountain districts near Nama and Tarwas. One girl named Pasanīp set out on her own to join the trading network, thus giving up her Play citizenship.

Immediate effects of new shipments

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

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

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

The Players worried that these were signs of female submission and that Dreamer men were planning a takeover of the feminist OHB network. They were unable to express their suspicions in words because they were worried about offending the OHB girls, who they knew had adopted the new art style from the Hipsides, fellow teenagers living further west, and might not know that the Hipsides had in turn gotten it from the hated Dreamers.

More changes within OHB

A boy named Yaminās-Tatām ("the Beast") defected to the Slopes, saying the feminist weapons network was hopeless and that male power would soon rule all of Erala and Ŋāse. In the Leaper language he called himself Kēxʷi. A team of girls captured and imprisoned him when he attempted to attack a nearby girls' station. Thus they proved that they could handle rebels from within. This caused the girls to become even more suspicious of boys than they had been before, just as they were considering moderating their approach and allowing boys to become leaders. Yaminās-Tatām offered a compromise: when the girls released him from prison he would dedicate his life to fighting girls and women, but would only attack those whom the OHB girls deemed to be enemies.

The Jokers

At this point, some girls called themselves Jokers (Play Kanaa), reviving the name of a party which had branched off from the Players around sixty years earlier. These people conceded that they were likely to end up in a male-dominated society simply because war was imminent and men (and boys) could take power in war regardless of what laws a peacetime government placed on men's behavior.

This was historically important because of a minor Play tradition of women referring to men as "jokes" in Play and other languages Players spoke. This was because Play women found their men a reliable source of amusement, always ready to be brought out when the time was right, and easily put away when serious matters came to discussion. However, this metaphor was not fixed to a single word, and the most common word was not kana but tīpa, which was more commonly used as a verb meaning to tell a joke, rather than to be a joke.

The Jokers believed, therefore, that transnational feminism was a futile prospect, since it could lead to women siding with the losing side in a war just because they were feminists. They stated that even Moonshine knew this, because Moonshine was trying to make an alliance with the Players supposedly in the name of feminism, while rejecting the Crystals, who were also feminists but were much weaker.

The Jokers stated that it was better to be the weaker sex on the winning side of a war than to die in a position of power. They knew that even if OHB distributed weapons only to females, the receivers of these weapons could not physically maintain possession of them during battle, and OHB agreed that it should be boys who do most of the fighting. Therefore at some point before or during battle, the male sex would hold the majority of weapons, and so-called physical feminism (women holding power by force) would break down, even if there were an all-female police force alongside the army. And there was no common police force in Lilypad territory, as the girls had experienced no crime wave while living with the boys.

The Jokers did not state outright that females needed to accept a lower status, but that it was human nature for men to take power during war, even in feminist societies. They said that any girls pretending that they could rule over boys using weapons would be denied weapons, while those admitting that they would be of low status and would rely largely on male followers would be granted the right to own and distribute weapons.

Thus, the Jokers were much like the Slope girls, but supported OHB. They considered themselves a transnational movement, not a party, but at the date of their foundation, all Jokers were girls who belonged to the Lilypad party.

Tāmpe army

Now Tāmpe-Vīu broke away from the Slopes, saying he had refined the Slopes' war strategy and realized that it had no connection to the Slope ideology. Thus, non-Slopes could use Slope strategies. He affirmed that the army he was building was still an ally of the Slopes, because they were both targeting the Crystal women in Erala, and that because they both shared sulalaka they could share territory, but insisted that the new Tāmpe boys were not Slopes and would not share weapons with them.

The Tāmpe leaders were all teenage boys, and stated that they would not allow female leaders. Their goal was to assault the Crystal women, cooperating with the Slopes who were doing the same, and through their raw strength impress enough girls to join them so they could carry on their population growth. Thus, Tāmpe saw itself as a natural overclass, and they were not intending to reproduce with the Crystal women.

Because Tāmpe had no ideology, they felt they could tempt boys from the feminist OHB network to defect, and also appeal to the Lilypad boys more broadly. They realized that there was little difference between Tāmpe and the hated Matrix party except for identity. They accepted that they were very similar to Matrixes but belonged to a narrow age group, the Lilypad generation, which would refuse all alliances with adults, even if they seemed likely to gain from them, and at best only carefully consider alliances with adolescents or with younger children's groups.

They coined the new term Tatevas for their territory to dissociate themselves from the Lilypads while also including the Lilypads. Citizens were called tatea if adolescents and tateā if children. They stated that a tatea (or tateā if they chose that name) was anyone from their generation, born between 4178 and 4191, who was living independently without adult care or had been doing so until abducted by an adult army. This included those tatea adolescents who had married and given birth to children of their own, and also included those who had adopted children of their own. But any biological children born were considered to belong to the next generation, not to be tatea. There were some households in which older adolescent tatea lived with young tatea children they had adopted and yet considered them to be of the same generation; this was in each case because these young children had made at least some independent decisions on their own, even if they were very young. The youngest of the tatea were five years old, and the oldest were eighteen.

Thus tatea could be children or adults, and the Tāmpe knew that they would not outgrow their tatea status.

Still the Tāmpe boys reserved Tāmpe membership for males alone, and stated that they might individually give up Tāmpe membership when they married since it would not be good for young children to have their fathers' main daily activity be the slaughter and abuse of Crystal women.

Related movements

Firebreath

Also at this time some Lilypads and others of the tatea generation joined the Firebreath party of Xema; most of these were boys. They considered themselves neutral on many other issues such as sulalaka. OHB opposed the Firebreaths, and many other groups such as the Slopes considered the Firebreaths irrelevant, saying that any party who considered the Firebreath a threat proved that they were very weak. The Firebreaths were primarily known for supporting tribalism, and therefore were a closed-entry party. Their power base was in Xema, and the kids claiming to be joining the group could not actually prove their membership, but they claimed that their generation was coming to power and would become the new face (and arms) of the Firebreath party.

One boy who joined the Firebreaths was Pasamā, but he soon began repeating Slope ideology, showing listeners that he may have wanted to join the Slopes but been unable because of lack of Slope allies in the area, and so instead chosen a group who could not enforce their ideology on him. Pasamā was one of several who endorsed tāmpe and claimed to be targeting only female victims, for reasons that were unclear even to the Slopes.

Some doubters said that the Firebreaths had been defeated in a recent war, perhaps in 4180, when their homeland was invaded by the Raspara. To these people, claims of Firebreath membership meant merely that the claimant was politically independent and wished to identify with a political party that had a reputation for violence.

Yīuvas-Pīsa, who had earlier declared himself a Crystal in order to harass the Crystal party leadership by demanding funding, now declared himself an ally of Pasamā, but did not specifically mention the Firebreath party or say that he was leaving the Crystals.

A tall girl named Sūasava also joined the Firebreath movement, showing that the appeal was not limited to boys.

Leashes

Yet the Firebreaths lacked allies, and some considered declaring themselves Leashes instead, or that the Firebreaths and Leashes would be brought together by the new generation. On the other hand, the Leashes were unpopular because they had invaded the children's nation of Tāmta just a few years earlier. Thus, whereas the Firebreaths were now weak but had been notorious for winning battles in the past, the Leashes were strong but had only demonstrated their power by invading a nation run by children.

To join the Leashes, or even to claim Leash membership, therefore would be more shocking to others and also disadvantageous, as the Leashes still had adult male soldiers in the wilderness who could claim that the new recruits must obey them. Therefore the Firebreath connection was stronger for the kids precisely because it was so weak; the Firebreath kids could claim to be in control since no Firebreaths would emerge from Xema to discipline them. Thus the Firebreaths became more popular among the adolescent boys who rejected all of the other groups and also did not want to obey women in OHB.

Spines

A new party for boys, the Spines (Play Vavata Pamiti) appeared in the far west, mostly from Tink defectors born in Baeba Swamp who now wanted territory of their own. This party name had been used before, and the new Spines created an alternate name of Šaanau to distinguish themselves. They supported violence against the Crystal women, saying that they were not even interested in slavery. They merely were targeting the Crystals because they were the weakest army in the known world, and therefore battles against Crystals could win the boys sovereign territory.

The Spines' motto was very simple: bes "hurt". Their logo was a red sun because they claimed they were continuing the program of the Red Sun, a Clover boy who was slain by his best friend who objected to his order to kill Crystal women in Pavaitaapu.

Summary of new movements

The Leashes and Firebreaths both endorsed racial discrimination, which the Cooks, the first children's party, had abolished almost immediately upon their formation. The Cooks promised to make allies of their enemies, saying that children by nature would seek to befriend other children, and that war and violence were problems created by the adults around them. The prohibition on racial discrimination had remained in the various parties that had branched off from the Cooks, but some of their allies, particularly the Crystals, did support racial discrimination, and the Clovers were ambivalent, as they were a children's party of a different origin and had had so much trouble meeting their basic needs that they had been unable to form firm opinions on such issues. Nonetheless, the conservative Lilypads who considered themselves protectors of the weak announced that they still opposed racial discrimination and saw no reason to ever change their minds.

Treaty with Hipsides

Background

The Tāmpe boys' predatory lifestyle normalized sexual assault against women, and implied that men who did not make it their life to assault and abuse women were not fully men.

Formal treaty

The Hipside boys signed a treaty with Tāmpe now, saying that they considered the Tāmpe boys to be full allies and would cooperate with them. The Hipsides stated that they would submit to Tāmpe rule, allow the Tāmpe boys to come and go in Hipside territory as they wished, and take things that did not belong to them without compensation.

The Hipsides recognized the Tāmpe as a superior class and stated that they wished the Tāmpe boys to write a set of laws that punished the Hipsides for not assaulting women, and spread propaganda reminding the Hipsides of their inferior status even in their own territory. The Hipside boys reaffirmed that they were not tempted, and would rather suffer punishments than to break their code by assaulting innocent women.

The Hipsides' only asking price for all of this was that the Tāmpe boys not be allowed to assault, abuse, or traffic Hipside girls in any way, so that the Hipsides could continue their mission of slow peaceful reproduction and family formation in a mixed nation.

First claimed territory

Tāmpe's army grew quickly. The Tāmpe boys knew that their explosive growth threatened the Slopes, who were bound by ideology and could not attract so broad a coalition. They believed that the Slopes only attacked weak people, and therefore that the best way to protect their members from attacks by Slopes was to launch attacks of their own, but not against the Slopes, as they still wanted the Slopes to be their allies. Instead, Tāmpe led a troop of 4,606 boys deep into Crystal territory to launch a coordinated attack against the Crystal women, put them into slavery, and create a new Tāmpe nation with defined borders.

The Tāmpe boys invaded the Crystal district of Tēmpato-Wăno with four armies, arriving at the same time and trapping the women on all sides so they could not flee. The Crystal women quickly surrendered. The boys were disappointed at the quick surrender, saying that they had been expecting a sporting fight, and so they would punish the Crystals for their easy submission by escalating the punishments they had been planning to inflict on them.

Tāmpe named their new nation the Square (Play Nuaumma), and the soldiers came to be known as Squares instead of simply by the name of their leader, Tāmpe-Vīu. Promising the Crystals were so weak they could be conquered by nonviolent means, the Square soldiers said they would mix traditional and nontraditional warfare, as they had few weapons but considered themselves much hardier soldiers than the Crystals and some other tribes such as the XIGs who had only used traditional combat. Their war strategy embraced našači, the use of weapons that could harm those who used them, meaning that they were out of humans' control. By the use of such weapons they could outfight traditional armies who used only those weapons that they could control. By this, the Squares meant that they might introduce plagues to the Crystal territory; some Squares were former Hipsides who had already been spreading plagues through Hipside territory.

Leapers react

The Leapers considered the Squares a greater threat to the stability of Erala than they did the Slopes. They made it their goal to assassinate Tāmpe-Vīu, the seventeen-year-old founder and military leader of the Square army, saying that if they were successful, no similar leader would arise to replace him because they would afraid that they too would be assassinated. But the Squares had taken control of territory well to the east of the Slopes, and the Leapers could not easily reach the Square nation without going through Slope or Hipside territory. The Hipsides had a river valley east of Tata that they themselves had promised not to defend, essentially inviting an invasion, but the Leapers knew that if they sent Leapers into the area, the other groups would know a war was coming and would make it even harder for the Leapers to trespass through than if they had gone through the Slopes' lands.

More organized attacks

Navaas attacks in the woods

An OHB boy named Navaas, claiming allegiance to the Firebreaths, started a fire in the woods where many kids were living and said that he would fight to the death, killing boys and girls of any age, until he himself was killed. The girls quickly captured him without suffering injury, as they had done with other rebels, and classified the incident as a crime rather than a small war. Rather than kill him, they imprisoned him. The girls noted that unlike the boys in the west, he was not motivated by gender issues but rather wanted to attack the open society that the various children's parties had created and revert to a system based on a strict racial hierarchy with the Firebreaths and their kin at the top and the Raspara and their allies at the bottom.

Navaas had destroyed much property, but failed to even injure the girls. This was in part because he had chosen at the last moment to attack strong targets instead of deliberately seeking out weak young children, but also because by this time the OHB girls had much better weapons and armor than did the boys, and they had matured enough that their armor was fit to their body shape and could not be easily worn by the boys. The failed attack encouraged OHB to go even further, saying that they had proven their strategy of protecting women but not men was precisely what they needed in order to keep their society safe. They passed a new law stating that law-abiding OHB boys were responsible for the behavior of criminal OHB boys, and that since they had yet to record a single instance of unprovoked violence from girls against boys (though there were abductions in which the boys attempted to resist), the girls were innocent, and did not need to police each other.

Views on gender roles

The Slopes at this time had coined an offensive term for a girl or women who cheered on abuse of Crystal women but did not herself participate. They said that these girls could still be Slopes, but would not be trusted to wield power. They accused the Lilypad girls and even the Moonshine women of this behavior as well, saying that they were clearly not objecting to the Slopes' abuse of the Crystals and therefore approved of it, but felt it was impossible for them to commit violence. The Slopes said that the best among them were the girls who directly participated in and even led the attacks against the Crystal women, allowing their true nature to show through rather than acceding to the Lilypad-Moonshine feminist belief that wanton violence was a male-pattern behavior.

Other people

A boy named Fūsuās rose to power in the Lilypad party; he had hygiene problems like those of BM and TP but not as severe. The Lilypads felt bad for these boys and for Yeŋita's older brother, who had similar problems.

Unrest in eastern Tāmta

December 15, 4196

At this point, various indigenous groups in Tāmta called for the children's groups to leave, saying that they now could safely move into the territory of the Slopes and therefore they were no longer refugees. They threatened violence against the children if they refused to leave. These groups were not closely allied to each other and did not represent any unified group in Tāmta; the children could not clamp down on movements outside their districts and therefore could not stop these groups from carrying out their threats except by preemptive invasion.

The children had believed the Leapers' earlier estimate that nearly 100,000 refugees in adult-led parties lived in Tāmta, but they had only personally met a far smaller number than this. There were at this time about 70,000 children belonging to the Cold Men, the Deer Walkers, or the Scorpions living in Tāmta.

Battle of Žipati

A group of men invaded the Cold settlement of Žipati, in an area west of the lakeshore where the children's territory was only a few miles thick. On the north side of Žipati was a river, and Žipati was connected to Moonshine territory just by a single bridge. Only about 400 kids lived here, though Žipati had once been a large city of about 10,000 in a past era. Many of the older inhabitants' stone structures still stood, such as this bridge. This meant that there were many places to hide in the city and nobody was homeless, although most structures had fallen into disrepair.

The men wanted to split the kids' nation in half, knowing that it would end their ability to communicate with the numerous kids' groups to their west.

Because the Cold Men had no internal military guards, the men had direct access to the civilian population, including the newer members of the party who were under thirteen years old (a separate group from the Deer Walkers who were physically isolated from neighboring territories).

The men abducted 22 young Cold children from a Moonshine-built playground and brutally tortured them, and then disappeared into the woods to the south. These children were from a group around ten years old, not the more numerous younger children. The Cold Men realized that the men had stopped because their hands were full; had the younger children been playing at the time, the men might have been able to abduct the entire population of that age group by carrying them one in each hand instead.

Then another group of men moved north to occupy Žipati. The Cold Men had no way to chase the kidnappers down without surrendering full control of Žipati to the second group of men and thus making the remaining children in Žipati vulnerable to the same abuses, so the Cold leaders promised instead to focus on keeping Žipati safe (despite the occupation, the soldiers did not have control of the streets) and preventing further attacks. They believed that the kidnapped children were still alive in the wider territory of Hōki and that the men would be seeking to sign a treaty with the Cold Men in which the kidnapping victims would only be returned if the Cold Men evacuated Tāmta or a large part of it.

In an internal vote, the Cold Men trapped just outside Žipati decided that they would not submit to such a treaty, as it would lead to far more than 22 deaths among their people and might also signal to their allies that they were no longer reliable. This was not a party-wide vote but the Cold Men had earlier stated that in an emergency, small local councils of party members had the authority to make decisions like this. Thus the Cold Men accepted that they would probably not see the 22 abductees again. The Cold Men were also deputized to take military action, but held off.

Soon, the Cold Men further east of Žipati urged those waiting outside Žipati to seek a diplomatic solution, saying that if they started a war against the adults, far more Cold Men would be hurt and possibly killed, and therefore that even if the Cold Men looked weak and vulnerable for choosing a nonviolent solution to a violent provocation, it was better for the Cold Men in the long run not to seek revenge. They thus organized a diplomatic meeting with the kidnappers and several other groups who inhabited territory to the south of Tāmta's narrow western extension.

Diplomatic standoff

When the Slope diplomats living in Cold territory heard what had happened, they stated that the Slopes would almost certainly start a war against the refugees: not out of sympathy, but for their own benefit, since they relied on the east-west trade route through Cold territory in order to sustain their nation. The invading men were now occupying just a few square miles of territory, but it was here that the Cold nation was at its narrowest point, and the Cold Men did not have permission to trespass through neighboring Moonshine. Thus the Cold Men realized that they would also need to declare war or else show themselves to be cowards by relying on the distant Slopes to fight their wars.

Because the men guarding Žipati refused to move, the Cold Men and others held their diplomatic meeting at the entrance to the city. They stated that the men should give up because the adult refugee populations were dependent on the children for their livelihoods, as the children controlled the trade with Moonshine. The Cold Men pretended they did not know that the men had abducted 22 children from the playground, and pretended not to believe the men when the men brought it up. This meant that the men could not demand that the Cold Men do anything to get them back. Thus the diplomatic meeting produced no concessions from either side, and the Cold Men vowed that they would soon force their way in. The men accepted this and did not try to abduct the kids at the meeting.

Cold Men respond

Thus the Cold Men sent a troop of teenage boys into Žipati, even though they knew that the men guarding the city borders could respond by moving into the city center and massacring defenseless young children. The Cold Men believed that even greater violence would soon follow if they did not act immediately. Thus the Battle of Žipati continued.

The boys rushed at the soldiers guarding the city. These boys were not the oldest ones, because the oldest boys had become fathers and given their weapons to those around 15 years old. They also had very little armor and were thus vulnerable to enemies' weapon attacks. However, none of the various refugee groups had a proper army either, as they were not legally separate nations and because weapons production had long been suppressed in the territory by mutual agreement. Thus the soldiers guarding the city fled from the boys rather than taking them head on, and the boys realized that this might mean that the many younger children in the city center would die before the boys could catch up to them.

The children in the city dispersed in all directions, taking advantage of the many places to hide among the heavy stone structures. The Cold Men knew that the bridge connecting the settlement to Moonshine was almost certainly closed, as the Moonshines did not want the Cold Men to enter Moonshine territory even though they claimed to be an ally of the kids.