Tamta/later history

Matrixes invade Hipsides

June 19, 4199

The Matrixes invaded Puba, the westernmost state of the Hipside community, in June 4199, hoping to encircle the new Hipside capital city of Napa, which was near the western extreme of that territory, and cut them off from the long strip of Hipside territories to the east.

They had invaded Puba before, in July 4197, and still controlled much of that territory. ut this new invasion was more than a hundred miles west of their other gains and across a mountain range, so the Matrixes were making two prongs rather than a wide spread.

Lilypads invade

In August 4199, having reached adulthood, the Lilypads marched westward and joined the war against the Matrix-STW coalition, seeking revenge for what had been done to them as children. These people were in the Hipside territory, not Hōki, and the Deer Walker children they had numbered about 21,000, plus they had a few thousand even younger children of their own.

The Lilypads left these children behind, saying that the Blue Cocoon would return to its original purpose as a safe colony for small children. (NOTE: This name may be wrong, as it may not have come with them.) Many of these children were less than five years old. However, although many young women had joined the coalition army, others stayed behind to care for the children, so the children were not as helpless as had been the Third and Fourth Classroom orphans. Nonetheless, the women who had stayed behind figured that as soon as the Matrix realized that Lilypad territory was now entirely free of adult men, they would immediately shift their invasion from Moonshine to the Lilypads.

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

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

Matrix invasion of Wōm

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

Matrixes invade Slopes

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

Matrixes invade the Square

Yīspʷilinâ, the Square, was now Slope territory, but it had kept its earlier name.

In Yīspʷilinâ, the Matrixes also found hostility, and realized that they would likely not be able to set up fortresses in Yīspʷilinâ's territory, as they had hoped to do.

Matrixes invade the Bear Trap

They thus quickly moved on to the Bear Trap, a state whose trade name was Mikagu (and whose native name was Poise). They planned to reach Moonshine territory so quickly that they could fight their war entirely within Moonshine, rather than needing to defend a battle front that was within Anzan. Even though Moonshine was more hostile towards the Matrixes than was Anzan, the Matrixes preferred to fight in Moonshine territory both because they believed that the Moonshine army was extremely weak and because they hoped that if they stayed out of Anzan, Anzan would stay out of the war.

Matrixes enter Lilypad territory

Then the Matrixes made it into Lilypad territory for the first time, realizing now that the population consisted entirely of women and children. The Lilypads had formed an all-female army to defend the homeland while the men and women of the traditional army were fighting in the west.

The Lilypad women were surprised that the Matrixes did not want to fight them, and were continuing rapidly on to Moonshine. Since the Lilypads were not obligated to defend Moonshine, they decided to allow this, and did not attempt to engage the Matrix men in combat. The women figured that perhaps the Matrixes still did not know that the Lilypad men had left, or that Lilypad territory was not worth colonizing as it was landlocked, or that some other reason they still did not know was keeping the Matrixes moving.

Matrixes enter Moonshine

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

Because of the Bear Trap counterattack, the Matrix soldiers were surrounded on all sides, and had no hope of establishing contact with the Matrixes who had remained in Baeba.

Matrix war strategy

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

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

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

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

Slope-JIB conflicts

In mid-July 4200, many Slope leaders began calling for action against the JIB groups, even though they had done no harm to the Slopes. It was merely that they were not doing enough good, and the Slopes felt they could make better use of them as slaves than as allies. Many JIB's had been trapped in their villages, little more than labor camps, for more than two years.

Background

About 180 original JIB's and 215 TPM's had escaped their labor camps over time as it became clear that few if any of them would ever achieve Slope status or even access to wider Slope society. All of the escapees were teenagers; the Slopes were somewhat more lenient towards their younger captives, allowing them to escape. The inability of the adults to escape despite no greater security measures against them helped the Slopes make clear that they could easily become even stricter than they already were.

JIB demographics

There were only about 3,600 JIB's, and most of them were people who previously been either Tašapaimma (TPM) or another group; these two groups combined were Vampapūsuu (VPU). The JIB's who were not VPU were all Crystals. The naming of the groups was confusing because the Slopes were now using the JIB name for the whole group, but one part of this group had never had any name but JIB; the first group called JIB's had consisted of 900 teenagers, mostly boys, though some of these had run away over time. This new JIB group actually comprised five different groups of people who had all attempted to join the Slopes over the past few years but had been relegated to this inferior status.

About one third of the expanded JIB group consisted of adults and of those adults a bit less than one third were women (mostly Crystals). The younger members were also mostly boys and thus the JIB's as a whole had no reasonable expectation of organic population growth. Most male members had joined expecting that if they behaved well they might be allowed eventually to access the female population of the wider Slope nation, which consisted mostly of Crystals and Dolls, but the Slopes had so far kept them trapped in villages where they were required to work to gain access to food.

Demographically, the TPM's were the largest group of JIB's, and they were adolescents, so the Slopes had been reluctant to harm them. Since these teenage TPM's lived mostly in villages with the adult VPU's, the Slopes had been reluctant to harm the VPU's as well. But the Slopes felt that an unreliable, poorly armed ally might be worse in a war than a weak poorly armed enemy.

Battle begins

Thus at the end of the month, the Slopes declared war on their own supporters, the JIB tribes, which had earlier submitted to the Slopes despite being ideologically opposed. The Slopes had planned to betray these people all along, and had always denied them access to weapons and political power. The Slopes figured they could take control of the entire JIB community without much struggle.

Coordinated sweep

Only four Slope men and no women were killed during the Slope troops' sweep around the JIB villages to bring them all under submission. (Even though JIB's had diverse origins, they had all adopted a similar way of life, one that was similar to the Dolls and which the Slopes profited from.) The Slopes killed only a few dozen JIB's, and this was irregular, as some JIB troops submitted instantly, so the casualties were concentrated in those JIB groups that initially resisted.

The Slopes allowed the JIB's to remain legally separate from the Dolls, and so despite the violent struggle, some JIB's continued to claim that they were willing allies of the Slopes whereas the Dolls and Crystals were unwilling. But in fact the JIB's now had even less power than the Dolls and were just barely above the enslaved Crystals.

Slope outreach

Merge with Tinks

It was only at this time (around 4202) that the Slopes finally made a formal alliance with their de facto ally, the Tinks, who were largely the estranged biological fathers of the Slopes, having taken new wives from the defeated Lenian populations of the areas north and east of Baeba Swamp.

Formalization of ZST

The Slopes created a new group called ZST (Play žipa tavi pas) which they defined as a new tribe encircling the Slopes, Tinks, and Zeniths, with no prohibitions on intermarriage or out-marriage. That is, any ZST member could marry another ZST member, and any ZST member could marry an outsider. The Slopes declared that the ZST alliance was a tribe, and that although they insisted the Slopes retain control of membership, they no longer saw the Tinks and Zeniths as outsiders or as inferiors.

The Slopes also considered the Lilypads to be of the ZST tribe even if they chose not to accept membership.

The declaration of ZST also demanded that ZST'ers release any previously captured slaves whom the Slopes judged to be of ZST descent, including the Lilypads and their blood relatives. The slaves being freed under this decree would be mostly Play speakers whom the Slopes believed might be blood relatives of themselves. Because not all Tinks were related to Slopes, the Tinks could have captured these slaves without knowing their ancestry; however the Slopes also felt that men who would abandon their wives and children during a war might also be the type who would enslave their own cousins.

Even so, as the Tinks had gathered their slaves a decade earlier, they had mostly sought out people they deemed to be Lenians, a group which overlapped heavily with the Play speakers due in part to the high incidence of nomadism in the colder climates (although Baeba Swamp was hot, the nearby areas were much cooler due to elevation and some quirks of the local climates) but which was geographically confined and mostly not the same group of people that had given rise to the Slopes and Lilypads.

The Slopes felt that a Play language test might be the best way to discern ZST tribal membership among the slaves, but also encouraged the drive to free the slaves by saying they would be able to make their own judgment calls on the spot, and therefore allow a few non-ZST's to be freed while keeping a few ZST's in slavery, if the behavior of the slaves and slaveowners in question suggested such a violation.

Plans to grow organically

The Slopes believed that they could starve out the Tinks' population growth without a conflict by adopting the tens of thousands of unenrolled children of the Tinks into the Slope party. They considered all of these children to be extended family members now, even though many Tinks were not related to Slopes, saying that the new tribe had made relatives out of strangers. The Slopes said as well that many of these unenrolled children were legally the siblings of the Slopes, even if they had different mothers.

Final battles

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

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

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

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

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

Matrixes in Moonshine territory

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

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

Relations with STW

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

Further relations with the Matrixes

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

Crystal party split

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

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

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

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

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

4202 war

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

Slope rule

The Slopes by this time were the only one of the original children's parties that still had a strong army with territory all to itself.

They were the only party that had achieved all of its major objectives:

1. They had reproduced within their group, rather than by forcing unwilling Crystal women to be their wives. There had always been more boys than girls in the Slope party, but the Slope girls did not complain of reproductive overload as they grew into women.
2. They had adopted tens of thousands of young children, with men taking on much of the parenting duties rather than forcing the women to do it all.
3. They had captured many Crystal slaves.
4. They had avoided a direct attack from any other parties of their generation (the tatea generation).
5. They had entirely avoided ideological splits, even as parties like the Matrix had divided and then divided again into ever smaller factions.
6. They had made converts of those in enemy parties, and then sealed off membership when they felt they no longer needed outsiders.
7. They had driven out adult armies such as the Zeniths from their territory.
8. They had driven out other top-tier armies, the ones who had just years earlier described the Slopes as children who huddled together in castles at night quivering in fear of the world around them.
9. They had gained territory in Baeba Swamp, which they had previously not felt possible.
10. They had been legally recognized by the Leapers in Baeba Swamp, and held a large fraction of the seats in the Leaper Parliament, showing that they had won the support of the people despite their violent history.
11. They had defied the predictions of many traditional powers who had stated that even if the Slopes were to achieve undeserved success, they were bound by shared childhood experiences and would therefore lose their sense of community as they became adults who had little in common.

The Slopes had changed little in ideology or lifestyle in their eight years of existence. They still obeyed many laws that seemed intended for children, and stated that this was because they had adopted so many young children from outside groups that such laws were still needed. They saw no end to this situation, and continued to laugh at other male-led parties who believed that raising other men's children was an act of submission.

Police force

Now the Slopes created their first police force, saying that they would be making changes to their way of life that would help them live among people in Baeba Swamp. These police would not live in the castles and therefore would not disrupt the way of life of the Slopes living the nuiŋee lifestyle.

The money to fund the police force was taken from taxes on both their own members and those they ruled over. The police thus became Yāsauŋa.

The Slope police's stated purpose was to ensure the safety of each individual Slope party member. This meant that young Slopes, especially girls, would not need to carry weapons or always be with an armed Slope every time they went on the streets. The police force was not meant to protect non-Slopes, and admitted that they would refuse to stop any Slope from attacking a non-Slope, even if the action was illegal by the Slopes' own laws. However, since Slopes also attacked each other, the Slope police stated they would intervene in such an attack on the side they judged to be the victim.

However, the Slopes still had their longstanding rule that anything that harmed the Slope nation in any way was treason, and if it came from a non-Slope, an act of war. No matter how small the aggression, the Slopes had free rein in escalating it, and this extended to the police. Thus the police could simply kill any non-Slope for the slightest misstep, so long as they could explain to any surviving Slope witnesses how the victim had harmed the Slope nation.

Šapei Napabapei and final years of Slope rule

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

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

STW reappears

STW was still a strong military force by this time; see STW#Wars_against_the_Dolls.

Pineapple rule

Note, these Lilypads are the ones who stayed behind in 4197, not the ones who stayed behind in 4199, because the latter group was staying in a territory that was already outside Hōki. It is possible that the 4197 group was also pushed out of Hōki by one means or another.

The Lilypads, now consisting mostly of adult women, reformed their government as they achieved unquestioned power over Moonshine's refugee state of Hōki, and declared a formal secession from Moonshine applying to not only the Lilypads but to the indigenous population, some of whom were descended from refugees who had fled into Hōki hundreds of years earlier. These people were now merely captives of the Lilypads.

Two-class system

The Lilypad rulers set up a democracy in Hōki: the Lilypads would be a hereditary ruling class who could not vote, in control of a hereditary voting class who could not rule.

Thus, the Lilypads gave them no choice but to accept captive rule, but would listen to suggestions about how to run their occupied territories. Many of these refugees did not speak Play, and the Lilypads made it clear to them that if they did not understand the issues, their own fellow citizens would be against them if they voted randomly, since it would disrupt the elections. These people thus were allowed to assign their votes to a trusted fellow citizen, meaning that those citizens who spoke Play could acquire disproportionate voting power. The Play word for such a person was ŋaupeifua, a proxy voter. This system had been used before in many small towns where the entire citizenry agreed to vote the same way on all issues, and sent a single person to vote with the power of the entire town's population.

The Lilypads stated that their new nation, the Habitat (LPD-4), would focus on children's issues that they had grown up fighting for from the other side of the generation gap. They praised the Players for having remained committed to the welfare of children for their entire existence, and promised to do the same. Like the Players, the new Lilypads (calling themselves Pineapples but with a different word than the usual Play word) were nationalists, so their endorsement of Play politics was not an endorsement of the Play nation or its vast and bloody military gains in recent years.

Inverted power structure

They promised to build a school system to educate the youth. They stated that because an entire generation (the Deer Walkers) had missed out on education, adults of that generation could also attend school, but they encouraged the Deer Walkers to seek jobs that did not require education.

This meant that the Lilypads expected to promote the even younger generation, who called themselves the Slimes (Play Tūuvām) into power before promoting Deer Walkers, and they realized that they were facing a similar situation to what had occurred in their own youth when the first children's parties emerged from a rebellion against the tiny adult male elite. This was also the first time that the Lilypads allowed people of other generations to hold power.

This controversial inverted power structure resembled some of the programs that the earlier generations of Lilypads had been most critical of. Essentially, the adolescent Deer Walkers expected the very young Slime children, who they expected would soon be more educated than most Walkers, to make most of the decisions for them, but the Slimes were unable to enforce these decisions without the Deer Walkers' cooperation.

The Habitat government in its full form lasted only one year, but it was replaced peacefully rather than by coup.

Campfire rule

The fifth Lilypad government was called the Campfires (LPD-5). They pivoted back towards wide-reaching politics instead of focusing on children's issues, saying that the Pineapple government had done many good things but that the children who had grown up as Pineapples had little interest to pursue since they were expected to be focused on the next generation. They stated they would not neglect the new generation, but that they would ensure their family cohesion would keeps generational bonds together.

By this time Moonshine had not only given up hope of reconquering Hōki, but had decided to shut off all refugees and all immigration, saying that refugees only harmed other refugees.

The Clover tribe

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

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