Tamta/4198

Tāmta continued to exist as a political entity in 4198 and the following years, but as its borders overlapped with other nations, its power waned as the male-led armies of the west grew in strength and acquired slaves.

Leapers hold elections

Despite the escalating civil war, the Leapers reaffirmed that Tāmta was still a democracy and that they would continue to hold elections for Parliament in which all parties that they had not yet ejected would be eligible to hold office and vote on bills.

The Lilypads and the Hipsides were now sharing the same territory, and requested that the Leapers reapportion the Lilypads' 72 Tāmta seats into the five Hipside states, but the Leapers said that it was too late to do this and that for the next year, the Lilypads would continue to represent Tāmta despite no longer living in it.

Players annex Hōki

February 18, 4198

By this time the Players had finally finished conquering the refugee territory of Hōki, which they renamed Fuaumuvas (FMM) after a sport involving tossing a doll around. They stated that they had fought their war in the name of the Lilypad children who had stayed behind to greet them, but also those who had fled, as they knew that those children were seeking safety and had pure motives.

Many of the Lilypad children who had stayed behind the first time had since fled; what remained was an almost entirely female population with an average age around 17, guarding many young children of both Deer Walker and Lilypad ancestry. The younger girls, too young to be mothers but old enough to direct their own lives, had mostly moved west along with the boys into the Hipside territories. The Players declared that the remaining Lilypads should be considered legally adults and that they would be welcome in the Play party but that the Players understood they might wish to remain autonomous. The Players also promised that they would never seek to take control of the Deer Walkers away from these Lilypad women, whom they recognized as the Deer Walkers' adoptive mothers.

The Players then wrote a treaty for the remaining Lilypads which merged them and the two groups of children into the Grass Walker party (Play Tivabapapana); the word for grass was new and described a taller type than the earlier Grass Walker name because this time the group included adults.

About half of the Deer Walker children had also fled just before the Play army arrived, however. (This is half of the half who had not fled the first time;) thus, only about 7,000 Deer Walkers still lived in what was now the Play state of FMM.

Players put limits on growth

Even as the Play nation reached its largest-ever extent, the Players officially disclaimed the formerly Play-held territory of Tata and said that they were no longer interested in competing for power in the wars of the west. They acknowledged that there could be hundreds of thousands of captured Players and their descendants living in Tata, as they had lost a war thirty years earlier, but conceded that it was unrealistic for the Players to expect to control all of their recently acquired territories and Tata in addition, and they also felt it would be unfair to expect their allies to fight for them in Tata when their allies were so much weaker and worse off than the Players. Thus the Players conceded that they had lost the war in Tata.

Matrix-Slope relations

By March 4198, the Leapers and other armies had come to believe that the Matrixes were the world's strongest army after all, not the Slopes as they had earlier been saying. Though they admired the Slopes, the Leapers now said it was most likely that the Slopes were interested in achieving a firm second place standing, such that the Matrix would be willing to attack every army except them. That is, rather than defeating the Matrix or finding an uneasy alliance with the Matrix, the Slopes were interested in becoming the only other army in the world that the Matrix could not intimidate. Thus the Slopes hoped the Matrixes would attack all of their enemies except the Slopes, and many of these armies were also enemies of the Slopes.

Differences between the two armies

The Matrixes had remained all-male and did not admit members until adulthood; thus, they were a nation consisting entirely of adult male soldiers and all of their wives were war captives. The Slopes insisted that they would continue to grow through natural reproduction, and would continue to adopt war orphans as well, though not as many as they had done in earlier years. The Slopes claimed that they already outnumbered the Matrixes 10 to 1 and would soon reach a much higher ratio as the first crop of Slope children reached adulthood while the Matrixes were struggling just to keep their population steady.

New Slope-Lilypad treaty

The Slopes were allies and close kin of the Lilypads, Hipsides, and other armies of the east who had been much less violent and much less cruel. The Slopes expected these people would make decisions that would weaken their combined military, perhaps out of misguided altruism, feminism, or pacifism, and that they might expect the Slopes to intervene. The Slope leaders reaffirmed their commitment to their classmates, stating that their bonds transcended ideology and even military strategy, and therefore signed a new treaty promising not only to intervene in any conflict facing the Lilypads, but to forever allow the Lilypads to remain as an independent party within Slope-held territory. Recalling the words of a Cold-Play meeting a few decades earlier, the Slopes stated that they wished the Lilypads to be their eternal enemy — meaning that they wished for a world in which they had no more enemies to face but the Lilypads, whom they loved and would promise to keep alive.

The Slopes retained the name tatea for the group containing the Slopes and the more peaceful eastern troops, saying that so long as these other armies retained their criteria for admission, barring anyone older than their oldest existing members, they would all retain tatea status and be legal parties in the Slopes' SMS nation. Earlier, the Lilypads had stated that they needed to exclude adults from their party for their own protection, but now the Lilypad leaders were in their late teens and the very oldest had reached the age of 20, and were thus adults by the norms of their own inherited culture as well as those around them.

Slopes appeal to Matrixes

Love letters

Now the Slope female leaders, using the Leapers to communicate, published love letters in the Baeban news service, pleading with Matrix men to come into Slope territory and carry them off into Tata and other Matrix-held lands so they could see what it was like to be under control of a real man. They claimed many male Slopes were weak, impotent, and not really men; some seemed incapable of sex altogether while others were focused on bizarre perversions; those Slope men who were actually attractive preferred to assault the Crystal women rather than form stable loving relations with the Slope women.

The Matrix leaders recognized that these messages were almost the same as the Hipsides' earlier appeals to the Matrixes to abandon their war and move in. The Hipsides' messages had mostly failed to reach the Matrixes because they did not have the Leapers as repeaters and because the Matrixes could not believe that a nation consisting primarily of male soldiers would want a group of taller and stronger male soldiers to move in with them. But now, the Matrix leaders worried that the rank-and-file Matrix soldiers would actually believe the Slope women's claims to be sexually insatiable without Matrix company, and that the Matrix soldiers would enter Slope territory expecting to be welcomed by the women, when in fact the Slopes had so far armed both their male and female leaders with weapons.

The male Slope leaders somewhat played along, pretending to be intimidated by the Matrix men (who were somewhat taller on average), and complaining about the Zeniths roaming through Slope territory sexually abusing Slope women, for which the Slopes were unable to retaliate. The unstated implication of this message was that the Slopes, like their Hipside kin, were physically small and even as adults would never be able to handle the Matrix or Zenith soldiers man-for-man. The Slopes understood that the Hipsides had failed to bait the Matrixes into an attack with this same message, but that this may have been due to the difficulty of contact and the lack of a strong motivation for the Matrixes to invade. By contrast, the Slopes knew that the Matrixes wanted to steal the Slopes' female Crystal slaves. The Slopes had been relying on Leapers to distribute their propaganda for more than a year now and had been satisfied that the Leapers were trustworthy.

Likewise the Slopes, both male and female, had acquired several diseases from various men, mostly Zeniths, who had abused them in their younger years. The Crystals now had most of these plagues as well, but the Matrixes had been spared because nobody had sexually abused them.

Beauty contest

The Leapers held a beauty contest in Baeba Swamp, and a young Slope woman won. The Leapers said that this proved that the Slopes were the most beautiful women in the world, as with just a tiny presence in Baeba (the only Slopes with homes in Baeba were diplomats) they outscored all of the native women of all parties. The knowledge of the beauty of Slope women spread to Baeba Swamp and some men planned to enter Slope territory to woo the native women, even knowing that the Slope men (and some women) were armed and vigilant. The propaganda was important here, as the men in Baeba Swamp found it easier to believe that beautiful Slope women might be single and looking to marry out if they assumed that the Slope men were small and typically unsatisfying as partners.

Internally the Slope leaders reminded their base that they were a very close-knit party, and would never endorse any policy that would benefit one sex at the expense of the other. Thus, the Slope men were meant to serve the women and vice versa. They said that any women who did seek to marry outside the party would cease to be Slopes, but that because there were more men than women in the Slope party, this prohibition did not apply to men. They claimed that no Slope women were harmed when a Slope man married a Doll woman, and therefore this was not a violation of their party policy.

Volunteer slaves

Privately the Slopes contemplated releasing women who felt loyal to the Slopes but uncomfortable with castle life to wander westward into Baeba, particularly into Matrix-held territory, claiming to be fleeing from the weak, unattractive boy-like men who ruled Slope territory, craving the attention of a strong protective Matrix man. These women would then spy on the Matrixes and flee back to the Slopes at the first opportunity, and would be understood if they claimed that they really did enjoy living with the Matrix men.

A second group wanted to volunteer to become slaves for the Matrix, but to pretend to be captives, saying that the Slopes had turned against their own women and were now selling them as slaves. This would bring capital into the Slope nation since the transaction would be paid as the woman would claim to be involuntary. Some Slope men would also sell themselves into slavery.

Maturation of Slope culture

Similarities to other cultures

The Slopes' urban lifestyle was similar in many ways to that of LAD a few hundred years earlier.

Locks

The Slopes did not allow toparchies, but stated that it would be theoretically possible for one person to obtain a lock on power (Play vetetu) in some area of their territory. This was a concept where, by slavery or some other means, a single person has the pledges of enough citizens in some particular area to declare themselves politically independent and wield power horizontally (across the branches of government) and below them. This had come about in some previous empires when a very rich person was able to directly buy the vote pledges of many locals in a democratic nation. But this had been more successful with true toparchy, when a person was able to buy up a town's land and set up a government of their own with absolute power for the property owner, and full respect from the government so long as they paid the taxes on their land. The Slopes did not allow this.

Denial of power-sharing

Unlike the Cold Men to the east, the loser of a close election was not allowed to take a 2nd-place position; campaigns were all-or-nothing for the candidates.

New Slope laws

Access to weapons

The Slopes, as expected, prohibited their Doll middle class from accessing weapons of any kind, and stated that because Dolls were so physically delicate by comparison to the Slopes, the definition of weapon for a Doll would include blunt instruments and kitchen utensils, meaning that even eating their meals would be illegal. This was because the Slopes said Dolls could use such weapons to hurt other Dolls. By contrast, since the Slopes were physically hardy, they had no prohibition against kitchen knives even in those areas of Slope territory where the Slopes had made true weapons off-limits even to each other.

Attitudes towards cooking

The Slopes originated mostly from a culture based in cold climates where all children were taught how to cook from a very early age. The Crystals (and thus most Dolls) were transnational, but the Slopes now lived in a warm climate and most of the Crystals they had taken control of were locals. Many of them could cook as well, but they typically did not learn the skill early and were more accustomed to eating uncooked foods of various kinds. Thus, by effectively making it illegal for the Crystals to cook, the Slopes had made their lives difficult but not impossible. The Slopes figured that this was a tolerable legal burden, as opposed to an impossible one, and would work well because at least some of the Crystals might actually feel guilty when violating the laws against owning kitchen knives.

Effects of the new law

Because Dolls could not access weapons, the Slopes created a new crime from the situation where a Doll walked into a room with weapons. The Slopes argued that this could also apply if the Slope brought the weapons to the Dolls; any Dolls who did not flee immediately would be guilty of a crime. Also, since Dolls could not know where weapons might be stored, the new law made it a crime for a Doll to enter any room or building where Slopes might live. Some Slopes wanted to extend the law further still, and charge Dolls with a crime if they were beaten by a Slope carrying a weapon; the crime of letting the weapons touch their body. An internal vote among the Slopes narrowly precluded this new extension of the law, but even those Slopes who opposed it said they would be willing to support it if they could get at least some non-Slope support for it. The main reason the Slopes were skeptical of this further extension was that they felt it was so transparently ridiculous that if they approved it, they would lose support among outside parties for the law in its entirety.

With the law as it stood, the Slopes still had a convenient reason to arrest any Doll for merely trying to eat healthy meals. Thus it had nearly become a crime to be a Doll.

One further help for the Slopes was that their system was similar to systems that had been in place in the recent past; the Crystals had even traditionally punished each other by depriving Crystal convicts of access to kitchen knives. And the Slopes claimed that the life of a Doll under Slope control would be a step up from what they had experienced under the Matrixes or even, for many, as free people.

Prowlers

The Slopes also for the first time allowed their members to prowl (Play panapa). By this they meant to be out alone, responsible for their own safety, and not traveling in a group for protection. The Slopes realized this was dangerous, because the Zeniths still roamed the streets of Slope cities, and the Doll middle class and even the slaves could in theory attack Slopes seen out alone, especially at night.

Shortly after the prohibition on prowling was lifted, a young Slope man raped a 16-year-old Doll at night and disappeared back to his castle. This girl was the daughter of a Crystal woman, and by tradition had become a Crystal herself at age 13, but now the Slopes had created a strong incentive not to identify as such. (The Crystals allowed overlapping party membership, and also told their members that the new Doll party only existed in the Slopes' nation, and for various other reasons was unlike traditional parties, so they encouraged their members to think of themselves as Crystals alone even if they were also Dolls.)

The Slopes' negative public reaction when the victim spoke out the next day made it plain to all that they considered this single incidence of rape to be more dishonorable than the hundreds of thousands of rapes they had inflicted on their Crystal slaves and some other free Crystals. It was not the woman's rape they seemed upset about, but rather the fact that the Slopes had revealed themselves susceptible to the same temptations as the Zeniths and Matrixes they felt inferior to them, and that their impression of an orderly society was in danger. The Slopes convened and considered passing a law outlawing rape, indecent assault, and grievous bodily harm against any non-slave Dolls, saying that the slaves deserved to be abused because of their social status but that the free Doll population should merely be exploited as a middle class and allowed to walk the streets.

Crystals' response

The Crystal women, already shunned by their own party leadership, had further lost outsiders' sympathy after several of the Crystal leaders in the Slopes' area (which the Crystals considered to be part of the Nest) endorsed the Slopes and stated that the Crystals should be their allies, seek a middle-class lifestyle, and do nothing about the vast number of sexual assaults the Slopes had inflicted on the Crystals aside from focusing on the future.

The Slopes had won the support of about 150 previously elite Crystal women by promising to spare them and their families from all sexual assaults. The Slopes had then also won the support of a few hundred lower- and middle-class Crystal women who sought to join the ranks of these supposed elites by performing various favors, hoping that the Slopes would permit them entry to the upper class and that the existing upper class Crystals would do what they could to enable this. This second group was thus comparable to the JIB group that had formed about a year earlier, but the Slopes saw them as even lower than the JIBs, and made no promises that they would ever be welcomed into the Crystal upper class which would be spared from assault, even if they spent their whole lives supporting the Slopes.

These women said it was their fate to live in the Slopes' nation, and that since the Slopes had a male surplus, the Slopes would always be abusing the Crystal women. They declared they would not seek justice for any crimes the Slopes committed against them in the past but would try to seek a new cooperative justice system that would limit the Slopes' abuses in the future. Even here they did not commit to asking the Slopes to make rape a crime, because they felt the Slopes could not control their nature and that therefore any cooperation with them might require the legalization of the Slope men's crimes of desire.

The Crystal leaders, acting without wider party approval, narrowly voted down an internal proposal which would have proposed to the Slope leadership a division of the Crystal party into two new legally recognized classes: those who could be freely abused and those who could not. The Crystals proposing the idea knew that they would not be the ones to determine who belonged to which class. (Because the Slopes were closed-entry, they could not become Slopes, and even leaving the Crystal party would not get them out of the Doll party.)

Slopes' own reforms

After the Crystals refused to make the rape of their own people a crime, the Slopes realized that their moral standing among other parties could improve if they passed a law outlawing rape and assault of Dolls, since they could then say that they awarded the Dolls a legal protection that the Dolls themselves had been unwilling to ask for (because most Dolls were Crystals , the Slopes often treated them as the same group). They knew that their own members would be largely against this, since most Slopes did not own slaves and many Slopes preferred the carefree lifestyle of assaulting random civilians to the hierarchical situation in which enslaved Dolls were already expecting it.

Nonetheless on July 12, 4198, the Slope parliament passed a law forbidding any sexual assault of a Doll, and restricting physical assault to situations of self-defense, figuring that they could later interpret self-defense very liberally while still claiming the moral high ground due to the prohibition of sexual assault. The Slopes did not have a court system and still claimed they did not need one; the punishments would be defined by internal votes among the membership and could include expulsion from the Slope party. This law did not apply retroactively to the many thousands of Slopes who had gleefully assaulted free Crystals (largely the same people as the new Dolls) in the past, even with no reasonable claim of self-defense. This law also did not affect slaves, but the Slopes' rival parties had their own slaves and generally did not challenge the Slopes on this issue.

Other exclusions

This law also did not prohibit sexual assaults by non-Slopes. The Slopes in fact wanted to encourage Zenith men to escalate their attacks, and to focus on the new Doll middle class while the Slopes assaulted the lower class. The Slopes said that within months they would have the middle-class Dolls riled up against the Zenith rapists, staging nonviolent protests against them, begging the Slopes to intervene, and considering themselves heroes if the Slopes did anything at all, as that would be the greatest level of political power the Dolls would ever achieve. The Slopes hoped that this conflict would drive the middle and lower classes of the Dolls further apart, because lower class Dolls would realize that if the Dolls' protests succeeded, the Zenith rapists would attempt to attack the lower class.

Since the new law did not prohibit use of violence against the Dolls in self-defense, some Slope men figured that they could continue on as they always had, but claim that the Doll woman had initiated the encounter, and that they had raped the woman in self-defense. But they figured this would fail to convince even fellow Slopes. Since Dolls were not allowed to attack Slopes even in self-defense, however, a more perverse reading of the law suggested that any sexual assault against a Doll could be converted to a fair fight if the Doll resisted (since both would be committing a crime), and any further aggression by the Slope attacker would be legally categorized as self-defense. These men felt that if they first raped and then beat up their victims, they could claim the resistance in the middle exhonerated the attacker.

Lastly, the Dolls were not slaves, but were legal subjects of the Slope rulers, so the Slopes claimed that they had the right to sell Dolls into slavery to other parties. (They could by the same reasoning also sell Zeniths, but figured they would be physically unable to do so.) Thus the Slopes figured that they could raise capital in their nation by selling Dolls as slaves to the Matrix army or anyone else who would buy them, so long as the payment was a tangible product that could not quickly depreciate in value.

Class divisions

Many Zeniths were business owners in Doll-majority districts of the Slope nation, meaning that the Dolls could not simply choose to avoid the Zeniths. Indeed, the Slope upper class contemplated defining the class boundaries according to how a person's basic needs were met. If they were independent (nearly all Slopes), they would be upper class. If they depended on Zeniths and other groups, they were middle class. If they were enslaved, they were lower class. The Zeniths themselves were middle class according to this definition because they generally did not have slaves and so could not survive without each other and the other citizens.

The Slopes felt that the legal equality between Zeniths and Dolls, when anyone could see that the Zeniths were far more violent and criminal than Dolls, could lead to tension between the two groups that would prevent them from forming any stable anti-Slope alliance. The Slopes had freed some Soap men who had remained in the territory while the Crystal men went away; these had become male Dolls, meaning the total Doll population was now about 80% female, not 100% as it had been with the Crystals. Many Crystals did not trust these Soap men, but the Soap men were the only men they knew who were not yet being legally encouraged to sexually assault them.

Like the Zeniths before them, the Slopes bragged about the fact that the Leapers were providing them all with monthly welfare payments despite the fact that the Slopes had such a strong military occupation force that the Leapers could not even enter Slope territory to dispurse the money without Slope permission. (It was mostly provided in tangible products however.) The Slopes distributed these stipends among their own people only, again flaunting the fact that the government aid was going to those people who needed it the least.

Comparisons of wealth

The Slopes were by one measure the richest people in the world, because they owned enough slaves that they could survive entirely from slave labor and never had to do any work of their own. The slaves provided them food, manufactured weapons and armor, and helped maintain the forts they called castles. The Slopes also had access to grapes in amounts far greater than they could consume, though it took time to turn them into wine. However, because the Slope plantations were self-contained, they had no trade routes of their own, and therefore had no access to certain basic material goods that could only come to them from outside. For this they depended on the Zeniths, who had taken control of much of STW's historical trade route in the region. This trade road extended all the way to Play territory, and the Players were continuing to trade even though they were hostile, because it helped the economies on both ends of the road. And the Slopes traded with the Zeniths. But they knew that the Zeniths could cut them off at any time, because even though the Slopes were much richer than the Zeniths, the Slopes produced nothing that the Zeniths needed, whereas the Zeniths brought in many things that the Slopes needed.

Food

As above, the Slopes produced their own food domestically using Crystal slave labor, making them independent of the Zenith-STW trade network they worried might break down (both because STW was actually anti-Zenith and because the Zeniths might someday turn against the Slopes). The Slopes did not worry much about famine, saying that if they ever ran out of food they would simply eat their own slaves and then go to war for more, figuring any famine would also affect surrounding areas and leave their armies too weak to defend their populations.

Alcohol

The Slopes realized it might also benefit them to prohibit the consumption of alcohol among their members, saying that true Slopes did not need recreational substances to fulfill their desires because the only people who had such desires were too emotionally weak to be Slopes. This rule would apply even to the secret areas of Slope castles where nobody would see them, and thus was not merely a propaganda tool intended to make the Slopes look superior to their rivals. Those Slopes who chose to consume alcohol would be ejected from the party, but they could still join other parties such as the Squares and the Zenith (though the Slopes wondered if the Squares also might prohibit alcohol).

The Slopes also had no intent of limiting alcohol consumption amongst the Zeniths, and indeed hoped that the Zeniths would dominate the alcohol trade, making the Dolls dependent on the Zeniths, and that this for various complex reasons would in the long run help the Slopes more than the Zeniths.

Results

The Slope parliament (a party-internal organization) thus passed two new laws: one prohibiting Slopes from working in the alcohol trade, and another prohibiting consumption of alcohol on Slope-owned properties. These laws also covered sleep flowers, the only other known recreational substance. It thus remained legal for Zeniths and others to transport, sell, and consume alcohol within the Slope nation so long as they did it on public property, rather than the Slope plantations and castles.

The Slopes offered those members whose income was dependent on alcohol sales to continue on in their careers, so long as they gave up Slope party membership and lived in the cities with the Zeniths and Dolls rather than the safety of the Slope-held forts. They said that for the meantime the Square party still allowed alcohol trade and consumption, but that they could not guarantee this would continue, as the Squares had been moving more and more in lockstep with the Slopes in recent months.

Role of the Yāsauŋa

The Yāsauŋa still existed, and had freed themselves from their ties to the Tanunaita corporation. Now, they were taxpaid Slopes who did Doll-like jobs at their whims, but never worked as hard as the Dolls did and could not easily be fired.

The Leapers wanted to make the Yāsauŋa open to a small elite subset of Dolls who could prove that their goal was to weaken the Dolls as a whole; in essence, to traitors. The Slopes cautiously accepted this plan but told the Leapers that they reserved the right to revoke the Yāsauŋa status of even these people and that they would never actually get Slope party membership, which would be the only reliable key to power.

Outsiders react to Slopes

As word spread that there existed some Slopes who, in between raping their Doll slaves, insisted that they be able to rape free Doll women in addition, the Slope leaders realized that their party's moral standing among outsiders was falling to a new low. Earlier, they had been afforded great understanding on account of their youth, but their behavior seemed to grow worse every year, and their giving up alcohol seemed not to matter to outsiders; indeed, some believed that their giving up alcohol would only make the Slopes even angrier and more violent, and that perhaps they had passed the law for precisely that reason.

The Slope leaders considered expelling these most violent among them into the Zenith party, but understood that the rapists lived mostly in the wilderness where the Slope leaders could not easily get at them, and that the rapists could restrain the traders who used the roads passing through their territory.

The Slopes in question responded by claiming superiority. They stated what they were doing was a sport, because they faced the risk of counterattacks, however weak; and that by focusing their desires on free Dolls they would give the castle Slopes more time to abuse their slaves.

Leapers diplomacize Parliament

As per tradition, the various parties seated in Parliament were awarded seats based on the Leapers' impression of the party's total contribution to Baeba's wellbeing. They were thus loosely correlated to the total party membership, so small parties tended to have fewer seats than larger parties, but increasing a party's membership would not automatically earn them any more seats. Also, some groups such as the Zeniths had no seats at all. Despite their having won the legal right to live in Baeba, the Leapers considered them enemies of the nation due to their having briefly overthrown the entire government of Baeba just a year earlier. The Leapers' power to add and remove seats was limited by the threat of military conquest if they were deemed to be too unfair. The other parties did not protest the removal of the Zeniths' seats, not even their allies, the Tinks, because all of the parties had agreed that to participate in what they considered democracy they could not overthrow the government. (Although the Tinks had earlier invaded Baeba Swamp as well, they did not actually take any pre-existing Baeban territory; rather, they conquered land just outside Baeba and agreed to allow the Leapers to annex it in return for the recognition of the Tinks as a legal party in Baeba Swamp. The Tinks had then immediately declared victory and begun to claim that they had indeed conquered Baeban territory.)

District boundaries

The parties drew their own district boundaries. This was important because some parties were geographically concentrated in a small part of Baeba Swamp and strongly opposed giving equal weight to those few party members who had chosen to live in other areas of Baeba Swamp. Thus the concept of a district (Play vapitās) only applied within each party.

This was similar to a Play custom that allowed individual citizens to vote in any Play-held district they chose, regardless of where they lived. The intent of this was to allow factions of the Play party to secure geographic strongholds and quell the tribalistic urge to secede that they felt would otherwise weaken the unitary Play government. They credited this system for how the tribal areas in the newly conquered eastern districts of Thaoa and others retained their independent spirit but based it on ideology rather than their historically non-Play identity.

However, the Leapers insisted that each district have only one representative, meaning the common practice among other parties to have multiple-member districts for cities was denied. The Leapers stated that the parties could do as they wished internally, but that if they submitted to the Leapers a map with multiple members sharing one district (or several districts coterminous in one place, a potential legal workaround), they would split those districts geographically and would preferentially align them with the interests of the other parties. Thus the Leapers created subdistricts called mitāsiūupeim.

Role of slaves

The slaves could not vote, but there were several de facto slave parties run by anti-slavery advocates whose representation in Parliament was larger than expected for the size of the free population but smaller than what the slaves might merit if freed. This helped motivate the advocates to actually pursue the abolition of slavery rather than simply turn the anti-slavery parties into political machines that only served the leaders. But these party leaders also knew that if their slaves ever achieved freedom, they could freely switch parties or start their own, so they had a balance of contradictingg goals.

Expansion of SMS seats

Around this time, the Leapers squared SMS's share of the seats in Baeba's Parliament from 4 to 16, and stated that it was up to SMS how to fill those seats (they had been assigned to just the Square party since the last year's Parliamentary election). Since this made the total Parliament size 160, SMS now had 10% of the seats, and the Leapers promised that they would consider giving SMS another 20 seats, meaning that they would have 36 of 180 seats, or 20%.

The Crystals had 56 seats, the Tinks had 48 seats, the Clovers had 10 seats, the Matrixes had 8 seats, the Leapers had 8 seats, and the other 14 seats belonged to small parties, mostly those of the slaves. Now SMS was getting 16 seats despite having almost no members living in Baeba. There was no firm rule that each party be given an even number of seats, but the Leapers preferred round numbers. The sections of Parliament that they were fighting over included the core (122 seats for the Crystals, Tinks, Clovers, and Matrix), the annex (the 14 seats for minor parties), and the mission (the 16 seats for the tatea parties, up from 4 the previous year). The Leapers' 8 seats were not part of any group and they could not be voted out.

The Leapers controlled the apportionment of seats as they still controlled the government of Baeba from above; their formula was complicated and they described it as being based on a party's total contribution to Baeba's well-being. For example, even the Matrix's 8 seats were out of proportion to their tiny population size of only a few thousand members, most of whom lived in Tata rather than Baeba, such that it seemed the only reason any Matrixes would live in Baeba was to serve in the government. They had won these seats after ceding conquered territory to Baeba, submitting land they had conquered by force to the rule of democracy. The Clovers' seats had also been assigned to them after a territorial concession.

The Leapers' system, though based on traditions, was unique in some ways and had many critics. The Matrixes were most offput by the Leapers' decision to award seats to a party whose members did not even in live in Baeba Swamp, but conceded that there was little for them to complain about, since the Matrixes were also a transnational party who mostly did not live in Baeba and had only just recently surrendered some of their land to Baeba.

Lilypads apportion Baeban seats

The eastern Lilypads mostly did not want to involve themselves in western politics, and figured that it might be best to assign all of the seats to the traditional boys' parties such as the Slopes and the Squares, or even just the Slopes, since the Squares had shown little interest over the preceding year. The Crystals were female, whereas the Matrix and Tinks were male, so this was an important decision.

After an internal vote, the various SMS parties agreed that all sixteen seats should go to the Slopes, as they were the only group in regular contact with Baeba's Leaper party. The Squares said that they might be interested in regaining access in the future, but that the situation over the past year had been difficult for them and that they were not sure they would even survive as a party now that the Slopes were both much stronger than the Squares and more conveniently positioned on the map.

Thoughts about campaigns

The Leapers suggested the young Slopes and other adolescent parties work on political campaigns in order to sway other Baeban voters to their side. They had learned the concept of campaigning in their schools, but only the Scorpions had put it into practice because the others had spent most of their adolescence running single-party states. Even now, because they were closed-entry parties, they could not actually obtain any votes from outside their party; the intent of a political campaign thus was not to increase their representation but to sway weak minority parties to their side on individual bills.

Clovers switch sides

At this point, the Clovers endorsed the Slopes and announced they would be voting with the Slopes on most parliamentary measures just as they had typically voted with the Leapers up until then. The Clovers in Baeba's Parliament were much younger than the children's parties in the nations of the east had ever been, with an average age around nine years old, and none of the other groups had taken them seriously. Indeed the Leaper representatives had often humiliated the Clovers whenever they seemed eager to express independent thoughts rather than simply adding to the Leapers' votes. Now, the other parties wondered whether the Clovers' defection was a sincere act on the Clovers' part, recognizing their kin even though the Slope representatives were much older than the Clovers, or whether it was simply another order given by the Leapers that might help the Leapers indirectly wield control over the Slopes.

Slope-Zenith relations

The Slopes were disappointed in their failure to incite civil strife between the Dolls and the Zeniths. The Slopes could not tell if the Zeniths were sexually assaulting Dolls or not; they only knew that the Dolls were not seeking protection against this from the Slopes. The Slope leaders figured that the Dolls knew that the Slopes would do nothing for them, and that it was futile to ask, and so simply accepted the sexual predators in their midst.

Indeed, the Zeniths were still raping Slope women, and seemed to take joy in targeting those Slope women who were least expecting it, often those with high social status and who communicated with Zenith diplomats. Thus the Zeniths not only exploited the Slope women, but embarrassed the Slope men, who claimed to be the strongest army in the world but were forced to attend meeting after meeting with men who were gleefully abusing Slope women.

These attacks happened when Slope women were out on the streets, usually alone. The Zeniths still had not attempted to breach the Slope forts and attack them in their homes. The Slopes downplayed the problem, saying that it was only natural that Slopes would be targets of sexual abuse, as the Slopes and the Dolls were the only groups in the nation that had a sizable population of women. The Zeniths, the Matrixes, and even XIG were all roving armies of men with few or no female members, and therefore could hurt the Slopes in ways that the Slopes could not turn back on them.

Dolls protest

Just as the Slopes began to notice the Dolls' lack of anti-Zenith protests, the Dolls started a protest against the Slopes' ongoing sexual abuse of the enslaved Crystals they still held captive in their forts, whose social status was much worse than even the Dolls'.

The Slopes knew that they could legally crush this protest, claiming self-defense since any protest against the Slopes in the Slope nation could be seen as weakening the state. They wanted to choose the most clever response, however, not the one that gave them the most immediate pleasures.

The Slopes hoped that they could find a way to gain political capital if they convinced the Dolls that they were protesting against the wrong people — whether they used a legal argument or a moral one — and that they should redirect their efforts towards the only men who were directly abusing the Dolls: the Zeniths. But they knew that they had a problem to overcome: since the Dolls were protesting against the abuse of a different group, not their own abuse, they would have the moral high ground in the minds of almost any outside group.

Matrixes prepare for war

The Matrix had by March 4198 taken hold of humanitarian rescue workers from Moonshine, mostly women. These people were Dolls according to their own definition. The Matrix had wished to acquire a far larger pool of slaves from the Slopes, but now felt that perhaps they could invade Moonshine instead.

Though avoiding a formal declaration of war for the time being, the Matrixes realized that by enslaving the Moonshine humanitarian workers, Moonshine and its allies might be preparing for war anyhow. They prepared their army to launch an invasion, as they preferred to be the aggressor in this war rather than the defender.

Matrix propaganda

The Matrixes asked the Leapers for help in distributing propaganda aimed at Moonshine which would seek to revive the earlier Moonshine-Matrix alliance, which had helped the Matrix greatly and Moonshine not at all. The Matrixes knew that even though the Leapers were cooperating with the Slopes in propaganda, they were not avowedly pro-Slope, and therefore might also be willing to write pro-Matrix propaganda. Their main aim was to present the Slopes as so chaotic and violent that a known enemy such as the Matrix would make a good temporary ally. But they had betrayed Moonshine just years earlier and knew that it would be difficult to convince the Moonshines to befriend such an enemy.

The Leapers agreed to disseminate Matrix propaganda, but Moonshine's diplomats were now impregnable, so the Matrixes carried on with their plans to invade Moonshine.

Internal Matrix propaganda

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

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

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

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

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

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

Matrix battle plans

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

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

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

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

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

Lilypad report

The Lilypads were intent on invading the Matrixes in due time, but had stalled just short of launching a full invasion. They had retreated to Hipside-like pseudo-pacifism, begging the Matrixes to come for them first, and feigning fragility.

Hearing the new Matrix war plans, the Lilypads warned that if the Matrixes invaded their territory and began assaulting them, the Lilypads would retaliate by sending rescue missions into Matrix territory to bring back the abused children the Matrixes had captured in previous raids.

Slopes invade Matrixes

In October 4198, the Slopes launched yet another offensive, this time against the Matrix homeland of Tata. The Slopes had struggled earlier to gain ground in Tata, since the easy access routes ran through the territory of their allies, the Squares, who at the time did not want to become subordinate to the Slopes. But within two years the Squares came to realize that the Slopes were growing far faster than the Squares, and decided to surrender most of their sovereignty and make the Square-occupied parts of Tata into a shared territory in which both Slopes and Squares could live.

The Slopes knew that there were very few Matrix soldiers to fight, since the Matrixes kept control of Tata using trained animals and perhaps even some slaves who were put in charge of other slaves. Therefore their objective was to bring back children and perhaps women from the Matrix slave plantations, and let them decide on their own whether they were bring abducted or rescued. They were already doing this to some extent along the southern front, but those territories mostly had ordinary civilian populations which the Slopes felt were best left intact rather than sending the women and children north to the Slope homelands.

Battalion forms

The Slopes assembled about 1900 adolescent boys and 300 girls under the command of the Snake, (Play Tāmpapapi); the minimum recruitment age was 15 and some were as old as 20, but the Slope leaders felt it was favorable to refer to their soldiers as boys and girls for so long as the outside parties such as the Leapers did. The Slope leaders felt that their willful decision not to sort their soldiers by sex would heighten the impression that they were still not yet adults. Nonetheless, when speaking Play they most often referred to their own kind as belonging to the tatea generation, which sorted them by birth year and not by their age at any one time.

Moral high ground

Since the Slopes were still allies of the Lilypads, they had a perfect opportunity to claim that their missions were humanitarian, with the goal of rescuing the captive children under Matrix control, as the Lilypads had claimed to want to do. Thus, the Slopes would be risking their lives to rescue abused children while the Matrixes risked their lives to find more children (and women) to abuse. But the Slopes refused to make this claim, saying that they had done well in the recent past claiming to be evil, and letting other parties make their decisions on how to view the Slopes. It seemed that a party claiming repeatedly to be the worst humans on the planet garnered more sympathy from outside parties than a party that did the same things while claiming to be heroes.

The Slopes' focus on rescuing children continued the tradition they had held to since their founding. The Slopes also claimed, however, that they had no choice. They could not rescue the Matrixes' captive adults because they were simply too difficult to pick up and place in the Slopes' carts, both because of their larger size and because they claimed the adults had been miseducated by the Matrixes into believing that they were living in paradise under Matrix control and would resist much more vigorously than would the children. Thus the Slopes admitted that they were taking children away from their parents, and that these children were not all orphans.

Nonetheless, the Slopes were confident that the children they took from the Matrixes would be happier under Slope rule, and would grow up as Slopes rather than defecting to the Matrixes; they knew that a few might run away or join splinter parties, but felt that even these defectors would mostly sooner ally with the Slopes than with the Matrixes. The Slopes' recent decision to become a closed-entry party meant that they were giving these children an award that outsiders could not get; thus, if the children chose to defect, they would need to give up Slope membership and not be able to get it back.

Slopes enter Tata

The northern Slope city of Metītaša provided many of the soldiers for this mission because it was the nearest Slope city to Tata and was easy to defend but difficult to invade. Metītaša now had almost no remaining Slope adolescents (or adults). The younger Slope children who had remained felt that they could not safely keep control of their slaves. The Slope soldiers therefore brought a small number of slaves with them, but left others unguarded. The Slopes assumed that the Zeniths would stop any slaves who attempted to flee Metītaša, and might take control of those slaves.

The Slope capital city of Vasās also provided many soldiers and was similarly depopulated, but to a lesser extent, as it was much further away.

Tāmpapapi's troop entered Tata and found the border totally unguarded, with no Matrix soldiers. The Slopes knew that they outnumbered the Matrixes by a vast margin, but that the Matrixes had trained animals and possibly also allies who were above the slaves but still not wholly free who might be obligated to fight on the front lines to spare the Matrixes' lives.

Matrixes win battles

Victory in Baeba

Meanwhile, the Matrixes won on the western front, crushing the Zenith completely by December 4198. They retook Baeba, and STW Base 257 moved back into the Swamp. At this time, the Matrix army passed a new law enslaving all non-Matrixes, effectively putting them at war with any party that did not wish to become the slaves of the Matrixes. The Matrixes felt that they were so powerful that they would indeed find people who would rather submit to slavery than fight for their freedom, and so they would not actually need to face off against the entire world in battle. In part this was because, like the Slopes, they planned to create a middle class that would have power over the lower class. Unlike the Slopes, however, even the middle class would be denied Matrix party membership and thus have no legal rights whatsoever; their middle class status was granted at the whim of the Matrix masters and could be revoked for no reason.

Victory in Tata

Then, the Matrixes won a lopsided victory against the Slopes who had attempted to wrest control of eastern Tata. They did this mostly by sending their animals to surround the Slopes, whereupon the Slopes realized they could be eaten alive if they did not surrender. Some believed that they would be eaten alive even if they did surrender, but the Matrixes made it clear that their animals' food came from traditional sources whenever possible and that there was plenty of food in the wilderness of Tata without relying on human meat.

This was the Slopes' biggest military defeat in their history, and since they had sent so many soldiers to other fronts, there were no Slope men left in the homeland to refresh and reinforce those who were dying in battle in Tata. Thus the Slopes surrendered and attempted to escape Tata, but the Matrixes had already surrounded them using trained animals. Thus the Slopes were captured. This led to the defeat of the remaining Squares as well, since they depended on access to the same piece of land.

The Matrixes enrolled the Slopes into the Doll population, which for the Matrixes meant slavery, and began violently abusing them immediately. The Slope captives told that Matrixes that about 500 young Slope children had been left behind in Metītaša with no adults to protect them, while the Slope capital city of Vasās had about 2,000 children living with relatively minimal adult care, relying on food and basic supplies coming from STW's old trade road. The Matrixes knew that they had quicker access to Vasās than even most Slopes did because Tata's side of the border had the easier terrain.

Matrixes consider future plans

Adoption of captives

The Matrix army was undermanned, relying mostly on trained animals since their earlier attempts to get slaves to fight on their side had failed. Now some Matrixes wanted to adopt the Slopes as soldiers, and separate them into two classes to encourage their motivation to change their identification to pro-Matrix even though the Matrixes were still reluctant to adopt any new party members. They wanted to have the captives march in a circle around a fire, with the Matrixes pushing them slowly inward, and those Slopes brave enough to enter the fire and stamp it out would be the ones adopted into the pro-Matrix protected class and allowed to abuse and encourage those who were cowardly. Any Slopes injured in this event would be enslaved.

Matrixes plan future battles

The emptiness of the Slope cities meant that the Matrixes had a chance to sweep in and occupy the Slope capital. STW had effectively occupied Vasās already since their transitory force of traders kept the non-Slope citizens from starvation, and the Slopes knew that they could not survive without outside help of some form if they lost their slaves, so they did not object to STW even though STW was still supporting the Matrixes. However, STW had long proven to be a very demanding ally, and STW's control of the city did not imply that the Matrixes would be welcome there; STW was a corporation with its own interests.

Vasās was at the junction of two rivers near Baeba, meaning that any attack on Vasās would be easily countered by Zeniths who had just been extirpated from Baeba. The Matrixes suspected that Zenith men had already invaded Vasās soon after the Slopes had left. Since the Zeniths were allies of the Slopes, the Slopes had no reason to oppose this (but also would be helpless to stop it).

However, some Matrixes considered that it would make more sense for them to invade the mountain district of Metītaša instead, where there were 500 young children living in a fort who they assumed would soon run out of food. They had been expecting the older Slope soldiers to return to the fort even if they lost the battle, since Slope soldiers were generally faster than Matrixes. This had not happened because the Matrixes had attacked with trained animals that were far faster than any human. If the Matrixes were able to take control of Metītaša, they would have the highest inhabited territory in the Slope state of Twadu and could control access to both rivers. They would then be able to row down the river into the lowlands and surround Vasās on three sides (assuming they held control of Baeba). The only area near Vasās which the Matrixes did not think they could control was the south side of the river, which rose into highlands again, and was held by not just Slopes but also aboriginal tribes who would almost certainly oppose the Matrix. Also, the Matrix soldiers would need to consider abandoning their animals by summertime because of the hotter temperatures in this area (although Vasās itself was also hot).

Some Matrixes were beginning to doubt that they could win even against the children, since their victory in Tata had relied almost entirely on their use of trained animals, and they were not sure that they could get these animals to invade a castle where the Slopes would have the advantage of higher terrain and of the building itself. They also worried that the children might have been lying about leaving Metītaša undefended, or that even if they had told the truth, the Zeniths would be present in the intervening wilderness area.

Matrixes move south

The Matrixes decided after an internal debate that they would invade Metītaša with their animals, taking their chances with the roving Zenith men, and figuring if they could at least reach the children's castle they might get the children to surrender without a fight just as they had in Tata. This would save them the trouble of trying to get animals to invade a castle.

The Matrixes knew that the Leapers were still attempting to claim that Erala was a functioning democracy, and that new elections were due in January 4199. They decided to revive their propaganda efforts, and to say that they were not abducting Slope children, but rather rescuing unaffiliated children from their Slope captors. The Matrixes no longer cared much about the government of Erala, but did care about their public image in Baeba, since Baeba really was a democracy and the Matrixes were interested in gaining power there.