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.

Timeline

4192 • 4193 • 4194 • 4195 • 4196 • 4197 • 4198 • later history

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.

Changes to the map

Loss of Tāmta

The Lilypads and the Hipsides were now sharing the same territory, and the Players now occupied most of Tāmta (Hōki). The Lilypads requested that the Leapers reapportion the Lilypads' Tāmta seats into the five Hipside states, so that the Lilypads and Hipsides could compete with each other for local power. 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.

Reduction of seats

The Leapers also reduced the Lilypads from 72 to 57 seats, to account for the Lilypads and Deer Walkers (about 1700 Lilypads and 7000 Deer Walkers) who had chosen to submit to the Players, as well as the loss of the non-Lilypad population which had earlier ceded their seats to the Lilypads. This calculation assumed a 3% population increase in one year, which the Leapers stated was probably an overestimate, and did not account for Lilypads lost in battle, as they had decided to accept this tradition from the Lilypads' parent culture.

Of these seats, 18 belonged to the Deer Walkers, but the Deer Walkers had earlier voted unanimously to elect teenagers of the Lilypads' Cold party to represent them, and so the Lilypads simply thought of these as Lilypad seats.

Other changes included the reduction of the Slopes' territory from 28 to 24 seats, of the Square from 17 to 16 seats. This left Erala's Parliament with a total of 164 seats, as the other territories were unchanged.

Planned future division by district

Likewise the Leapers had not been able to divide the many states of Erala into districts as they had planned. They considered merging Erala with Baeba, with Baeba intended to to be the capital of the combined territory, saying that the prohibition of war within Erala had seemingly not accomplished much, but promised that there would still be a division between Erala and Baeba at all but the highest levels of government. For legal reasons, merging Erala into Baeba would require the Slopes and Matrixes to sign a treaty, since the Leapers would need to reinstate the Matrix as a legal party in the combination. The Slopes refused to do this.

Views of the Slopes

Despite the Slopes' dismissive attitudes towards the Leapers, the Leapers reaffirmed their endorsement of the Slopes, saying that they would figure out how to reach the adolescent Slope leaders without offending them. The Leapers believed that the three-caste population of Slopes, Dolls, Zeniths was ideal for a rising economic power, and that with the Slopes in charge they could turn Erala into the world's fourth economic power, after Dreamland, Baeba, and Tata.

The Leapers decided to legalize the Slopes' three-caste society in Baeba as well, meaning that the Dolls became a political party in Baeba, and they used the Slopes' definition, not the Matrixes' slightly wider one.

The Leapers again praised the Slopes, saying that they were able to exploit the Dolls than the Matrixes were, because giving the Dolls some legal rights gave the Dolls false hopes of success, meaning that they would work harder to better their situation, and it also set the Dolls against each other, preventing them from forming an army or even a unified political ideology. By contrast, the Matrixes' much crueler slavery system theoretically provided better labor output from the Dolls, but since the Dolls had little to lose from not working (since the Matrixes were already punishing them arbitrarily), the Leapers believed that the Matrix system was inefficient and that the Slope economy would eventually eclipse the Matrix slave economy in Tata.

Leapers draw up anti-Doll laws

Thus the Leapers passed a series of laws in Baeba Swamp that closely mirrored the Slopes' laws. They called these the Laws of Shame because many were based in the assumption that it was a crime to be a Doll, and therefore laws that were unfair against Dolls could be worded as if they were kind accomodations that could be revoked at any time so that the Dolls would face even worse situations that would be considered their just desserts. Many of these laws also were similar to those of the Raspara. One major difference was that while the Raspara laws cemented the tiny Raspara minority at the top of the social scale, in the Leaper-Slope system the privileged class was the majority, and the Dolls would need to be worked very hard to keep up with their demands.

Raspara-like laws

Some Leaper laws that resembled Raspara laws were:

Slope-like laws

Some Leaper laws that resembled Slope laws were:

1. Dolls cannot handle weapons; this is because the Dolls are physically fragile by nature, more apt to harm themselves than to make good use of the weapons.
   1. This includes kitchen knives, so any Doll eating a food that requires the use of a knife, outside of a supervised restaurant, is a criminal.
   2. Dolls cannot be police officers or soldiers, even in a noncombatant role.
2. The Leapers are permitted to relieve any Doll of their party membership, should they feel that the person was miscategorized. But Dolls cannot ask for this themselves. Escape from the Doll party is by invitation only.
3. Although the Dolls are a legal political party, special restrictions apply to them such that even if the Dolls become a majority, they cannot overrule the remaining parties on certain important legal issues.
   1. Dolls are eager to submit to the strongest power and thus cannot have a voice in Baeba's foreign policy.

New laws

Leaper laws that were new creations included:

1. Dolls cannot travel freely.
   1. Dolls cannot leave the nation without permission from the Leaper police force.
   2. Dolls cannot enter the swampland of Baeba. This is because they are physically delicate, attract predators, and prone to catching disease, which could spread to other citizens.
   3. Dolls cannot have cities of their own, though they may have neighborhoods so long as these are surrounded on all sides by a guardian population such as the Slopes or Leapers.
2. Dolls lack emotional attachment to their family members.
   1. Dolls have the right to reproduce, but lack parental instincts and thus have no claim to custodianship over their children. Leapers and others are thus permitted to split up Doll families whenever this is needed for work.
   2. Dolls cannot choose their sexual partners, as they by nature prefer partners with traits not found in their own population, and therefore cannot form stable bonds with each other or with their preferred partners.
3. Dolls have little use for education.

Summary

Thus the Leapers joined the Slopes and Matrixes in legitimizing rape of the Doll population, though with a different rationale.

The Leapers felt their Doll class was more stable than the Slopes', which had three subdivisions of Dolls, each intended to be set against each other. The Leapers admired the Slopes' cleverness in splitting the Dolls this way but felt it had been ineffective and that the better-off Dolls in Slope territory had always advocated for the rights of the worse-off Dolls.

The Leapers predicted that Dolls would at first show little resistance to these new laws, as the laws at least shielded Dolls from responsibility to fight in the ongoing Matrix-Zenith war, but that at some point the Dolls would unite and form a nonviolent protest movement. If at that time the Dolls were the only group holding protests, the Leapers would propose a new law outlawing protests so that the other parties could unite against the Dolls and prevent the Doll movement from gaining outside support.

Leapers codify laws

The Leapers had the power to pass these laws on their own, despite being a minority party in Baeba's Parliament, because defining parties was one of their reserved rights, and other parties could not take that away. The Tinks were the largest slave-owning party in Baeba, and held most of the people that the Leapers considered Dolls. The Leaper laws actually elevated the status of these Dolls, and also implied that other Baebans, not just the Tinks, could push the Dolls around and not face a penalty. The Leapers reassured the Tinks that these new laws did not take away the Tinks' rights to force additional restrictions on their Dolls, but that the Tinks needed to accept that they were subject to the laws of Baeba, and that the Leapers could write laws that affected them and their slaves. The Leapers stated that they in theory had the right to free all of the Tinks' slaves, but had no plans to do this so long as the Tinks did not commit treason against Baeba (as they had arguably done seven years earlier).

Like the Slopes, the Leapers wanted the Dolls in Baeba to believe that they lived in a democracy, and that if new laws were passed that harmed the Dolls, the Dolls had no one to blame but each other. The Dolls had the right to sit in Parliament and vote on bills like the other parties did, but there were certain things out of their reach, just as there were things out of reach for other parties as well. The Leapers did not explain why there were so many laws against the Dolls specifically, and few or none against the other parties, figuring that the Dolls could only conclude that they were being punished for their behavior and could only hope that future generations of Dolls might rise above this status.

Definition of a Doll

As above, the Leapers endorsed the Slopes' definition of Dolls. But there were citizens in Baeba that had no citizenship in Erala. The Leapers wanted to include citizens of Moonshine as Dolls by definition, figuring that the Lilypads had lost their attachment to Moonshine after Moonshine did nothing while various armies of traffickers kidnapped Lilypad children, but the Lilypads stated that they preferred to handle the Moonshines on their own, and did not want to be involved in abuse of Moonshines in Baeba. The Lilypads were still interested in invading Moonshine, but wanted to do this from what they considered the moral high ground rather than a situation in which they were guilty of aggression against Moonshine.

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.

Background

The Players had conquered the Lilypad heartlands five years earlier, in January 4193. The Players then renamed this territory to the Despotates, putting the children in charge of petty monarchies where they expected they would struggle so much that they would end up submitting to the Play army. Safe in this, the Players had then moved their troops north to the border of Hōki, where they stalled for a significant amount of time, and had only moved into Hōki in late 4197 once the diplomatic situation favored it. Thus more than four years of peace intervened between the Players' annexing the Despotates and their annexing Hōki.

Before this treaty in January 4193, the Play generals had decided to allow the children to flee northwards but in no other direction. After the treaty, the Players at first allowed the migration to continue, and indeed encouraged the children to flee in greater numbers, but also warned the children that they would soon close the border as they figured any children who refused the opportunity to flee must be looking for a fight. It took about a year for the Players to finally close the border, and they did not fully enforce this until May 4194, at which point they had announced at a diplomatic meeting that all of the children had been accounted for: tens of thousands had surrendered to the Players, thousands more had been killed by the aboriginals they had been told to rule over (including all 21 despots), and a few thousand more had rebelled against the Players and thus died in combat. There had also been much human trafficking, but at the time the Players had actually blamed the children for this, saying that they would have been safe if only they had submitted to the Players, but by insisting on running their own governments in the Despotates they had allowed human traffickers to patrol their rivers.

New movements

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. The Tadpoles were excluded and the Players promised they would never be written in as allies even if the Players restored their alliance with Moonshine and Moonshine declared the Tadpoles as allies.

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 twenty years earlier. But the Players conceded that since Tata was so far west it was unrealistic 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.

Lilypads' resolutions on future migrations

The Lilypads assumed that the Players would soon invade the Starfish Strip. This land was not particularly valuable in its own right, but it would be the Players' only access to the northern sea, and would also block Moonshine from easily accessing any of the children's territories of the west. Thus the Lilypads voided their claim to the Hipside Strip. The Lilypads said that they had no interest in either fighting or cooperating with the Players, and that if the Play army invaded the children's nations they would flee those too, either by moving to the tropics after all or by invading Moonshine. However, the Lilypads noted that the Players had yet to invade Moonshine's sovereign territory, and so there was a chance that the Play army would leave the Hipside Strip open.

Lilypads move districts

As the Lilypads moved, they did their best to keep the people of each original district together. Thus there was a Pusuaani troop, a Titapa troop, a Šanataŋūs troop, and so on. (The people of Fipapanu, who had early on come to call themselves Hipsides, had already moved west.) The demographics of these troops varied significantly because they were groups of people that had chosen to live together. These were the Cold Men's colonies, having been founded in early 4194 when the population had been much younger. There was a subdistrict called Tamataa founded by two six-year-old boys.

Even the people of Titapa, the Gardeners, who promised not to move, joined the migration. Some of them stayed behind, just like some of the other groups had stayed behind, but those people who chose to stay agreed to give up their identities, and thus the only Gardeners were the ones moving west with the troops.

Creation of Banetepaa

Now the Lilypads renamed their capital city (not the capital of Erala) from Šanataŋūs to Banetepaa, saying that it was a migratory city with its own districts, and that they wished to have it represented in Parliament as a separate state as soon as possible. The citizens of Banetepaa would be the Deer Walker children and any overseers they chose to welcome; these would be tightly controlled by a cooperation both inside and outside the capital. Thus there would be no adults and no teenagers in Banetepaa, and the territory would be just as the earliest Lilypad colonies had been.

The troop stated that Banetepaa would soon relocate to a lake at 40°N, 7°E, and shorten its name to Banete. The planned site for Banete was only a few hundred miles from the Matrix army in Tata, but the children said that they were safer here than along the coast because they could flee in any direction if invaded, including to the coast. This lake was far smaller than their original lake in Moonshine territory, and the climate was much warmer; the Lilypads still insisted that living in a cold habitat would be better for defensive reasons, but accepted that they had little choice at the present time but to migrate towards the warmer climates of the west. Here, even though the latitude was nearly the same as their earlier homeland, snow was rare.

This new bill did not move the capital of Erala, but since the Leapers had earlier expressed their wish that the Lilypad and Eralan capitals be the same, the Lilypads presented this new system as a compromise; the Leapers would get to meet the Lilypads in their most central territory, but the Lilypads would choose where that was.

New diplomatic information

The Players gave the Lilypads information about Xema and Mevumep that they had obtained through diplomatic contacts with Laba, which had some years earlier helped protect both the Players and the Cold Men (the parents of the Lilypads) from Xema's navy.

The Players stated that Mevumep belonged to an empire divided into four quadrants, with Fox Island in the southeast, and three areas of land to its west, northwest, and north. Politically, though, the division was between Mevumep proper (Flowerland; consisting of Fox Island plus the two northern quarters) and the southwestern area consisting of tribal homelands that were largely independent even from each other but still had military agreements with each other and with Mevumep. This southwestern area was called Hăla, as it was located in the southeast with respect to the mainland.

Flowerland translated into Play as Pasapašas (PBC).

Geography of Mevumep

The north

The northern states of Mevumep were very poor, as the climate was difficult for humans to survive in. They had no army, knowing that the only adjacent lands would be difficult to conquer, and that few other areas would be interested in invading Northern Mevumep. They had a strong navy to patrol the seas, which was also their main source of food. Despite their poverty, they had a well-developed democracy with parties based on ideology rather than simply representing tribes. Their dominant faction at the time believed in a "Not Our War" (NOW) type of pacifism, saying that peace was not good in and of itself but that war was bad for the people of Northern Mevumep.

The northwest

The northwestern states of Mevumep were considerably richer, and had strong commercial ties to the interior of the continent, but knew that without their trade they would become as poor as the North. These states had also signed the pact establishing a democracy, and although they had their own party system, those parties lined up well with those of the North. One difference though was that much of Northwestern politics dealt with how to react to Repilia's movements, which were out of Mevumep's control. Thus the people of the Northwest, though much wealthier, often felt jealous of the people in North Mevumep. They realized in particular that their wealth was fragile and dependent on the goodwill of foreigners, whereas the North could not get much poorer than it already was and was an unlikely target for invasions.

Fox Island

Fox Island was materially poor, but with such a mild climate and the relative scarcity of predators, humans on Fox Island lived simple lives and most did not even wear clothes. Further north, there were so many predatory firebirds that humans wore thick clothes even in summer to discourage birds from preying on them. But the climate of Fox Island was too warm for the main species of firebird, and other species had to compete with other predators, so humans were mostly safe.

Because life was so easy on Fox Island, the population was growing, and Fox Island had replenished the populations of the other regions after various natural disasters and wars.

Fox Island had four main tribal groups. Three of them corresponded closely to the groups in the southwest on the mainland, while the fourth group corresponded to the entire remainder of Mevumep. (One of this first group was actually a back-migration from the mainland.) Traditionally, when populations on Fox Island grew too much, those of the three tribal groups went to the west, while the fourth group went to the north. But since Hăla was a land of war, many of these people wanted to move north instead, particularly to the richer states of the northwest, where the trading routes were. This too had been a source of much political conflict in Mevumep, because neither side could raise arms against the other.

The southwest

The southwestern states, not part of Mevumep, were again poor, despite the warm climate, and their political parties were little more than tribes. Because of their location, they were much more prone to invasion than the three Mevumep quadrants, and many in the northern quadrants wished they had never signed an alliance with the South, knowing that they would be forced to defend the South in a war that would benefit only the South. Furthermore, because the South was poor despite its mild climate, Northerners looked down on these people.

Thus the political conflicts in the North often revolved around whether to exit the alliance with the South. They knew that if they did this, the South could simply invade the North and might even win despite being outnumbered because the North, especially the far North, was indefensible on land and relied on its navy, which was shared with the South, and because the South might find allies in other nations. In recent years particularly, the North had worried that the South might sign a trade deal with the rapidly growing Play empire, thus satisfying their economic needs and assuring themselves that the Players would not attack them. This would leave the Southerners free to invade the North, particularly Fox Island, on which they might be able to find many rebels due to the many tribal settlements particularly on the western half of the island.

Major cities

The financial capital of Mevumep was actually located in Repilia, and it had many names, such as the Bay City and Motherport. Since nearly all of Mevumep's external trade went through Repilia, Repilia had taken over control of the city from Mevumep, and Mevumep had been forced to accept this without complaint. This was for the most part the legislative capital as well, but a city on western Fox Island, across the bay from Bay City, had taken over some of the functions of the old capital so that Mevumep could still have their Parliament in their own territory.

Xema leases port

When Xema asked to station its navy in northern Mevumep, Mevumep had no feasible way to refuse, since they had no army to defend their territory. Their navy could stop Xema's navy from patrolling the seas, but rather than risk such a conflict they agreed to lease control of the port to Xema for so long as Xema paid them. Since Xema was poor just like Mevumep, they paid not in cash but in trafficked children from various western territories, which UAO delivered to the happy citizens of Mevumep.

The Players thus explained that Xema's participation in two wars had been entirely funded by child trafficking, and that this explained why sailors from the normally aloof Laba, a naval power traditionally opposed to both the Players and the Cold Men, had risked their lives to defend them.

Since UAO mostly abducted children from war zones, the operators of the port claimed that they were actually rescuing and adopting these children, so moral resistance within Mevumep was limited and no movement to shut down the operations had yet succeeded.

When the Lilypads reached Moonshine's refugee territory, the availability of trafficked children went up and therefore Xema got even richer. All of this happened through Moonshine territory, and Moonshine had denied involvement. The Players could only guess at this, but stated that it was clear at least that Moonshine's navy was not stopping the traffickers.

The children quietly speculated that Xema's original source of trafficked children had been the Play territory, and that the Players had kept silent about this because they would otherwise have to admit that they had been the indirect cause for UAO's changing its missions' target to the Lilypads.

Repercussions

The trafficking of children deflated the argument that the people of Northeast Mevumep were morally superior to the richer people of the Northwest, an argument that had been advanced more often by those in the Northwest than by the Northeasterners themselves. The trafficking had shown that the simple desires of those with little wealth were not always more pure than the materialist desires of those who were already rich.

Many in Northeast Mevumep cared little for what others thought of their morals, and those who did held strongly to an ideology that merged ethics with ethnicity, meaning that a tribe's moral standing derived from their identity, and some tribes achieved higher moral standings merely by defending their tribe's integrity, while other tribes derived lower moral standings from doing the same. This was similar to Moonshine's view of the world, but Moonshine disagreed about who to place on top. (Though both groups could thus be considered racists, both groups were quick to make allies of distant tribes and quick to make enemies of neighboring tribes. There is no convenient English word for this sort of cosmopolitan tribalism.)

But now Repilians in the Bay City had begun referring to NE Mevumep as Xema, saying that because Xema never sought allies, any apparent allies they had must be Xemans themselves. They particularly identified NEM with the Ring (ZDE); the Ring was the less hated of the two Xeman kidnapping operations, because they had always strived to retain control of the children they abducted, intending to recruit them into the Ring army rather than handing them on to abusers; this had caused problems internally within Xema, however, because this was not in the deal that they had signed with Mevumep, and these issues were not fully understood by the powers further west. Nonetheless, both armies had been abducting and delivering children to the abusers in Mevumep.

Attempt to differentiate from Xema

Xema's moral status was so low among the wider world that even the abusers in Mevumep found it insulting to be grouped with them. In large part their moral identities were based not on what they did but who they were; they saw themselves as a class above other people, and their behavior could merely diminish this but not take it away. Thus the people of NE Mevumep felt they needed to prove that they were not pro-Xema, and had no ready explanation at hand. They knew that they had not been invited to join Xema, and that Xema could at any moment betray or even invade them if the Xemans decided they no longer needed access to a naval port in Mevumep.

If they were to protest that Xema had forced them to open the port under the threat of invasion, they would need to both admit that they were weak and explain why they had not asked the rest of the Union for help. If they claimed that they had signed the deal thinking that they were in fact rescuing children, they would look stupid and naive. Thus NE Mevumep chose to admit that they were immoral and did not need to apologize for it, but that the other regions of the Union had a duty to defend them in a war just as they would defend the other regions. This referred to their worries over a potential invasion from the Players.

Worries about invasions

The children being trafficked into NE Mevumep were mostly of Play ancestry, and the Players had repeated that they considered these children to be politically theirs even if they belonged to enemy nations. Thus the rest of the Union, particularly the southern states (Hăla), figured that the Players would now have a motive to invade the Union and that the southern states would suffer for what the northern states had done. This in turn led the northern states to predict that the Hălans would flee into the North for safety, and that the Northerners would be forbidden to stop this unless they ejected Hăla from the Union at the first sign of hostility. But following this option could lead to a Play-Hăla alliance and they would then team up together to invade the North.

Meeting with Moonshine diplomats

At a meeting, the Moonshines exonerated the Lilypads against Moonshine's earlier claims that the Lilypad elite had been profiting by selling their own kind to the traffickers: the traffickers were now attacking Moonshine, and not paying anyone for the children they were now abducting. Moonshine apologized for their earlier doubts now that they were facing the same problems the Lilypads earlier had.

However, after the meeting, the Lilypads quickly created an alternative explanation they felt more plausible. They believed Moonshine's accusation of the Lilypads making money from the abductions had come so quickly to them because Moonshine had been doing it themselves. Knowing Moonshine's views on gender roles, they explained that Moonshine's navy was most likely providing young boys to the pirates, whether for a pittance or even for free, but either forbidding the abduction of girls altogether or charging a very high price. Moonshine men would not object to the abduction of their sons for various reasons, among them that the culling of young boys would leave the survivors with a life of constant sexual pleasure once they grew into men. Married men in Moonshine society were little more than slaves, and unmarried men even worse off, but because they were so few in number, women's demand for them was insatiable and few men were neglected. The men might realize that if they disobeyed their orders, their access to women would be cut off and explained that they were merely experiencing the fate that they were bringing to others.

Since Moonshine denied young girls to the pirates, the pirates would need to always have another nation to abduct children from. The pirates had been taking both boys and girls from Lilypad territories without a clear pattern, but the Lilypads figured that this needed no special explanation, as any captured slave was better than no captured slave, and at least some groups involved in the trafficking had made profits by selling captives back to the Lilypads.

Since the pirates had lost access to the Lilypad children, they had effectively lost access to girls. The Lilypads felt that the pirates might have placed heavier demands on Moonshine as a result, as Moonshine might view the loss of their male population as anything from a minor annoyance to a benefit for both sides, but would stridently resist any abductions of women or girls. Since Moonshine could not openly admit this to their allies, they needed to pretend that the pirates had only just now begun to attack Moonshine, and thus that Moonshine had only just now begun to fight back.

The Lilypads understood that so long as they remained in an alliance with Moonshine, the Lilypads would bear some of the guilt for what happened to the many Moonshine boys provided to the Xeman pirates. They admitted, however, that to outsiders their story might sound just as implausible as the Moonshines' similar accusation about them, and chose not to raise this issue either with Moonshine or with the Leapers. Additionally, some Lilypads believed Moonshine's diplomats were telling the truth, and that merely having a motive did not prove there was a conspiracy.

Information about politics

The Moonshines had also mentioned briefly, speaking in Play, that the people of the tropical southern regions of Mevumep were naked (žitua). This was the same as a common Play word for political liberalism, the metaphor being that a naked, unprotected hand feeds both the strong and the weak who would be otherwise afraid to approach and ask for help. Some people in Dreamland were also naked, and for a similar reason: a naked person could not easily carry or conceal weapons, so anyone approaching them would know that they were safe. The Slopes, whose homelands were hot but not quite tropical, often wore underwear, again in part to assure other Slopes that they were harmless and not hiding weapons. (Though the Slopes also had other reasons for this, including the foundational belief that beauty should neither be valued nor imitated; if any member of the Slope party felt themselves to be physically unattractive, they were expected not to hide this, and other Slopes were expected to treat them just the same as the most stunningly attractive Slope models (and Slope women were renowned for their beauty)).

Such a lifestyle was not possible in the cold climates the Lilypads were accustomed do, nor in the even colder Moonshine. Moonshine's diplomats had thus often taken a negative view of nudist cultures, though no more so than they disliked other cultures of the tropics.

Because nudism correlated so well with climate, and because the Play word for nudity and liberalism was the same, the Lilypad diplomats came to believe that to be liberal, one must live in a tropical climate. At the end of the meeting, one of the Lilypad diplomats asked the Moonshines if Mevumep as a whole was liberal, or just the tropics, because he wondered if even the coldest areas of Mevumep had people wandering around naked, and what that must be like. The Moonshines responded that the culture of the tropics of Mevumep made it impossible to be liberal, but that liberalism could exist in the colder northern states of Mevumep. By this, they meant that Fox Island (which included the tropics of Mevumep) was too poor overall to have a class with excess wealth, and that since liberalism answered the question of what to do with excess accumulated wealth, poor nations could not be liberal, but they did not explain this and did not understand that the Lilypads would need an explanation.

Thus the Lilypads now had contradictory information. Moonshine then further confused the matter by adding that Dreamland had political parties that were very liberal. The meeting thus concluded with the Lilypads misunderstanding the subject and figuring that perhaps Moonshine's diplomats were lying, or at best improvising, on their knowledge of the culture of Mevumep, while the Moonshines were unaware of the misunderstanding.

Issues with Mikagu

Now the Lilypads, Slopes, and Hipsides all voted to exclude the state of Mikagu (the Bear Trap) from Erala. The Bear Trap was the only state in which no children's party had ever settled, in large part because it was a hotspot for human trafficking. Previously, they had tolerated the Bear Trappers because Mikagu was geographically in between the Lilypad territory (Tāmta) and the rest of Erala. But without Tāmta, there was no need for Mikagu.

The Leapers refused this, saying that expelling Mikagu would invite the Players to invade, since the Players had just taken over Tāmta and parts of Pitana, the two of which made up Mikagu's only non-Erala borders. Conquering Mikagu would put the Play army within 400 miles of Tata, in which the Matrix army held tens of thousands of enslaved descendants of the Players. This 400 miles would be Slope-held territory, and the Leapers felt that the Slopes did not fear the Players the way the other children did. Thus, a Slope-Play alliance might form, and the Leapers worried about this for two reasons. Firstly because the Players could use Slope territory to put Play soldiers on the border of the Leaper homeland of Baeba Swamp, and secondly because, despite the Players having earlier admitted defeat in Tata, they might decide to invade Tata after all, on this time as a humanitarian intervention, meaning that they would continue to disclaim territory there but would tie up the rival powers in a war that would weaken them all while potentially strengthening the Play army presuming that at least some of the descendants of the earlier-captured Players decided to fight for the Players.

The Leapers were forthright about their motivations here, but reminded the children that they needed to honor their commitments to military allies, even if the allies gave them nothing back. Even if the Players did not invade, expelling Mikagu would allow the Slopes to invade as well without violating any treaty.

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. Since the Matrix army consisted of scarcely a thousand soldiers, while other armies numbered in tens of thousands, the Leapers acknowledged that claiming the Matrix to be the strongest was counter-intuitive. But they explained that the Matrix could generate new soldiers very easily, and that their strength lay in their store of armor, weapons, wagons, and trained animals. The thousand Matrix soldiers, should they be defeated, would still be able to pass at least some of their weapons and other belongings along to the next wave of Matrix soldiers.

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.

Capture of Moonshine slaves

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.

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.

Deer Walkers arrive at Banete

March 6, 4198

With the child traffickers out of the way, the Lilypads and the Deer Walkers among them moved much more quickly than before and arrived at Banete Lake on March 6 to set up their new capital city. The Hipside capital city, Napa, was about 200 miles away, and the Matrix army in Tata was just west of that.

Reflections about Xema

The Hipsides reminded the children that Xema had never reached the Hipside territories, and might not even know of their existence. Thus Xema most likely did not know where the children now were, and so even if they attempted to resume their child trafficking operations, they would not find the correct location of the new settlements for quite some time.

Matrixes spy

The Matrixes' trained birds alerted the Matrix soldiers to the new settlement at Banete immediately, and the Matrixes contemplated shifting the target of their invasions from the women of Slope territory to the children of Banete.

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.

Marriage

The Slopes divided into three lifestyles now. Those seeking marriage were told to move to tayuna cities, while those who preferred to remain single were either told to remain on the plantations for defensive purposes or join a troop of soldiers going on offense. There were still many male Slopes who had no interest in adopting children or marrying women, and stated that they would be forever young, and most likely die in combat in early adulthood winning more territory for the Slope nation.

The Slope leaders were well aware that their sex ratio would ensure many of the young Slope men seeking marriage would never find a Slope woman. They believed that opening tayuna cities was the best way to handle this, because the women in general had more to gain from marriage than did men, so the sex ratio within those cities would be near parity, and men who chose not to move could not later complain when they had had ample time to move and would have noticed quickly that their cities were becoming almost entirely void of Slope women. There were still more than 20,000 Crystal women spread across Slope territory and some adjacent areas, and though the Slopes had freed most of these women, they were of such low social status that the Slopes assumed a Slope man would be able to marry a Doll woman if he chose to do so. (The children of these marriages would however generally not be Slopes.)

Conversion of cities

The three cities being converted to tayuna status were:

1. Vimimpa
2. Yatubapapumu
3. Tepetau-Šanui.

Tepetau-Šanui, located at 35°N 10°E, was one of the few Slope cities named after a person; Tepetau was a young boy who had risen from the lowest to the highest social rung in this city and helped attract more Slopes and Dolls into the city. Now it had a population of about 1,700 Dolls, and the Slopes figured that those Dolls could support a Slope ruling class of about 2,000; any more and the Dolls would die from hunger or exhaustion. They did not know, nor did they care, how many Zeniths lived in the city.

Marriage procedure

The Slope leaders intended to cycle each city's population every year, starting with those 18 years or older first, and moving down one age bracket each year. Then they would find a new purpose for the cities when all the Slopes were married. The understanding was that one year was a long enough time for two partners to find each other, and that the partners who had the most difficulty finding a mate would be the only singles left at the end of the year, so they would not be competing with the others. The Slopes figured that there would be some among the city's population at the end of the year who chose not to marry after all, and stated that these people should express this to the city leaders at the earliest possible time so they could find another role for themselves in the Slope nation. They reminded these people that if they did not marry within the year, they most likely never would, since there would be no other place in the entire nation to find unmarried Slopes, and each year's population would only be able to marry others of their age group.

Although it was traditional in their parent culture for the husband to be slightly older than his wife in a marriage, the Slope population was made up of teenagers of whom the boys and girls had almost the same average age, so they could not do this. Likewise, while their parent cultures allowed both polygamy and homosexual marriage, the Slopes were interested in maximizing their immediate population growth and in making sure there that, despite their overall male surplus, there would be as few men left single as possible. They stated that anyone wishing to continue their cultural tradition of polygamy had plenty of Dolls in their nation, but that they would not recognize any Slope-Doll marriages.

Policies towards Zeniths

These tayuna cities were pre-existing settlements, and already had both Zeniths and Dolls living in them. The Slope men said that they were not worried about Zenith men abducting their women any longer, and neither were they worried about Slope women voluntarily choosing to marry Zenith men. Likewise, the Slope women said that they were not worried about Slope men going after the Dolls (who were almost all women), and that the Dolls in tayuna cities would have no men to keep them company save for the violent and abusive Zeniths.

Politics

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.

JIB offer

Since the Leapers would not let the Slopes expel Mikagu from the Union, the Slopes offered to enroll Mikagu's ruling XIG party into the JIB group; these would be mostly men, who would be subordinate to the Slopes but mostly immune from attack by the Slopes. But the XIG men refused this, saying that they were few in number but made much better soldiers than the Slopes or Lilypads. The XIG men offered an alliance with the Slopes, saying that they preferred they think of each other as equals. The Slopes accepted this offer, but acknowledged that they seemed to lose whenever they relied on diplomacy and would often win whenever they relied on war.

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.

The Slopes' term for sexual assault here was paipubu, a term which emphasized not the victim's pain, but the perpetrator's licentiousness. Slope men who committed paipubu were told to be ashamed of themselves, and the leaders announced they would keep a running tally of incidents to judge the characters of their men, but the victims were not consoled.

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. The same was true in the new tayuna cities where the Slopes often now had the majority but the Dolls had previously been the majority. 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 95% as it had been a year earlier in the census (this is why there had been 19 Crystal seats and only 1 Soap). 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.

Clothing

Now the Slopes extended their cultural dress styles to the people they ruled over. The Slopes in their castles wore only underwear, saying that they did not need protection when they were already safe. The Slopes passed this logic on to the Dolls living in the tayuna, saying that any Dolls who insisted on wearing protective clothing must be worried about violent crimes, but since the Slopes had decriminalized assault of Dolls there was no such crime. Therefore the Dolls had no need of protection, and the Slopes made it a crime for a Doll to be visibly worried about their safety.

In Tepetau, at the far north end of Slope territory, the winters were somewhat colder than what the Slopes were used to, but they stated they would warm up from the cold by drinking hot liquids while watching the Dolls shiver outdoors.

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.

Compass reforms

Role of the Dolls

Though just months earlier, the Slopes had been proudly racist against their enemies and even some of their allies, they had come by early 4198 to feel that all closed-entry parties had much to gain from publicly refudiating racism, since they could then claim the moral high ground while they continued to discriminate against all groups other than their own. They owned Dolls from two different racial groups, who had a history of nonviolent conflicts with each other, and the Slopes felt that they could put the two groups of Dolls together on plantations and then shame them for any internal conflicts that erupted.

However unlike the Leapers and some other historical slaveowning tribes, the Slopes refused to elevate one racial group above another, saying that to do so would be an instance of the very racism they claimed to have overcome. They had conquered the Dolls even when the Dolls were unified, and felt no urge to divide them against each other, knowing that they had earlier failed to divide the Dolls against the Zenith along racial lines, and figuring that sitting atop a class-based structure would be more lucrative for the Slopes overall.

Thus the Slopes announced that they had eliminated racism among their own kind, and would now begin working to end racism across the world, starting with the slaves they held who could not tolerate working alongside each other. They promised increased punishments for any slaves who complained about the new mixed-race labor camps, and that they would also apply this to the free Doll population. They also claimed that their earlier endorsements of racist ideals had been merely a ruse to trick the Matrix into signing a treaty with them, and that this trick had failed, so they no longer saw any reason to pursue it. Thus the Slopes accused the Matrix leaders of being racists.

Since the Slopes now claimed they had never been serious about endorsing racism, they had no need to expel any Slopes who had written racist propaganda or pursued similar policies. Thus the Slope leadership continued along unchanged.

Division into parties

The Leapers then met with the Slopes and offered them a different plan to divide the Dolls amongst each other that would align with the Slopes' commitment to root out racism. The Leapers proposed to divide the Dolls along ideological lines instead.

Thus the Slopes divided the Dolls into four political parties, corresponding to the directions on the compass: north, south, east, and west. These were called patu parties (Play patiaus vap) because they were designed by outsiders to benefit those outsiders. The Slopes themselves endorsed the South party but admitted privately that it made little difference to them which party the Dolls favored.

South

The South party (AYP) favored the status quo. It was named after the Slopes, the ruling party, who held the southernmost territory in Erala.

East

The East party favored a hedonistic lifestyle generally aligned with the interests of the XIG soldiers in the Bear Trap, which formed much of the eastern border of Erala (though the Hipside territory contained some land even further east). The East ideology called for the Dolls to release their inhibitions by assuming a sexually subservient role, saying that they would enjoy fulfilling their natural role in Erala society. The Eastern Doll ideology thus stated that if they were to win power, it would no longer be a crime for a Doll to submit themselves to prostitution and they would no longer be punished for doing so.

North

The North party (HLP) generally aligned with the interests of the Tinks in Baeba's northern district, although this was actually far to the southwest from Erala's standpoint. The Leapers had already assigned pro-Tink Dolls in Baeba the name Cupbearers, and suggested the Slopes use this name too, as it would be more straightforward than the geographical name and might convince these Dolls that their interests lay outside Erala, thus weakening the already divided Doll community. There was no coherent ideology in the Cupbearer party apart from the tenets which united the four Doll parties; thus the Cupbearers were in some sense the "basic" Doll party.

West

Lastly, the West party favored an emphasis on commerce, like the Zeniths, and the establishment of banks and other instruments of intangible finance common to the western nations of Dreamland, Baeba, and Tata, but nowhere else on the planet. (These people later came to call themselves Bottoms, forming a three-way chain between the Zeniths, the Slopes, and themselves, but they came up with this name on their own in a later era and not at their formation.)

The Slopes intended this party to appeal to the supposed Doll middle class, since they were the most likely to work in commerce, but also planned to make sure that the West party membership was not too tempting, because they wanted even the middle-class Dolls to remain mostly with the South party.

Summary of new party divisions

The Slopes intended for the Dolls to think of the South party as their own, rather than as a pro-Slope party, and that to endorse one of the other three parties would be an act of selflessness, since the Dolls would be going against their self-interest. This meant that the Slopes could set up the other three parties to be openly anti-Doll, while moving the South party towards a campaign of lawlessnice and violence to drive the Dolls out of the party that was supposedly set up for their own interests.

The Soap Bubbles were still a political party transnationally, but the Slopes had included them in the Doll population. Since most Soap Bubbles were men, the Slopes contemplated keeping them outside the compass system so that there would be a "men's party" working against the four female parties, further dividing the already extremely weak Dolls. Thus, the Slopes chose to suspend admission of men into the four compass parties, though they expected that they would soon decide to dispense with the Soap after all since they felt it would be more interesting if the tiny male population were distributed among the four otherwise all-female parties.

Division into races

Against the Slopes' own wishes, the Slopes now also ratified a Leaper-written law that divided the empire's population into four racial groups, also corresponding to the four compass points, along with a fifth group for all of the mixed-race people. These racial groups overlapped with tribal boundaries, meaning within each tribe there were multiple races, and within each race there were multiple tribes. This was one reason why the Slopes so opposed the new idea, but the Leapers had convinced other groups within the Empire to vote for the new proposal. Even the Clovers emphatically endorsed the Leaper plan. The Leapers explained that one reason they so urgently supported racial divisions was because they wanted to allow Dolls to move from one empire to the other, and then use this to explain that Dolls were legally equal to or even above certain other groups in the empires, and had no right to complain about the various anti-Doll laws in both empires.

The western and eastern lineages were for the tatea generation and potentially for allies they chose to admit. There were some slight overall physical differences between the Lilypads in the east and the Slopes in the west, but the Slopes chose to allow their members to choose either the western or the eastern identity for themselves. Play's word for east-west was pitas and so this name covered both groups.

The northern and southern lineages were for the lighter and darker-skinned Dolls, and any other groups of people that the tatea chose to exclude from power. The Slopes had decided earlier that their allies in the XIG party could never become Slopes, and the Slopes decided to place them in the northern group along with the Dolls, rather than the eastern group as their homeland's place on the map would suggest. This meant that in some ways XIGs were like Dolls and in some ways they were like Slopes. Play's word for north-south was pinap and so this name covered both groups.

Lastly, the mixed group covered anyone known to be of recently mixed heritage among the others. The Slopes wanted to use this group for mixed marriages between the higher and lower tiers in the system, so that the children of an east-west marriage could be either east or west, but not mixed. Thus there would be no racial ties between the upper and lower tiers.

The Slopes found this new system confusing, and insisted that they had already conquered the Dolls and did not need to forcibly divide them by race to weaken them further. The Slopes felt that their propaganda worked best if the attacks were aimed at only one group of people, as it would be easier for the wider public to believe that there was only one harmful group in their society rather than two unrelated groups. Nonetheless the Slopes conceded to the Leaper plan, largely because they felt they needed to remain close to the other tatea groups but also because they admitted that the Leapers' logic of dividing the lower class by race did make sense.

Summary of racial divisions

These new racial divisions had nothing to do with the four new political parties for the Dolls. The Leapers explained that they intended to get the Dolls to believe a connection existed, so that for example the Dolls classified as northern would want to join the Cupbearer party, and would find southern Dolls unwelcome, and likewise the southern Dolls would want to join AYP, which was pro-Slope, and thus come to believe that the Slopes had accepted them as allies and that they were the superior Doll lineage. Meanwhile Dolls would also want to join the east and west parties but would feel that they must forever occupy a lower tier of power within those parties.

The Dolls were easy to separate into two groups because, although the northern and southern Doll lineages had been freely marrying each other, they had only been in contact for a few hundred years, and therefore there were relatively few Dolls who had intermediate physical types. The Crystal party, the source population for many of the Dolls, had their own racial hierarchy, which placed the lighter-skinned types at the top of the power scale; many lighter-skinned Dolls had long wanted to abolish the hierarchy but assumed that if they abolished racial discrimination they would be forced to institute slavery. (The main reason for this was that they were an open-entry party, and therefore without some means of discrimination against new members their enemies could join and outvote the hereditary members; yet there were other reasons.)

The Leaper system appeared to place the dark-skinned Dolls on top, thus inverting the hierarchy while discouraging the light-skinned Dolls from joining the AYP party through which they would expect the Slopes to award power to the AYP Dolls. But the Slopes and Leapers agreed that this would be a false promise, and the Leapers especially believed it would be highly effective in irritating both groups of Dolls, as each blame the other group rather than the Slopes or Leapers for their continued low status in Erala's society.

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.

Slopes survey Dolls

The Slopes were disappointed when they asked the Dolls to join one of the four new parties, as 13 of them chose the Cupbearers (North), 3 chose the West (later known as Bottoms), and 3 chose the East (pro-XIG), but so few chose the pro-Slope South party that because they were additionally divided by state the Slopes could not award them a single seat in Parliament. The East and West joiners were mostly of the dark-skinned lineages, so the Slopes felt that the northern lineage was simply not interested in ideological politics and wanted to identify as a tribe. But neither of these groups seemed to think highly of the Slopes, and even under the threat of retaliation would not vote for the Slopes.

Rather than appoint new representatives, the Slopes decided to re-assign the sitting Doll representatives to the new parties for the remainder of the legislative session. The Slopes told the representatives that the voters had chosen the ratios of the three parties, but it was up to the representatives to choose which of them would fill the new seats. Almost all of the representatives wanted to be Cupbearers, and the Slopes felt that this might be because the Cupbearers had the least ideologically binding party platform of the three. Of the twenty representatives, 19 were Crystals and only one was Soap; he was also the only male Doll in the legislature. The Slopes had chosen to leave him sitting for the duration of the legislative year, but stated that they wanted to eliminate the Soap party and have the Soap Bubbles vote like the other Dolls beginning in 4199. The Slopes therefore tasked the 19 female representatives with choosing six among them who would sit for the West and East parties. Only two (one each) volunteered, meaning that four of the others would be forced into a party they did not like. Finally after an argument the women chose which of them would sit for the involuntary parties, comforting themselves by promising to resign at the next election.

Slope-XIG treaty

Now the Slopes signed an arms treaty with the XIG party in the Bear Trap (Mikagu). Both signatory parties believed that the treaty benefited both sides, and that this proved that the Slopes and XIG were true allies and not just reluctant temporary trucial states. There were more clauses in the treaty favoring Slopes than XIG, but the XIG's clauses promised greater concessions, so the two groups felt they both benefited about equally and that their gains would come mostly at the expense of outside parties rather than each other.

This treaty ignored the other tribes in Mikagu, the Crystals and the indigenous Bear Trappers. This treaty thus made XIG, originally the party of neighboring Olansele, effectively synonymous with Mikagu.

Right of trespass

The new treaty gave the Slopes and the XIGs the right to trespass on each other's land, in which case they would be bound by the laws of both states. The Slopes were mostly interested in access to the Butterfly River, through which they would connect with the Lilypads and Hipsides in the northern states of Erala. The XIGs wanted the right to trespass on Slope-held land, and to become much like the Zeniths who already did so, ruling the streets of Slope-held cities with the tacit permission of the Slopes whose sulalaka lifestyle told them to live in forts and rule only over the small plantations that surrounded those forts.

XIG men said that they would continue to derive their profits largely from human trafficking and smuggling of alcohol, moving their focus towards Baeba Swamp. They claimed as before that they were not interested in trafficking children, nor would they ever abduct people from any tatea group even as adults; their victims were the indigenous minorities of their own territory and various groups of people from nearby nations who were not covered by any treaty. (This was in part why they had for a brief time called themselves Sunspots; the Sunspots preyed on women but protected children.)

Because the Slopes did not patrol their own cities, the Slopes said that they had no right to deny access to an ally such as XIG; indeed they had already allowed access to an enemy, the Soap Bubbles, saying that what looked like a military surrender on the Slopes' part was simply an effect of their tight consolidation of power onto their plantations.

The Slopes warned XIG that the Zeniths were a lawless gang, and would not side with XIG simply because both groups were fellow criminals. Zenith men continued to abduct, rape, and kill Slope women and teenage girls, and sometimes even younger children, and the Zeniths refused to punish other Zeniths for this. Thus the Slopes said that if the XIG men wanted to pursue such a lifestyle in Slope-held cities, they would do best to send only their men into the cities, lest they become prey alongside the women that they were hoping to abduct.

Diplomatic effects

The Slopes and XIGs had written this new treaty on their own, without input from the governing Leaper party, and both sides agreed to see each other as allied independent nations rather than as states of the empire of Erala. Thus both sides agreed that the Leapers should have allowed Erala to expel Mikagu (though the XIGs admitted they would not have voted to secede themselves). XIG thus agreed to obey the Leaper laws to keep the flow of commerce going, but that they would think of themselves as independent in all possible ways.

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.

Comparison to Erala

The size of the Parliament of Erala was very similar: 164 seats. In Erala, the seats were apportioned by state, not by party, but the Leapers had conceded that their attempt to distract Erala's citizens from their tendency to vote along party lines had mostly failed, and therefore that they could produce a list of seats by party for Erala as well. In this list, the Slope-Square alliance had 30 seats, the Lilypads had 57 seats, the Spines had 5 seats, the Dolls had 20 seats (13 Cupbearer, 3 West, 3 East, 1 Soap; all non-Soap seats were held by women), the Hipsides had 8 seats, the Clovers had 8 seats, XIG had 8 seats, and 28 seats belonged to indigenous minorities.

The state-by-state breakdown for these was: 24 seats for the Slope territory, 16 seats for the Square, 57 for the wandering Lilypad troop (who had asked to be divided by state, but the Leapers refused), 8 for the Clovers in PMZ, 14 for the Bear Trap (Mikagu), and 10, 10, 10, 8, and 7 for the Hipside states along the coast.

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 eight years old, even younger than the Deer Paws and with a greater proportion of the population under age six than with the Deer Paws. This was because the original Clover rulers had been overthrown and had decided to survive as a party by handing power to the very youngest children among them, who were all orphans and who the original Clover leaders hoped would engender sympathy from even those armies who had felt no shame in committing violence against the teenage Clovers who the younger children had all earlier agreed to follow. This youngest group was called the Fourth Classroom. Many of the teenage Clovers had fled, some joining the Slopes, as they felt that to remain in their territory would mean doom. Among those who had fled, some had later returned, so the Clovers still had some teenagers in their ranks, but the youngest children were divided about what to think of these teenagers who had abandoned them in war, and so the teenagers agreed that they could no longer be the leaders of the Clover party.

Thus, with the very young Fourth Classroom children in charge, none of the other groups in Parliament had taken the Clovers 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.

Though the Clovers and Slopes both had seats in two Parliaments, Baeba and Erala, the Clovers' declaration applied only to their seats in Baeba's Parliament. In Erala's Parliament, the Clovers had an entire state to themselves, and the rules for voting were different, and both the Slopes and the Clovers agreed that they would be better off to remain untethered by such a treaty.

XIG joins the alliance

Hearing this, the XIG representatives in Erala forged tighter connections with the Slopes, and announced that they were considering asking the Clovers to make XIG the new protectors of the young Clovers, restoring their earlier commitment to the Sunspots (they had abandoned this name after both Suns were killed). XIG said that they would also tie themselves to the Slopes.

Slopes form committees

Now the Slopes formed the Butterfly River Committee in Erala's Parliament consisting of the 30 Slope-Square seats and the 20 Doll seats. They stated that, like in the past, a 60% majority would be required to advance any legislation, so any bill getting 30 votes in the Committee would become law unless at least 86 legislators among the remaining 114 seats (75%) voted to overturn it. This number was calculated from a complex mathematical formula intended to work such that any bill passing through a committee would only require around 40% support from the entire Parliament (including that committee), equivalent to a 60% majority against passage (though this number was dependent on the size of the committee and their degree of consensus). Thus, they often stated that any bill which passed through committee became law immediately, and that the 60% vote of Parliament that was required to stop the passage was the equivalent of an immediate repeal of the newly passed law.

This committee was not geographically based; it was a union of the Slopes, Squares, and Dolls, where the Dolls were now being shepherded into four parties. Because even the most politically naive people could see that the Slopes would defeat the Dolls in every committee vote, the Slopes threatened another wave of violent assaults if the Dolls did not join the new committee.

New wealth tax

After a survey suggested that the Dolls had the lowest standard of living in the empire, BRC voted 30-20 to levy a new wealth tax on all Dolls to punish them for their dragging down the empire's economy. Only with this new tax, the Slopes argued, could the Dolls be motivated to work harder. The Slopes stated that the wealth tax would increase each year until the Dolls' living standards matched those of the Slopes. The money collected by the tax would be delivered to all of the other parties in the empire, not just those in the Slope-held regions.

Repercussions

Although the Slopes' new committee was legal, and the Leapers had helped them set it up, some Leapers in Baeba argued that they were abusing the committee function and that they should be restricted to forming committees based either on geographical boundaries or voluntary association, meaning that they could no longer claim jurisdiction over free Dolls living in the Hipside territories or Mikagu. This would leave the committee with 30 Slope-Square seats but only 4 Doll seats, making it useless for the Slopes' goals.

Lilypads and Hipsides explore politics

Now, the Lilypads and the Hipsides again defied the Leaper governors by signing a treaty abolishing the now landless Eralan state of Tāmta to assign the Lilypads citizenship in the five coastal Hipside states that the Lilypads were migrating into. The Hipsides were still calling these states the Lifeline, by which they meant an umbilical cord, though their connection to the Womb had been lost. (Thus they said they had been born prematurely.) The Hipsides admired the Lilypads' plan to run political campaigns and pursue a better government for all citizens based on democracy. The Hipsides were liberals (Play žitua), and the Lilypads were their opposites (Play maŋatua patu (sleepers; also known as MTP;) though they could be called conservatives, the way of life they intended to conserve was just one lifestyle among many in the world, whereas the liberals were diverse and thus unipolar).

Because the Lilypads were giving up their powerful 57-seat bloc vote by integrating into the Lifeline states, the Lilypads felt they had a strong case to make that the Leapers should recognize the new seat allotment immediately, rather than waiting until the election of 4199, or defying the Lilypads altogether as they had done in the past. The Leapers stated that they would not reapportion any existing seats because the sitting representatives had been elected by citizens expecting them to govern a state, but promised to consider the Lilypad plan for the following year.

Now the Spines, an army of boys who had allied with the Slopes, and lived mostly in Slope territory but failed to make significant military gains, also announced that they were considering a transition to the nonviolent strategy of political campaigns, but understood that they would likely attract few votes, and were unwilling to abandon their territory at the time. The Spines' political ideology was conservative, like the Lilypads', but with a different way of life. Thus, they saw the Hipsides, the only diverse party, as a moderate group with the Lilypads on the opposite side. They looked forward to a three-party system in the Lifeline wherein they would all cooperate to pursue their shared interests. They admitted that their campaigns would struggle because they had no female members and could not reproduce among their own kind.

Definition of liberalism

Earlier, the Lilypads had strongly criticized the liberal žitua ideology, but now seeing the Hipsides identify with it decided that the Hipsides, who they felt were not actually very liberal, might help keep the desire for a liberal party in check and thus strengthen the positions of the Lilypads even if the Hipsides won more seats.

The Blue Spine faction of the Spines endorsed liberalism, saying that they were breaking free of their ideology but not their adopted identity, and that the Spines were still a group with a coherent identity. The Blue Spines leaned towards ZMB's child-oriented liberalism, saying that teenagers did not need welfare benefits, that humans were part of nature (rather than submissive to it), and that sexual reproduction was a necessity rather than a pleasure. They identified themselves as straight (up and down) (this was not a pun, since their Spine name referred to spikes on an animal's back, not just those ordered in a line), as opposed to the slanted Hipsides.

Lilypads redraw party boundaries

The Blue Spines agreed to accept the name ZMB and thus join the much younger Deer Walkers; they did this even before the Lilypads revealed that this move earned them the right to compete for leadership of the Deer Walker party. But the Lilypads stated that they could not have two party memberships; any Spines who wanted to lead the Deer Walkers would no longer be able to call themselves Spines, not even Blue Spines. Thus the Spines would not be a liberal party unless the Blue Spines chose to stay within it and forego the offer of power over the Deer Walkers.

The Lilypads stated that in either case they would promote ZMB ideology for the Deer Walkers, saying that liberalism was good after all but it was for children. Thus the children could get their welfare benefits, but they would be for childrens' things, the basis of which would be candy and toys, and the Hipsides who also supported welfare would have a choice between also getting children's things (useless to them) or arguing for a special type of welfare just for them.

North-South divide

Now, the five northern Lifeline states had dedicated themselves to peace, multiparty democracy, and abstinence from slavery. The two southern states were now run by the Slopes who occupied their land by force, built their economy largely on slavery, forced other parties to become controlled opposition, and were eager to expand their land even further. They considered Mikagu a foreign nation but Mikagu fit neatly within the South in this new cultural divide.

In part because of their reliance on slavery, the South was richer than the North; though the Deer Walker orphans lived only in the North, and their presence weighed down economy as well. The superior economy of the South allowed free people among the ruling Slope population to raise a standing army. By contrast the northern states were focused on self-preservation. The South also faced threats that the North did not, however, because their territory bordered other nations whereas the North was stretched along the ocean. This meant that the North was buffered by the South, and the South's military conquests did not directly endanger the North.

The Slopes had never claimed that slavery was morally superior to free labor, but they claimed their missions to capture and forcibly work slaves made them braver than the Lilypads whose only subjects were young orphaned children. But the Lilypads posed no threat to the Slopes. So the two cultural zones remained firm allies.

Other internal divisions

The Lilypads annexed Candyland, well aware that Moonshine was unlikely to allow them access, let alone occupation. They stated that since the Leapers continued to recognize Tāmta and Mikagu as states within Erala against the Lilypads' wishes, Candyland was as much a part of their empire as those others, and it served a convenient political purpose by allowing those citizens who did not wish to join the five Lifeline states to have a state of their own. Thus Candyland had no geographic extent.

The Lilypads also proposed creating the new state of Nyŭfan (Play Nīupunu) and assigning the Lifeline's indigenous population to it so that they could not interfere with the Lifeline's democracy. They had various arguments for the legality of this, such as the fact that they were giving up a democratic monopoly by splitting their votes among the Lifeline states, that the slaves in the southern states were worse off and that the Leapers had condoned this; and that they would put their proposal through Erala's existing democracy to ensure that it was the net will of the citizens even though they knew that the Nyufan tribes would almost certainly vote against it. But the Leapers had told them repeatedly in the past that they did not have the right to determine the borders of Erala because Erala had been created for them, not by them.

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.

Three-party protest

Just as the Slopes began to notice the Dolls' lack of anti-Zenith protests, the middle-class Dolls of the North, East, and West parties started a protest against the Slopes' ongoing sexual abuse of the lower-class Dolls they still held captive in their forts. The Dolls who supported the South party were mostly those who did not live near Slopes, so the Slopes could scarcely use their lack of participation for their gain.

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 middle-class 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 middle class: 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.

Leapers push Slopes to reform

Hearing that the Slopes were now rapidly marrying each other, the Leapers asked the Slopes to consider abandoning their sulalaka lifestyle. They stated that sulalaka was not so much an ideology as a strategy for orphaned children to keep safe when confronting adults. The Slopes replied that they would always be childlike in comparison to the roving all-male armies of the Soap Bubbles, Matrixes, and Zeniths, and therefore they would not abandon their lifestyle, although they were sending more and more Slope men outside the plantations.

Leapers push for civil rights legislation and courts

Now the Leapers wanted to set up a court system in Erala that would be able to try criminals from every party. They pushed the Slopes to have this apply to intra-party crimes too, so that the Slopes could no longer handle their differences internally.

Matrixes prepare for war

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 Leapers helped leak the Matrixes' battle plans to Moonshine. In response, Moonshine's leaders said that the Matrix war plan had long been as obvious as the Matrix men's sexual arousal every time they met with the female Moonshine diplomats. Moonshine said that they were prepared for an invasion but, as they still held to their doctrine of pacifism, they would not allow their military to leave Moonshine territory and therefore all battles would take place within Moonshine.

The Matrixes planned to invade Moonshine's capital city, which was geographically central but, because of the climate zones, had almost no soldiers stationed to its north. Northern Moonshine was little more than a series of shelters along the coast where people moved from one to the next on fishing boats. This is why the Lilypads had earlier figured that if the Matrixes invaded northern Moonshine, the Lilypads could invade even further north and Moonshine would have no way to stop them. Nonetheless, the Lilypads now felt that the time had come to abandon their commitment to acquiring a cold climate habitat so that they could join the rest of the tatea armies in moving towards the tropics.

Lilypads abandon northern migration plans

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

The Lilypad leaders confirmed to Moonshine's leaders that they were serious about this, and would abandon their plans to settle Moonshine, even if Moonshine changed their minds and decided to allow them in. They felt that although they would rather live in a cold habitat to protect themselves from invasion, it was their duty to invade the Matrix homeland of Tata now that the Matrixes were leaving it so vulnerable to attack. If they were successful, they would be the only army in the world that had done what the Players could not. They realized that they would be themselves vulnerable to attack in Tata, since Tata bordered Baeba, Dreamland, and Erala, but felt that their moral duty was more important than winning control of a safe homeland in the tundra.

Though the Lilypads were intent on invading the Matrixes in due time, in an internal vote they now stalled just short of launching a full invasion. They retreated to Hipside-like pseudo-pacifism, begging the Matrixes to come for them first, and feigning fragility. They claimed nonetheless that their abandonment of their northern migration was sufficient proof that they were preparing for an invasion of Tata, and that because they would use the Hipsides' ships for this, they did not need to shift their land population west before the war. They felt in fact that staying further east was a better strategy.

Hipsides take over

Although the Lilypads, a merger of three different parties (Cold Men, Scorpions, Deer Walkers) outnumbered the Hipsides by more than 6 to 1, they were now dependent on the Hipsides for their physical safety, and had agreed that the Hipsides should for the time being maintain control of the navy since they had built that navy entirely on their own.

The Lilypads thus walked back their earlier commitment to politics, saying that unifying as a nation was more important. They claimed that this was no surrender, but that liberalism required a move to a tropical climate, and therefore in a tropical climate it was acceptable to be liberal. Since fighting the Matrix would take the Lilypads into ever warmer climates the more victories they won, the Lilypads claimed that they would adopt a liberal lifestyle to ease their cooperation with the Hipsides and leave their political conflicts for the future, hoping for a victory that would allow them to resettle anywhere they wished, including the cold climates they had left behind in Hōki and the even colder climates some had grown up in further east.

Since the large Lilypad party was now bound to cooperation with the small Hipside party, the Lilypads admitted that their democracy had come to an end after less than two years of government, and that their main reason to continue it was that it greatly enhanced their military power. The Hipsides granted generous concessions to the Lilypads, allowing all of their districts and even neighborhoods to function as toparchies so long as residents could escape any petty tyranny arising in their town by moving to a different town.

Slopes invade Matrixes

In October 4198, the Slopes and the Spines launched an offensive against the Matrix homeland of Tata. They did not ask the Lilypads for support, knowing that a majority of the Lilypads had recently stated that now was not the right time for a war against the Matrix. But a sizable minority of the Lilypads wanted an immediate war, and the Lilypad leadership had also just announced that they were de-emphasizing politics, so the Slopes held open the possibility that some Lilypads would join the Slope invasion after all.

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), while the Spines contributed about 1700 boys. The Spine party was much smaller, but had simpler goals; they merely wanted to maintain their relevance against the rising Slope army, and hoped that if they pushed into Matrix territory along with the Slopes, and the coalition army won its war, the Spines would be able to remain in Tata to a greater extent than the Slopes, since they did not have a home territory to defend.

For the Slopes, 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 avoided classifying them as either children or adults. The Lilypads had been doing this for about a year now and felt that it might be the best way to ease the transition into adulthood rather than changing their identification all at once.

Meanwhile, since very few of the Spine soldiers were married or had fathered children, they began calling themselves boys again, though at home they had considered themselves men.

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.

Coalition army enters 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.

Though the troops in the coalition army outnumbered their estimate of the Matrix army's population by more than 10 to 1, they understood that the Matrixes used unconventional battle tactics, had many trained animals, and that they likely had a vast storehouse of armor and weapons in Tata, so that even if every soldier in the standing Matrix army were killed, a new army just as large and just as powerful could quickly emerge from Tata to replace them.

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.

Zeniths move east

The Zeniths fled into Slope territory. The Matrixes had tried to force the Zeniths west instead, into Dreamland, where they would have difficulty reconnecting with the Slopes or with their commercial network. Dreamland was already commercialized and had little use for a new merchant class. But the Matrixes could not control their animals well enough to push the Zeniths west, and therefore the Zeniths resumed their positions in Slope territory.

Matrixes defeat Slopes

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.

Slopes respond to defeat

The Slopes believed that they would ultimately win, and did not expect the Lilypads to bail them out. But they pled with the Lilypads to coordinate a future Lilypad-Slope pincer attack so that they could both hit the Matrixes at once when the time was ripe.

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.

STW mediates

Now STW wanted the two armies to sign an alliance and begin trading with each other through STW intermediaries, just as other warring nations had done in the recent past. STW was disappointed to find out that neither the Slopes nor the Matrixes were interested in having the Matrix release their captured Slope/Spine soldiers, however: the Matrixes stated that those soldiers had recognized that they were adults while in captivity, and that for some this meant promotion to Matrix party membership while the others (including all of the girls) had become slaves. Thus the Matrix bragged that they had not only won the battle for Tata, but increased the size of their army in doing so, while the Slopes had shrunk and the Spines were nearly eliminated.

The Slopes denied that any of their members would actually switch sides, and explained that if any had accepted Matrix membership, it only meant that they would soon sabotage the Matrix war and put the Slope army back in control of eastern Tata.

Spines regroup

In the wake of the loss, the Spines turned more towards crime, realizing partisan politics meant little in the midst of a war. A divide emerged between Spines who wanted land and those who wanted to dwell in others' cities as a criminal gang; the gang supporters won and the entire remainder joined the Hipsides. The gang-oriented Spines stated that they still had an ideology, and that their ideology stated that their allies, the Slopes, had won the right to marry Slope women, so the Spines would respect that and instead force themselves upon Doll women like the Matrixes and some other Slopes were doing. (Most Slope girls had moved to the tayuna cities; those staying behind in the sulalaka castles were outnumbered.)

Planned roles

The Spines said that they would live in the cities and keep the streets safe, since the Slopes did not trust the Zeniths. The Slopes had the tightest social circle of any major party, because they were all boys and had all come from the same region of the Empire. They were runaways, not orphans, and had come from wealthier families than most of the other tatea parties, but they had thrown off this wealth to embrace politics and live without adults. Though initially less hardy than some of the other children because of their more sheltered upbringing, the Spines claimed that they had become among the hardiest people in the world because they had been forced to not only live in the wilderness but also fight off enemies, and any among them who were unfit for such a life had either run back to their parents or been captured.

Unlike the Zeniths, the Spines had no goods to supply the Empire. They understood that a gang was not merely a group of young outlaws sharing a common identity, but had to also make a living one way or another. Since they knew that they could not supplant the Zeniths' role in commerce, they decided to focus on security, and hoped that they could function like a police force for the Slopes since the Slopes did not have police and claimed not to want to them but yet still suffered attacks whenever they needed to visit the cities.

Since the Spines did not have girls, and knew that the Slopes were unwilling to marry them, they hoped also that their transition to a street gang would allow them to roam the territory to their north and meet young Crystal women who had not yet been captured by the Slopes. They would say that these women would be better off with the Spines than with any other party, and that they no longer had the option to be independent.

The Spines promised to adhere to collective responsibility, meaning that if any outside police force came to arrest a Spine boy for committing a crime such as rape or murder, every Spine would claim to be guilty, allowing the real killers to roam free and giving the police force the choice of escalating to all-out war against the Spines or admitting that they would never be effective at reducing crime. There was as of yet no police force within Erala, however, so their threats meant little.

Zeniths respond

Hearing this, the Zeniths transferred control of four important segments of road to the Spines, though only one of these was under Zenith control at the time. The Zeniths urged the boys to see them as allies, not rivals, since their common enemy was the Matrix. They understood that the Spine boys might be afraid of a group of men who boasted about their callousness and unpredictability, and therefore assured them that they could occupy their territory separately rather than mixing with Zeniths. This is what the Zeniths had done with some previous allies such as the Raspara and (mostly) the Slopes.

The four areas of land were: the Clover kingdom, the Hipside territories, a small segment of the Nīu Valley, and a segment of land further east in Square territory. This last one was the only one controlled by the Zeniths at the time; the others were controlled by the Matrixes or the Hipsides.

The Zeniths stated that they would benefit from this arrangement because if the Spines helped in trade, the Zeniths would have more manpower to devote to the ongoing war with the Matrix, and the Spines would be incentivized to continue fighting this war because two of the four areas of land they had just been assigned were currently held by the Matrix. The Zeniths warned that if the Spines chose to exit the war, the Zeniths would revoke all of their concessions except for the Hipside road, in which they had never meaningfully participated. (Moreover the Hipside road was largely dependent on control of the Nīu Valley.)

The Hipside states had been invaded by a group the Hipsides called mupi, adult men who had adopted a gang lifestyle. They had originally planned to take over the Hipside cities along the coast, but soon had to admit that even the famously submissive Hipsides were too tough for them; the men explained this by saying they were outnumbered, and that they would retreat to the mountains and cut the Hipsides off from the other tatea nations.

Now, the Spines said that they would defeat these men. The Spines said that they would become ambush predators and that nothing the men could do to them would frighten them away from their mission, while the Spines would make life for the mupi very frightening since their own cities would not be safe.

Background information

The Spines had earlier considered asking their parents, the Tinks, to sign over the rights to the name Swamp Kids since the Spines had become literal swamp kids whereas the Tinks had chosen their name at a time when they had been led by elders and lived in cold barren climates. This name had been chosen to make a political point, and they had abandoned it and cycled through various other names over time.

The Spines had changed their mind about changing their name as they had forged closer ties with the other tatea parties, since the Spine name honored a different party, but now they considered becoming Swamp Kids again, this time to honor their earlier decision to run away from their wealthy parents and adopt a much more difficult life in the swamps east of Baeba.

The Spines adopted a code language so that they could find each other in the cities; although they all had a similar physical type, this type overlapped with the somewhat more diverse Slopes and they trusted that the Slopes would not falsely disguise themselves as Spines.

Earlier, the Spines had been recruiting more children into their gang even after they had run away, since those children who had initially been too shy to join the Spines had begun changing their minds as news poured in of Spine successes in the east while the Tinks' existence in Baeba seemed increasingly under threat. But once the Slopes and their allies started to lose battles, the Spines stopped recruiting children so they could focus on keeping their own members from deserting the gang and trying to get back to Baeba. Both the ones joining and the ones now leaving had tended to be younger than the rest; very few of the original core members returned to Baeba.

Matrixes grow

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 occupied 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.

Spines shrink back

The Spines told the Zeniths that they were unwilling to fight the Matrixes in this part of Slope territory, and hoped that the Zeniths would not consider this a betrayal, since the Zeniths had just weeks earlier told the Spines to focus on the northern front instead, the valley of Nīu.

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 was also a democracy and the Matrixes were interested in gaining power there.

Further developments

See Tamta/later history.