Oyster War

The Vegetable War was a war on the planet Teppala which raged from 2662 to 2674 AD. It was so violent that nearly all large animals were killed, leading the people who survived the war to become vegetarians, at least inland.

Parties to the conflict were:

• Litila, actually an alliance between Litila and Thaoa which promised to fight anyone who did not submit to them, even it meant fighting the entire world. Litila is a religion which wants to put a species of worm-like crab called the liui in control of humans. This is still not the same as the Inkʷa/Ifena/Isyna group, which favors animals in control of humans in general, but not just the one specific species of crab. The liui are often called "crabworms" in English, because worm in English is a general term for any organism with a wormlike body shape, and the situation was similar in most humans living in nations to which the crabworms were not native. However, they really are crustaceans, being crabs with very elongated bodies. They communicate with humans purely through sign language: the crabs wave their claws and the humans wave their hands in mutually recognized patterns to spell out each letter of each word in their shared language, which was based on Subumpamese but had many loans from the crab's native language. Written language was also used.
• The Gold Empire, actually a part of the Gold Empire that had rebelled and conquered the rest of it.

Background

Litila was based in northern Subumpam. They wanted to turn over control of the government to the crabworms and stop the explosive expansion of human settlement all over the continent. They were rejected by everyone else as masochists with simple minds. But their power grew rapidly, as the crabworms actually were a very intelligent species capable of running an advanced nation. Their exoskeleton was too firm to be pierced by any known human weapon, so humans were forced to fight crabworms by avoiding them instead of attacking them. They were thus very powerful at war, and Litila's military power was limited only by how many crabworms they were able to breed.

First battles

In 2662, Litila invaded the Gold Empire with its army of crabworms and humans. Litila was much smaller than the Gold Empire, and was located in the worst possible position, but the Gold Empire had been weakened slightly by having just come out of another major war against Nama, in which Litila had fortified its borders and remained neutral. Thus Litila was able to attack at full power against a weakened enemy.

Nevertheless, the Gold Empire was very strong, and they gained allies as they fought as even their enemies in Nama preferred them to the crabworms. Thus the war was the bloodiest war the world had yet seen, and after twelve years almost all animal life apart from humans, crabworms, and a few other mobile species such as birds had gone completely extinct. Surviving humans were pure vegetarians except for a few living along the immediate south coast. Meanwhile the human governments of both sides of the war had collapsed and their replacements were not interested in continuing the war.

Nevertheless, Litila had won the war, as its goal had been no more than to defeat the human population and establish more land for crabworms. Crabworms now set up a new government in Subumpam that excluded humans entirely and considered them merely as food. The Subumpamese were upset that the crabworms had chosen the very humans that had been helping them seize power as their primary food source, rather than the enemy humans that they had captured. But the crabworms made no distinctions at all among the various classes of humans; to them they were all just meat.

Thus life in Subumpam was so bad now that all other humans, even those living in pestilential conditions far away from Subumpam, were better off than the Subumpamese, and began to take in Subumpamese refugees in their nations. They hoped that they could starve out all of the worms, or at least force them to all move to the coast where a relatively uninterrupted food supply still could be found.

In 2674 a coalition of human nations attempted an invasion of Subumpam from the sea. They had mostly come from Nama, so they landed in Vuʒi, on the southwest coast, and began to march inward in search of crabs and distressed humans. Crabs preferred to live in rock nests, so it was uncommon to see a crab simply crawling out in the open even in a time of safety. But the sight of the advancing mob of flesh encouraged the crabs to come out, as they had been running short on food in this area recently. The humans tried to fight back, but were simply unable to hit the crabs hard enough with their swords to injure them. And so the entire human battaltion was killed without the crabs suffering a single casualty in the battle.

A few humans had stayed behind on the ships, and even though crabs could also crawl along the ocean bottom and could burst their ships from below, the area they had landed happened to be empty of crabs for the time being because the fish in this area had also been depleted. When they saw that none of the humans that had marched inland came back that night, they figured that they had probably been eaten and decided to return to Nama.

Back in Nama, the human coalition decided that it was unwise to attempt to invade Subumpam. They looked for other strategies such as chemical warfare, while continuing their attmpts to rescue runaway humans hiding in the wilderness where crabs could not easily reach them.

The crabs had spared Thaoa from direct geographical occupation because even though it was one of their strongest allies, Paba stood between Subumpam and Thaoa, and the land route was not easy to get over. But even so, the crabs looked hungrily at Paba as their next conquest, and the Pabaps realized their long streak of escaping being involved in the world's bloodiest wars was about to end.

War in Paba

Paba had been preparing for the Vegetable War (Īpipayas) for a long time. At this time, Paba was a strongly militarized empire but had not fought a major war for over a thousand years. But unlike other peaceful nations, they did not let their military skills degrade. They kept an active military at all times even though the high propotion of their people serving in the military caused their per capita income to be lower than the areas around them. Partly, they made up for this by becoming the masters of the sea as well, and dominating trade with their powerful navy that even wealthier coastal nations such as Thaoa were not allowed to question.

Paba was sharply divided into two major racial groups. Far back in the past, on Laba, there had been an alliance between the ancestors of the Pabaps and the ancestors of the Tarpabaps. The Tarpabaps lived the equatorial rainforests of southern Laba, and were all very tall, thin, very dark-skinned people. The Pabaps were short people, less than half the size of the Tarpabaps, with blonde hair and blue eyes but facial features not much different than Tarpabaps'. The size difference between the two races was so great that both groups agreed to a cultural taboo against forming mixed families. This held true even when they came to share the same religion, Yiibam.

When an asteroid hit Laba, every society was ruined. Seeking a way out, the Tarpabaps gave the Pabaps access to their many ships in return for Pabaps guaranteeing them safe passage along the northern coast of Laba so that the two groups could both leave Laba and settle a new nation on the continent of Rilola. Thus, both groups came to Rilola in far greater numbers than one would have expected, and in fact formed many nations instead of just one.

Once on Rilola, the two groups mostly stayed together. The new nation of Paba was formed, bordering Subumpam to the west and Thaoa to the east. The ships kept coming, and the population icreased rapidly. The settlers quickly agreed that their society would be better off if the two groups switched places: Pabaps would mostly live along the coast and focus on fishing and trade, whereas the Tarpabaps would move inland and focus on agriculture and the military. Large body size was no advantage at sea, except when rowing was the only means of moving, and the Tarpabap people seemed to have huge appetities even for their body size, which put them at grater risk of starvation. On the other hand, the Pabaps did not want to go to war against people that could step on and crush their puny soldiers without fear of any damage.

The two groups lived peacefully in Paba and the Tarpabaps mostly adopted the Yiibam relihgion from the more numerous Pabaps. Nevertheless, they still did not marry Pabaps. They did not disciminate based on skin color, but the very few chiuldren that were born from mixed marriages (generally involving a healthy Pabap marrying a Tarpabap who was malnourished or otherwise shorter than normal) were easily identified by their intermediate skin and hair color, and excluded from mainstream society. These people mostly married other mixed people, but their numbers never grew significantly. Note that unlike other empires such as Subumpam, in Paba there was no "bridge" population that was physically intermediate between the tiny Pabaps and the tall Tarpabaps. THe Pabaps had massacred the dark-skinned aboriginal Sukuna people, save those few that converted to Yiibam, and those few that did remain primarily associated with Tarpabaps. (Note though that despite the huge body types, Tarpabaps and Pabaps were more closely related to each other than to aboriginals such as the Sukuna, who had been living separately for tens of thousands of years.)

Pabaps had been roughly a 90-95% majority in their nation for most of its history. Thus, despite their shared belief that Tarpabaps should live mostly inland and focus on the military, even the land army was primarily Pabaps, and the capital city, located well inland, was also almost entirely Pabap. However, this began to change around the 1700s when the Tarpabaps decided that they wanted a nation of their own rather than (or in addition to) being a minority in Paba. Many thousands of Tarpabaps immigrated from Laba to Paba, causing overcrowding problems. Even though most of these were only intending to stay in Paba for a generation at most, and then move on to one of the other new nations that was being formed, those who stayed caused the Tarpabap population to increase from a 10% minority to a 60% majority, with Pabaps being only about 15%. They were also moving to other nations such as Subumpam, but most chose Paba as it seemed to be the most peaceful nation and the most welcoming of outsiders. Pabaps had full control of the sea around them now, and could have simply refused to seat these people, but for the most part they considered the Tarpabaps a valuable ally, even if they were a very intimidating one. In fact, almost all of the ships that were bringing Tarpabaps to Paba were actually Pabap ships, as the navy of the Tarpabaps' original homeland on Laba had drastically declined as rising seas flooded most of their best harbors. (This was also happening on Rilola, including Paba, but here the land was much flatter and more gentle. On the other hand, because the land was flatter, each sea rise reduced the amount of habitable land much more drastically than on Laba.)

Though the Tarpabaps living in Paba mostly still claimed loyalty to Paba, they felt uncomfortable being a majority and yet not controlling the government. Leadership was mostly hereditary, and Paba had been ruled by the same royal family for nearly its entire history. Paba instituted some reforms in its government which still denied the Tarpabaps access to the ruling class, but attempted to pacify them by giving them more money to help improve economic conditions in majority-Tar areas of the nation, and allowed them to own ships and penetrate the Pabap naval blockade around rival nations in order to carry on independent trade missions with those other nations. (Paba's navy had now become the strongest in the world, as their previous rival's navy had been destroyed in the war immediately preceding the Vegetable War.)

Nevertheless the Pabap leaders were worried. Since Paba's army was almost entirely composed of ethnically Tarpabap soldiers, they realized they were about to risk the lives of almost the entire adult male Tarpabap popilatuon without the Pabaps having to suffer at all. The army had known for hundreds of years that any war that Paba engaged in would likely be fgought mostly on land, and therefore many more Tarpabaps than Pabaps would die, but none of them had expected a war of this degree.

Worried about revolt, Pabap leaders promised the Tarpabaps that since all of Paba was at risk in this war, all of Paba would fight, including the navy and the large civilian population. They also annexed Subumpam, declaring the whole of the huge wrecked empire to now be Pabap territory, and promised the soldiers that they could have it all to themselves if they wished. At the same time, though, they were cautious not to imply that they were deliberately trying to get rid of the Tarpabaps by granting them more land to move into. Even the most suspicious Tarpabap soldiers could not think of a reason why Paba would deliberately risk losing its army in a foreign nation knowing Paba itself would be immedaitely conquered aft6erwards. Moreover, they noted that the large Pabap minority in Subumpam had fared no better than the rest of the Subumpamese.

Paba enters the war

As above, Paba had not fought a land war for over a thousand years. They had expected the attack to come from occupied Subumpam's ally, Thaoa, a rival nation of Paba which in fact had originally been settled by Pabaps and had a similar history of dominating other nations with naval blockades but had eventually lost out to Paba. But Thaoa realized that the crabworms eating people in Subumpam were far more powerful even than the best-armed humans in the world. Moreover they were shocked at how the crabworms had run out of food and decided to eat the humans who had helped them the most in the war, and were unsure about even participating in the war against Paba at this point. However they knew that if they asked Paba for an alliance, Paba would demand the immediate annexation of Thaoa's entire territory to Paba, which they were not willing to do even if at the pain of death.

Meanwhile, Paba had not expected an attack from Subumpam, which had had a history of usually being an ally of Paba, and being embarrassingly incompetent whenever it wasn't. Even though the Pabaps were aware that crabworms had broken out of their strongholds in Litila and occupied most of Subumpam, they still figured a human invasion was more likely than a crab invasion and moved only a small part of their army to the western border.

So the majority of Paba's land army remained concentrated near its eastern border with Thaoa, whereas the crab worms were invading them from the west. Pabap civilians fled in terror as the crabs clawed their way through the border walls the Pabaps had built, which were much weaker than the walls on the eastern border with THaoa. The crabs faced little resistance, eating both civilians and the few soldiers that had been posted at the western border.

Nevertheless, since the capital of Paba, Biospum, was also in the west, a stronger army was not far behind. These soldiers were better armed, and better prepared for a fight against an enemy unbeatable by conventional means. Since they knew that even their sharpest swords could not penetrate the crabs' bodies, they did not bother bringing any. Instead they relied on chemical weapons and attempts to bring heavy rocks up to high places so that they could drop them on the crabworms. A leading battallion swept off into the countryside to attempt checmical warfare, but the other half of the army had to occupy the capital city as the land here was so flat that there were no tall buildings anywhere else to drop heavy stones from (crabs did not generally move through thick forests, so occupying trees would be useless).

Crabs move in

To Paba's distress, no crabs were sighted anywhere near Biospum for the first month of the war. They realized that the crabs were a very intelligent species, even if not as intelligent as humans, and that they had no reason to even attempt to occupy the capital city since there were plenty of humans available for them in the countryside. So they realized that the strategy of dropping rocks from a great height would likely never get a chance to be used, and that their only chance of stopping the crab army was to attempt yet another conventional battle, the same strategy that had failed every other time it had been used.

And so a section of the army called Pamimibūppus was sent out from the capital city to meet the invading crab army. They did not have chemical weapons available to them, and they had almost no armor or weapons, so they figured that they were likely to be simply eaten as soon as they encountered the crabs. However, they at least supposed that the battalion that had left the previous monthg, unless it had alreayd been entirely defeated, would at least be able to guard them as they fought and that they would be able to take some of the armor off of the dead soldiers if they could find it.

Later history

After the war, the human population of this part of the world was so destitute that they did not fight any major wars for another 400 years, and the balance of human power shifted to the colder northern areas of the continent, where large animals had not been affected. The human population density here was very low, however, so humans in many areas were not even the dominant species. This led to an era in history where humans were fighitning mostly agaiunst animals instead of other humans, although complex wars with human+animal teams fighting other human+animal teams also occurred. In the frigid north, the primary inhabitant was the penguin. Slightly further south, there were rabbits, wolves, eagles, and firebirds (a seagull-like bird). In the water, there were a few dolphgins, but they lived a difficult life because they were walled in by ice on one side and land on the other, and could not escape back to the wider ocean. (They had moved in during an unusually warm series of summers in which the sea ice partly melted and the water was at its most bountiful.)

Penguins did not normally attack humans, but all of the other large animals did. Rabbits were the most dangerous, because they were as vegetarian as humans were, and therefore competed for the same food sources. They also commonly lived in cities, as did humans. Wolves were also very dangerous, but considered humans a third-tier food source as humans were much smaller than the prey they liked to eat. Eagles and firebirds considered humans their absolute ideal food source, but eagles found the climate too cold to live in and firebirds had a difficult time getting to this area from their homes on the other side of the icecap. Dolphins were natural allies of humans, having known about them for many tens of thousands of years because they had seen them on Laba, but the dolphins living here were in danger of starvation and did not even attempt to be friendly towards humans. It is notable that most of the animals that reached local dominance were predators that had out-competed all of the other animals including the other predators. Humans and rabbits were incapable of being predators, and acheieved dominance by artifically strengthening themselves by building cities and learning to use weapons (although rabbits were disadvantaged because of their shape, they could nevertheless use and handle weapons such as swords.) Another example of a non-predatory dominant species was the hedgehog, although humans for the most part were not familiar with hedgehog-only civilizations yet; they had only seem them living in the woods around humans.

The humans living in Mabimbižip (literally "soap bubbles") had been wishing for a long time that the dolphins around them would die. Dolphins were eating them, because they were so hungry that they would eat even humans, and the dolphins were also eating most of the fish that the humans themselves would have preferred to live on. They had reached the coast, but found that the coast was the worst area of land to live on, whereas human settlements in the interior such as Tarwas were doing much better. The Mabimites were good at checmical warfare, and considered poisoning the water, figuring that it could still be repopulated by fish later on since fish could swim through ice and doilphins could not.