Soap Bubbles

The Soap Bubbles (usually called Bubbles) were a party founded in the year 3842 in the Thunder Empire as the Thunder Empire was being conquered by Dreamland. The Thunderers here had decided to collaborate with the Dreamers, as although they preferred independence, they felt that the Dreamers at least were rescuing the Thunderers from their previous oppressor, the Crystals. The Bubbles were the ones who refused to collaborate. Although both the Bubbles and the submissivist Thunderers agreed that they preferred independence, the Bubbles differed in that if their destiny was to be oppressed, they preferred Crystal oppressors to Dreamer oppressors.

Early history

The Soap Bubbles were not related to the Soap Bubble Societies of the 2400s despite originating in nearly the same geographic area. Since that earlier name was still in use amongst the descendants of those nations, as two of the three nations had in fact survived, they occasionally referred to themselves, at least in that part of the world, as the Snow. Snow had actually been the original proposed name for their party, but it had been changed to Soap before the official founding date in 3842, as they wanted a name that would be less inviting to the Dreamers and Dreamerized Thunderers who seemed to feel that the whole of nature was their bathroom.

The Soap Bubbles sometimes used nonviolent imagery to appeal to their enemies; whereas all of the other armies would slice people up with swords and stab them with spears, being conquered by the Soap Bubble army would merely make people feel refreshed and a ltitle bit prettier. They painted murals of their people dressed as soldiers, with giant white soap bars in place of swords. However, they knew from history that such claims to innocence bought little sympathy from stronger armies, and that if they ever wanted to be anything more than the bottommost group amongst an already oppressed people they would need to behave like normal people and establish a conventional army with swords and shields.

The Third Empire

In 3785, the Crystals got tired of cooperating with the Thunderers in running their Empire and conquered the Thunder territory (known then as Altotta) completely. The Thunderers had been getting weaker for centuries because they did not have a warm-water coastline, and even though the climate was warming up, they were still dependent on the Crystals for much of their food supply. Though the Thunderers were more militaristic in general than the Crystals, they were far poorer than the Crystals and could not afford to keep a sizable standing army in their half of the Empire while maintaining a secure food supply since they needed nearly the entire male population to work on farms and fisheries just to feed themselves.

The victorious Crystals claimed to be the first politicians in Altotta, and that the Thunderers who preceded them were primitive people who could not see beyond the present day in order to plan for the future. Because they wanted their rule to be as stable as possible, the many Thunder nations that had been set up over the past few hundred years were allowed to retain their governments, and were still referred to as nations, but on top of each government was an additional layer of government that answered only to the Crystal colonists' organization in Baeba Swamp. Thus the Thunder government did most of the work, and the Crystals stepped in only when the Thunderers tried to vote for something the Crystals didn't like. This allowed the Crystals to devote most of their attention to their military occupation rather than the time-consuming and largely unproductive work of running the civilian government.

Under the Crystal occupation government, which was often referred to as the Thunder Empire III or Third Thunder Empire, the Thunder religions were suppressed and Thunderers were encouraged to convert to the Crystal religion. As they had in Paba and Subumpam more than 1500 years earlier, Crystal people stood on street corners in Thunder cities blocking the path of Thunder citizens trying to go to work or take care of their necessary daily tasks. They put up signs on the streets insulting the Thunderers and warning them that in the future there would be a major war and they would lose. Yet on top of all of this they encouraged Thunderers to move to the Crystal Empire, promising that although they would be discriminated against there too, they would be safer because the Crystal Empire was solid and impenetrable to all potential invaders.

Dreamers invade Altotta

After about eighty years of being oppressed by Crystals, the Thunder Empire was invaded by the neighboring nation of Dreamland. Dreamland had invaded the Crystal Empire about 300 years earlier, and the Crystals had never forgiven them. The Dreamers considered the invasion of the Thunder Empire to be another step in their goal of conquering the Crystals, as the Thunderers had been denied the right to own weapons for 80 years and both sides considered them to have no role in the war. The Dreamers figured that if they pushed out the Crystals, they would have won the war and could begin oppressing the Thunderers just as badly as the Crystals had.

They were wrong; although the Crystals had denied the Thunderers the right to build a military of their own, the native Thunderers outnumbered the Dreamers by a wide enough margin that, even though they had almost no weapons, they were able to hold off the Dreamer invasion for two years. After two years, it became clear, however, that the Thunderers were going to lose their war, and that their Empire was merely going to change hands from one oppressor to another. In 3884, the Thunderers signed a surrender treaty turning over the whole of the Empire to the Dreamers and promising to help the Dreamers eliminate the last few rural strongholds of the Crystal armies.

The Soap Bubbles were a fork of the Thunderers who refused to surrender. Many of them were immediately killed, since they were just a tiny fraction of the Thunder population, and were thus outnumbered far more severely than the wider Thunder army had been. The Dreamers classified them as Crystal sympathizers, because they still refused to recognize that the Thunderers had any rights of their own and that there were more than two sides in this war. They considered eliminating the Bubbles a lesser priority than eliminating the Crystals, however, because like the Thunderers, the Bubbles were mostly unarmed and even those who had managed to steal weapons were untrained in how to use them properly and were thus poor fighters.

Because the Dreamers were focused on tracking down Crystals, many Bubbles escaped into the territory of the Crystals. Thus, the Soap Bubbles were saying that given the choice of two oppressors, they preferred the Crystals, whereas the Thunderers preferred the Dreamers. The fleeing Soapies said that they would even agree to be slaves for the Crystals if it would somehow help the Crystals eventually throw the Dreamer government back out of power. However, they knew that the Crystals had sworn off slavery 2500 years ago and showed no sign of returning to it ever again.

The Crystals at first considered the Soap Bubbles and the Thunderers to be the same, as the only difference between the two was that one had surrendered to the Dreamers and the other had not, and therefore considered the Soap Bubbles their enemies. They did not try to stop the flow of Soap Bubbles into their nation, however, just as they had never tried to stop the Thunderers from moving in during the previous era. They merely stated that the Bubbles would be the lowest class in their society and would have to work unpleasant and low-paid jobs such as scrubbing people's clothes with soap and extracting salt from the bubbles of the sea.

However, the Crystals soon realized that the Bubbles were now true allies, and the Crystals increased the civil rights of the Bubbles living in Crystal-held territory. This caused most of the other Thunderers that had been living in Lobexon to also convert to the Bubble party, seeing that to refuse to convert would be tantamount to endorsing the Dreamers' war against the Crystals. Meanwhile, the Soap Bubbles were being quickly washed away in the areas of the Thunder Empire that had been their original homelands. Thus, they soon became effectively a refugee minority living amongst the Crystals, despite having come to them from the Thunderers.

Thunder government returns to power

When the Thunderers overthrew the Dreamers in 3884 and established a racist government that oppressed Crystals moderately and Dreamers severely, they invited the Soap Bubbles back in. But the vast majority of the Bubbles, including the party leadership, did not reconcile. They stated that the Thunderers had drifted so far apart from their original belief system by this time that the Soap Bubbles actually preferred to live with the Crystals, and said that they would forever be allies of the Crystals. The Bubbles reminded the Thunderers that the Bubbles were the true descendants of the original Thunder party, because while the Thunderers had changed greatly under the Dreamer government, the Bubbles, having not been corrupted by power, had not changed at all.

When in 3919 the racist Thunder government was overthrown by a more moderate Thunder government, the Bubbles still did not make peace with the Thunderers. Nevertheless, the Thunder Empire was a very large place, and some of the Bubbles did start to move back in to their old stomping grounds. They found places to live in Altotta in which they could live amongst only their own kind, protected by small but powerful Soap Bubble militias, a tactic they had learned from living for so long surrounded by enemies, something even the Thunderers had never experienced.

Being a minority, the Soap Bubbles had always emphasized the need to prepare themselves for a war despite being traditionally nonviolent, and thus were actually, per capita, both better armed and better educated about military strategy than the Crystals. Thus, they were better soldiers than the Crystals. Nevertheless, the newfound similarity in political ideals between the Soap and the Crystals led many Bubbles to convert to Crystalism over the years, and few the other way around, so the Bubbles remained a small minority amongst the Crystals.

Later history

The Bubbles nevertheless became known as the least violent of the many mutually hostile armies during the chaotic period between the last days of the Thunder Empire (4108) and the beginning of the Swampy Empire (4149). Indeed, they had remained completely nonparticipant in any violence, although because they were so small and weak, they at times entered into alliances with the Crystals in which the Crystals promised to protect them.