Lava Handlers

The Swamp Kids were a political organization founded in Vaamū in the year 4149. The founding members of the party were men who worked manufacturing weapons and were so efficient that all other weapon manufacturing businesses went bankrupt. Thus, they had achieved a monopoly, and therefore had the power to overthrow their own bosses and face off against the Army if the bosses pled to them for help.

In some ways, the Swamp Kids strongly resembled the Zenith. Like the Zenith, the Swamp Kids believed that violence against women was an important pillar of their society and were suspicious of women who didn't have bruises. Like the Zenith, the Swamp Kids were founded near Paba but envisioned their people aggressively punching westward through the continent towards their goal of conquering Baeba Swamp. The Swamp Kids realized this, and stated that they were definitely not the Zenith and never would be. They arose at a time when

Early history

Background

The Swamp Kids were founded in a very violent time. Their nation, Vaamū, was currently being occupied by a foreign army calling itself Zakap. Much of Vaamū, previously known as Halasala, had been the pacifist empire of Paba for three thousand years, but late in their history the miracles of diplomacy that had saved them over and over from being conquered by their much more aggressive neighbors finally stopped. Paba's reaction to this was not to raise an army, but to submit completely to simultaneous invasions from all of its neighbors. The royal family had been in charge of declaring war, and they responded to the invasions by hiding out in their fortified castles hoping that they would be spared from the invasion.

For the next two hundred years, Halasala changed hands from one abuser to the next as no outside army was willing to let any other outside army have total control. The only positive change was that racial conflict in Halasala had entirely stopped, as the many different invaders had come from many different ethnic groups and all had agreed to abuse only the natives and not turn against each other.

In 4143, the leaders of a group of Vaamūans called the Horses, who were one of the most powerful groups at the time, ordered a full reinstatement of the pre-Zakap government, but only for the Horses. All non-Horses, they said, would be killed. But the rank and file of the Horses would not agree, and instead they revolted and killed their leaders. This was the beginning of a trend in Wâmûan society, as the underclass came to realize that their leaders were not invincible, and could be overruled by large crowds of otherwise powerless people. Assassinations of leaders increased over the next few years until the leaders were forced to speak to their workers from a safe distance or use only written communication. This, however, served to decrease Wâmûans' confidence in their leaders, and the leaders of many groups responded with stricter discipline.

In 4145, a civil war erupted in Wâmû. The Horses, who now had come to believe that it was God's will for them to kill all non-Horses as soon as they could, had focused their attention on the Zakap, and a group of pro-Zakap Andanese called the Kakalakakamalila. The Horses outnumbered the Zakap, but the Zakap were viewed with much less suspicion by the other groups.

The Horses wanted to kill their enemies because they believed that they were all doomed to spend eternity in Hell, and that it was God's will to kill all those who are damned. There was nothing in the Kaa religion that would suggest this, but it had worked its way into their holy books just the same. Because this was a religious belief, the Horses would die for it, and indeed they were not afraid even when they found themselves facing an army more than ten times the size of their own.

The Horses were quickly eliminated, and the center of conflict shifted to a second civil war between the Zakap and another army called the Laaatalalatataaa, a former ally of the Horses. The Laaatalalatataaa believed as well that it was God's will to kill the unfaithful, but they believed that nobody could know who the unfaithful were, but could only make an educated guess. So they put all their followers through tests to determine as best they could whether they were faithful, and found that many of them had failed. But they were afraid to tell this to their people, so they told the people that only a few of them had failed, and that these people were not really Laaatalalatataaa. But most of the Laaatalalatataaa had already been reached by other political ideas, and they too turned against their leaders, and assassinated them, thus creating yet another victory for the Zakap.

The Zakap army saw that they seemed to have more popular support among the roughly 2 million Wâmûans than all the other armies combined, and so they declared war on all other armies, and claimed they were going to reunite the nation under Zakap principles. The war was fought in 4147, a date the Zakap promised would be relabeled as 0.

The Zakap army took over the weapons production of their territory, and killed the soldiers in opposing armies with terrifying efficiency. Just four days after the war had started, it was over, and two thirds of their enemies lay dead on the ground. The survivors were so terrified of the Zakap that the Zakap took the opportunity to abuse and overwork them. Meanwhile, they moved their weapons factories deeper into their territory, so that a rebel army would not be able to kill Xakaps the way Xakaps had just killed rebels.

Birth of the Swamp Kids

The Zakap army was now far more repressive than they had been before, and they managed to stay in power for nearly two years before a third civil war broke out. This time, the conflict was between the Xakaps and their workers; the more than 500,000 workers who were still alive claimed they were being abused and wanted to take control of the government themselves and have a direct democracy.

The Xakaps were terrified. Their workers were mostly much too young and dumb to run a government, and they knew that if they did not win this war then Wâmû would be doomed. The Xakaps were strong enough to take on their whole nation, however, and they were prepared to do just that. In mid-4149, the Zakap army attacked their workers directly.

But what they didn't realize was that their workers were not quite as dumb as they had become convinced; it was the Zakap who had made the most stupid move here. The workers had become so efficient at producing weapons that all of the other companies had gone bankrupt, and they know had a total monopoly on dangerous weapons. Thus, the Xakaps could not turn to any other supplier to defend themselves against their workers. While the Xakaps were busy discovering they had been tricked, the workers' army, called the Swamp Kids, seized power in a well-planned scheme.

First Swamp government

The Swamp Kids at first called themselves a name best translated as Tinks; the original Tink governors were some of the oldest people in their nation. They claimed that their age gave them wisdom, and that they were the only ones old enough to remember what life had been like when they had just defeated AlphaLeap. However, they realized that their children and grandchildren were much more powerful and more numerous than the original Tinks, and planned to hand over power to a newer generation as quickly as possible. They planned to restore a government they referred to as "the Empire" (milikihu). This was a term that had previously been used by organizations such as STW as an insult, but the Tinkers considered it as praise for a government that had been much stronger and yet more peaceful than any of the many governments that had followed.

The Tinks were much weaker, per capita, than the Zakap, but had the advantage of a total lock on supplies of weapons and armor. Most of the Tinkers were descended from Pabap people, and therefore had difficulty wearing the armor that they themselves were producing, but they had an easier time holding swords and spears. But even so, they immedately set forth producing smaller-sized versions of the weapons and armor that they had previously been making for the Zakap. Some Tinkers defected to the Zakap, noting that the Tink leaders were protecting themselves at all costs and not participating in the fighting. But the Tinks eventually conquered both the Zakap and the few pro-Zakap Tinks, and created a new nation they called Anzan after the Andanese people that made up much of its population.

This was the first time in all of history that the Andanese people had had their own nation. Previously, they had always lived in nations founded by other people, always as an underclass. However, Anzan was very diverse at the time of its founding, and people living there had to be encouraged to consider themselves Andanese.

By this time, Anzan had lost complete control of its territories in Atlam and Tarwas. The Tinkers were curious to see what had happened there, as they saw that on these continents, conditions were even worse than in Anzan. They discovered that Tarwas was winning its war against the Andanese, and that the Crystal party in Atlam had been thrown completely out of power by a new party that had arisen in just the last few years. The Tinkers wanted to avoid a similar situation in their own country, but had no plan.