The Moonshine people live in the northern regions of the planet Teppala.

Teppala takes Earth's place in the solar system, but there are only two continents, and humans live on only the smaller of those two. The human population of the world has never exceeded 10 million at any one time, and the current population is much lower than that. Of that, the Moonshines are just a few hundred thousand.

The Moonshine Empire has a very cold climate. The total range of temperatures is comparable to that of Canada plus Greenland, but with the land concentrated towards the Arctic and only the far south of the Empire within the temperate zone.

The Moonshines derive most of their food from fishing, and though their population density is higher towards the south, the difference is slight, and many Moonshines live in the northern states where it can snow even in summer.

Moonshines in general are proud of their ability to survive and prosper in the world's coldest habitat. Many believe that they have evolved an innate adaptation to their climate, and very few Moonshines show interest in moving to a warmer climate.

The only natural disasters are winter storms.

Currently the axial tilt is 17° and the eccentricity is much greater than Earth's, with the aphelion offset by about three months from the solstices. Combined with the predominance of open water on the planet, this makes seasonal amplitudes fairly small in the Northern Hemisphere where humans live. Thus, although the Moonshines' climates are very cold by Earth standards, they never experience temperatures comparable to the very coldest temperatures found on Earth. Nonetheless, because summer is so weak, in many parts of the Empire it snows every month and glaciers dominate the landscape.

Water and the fish that live within it.

The population density is so low that Moonshines have very little impact on nature, and little evidence of their presence exists outside their widely scattered and highly transitory settlements along the coasts and riversides.

Yes; it is rare for a person to starve, and typically due to an incurable disease or mobility issues; mass starvation is unheard of.

In the far south, some people own farms, but even there, the Moonshines mostly stick to their traditional lifestyle.

There are caves, but most metals are introduced through trade.

Horticulture is absent from all but the extreme southern fringe of the Empire, where there are vineyards and a few apple orchards.

There are many large land animals, including wolves, penguins, and bears, though their habitats do not greatly overlap. Like humans, penguins and bears derive most of their food from the sea. Only wolves primarily target land animals. In the sea live many dolphins, which humans consider to be an animal on par with themselves. There are other sea mammals of similar or even larger size, as well as very large fish.

There are no truly domesticated animals, though some wild animals, including all four of wolves, bears, penguins, and dolphins, are naturally tame and can be safely approached by humans. It is merely that humans do not see themselves as natural leaders of those animals that prevents domestication.

The Moonshines arose from an amalgamation of tribes from all climates, but living in a highly mobile society for 2,500 years has made them very homogeneous.

Many corporations are small, family-owned businesses who hire only their children and other close relatives.  There is no unconditional welfare support for adults, so it is important for every able-bodied adult to find a job, and someone with marketable skills may have trouble doing so if the only companies interested in their skills are owned by strangers. 

Polygamy is legal everywhere, but most marriages are monogamous. When polygamy does happen, it is usually 2 wives and 1 husband, and both wives must be familiar with each other from before the marriage. In such a marriage, the two women must agree beforehand on how to divide up property, since a woman ordinarily takes ownership of her husband and all of his property during a monogamous heterosexual marriage. Generally the first wife has priority, but she can legally transfer property to the incoming wife, including the ownership of the man. This is most common when the incoming wife is much younger than the first wife. It is illegal for two women to both claim full ownership over the same man, so a common arrangement is for one wife to own the man and the other his most important belongings.

Customs vary from one settlement to another. In some areas, girls simply to go the edge of the town and buy a boy from the state-run work camps set up for boys who have aged out of their parents' care.

In other areas, boys are still required to live outside the main part of town after age 10 but are not considered property of the state, and are allowed to refuse a marriage proposal from a girl who enters their home.

Although Moonshines tend to marry very young, parents have no role in setting up a marriage for their children. If a boy and a girl love each other but do not want to get married they are allowed to still live together and be apart from their parents.

A divorce is the inverse of a wedding. All marriage contracts include the terms for divorce, and these cannot be changed during the marriage even if both parties agree.  All divorce clauses are inherently unequal, because only one party can retain ownership of the house.

Women who have legal ownership of their husbands are allowed to get rid of them at any time for any reason, but it is customary for the woman to first visit a council of local women to see if any of them are interested in taking over control of the man.

Because men cannot own land, a man whose wife dies must immediately marry another woman or else forfeit any property that she had owned.  Thus, men at this age are even weaker than they had been as boys in the cabins.  But many single adult males are not widowers but rather divorcees, and a woman who divorces her husband will typically leave him nothing at all, meaning that the man loses his right to live in a town and must flee into the wilderness to live with criminals.  Thus, though not legally defined as such, it is effectively a crime in Moonshine society to be a man whose wife has divorced him.

This means that a single woman in hear peak childbearing years will have a difficult time finding a single man in town; because women die less often than men, there are always more widows than widowers, and because men must remarry immediately, it is rare for even a large town to have more than one single adult male living there at any one time.  Thus, single women who wish to remarry are forced to choose between the various men living at great distance in the wilderness, all of whom are considered non-citizens, and who can be legally killed for any or no reason at any time by any Moonshine citizen.   

A woman in this situation will often seek a husband who is older than she is.  Many women in this situation will say that they find men slightly older than them to be more attractive than those of equal or lesser age.  Older men are perceived as more emotionally stable and less likely to be criminals than are younger men.

Even marriage is not enough to restore the civil rights of a man who has fled town; men who move back to town to marry a woman live out their life with the realization that anyone around them can simply kill them without provocation, and will pay no fine nor face a prison term for so doing.  The wife can pursue a criminal case against the perpetrator for the crime of violating her marriage, but if it can be shown that the husband was once a violent criminal rather than a man who was pushed out of town by his previous wife, the perpetrator will be acquitted.     

When a woman marries another woman, both of them have legal rights set into the marriage contract, and at the time of the wedding both women agreed to respect the terms of the contract throughout their marriage.  Typically, the two women agreed to split their property in the event of divorce, but because two women cannot split ownership of a house, any divorce between two women leads to one of them becoming temporarily homeless.  In most cases, this woman will still have her job, and may be able to afford a new house immediately, but if the woman had been working for her wife, she may lose everything during the divorce process. 

Women always retain control in a monogamous heterosexual marriage; in any marriage involving two or more women, these agreements are written into the marriage contract and cannot be changed at a later date.

Children over the age of five are allowed to request a change to the custody arrangements, but they cannot themselves make a binding decision; instead, the matter goes to the local priest in her temple, where the two mothers and their children will all make their cases.  The priest's decision takes effect immediately. 

Children use their mother's given name as a surname. 

When a daughter moves out, she is no longer legally tied to her parents and will choose for herself a new surname, which can be anything of her choosing but typically describes her in a positive way.

Sons who move out at the age of ten are known only by their birth names; they no longer belong to their parents, nor do they receive a new surname until they marry.  When a boy marries a girl, he takes her surname in an inflected form to show that he belongs to her.  When two women marry, the one who owns the house is defined as the head of household, and the incoming woman adopts her surname in an inflected form, but different from the inflected form that men take.   

Orphans are taken care of by the state, and the operators of the orphanage are supported by taxes, but they also force orphans to work both in physical labor and in the classroom.  That is, they work to support their own immediate needs, but also work different tasks intended to ensure that they will be self-sufficient when they become too old to live in an orphanage.

Living conditions in orphanages are comparable to those in prisons, and because they are communally run, neglected children have a difficult time seeking help from outside.

Girls are prepared for leadership roles and boys are prepared for subservient roles and physical labor. The education system is humble, but this too tends to favor girls as they are required to have broader knowledge than boys by the time they are teens. Boys, however, generally learn just one subject and learn it deeply.

Although many women have jobs on their own in the public work force, their husbands are required to pay for them if they choose not to. In fact, a man's property becomes owned by his wife when he gets married. Because unmarried women do not receive money from their boyfriends, most women marry as soon as possible, usually in their teens, and have many children.

Additionally, during pregnancy and early child-raising years, women are not expected to work; they derive all of their income from their husband's employment and from government-supported maternity funds.

Boys learn carpentry in school and many women expect their husband to build her a new house to live in before they will be truly considered married. 

The construction of so many new houses is not a problem because of the nomadic lifestyle of the Moonshines and the harsh climate that causes nature to destroy many houses each year. The boys are expected to build and maintain a house for the duration of their time together, but not one that will stand for hundreds of years.

In some circumstances, a young woman will already own a house before she is married, and may not be interested in a marriage gift other than the man himself. 

Yes, but Moonshine's emphasis on legalistic contracts leads people to think about what they are required to do before they consider what they want to do.

The population of the Moonshine Empire has been stable for a long time, neither increasing nor decreasing. The average mother has about three children, with a stereotypical preference for two daughters and one son. This gender ratio results from the practice of infanticide against boys, boys' greater susceptibility to disease, their exposure to more dangers in early childhood, and the requirement that all boys leave town when they reach the age of ten.

A woman who gives birth to three daughters in a row with no boys among them is considered to be very lucky, and may experience a modest rise in social status after the third birth.

Anyone who owns a house other than a group home is considered to be the head of their household, and anyone who lives with them is part of that household.  The head of household must be an adult female.  Homeless people are not considered to be residents of any town, and are not included in population tallies. Prisoners, orphans, and residents of boys' wilderness camps are thus the only residents who do not belong to households; they are all wards of the state.

Most houses are small and fragile, intended for only a few people at one time. Renting homes or rooms within a house is legal but very rare, and the tenant must already have another place to live.  Thus, rentals are typically short-term and the tenants are travelers on long journeys who need to postpone further travel for a significant amount of time.  Large cities also have hotels for short-term stays.

Children leave their parents' house while still young, and each new husband builds his wife a new house to raise their own families in. Thus, a household consists of at most two generations. Because people marry young, a woman can become a grandmother before the age of thirty, and give birth to children who are younger than the offspring of their own siblings. Thus, generations do not line up well with chronological age.

Boys leave their homes at around the age of 10 to live in cottages at the edge of town with other boys their age. These homes are tax-supported and owned by the city, but like the orphanages, the boys are made to work for a living and to learn basic life skills on their own, with minimal adult supervision.

If a woman dies and all of her children are too young to own property, their children become orphans (even if the father is alive) and all property is handed over to the state, to be disbursed to them when they reach the age of majority.  If there is at least one child old enough to own property, they receive what they were promised in their mother's will and the rest is reserved for the younger children.  If all of the children are of the age of majority, the mother's will is executed as written with no delay.

If a woman has no children but has a written will, the will is sent into a court that determines which provisions of the will should be followed and which should be overridden by the court.  For example, the woman cannot deed her house to a relative who already has a house, even if the person is willing to sell their old house. Typically, much of the property of a woman in this situation will be taken over by the state.

If a woman has no children and no will, all of her property reverts to state control immediately, and other relatives are not allowed to challenge this.

A woman can name her husband as a party in her will, and the husband can take ownership of most of the woman's tangible belongings, but cannot inherit her house, and therefore cannot feasibly inherit the rest of her property either unless he immediately finds another woman to move in with. 

The only illegal marriage is a triangle marriage, where three people are all married to each other. Instead, a marriage consisting of three people must have a formally identifiable core participant, who is married to the other two, while those other two are not married to each other. This rule is solely due to property inheritance laws, and there is no prohibition against a tripartite relationship existing at the social level.

The same rule also applies for a four-party marriage, although such arrangements are uncommon. In a four-party marriage, the chain of relation must be a line, not a square. Thus, there are two core participants who are married to each other and also to one other party, and two side participants who are only married to one other party. It is much more common, however, for four people living in a household to pair off into two ordinary monogamous marriages, even if they are also having sex with one or both of the people from the other couple.

Male and female homosexuality are seen as greatly different from each other, but both are allowed.

The most common tripartite marriage consists of two women married to the same man. The second wife signs a marriage contract with the man, and the first wife signs an inheritance agreement, agreeing to surrender certain property rights to the incoming wife.

Also common is a marriage in which a woman is married both to a man and to another woman. 

It is uncommon for a woman to simultaneously marry two men because women outnumber men in Moonshine society and men tend to marry very young. However, this is legal, and from a legal standpoint is exactly equivalent to the woman entering two monogamous marriages. The two men do not sign any type of agreement between each other and such a marriage does not typically involve any input from the first husband.

Sometimes, two men will marry each other, and then a woman will choose one of them to be her partner as well. Since men cannot own land, this is the only way a male-male couple can earn the legal right to sleep indoors. The woman in such a marriage may be intensely interested in the man or entirely uninterested; in either case, however, her legal rights are the same, and she owns all of the property of the man she chose to marry, and also wields lesser control over her husband's husband.

Three women can marry each other, subject to the rule that one of the three must be the core partner, with superior legal rights compared to the other two.

Lastly, three men may also marry each other. While these relationships are legal in and of themselves, such groups must immediately leave town because, without a woman, they have no legal way to enter mainstream society or even earn the right to sleep indoors.

Women who work typically return home after the birth of a child and return to work only gradually. If two women are in a relationship with the same man, it is rare for them to both be pregnant at the same time, and so the women will alternate nursing duties for the baby when the other is away.

Ideally, the mother and father divide the duties of childcare in half: the mother takes care of the baby's top half, while the father takes care of the bottom half. This means, broadly, that the mother will breastfeed the baby and feed the baby their first solid food, while the father will change and wash the baby's diapers, and carry the baby around from place to place.

In practice, however, most fathers are at work during the baby's first year of life, and because the mother typically remains at home until the baby is ready to eat solid food, she attends to all of the baby's needs when the father is out of the house.

Most Moonshine men are capable of breastfeeding their babies, but men's milk is considered to be an inferior form and men are only called on to perform this service when the woman's supply is insufficient.

Boys move out at the age of ten and girls move out when they marry or acquire enough money to buy a house. Girls and boys both marry young, and if the marriage is stable, they often remain in the same house for the rest of their lives.

Moonshine families prefer daughters.

Because children cannot choose to be born, there is no contract signed at childbirth, and children are not legally required to repay their parents for the labor and expense that growing up demands.

The birth of a son is an economic liability for the parents, because the boy must move to the edge of town at the age of ten and any labor he does from that point on can benefit only his future wife or the town as a whole. Though Moonshine society always grants women superior legal status to men, Moonshine men are legally more tightly bound to their wives than to their mothers, so mothers cannot call their sons back to the house to ask for help with basic daily living activities. Even during the typically short period in which the boys live in cabins at the edge of town, they are already more tightly bound to the female property owners of those cabins than to their mothers, and their mothers may not even be allowed to visit their sons during this time.

Daughters have no legal obligation to care for their parents, and typically move out in their early teen years. Thus, parents get no immediate economic benefit from raising children of either sex, and because raising a daughter in Moonshine society is vastly more expensive than raising a son, daughters are also an economic liability for their parents while they are young. However, even though women in Moonshine society have every legal right to neglect their parents as their parents become elderly and frail, most women will visit their parents frequently and care for their needs as their parents become less able to care for each other. By contrast, men can only do similar things when their wife permits it, and the earlier separation from their parents that boys endure leads to a much weaker bond between the parents and the son as the son becomes a man.

In areas where marriage contracts assign the woman full legal ownership of her husband, she is allowed to inflict physical injuries of any kind against him and pay no fine. No other woman can intervene in such a situation even when the man's life is in danger.

Violence against husbands is common even in the most egalitarian marriage contracts because men are not allowed to testify in court without a woman's permission, and so the husband must first find a woman who is willing to hear his story before he can accuse his wife of a crime. Even when the evidence of abuse is plain, uninvolved Moonshine women will commonly blame the husband for the situation and remind him that whatever suffering his wife inflicts on him at home, he would suffer worse if let loose into the wilderness to fend for himself.

Men also sometimes beat women. Here, women are expected to have full control of the situation, and a woman who cannot control her husband is expected to be embarrassed unless she is visibly disabled and unable to competently defend herself. A battered woman expecting sympathy from another woman would be given an even colder rejection than would a battered man; battered women's shelters simply do not exist in the Moonshine Empire. However, all Moonshine marriage contracts allow women to divorce their husbands for any reason, so in the case where the woman is physically disabled, if she can escape her home and contact another woman, she can then ask for help, and the police force will immediately imprison the man with no trial.

Child abuse can come from either parent. Boys are not allowed to accuse their parents of abuse, but young boys are more likely than grown men to find a woman willing to represent them in court, and therefore have more success than adults at escaping their situation. A court system that determines that abuse has been committed will punish both parents regardless of which of them committed each instance of abuse, because the wife in any marriage is expected to be fully in control of her husband.

Children rescued from abusive homes are immediately placed into orphanages. The living conditions at Moonshine orphanages are notoriously dire, but very few battered children have ever asked permission to return to their abusive parents.

Adults receive little sympathy, and both men and women are often blamed when they are physically abused, though in starkly different manners.  A crime against a child is considered to be much more grave.

The school system watches children closely and will hold a child after class if they suspect the child's parents are abusing them.  Regardless of the true situation, the police will arrest and imprison both parents immediately and they will then need to wait for their trial to make their case.  The children are then housed in the local orphanage.

When innocent parents are arrested, the process is often traumatic for the child, but the school system is immune from retaliation and the parents cannot pull their child out of school.  But the court system defines child abuse as any physical assault by an adult against their child, and few parents are truly innocent.  Many children have to be convinced that what their parents are doing is wrong.

Boys are not allowed to accuse their parents of abuse, so the teacher must appear in court to make the boy's case.  Girls are allowed to represent themselves in court, though the emotional reaction that a child testifying on the witness stand brings can determine the outcome of the case regardless of the evidence, and send innocent parents to jail while exonerating guilty ones.   A very young girl will typically speak only through trusted adults, and a 5-year-old who speaks plainly and confidently about what her parents are doing to her will often lead the judge to believe that she doesn't understand what she's talking about.  Similarly, a 13-year-old who claims to be too traumatized to speak will garner suspicion even if she is telling the truth.

Women are at the top of society and men are at the bottom; all other divisions are secondary. Among women, social status is determined primarily by occupation, which correlates well with wealth and income, but some women with well-esteemed jobs remain relatively poor because of financial obligations not their own fault, and many rich women simply choose not to work. Monthly income is more important than total wealth in determining one's status, as people recognize that many rich women simply inherited their wealth rather than earning it through hard work.

Women could be said to have two simultaneous social class systems: a legal one and a popular one. Legal social status is important when determining which of two women has a better claim to a disputed property item or which of them should be excused from basic civic duties, but popular status is never written down and is based on intangible personality traits such as keeping promises. A woman who becomes popular in society may eventually see her intangible status become a tangible one, if offered a high-paying job she would ordinarily not deserve.

Men are typically egalitarian among themselves, but women will treat their own relatives with more respect than they treat other men, and thus men form into temporary social hierarchies depending on which women are around them at any given time.

There are no specific titles, because legal social status is derived primarily from one's occupation.

Moonshines teach their children that there are no inferior occupations, but those in dangerous jobs are treated as inferiors even so.  Often, the assumption is that someone in such a job would never have wound up there by choice, and must have committed a crime or become otherwise untrustworthy.  Nearly all people in dangerous jobs are men, and the few women who work alongside them are treated with even greater suspicion because women are expected to be in rewarding careers by the time they reach adulthood.

Women who perform arduous physical labor are highly respected so long as the work they do is merely unpleasant rather than being both unpleasant and dangerous.

When the Moonshines were at war, they embraced the color white, to represent the glaciers and frequent snowfall of their new nation, and also preferred cold colors generally.  Modern Moonshines still use these colors frequently, but for the most part they have given way to shades of pink and purple, perceived as the most feminine colors.  Since femininity is power, pink and purple are their power colors.  The most common objects with these colors are fruits and flowers. 

There is no one color associated with virtue because there are three goddesses and they are depicted in three different ways.  Malamen, the goddess of life, is associated with white, and with pink and purple especially in the context of childbirth.  However Kwatena, the goddess of death, is also a supreme deity and her judgments are perceived as morally good.  She is associated with dark colors, including black, and therefore black is also a color of virtue.  Lastly, the supreme deity Yuni is most commonly depicted in purple, but as a shapeshifter, she can appear in any form. 

The women closest to the two men would meet up and decide what to do with their men.  In most cases, the women would agree that no crime has been committed, but if one man is clearly stronger than the other, the woman on the losing side might ask the other woman to keep her man indoors or at least limit his contact with the public.

Women are discouraged from engaging in physical fights with each other, but for it to be a crime, one of the women must report the other; a third party cannot object to a fight between two women who have no interest in pursuing legal charges against each other, even if property damage was involved.

The emotional needs of the closest surviving relatives are paramount.  Nobody is allowed to criticize another person's reaction to the death of a loved one; some people will weep for years, and others will exhibit no emotional change at all.  Many who show no visible reaction will explain that they had seen the death coming and had already come to accept what was about to happen.

Jobs cannot be passed down through a person's will; a woman will typically try to get her daughter into her line of work while they are both young.

Men cannot meaningfully inherit property because they cannot live in any town unless they are married to or under the care of a woman, and that woman will nearly always take ownership of all of the man's property, and in some cases even of the man himself.  A woman who leaves property to her husband is in effect hoping that he will be able to choose which woman to give it to.

Large cities have neighborhoods at the center of the city in which only female citizens may enter; women typically work in these neighborhoods and then return home to their families, but some all-female families live in houses in the female district even so.  Young boys are forced to live in the wilderness after they turn ten and until a girl their age takes them in.

Non-citizens are not allowed to so much as enter Moonshine territory, let alone live there, but the Moonshine Empire is almost entirely defined by water boundaries, and furthermore, their nearest neighbors are both wealthier than Moonshine and friendly to Moonshine, so illegal immigration is very rare.  Most non-citizens are in fact Moonshines who have had their citizenship stripped after committing a crime.  Such people can be killed on sight with no penalty by any other person. 

The male-female divide is absolute; men cannot live as women, or otherwise escape being men.  Gay men may identify themselves as hařč or pàp, which mean top and bottom respectively, but such terms give away that they are not interested in having children and thus not part of mainstream society.  Women, including lesbians, have no similar terms.

A large portion of the adult female population works for and is paid directly by the government.  The government also funds the temple at the center of each town.

Everyone attends temple services; people who privately question their religion act and speak the same way as fervent believers in public.

Very little has changed in Moonshine society in the last 2,500 years.

Moonshines today still teach their children about the founding of their Empire, over 2,500 years ago, when their women seized control of power from their male population and started a worldwide feminist revolution hoping to unite all of the women and girls in every nation of the world.  A long and very embellished retelling of this story appears in the scripture book in nearly every temple, and is one of the few written texts of the religion that do not vary from one temple to the next.   

Very little organized violence has happened in Moonshine territory in the last 2,500 years, so most stories are about peaceful happenings such as the discovery and settlement of new islands.

Moonshine is properly the name of a political party, but because it is the only legal party in their Empire, it has come to be used as the name of their tribe as well.  This practice is common on planet Teppala and not restricted to just certain nations.

Parents choose the names of their children typically while the mother is still pregnant.

Male-on-female rape is rare because of difficulties of anatomy, and when it does happen it is punished less severely than anywhere else. Male-on-male rape is the most common form. When prosecuted, it is often referred to euphemistically, as if the man being raped had only been beaten up or wounded, as the penalty for this is quite severe on its own. It is generally taller, stronger men raping shorter weaker men.

Female-on-male rape is rare, and is classified as domestic abuse, since it mostly happens with married couples. The same is true of female-on-female rape or woman vs child. Women cannot legally be accused of rape, either by men, or by women, or by children, but they can be tried for assault.

Moonshine society has the highest rate of child rape in the world.¹ This is due in part to the physical difficulty encountered by Moonshine men in attempting sex with an unwilling adult partner; men attack children because they are easy to subdue.  Because this situation results from the Moonshines' anatomy, there is no simple solution to it, and the problem persists despite aggressive punishment of the perpetrators.      

There are no laws against cousin marriage, but significant social pressure combined with the restricted access eligible bachelors have to the outside world keeps such marriages from happening except when the parties are unaware they are related.  Incest within a household is not outlawed either, but anyone hearing of it will immediately arrest both parents for child abuse and deliver all of the household's children to an orphanage pending the result of the child abuse trial.

Moonshines are proud of their empire's good sexual morals.  Apart from the high incidence of child rape, which is well known, most Moonshines would not believe an accusation of sexually deviant behavior leveled against a neighbor, even an unpopular one.

The only illegal sex is rape, and the Empire's child rape problem is no secret.  The problem persists because while the general public is aware that children are being raped, few people suspect their neighbors of perpetrating it, and assume that the typical child abuser belongs to a social network with other child abusers who protect each other from the law.

The only neighboring tribes that the Moonshines know much about are the Poswobs, whose culture is very similar to the Moonshines'. But some Moonshines perceive the Poswobs as being physically weak and prone to submissive behavior, even towards inappropriate targets. Thus, the accusations against Poswobs, though rarely made, tend to focus on depictions of the Poswobs penetrating themselves with vegetables and other firm objects, and submitting to sex with dangerous animals.

The most common sex position involves the man lying on top of the woman, resting his head against the uppermost part of her chest, cushioned by her breasts.  This is considered the most natural sex position because women, being larger than men, are able to hold the man in place during the sex act.  By contrast, when the woman is on top, the man must position himself farther down her body and she may inadvertently smother him.  Some couples prefer this method, but typically keep it a private matter as they do not want other people thinking of their sexual habits as their most salient characteristic.

Sex typically stops when a woman becomes visibly pregnant, because a woman's belly becomes quite large and a man would need to bend into an awkward position, putting him at risk of significant injury, to achieve penetration.  Nevertheless some couples continue to have sex throughout pregnancy.

Women and men typically pair up with partners of a compatible height.  Women are taller than men, but a woman who is taller than average will usually seek a man who is also taller than average.  If a woman forms a relationship with a man who is judged by society to be too small for her, she may lose the approval of the women around her and come to have a low social status.  Women almost never form relationships with men taller than them, with the exception of women who failed to reach their normal adult height due to disease. 

Women typically avoid traditional sex during menstruation, but will engage in other sexual activities.

Common fetishes are looked down on by some.  For example, some women are attracted to playfully dominant men, while others see any form of male power, even as part of a sexual game, to be disgusting and will shun women who identify as that particular type.   However, most female Moonshines who disapprove of this type of sex are very young and do not have fully formed identities of their own yet.  Once women become independent and realize how weak men really are, they no longer feel repulsed by games involving male sexual dominance.

Premarital relations are allowed, and to the point that a marriage between two virgins is very rare. When an unmarried woman is pregnant, she will go on leave from her job, and her boyfriend will pay for her needs and is expected to marry her.

Because the vast majority of the adult population is married, extramarital relations typically imply adultery.

Adultery is any sexual contact between two people, at least one of whom is married, that transgresses the will of another partner in that marriage.  It is not a crime, but a civil matter, and therefore it is handled by a council of women at the local temple rather than in a criminal court.

If a wife finds her husband with another woman, she is entitled to punish her husband in any way she sees fit without seeking a second opinion. Since by law the wife owns all of the property in the marriage, she can simply throw him out of the house and end the marriage, keeping all property for herself and making the man homeless. Thus, men do not cheat on their wives very often.

If a man finds his wife with another man, he typically will hide the fact he saw her, because the woman could punish the man for the mere act of discovering the affair by divorcing him and throwing him out just as in the situation above. However, because almost all adult men are married, a woman who does this would be also committing adultery against her lover's wife, and therefore that woman could sue the first woman for violating her marriage contract.

Prostitution is allowed in most but not all cities of the Empire; there is no state that outlaws it, so the decision is left up to each individual city or town. However, most prostitutes live in the wilderness, not in ordinary homes in the cities.

Most prostitutes are submissive males seeking other males, though some also contact female clients. Male prostitutes often have surprisingly luxurious homes, as they have much free time to themselves, are richer than typical males, and live in remote areas where other people's property claims cannot reach them. By choosing a submissive role, a male prostitute can perform many times per day and appeal to a wider client base.  Some male prostitutes will perform in a dominant role sometimes and a submissive role when they are worn out.

Female prostitutes are rare, and many perform only in an accessory role in which a male prostitute is also present and is the primary target of attraction. 

In areas where prostitution is illegal, the law has very little effect on its prevalence, because prostitutes typically do not live in cities.

Most married women control their husbands' whereabouts to an extent that they will soon learn if their husband has been secretly visiting a prostitute.  A woman who learns this is free to divorce her husband immediately, which in most cases will automatically banish him from the town.  Thus, visiting a prostitute is dangerous for a man.  For this reason, men who wish to see prostitutes will ask their wife for permission, and provide a well-thought explanation for why allowing him to see a prostitute would actually help strengthen the marriage.  As most prostitutes are male, often a woman will acknowledge that her husband is attracted to men and women alike, and will grant him permission to visit the male prostitute.   If the wife is unwilling to share her man, however, she is free to divorce him on the spot, not even allowing him the choice of whether to obey her.

A woman who is unhappy with her husband's performance at home may seek a male prostitute in the wilderness, but more commonly she will force the male prostitute to come to the woman's house instead, which saves her the trouble of making a long hike and humiliates her husband as well.       

The existence of prostitutes does not bother most Moonshine adults, though women who suspect their husband has secretly become one may ask their friends to keep watch over him to ensure that he continues to show up at his job and does not travel into the wilderness.

Marriage typically follows a sexual relationship, though in some cases they begin simultaneously.

Priests marry in a different way from their worshippers.  When a priest becomes pregnant, she will announce to her worshippers whether she conceived the baby with a man, with a woman, or by herself.  Adult worshippers are expected to know that the priest is not literally claiming to have a supernatural womb; rather, priests undergo a ceremonial marriage in which the partner is usually not the one who conceived the baby.  But if the priest chooses someone other than the biological father to be the baby's other parent, the father may not reveal himself.  Such men are typically already married to other women; indeed, it is rare for a priest to announce a man as her ceremonial partner. 

Priests who have many children often have many different male partners, and they are above reproach by their worshippers.  Occasionally, a priest will give birth to a child with a distinctive appearance such that it becomes plain who the biological father is; in such a case the man is still required to keep silent about the event, but his wife may become irritated as the word spreads around the town.

The idea of a three-way distinction between male conception, female conception, and internal origin is derived from the reproductive patterns of the angels.

The presence of large, tame animals such as wolves and bears in close proximity to human settlements presents both male and female Moonshines with a temptation to pursue intimate relationships outside the bounds of social acceptability.

Couples are expected to marry when the wife becomes pregnant.  This includes lesbian couples in which one partner conceives a baby with a man; the woman must marry immediately upon discovering that she is pregnant, but she will marry her female partner, not the biological father.  This is similar to the priests' ceremonial marriages, but unlike priests, lay women do not have the option to declare the baby to be of their own origin and remain unmarried. 

Boys move out from their parents' household at the age of ten and live in cabins at the edge of town. They seek to marry a girl at the earliest possible time, though because they are competing against the other boys in the cabins, it is typically the oldest and best-prepared boys who find mates first, and most boys spend at least three years in the cabins.

Children under the age of ten who engage in sexual behavior with other children are assumed to have suffered sexual abuse themselves, and the parents of the initiating partner will be arrested on sight.  The child is then charged with assault, though younger offenders are typically acquitted on the basis that they were not acting with a clear mind. 

A man accused of having sex with a child will be imprisoned immediately and soon executed unless credible witnesses arrive in court to testify in his defense. If the rapist is a woman, the crime is still considered severe, but is classified as assault because women cannot be accused of rape in the Moonshine court system. A woman may receive a long jail sentence if convicted, particularly if there were multiple assaults, but women are almost never executed.

Children also cannot be legally accused of rape, so boys who rape other boys in the cabins are tried for assault, not rape. This applies even if the rapist is several years older than his victim. Nonetheless, this is still a very serious crime, and the rapist may be executed if the judge is convinced of his guilt.

Group sex is rare, but unless it involves adultery, it is legal and no outside party can raise any legal objection.

Moonshine houses are built such that finding visual and auditory privacy is difficult outside a bathroom, and most homes do not have bathrooms. Young children in a household may hear their parents having sex, but typically will think little of it as they do not know what sex is at that age. There are almost never any adults not part of the marriage living in a household.

Moonshines admit that their cooking is unappetizing, and that it becomes worse the further north one goes, as climates get colder and food sources become less and less varied. Even the poorest citizens have enough food, however, and people who appear thin are typically those with digestive problems or other health problems that lead them to waste away.

Western Moonshine states have access to tropical fruits from Baeba Swamp, which is a few thousand miles away and separated by a tall mountain range. Coconuts and pineapples are hardy enough to survive the journey, and pineapples especially are favored as a topping on meat dishes, but they are expensive.

Hunting and fishing are sufficient to supply the dietary needs of the people, but food must be eaten quickly and replenished. Vegetables are eaten in small amounts, but become rare in the colder climates.  Most people do not have access to any truly nonperishable foods.  There are restaurants in large cities, but they sell food that must be eaten immediately; there are no grocery stores.

Most families eat with knives, forks, and spoons.  In winter, it may be so cold inside a family's house that they are forced to wear thick gloves even while eating, and in such times, using cutlery is extremely frustrating, so people will eat with their hands.  Some people prefer to eat with their hands all the time, and this is acceptable even in public. Cooking is done with pots and pans over a fire, but many families have only one such item in the house.

Children learn to cook very early because there are times when both parents are away or otherwise unable to help them, but ideally cooking is the responsibility of the husband, with the wife helping out when a meal is very difficult.

Most families have just one table in the house, which serves all purposes, so it may need to be cleared off at mealtimes.

At a family gathering, the host takes priority over the guest, but when they sit down to eat, all are equal, because there is typically only one table to eat at.

Nearly all families have a dining table with enough chairs to give each family member a seat.  If they do not, the husband will wait until the others have finished their meal before sitting down himself, or will eat on the floor.

Most families will have at least one large meal per day, usually in the evening, in which they all eat together, but if the parents have different work schedules, this may not be possible.  Outside of the evening meal, people tend to eat very little because it is difficult to cook small portions. 

Yes. 

Food is unappetizing but plentiful, so a typical meal is very cheap, but a tasty meal can be very expensive. Most families avoid expensive foods so that they will not develop cravings. Full-time restaurants are only found in cities; here, the restaurant owners buy food from traders in quantities that would be impractically large for single families.

Almost all fruits must be imported.  Western states actually have an easier time importing foods from the tropics than from temperate climates due to the shape of the land, so they are more familiar with pineapples and oranges than with apples and berries.  Further north and east, neither of these fruit types are easy to find, but the large tropical fruits tend to be more durable and thus remain more common even in the far north.

In the extreme south of the Empire, apples grow, but most land is nonetheless used for hunting and fishing, and settlements are near water.

Even cannibalism is legal, so long as the person being eaten was a fugitive whose right to life had been taken away by the court system.  Humans who eat humans typically do so out of an insatiable curiosity, not for utilitarian reasons, as there are many other animals which are both larger and easier to kill.  The court system will never directly sentence someone to be eaten, and when criminals are executed, their bodies are dumped into the sea with the intent that they will soon be eaten by fish and other sea life.

In the coldest parts of the Empire, simply storing meat outdoors is sufficient to preserve it. In warmer climates, food can be stored underground or in caves throughout the summer. Some people shovel snow into dark caves where it persists throughout the summer.

There has never been a true famine. People starve to death occasionally because they are unable to catch fish and to alert their neighbors that they need help, but when this happens, it usually means that the entire family is incapacitated, and so the entire family suffers starvation together.  Legally speaking, however, when food runs short parents are required to prioritize their children over themselves, and women over men.  

Most people never drink anything besides water, which is obtained from rainwater and melted snowfall.

Grape wine is the only known alcoholic drink. In the extreme south of the Empire, grapes can be grown, but wine produced here is typically drunk locally because Moonshines in general perceive the quality of native wine to be poor, and prefer to pay higher prices to drink wine grown in warmer climates such as those of Paba.

The entire family will sit at the same table and eat at the same time. When everyone has had their fill, the husband will clean the dishes and then go outside to dispose of any waste products.

Like their neighbors to the south, and indeed most other human cultures on the planet, the Moonshines are very plain, with neither jewelry nor bodily modification, even in warm climates where people show more exposed skin.

All Moonshine territory has at least some snow each winter, and in some areas, it can snow in every month. Thus winter clothes are the primary mode of dress and people are often so bundled up that their own relatives can only recognize them by their distinctive clothes, so women especially take care to ensure they have a wide variety of winter clothes.

As pacifists, the Moonshines never carry weapons in public, but thick animal hides capable of holding a sharp knife are used in the clothes worn by both hunters and cooks.

There are no ceremonial weapons.

Nudity is legal; this is a common trait on planet Teppala. However, the Moonshines live in the world's coldest climates, so days warm enough for people to be comfortable with no clothes on are rare enough to be cause for celebration, and even they occur only in the southern reaches of the Empire.

Even the neighbors of the Moonshines dress in humble clothes, so most Moonshines are not aware of such things even from what they study in school. Only a few scholars remember that, nearly five thousand years ago, the Moonshines participated in a war on the side of a tribe whose historical enemies were known for their pride in wearing jewelry and bodily modifications. But even during this war, the Moonshines were fighting for their Empire and not against the third nation.

Moonshines are famously tolerant of cold weather, and seem perpetually underdressed by comparison to more southerly peoples. If the temperature is above freezing and the sun is in the sky, many Moonshines will simply go about their business in their underwear. Because their underwear provides no significant protection against the cold, this is also the same outfit they wear during the very rare warm and hot days of summer, but such days can be seen as cause for celebration and some people will go outside wearing nothing at all. Thus, nudity is legal everywhere and is not considered rude. Likewise, underwear can be revealing of one's figure underneath and not be considered rude, even in the presence of family members.

Outer clothes for both genders are made of simple cloth or animal hide, and have a similar appearance, but women's clothes are more sturdy and thus longer-lasting.  Men's clothes tend to be tighter, as men have a more simple body shape, whereas women's and children's clothes are loose-fitting but adjustable.  Women's outer clothes often have side pockets sewn into the hip and breast areas to help them carry small objects without the need for a backpack.  Typically the hip pockets are external and used frequently while the breast pockets are internal, much smaller, and used less frequently.  Some women's outerwear also has pockets in the front or back.  Men's and children's clothes do not typically have pockets, though girls approaching adolescence can often fit into women's wear.

Parents buy or hand down clothes to their children that are at first much too big for them, which they will grow into over the next year or so.  When the clothes become too tight, the parents will hand them down again.  

Both men and women learn are involved in the production of clothes, and it is one of the few areas where different private corporations compete with each other in the same industry.  Despite clothing manufacture being one of the Empire's few robust local industries, the cost of clothing is among the highest in the world because Moonshines wear thicker clothes than any other people and because some of the materials they rely on cannot be found locally.

Animal hides, plant fibers, and fur are the most common material in order of increasing price.  A thick fur coat is meant to last many years, in some cases even long enough to be handed down through several generations.  Though fur coats are made from the hides of local animals, the process of sewing a sturdy coat together is very labor-intensive, and therefore this is the most expensive material of all.  The same is true of bed blankets.

There are no stretchable materials, so pregnant women buy maternity clothes that at first are far too big for them, and which they fasten with a series of belts.  As the woman's belly grows, they loosen the belts until finally when they are ready to give birth their clothes fit in the way they were intended.  Because women do not wear maternity clothes very often, they tend to last a long time.  Most women have more than one child, but when they are no longer of childbearing age, they typically will hand the maternity clothes down to one of their daughters.

Women have many options for handling their menstrual periods. Monthly flow is extremely heavy; the typical woman will bleed for about six days and spill enough blood to fill a drinking cup.  Thus, great attention is paid to feminine hygiene and different women prefer different methods of keeping clean.  Some women buy inexpensive underwear, which they use and then throw away. Others use cloth menstrual pads that they put inside their underwear to keep the underwear clean. There are also washable menstrual pads intended to be used and reused for several years. Still other women use tampons made from imported plant fibers. Young girls who are just starting to menstruate may use nothing at all.

Reusable menstrual pads are very expensive; a single pad can cost as much as an average worker's monthly wage. But women who buy traditional pads will spend about one tenth that price for each use, and thus if they are not willing to wear the same pad for several days in a row, they will spend more than the women with disposables.

Diapers for babies may be no more than handfuls of moss, but some families will buy expensive washable diapers made of cloth.

There are no zippers.  Men who are able to urinate simply by pulling down the front of their pants are proud of their ability; men who cannot reach using this method are forced to pull their pants all the way down.

There are no ceremonial clothes; even at a wedding the bride and groom will be wearing their own clothes from home, though typically they will show up wearing the best clothes they own.  Sometimes the bride will wear shoes and the groom will not.

When the weather is warm, especially in the first half of summer, people will take off their clothes and some will appear in public wearing nothing at all. Thus, it could be said that Moonshines do not put on special clothes for ceremonial occasions, they take clothes off.

Women's underwear is often made of plant fibers that are cheaper when imported from warm climates where they are most plentiful, but can be made locally in at least the southern states.  Animal hides and fur are obtained locally.

Thick winter clothes can be very expensive, reaching well into the four figures in an economy where the typical annual salary is on the border between four and five figures. But well-made winter clothes can last as long as a human lifetime, and people who buy them consider them well worth the price.

In order from most to least expensive, typical Moonshine clothing items are:

1. Thick winter clothes such as fur coats and tall boots for walking through deep snow. A woman earning a monthly salary of 1,000 mač working an outdoors job involving riding horses will happily pay 2,000 to purchase a single winter coat that would block the cold winter wind and a few thousand more for strong snow boots. Women's clothing tends to cost more than men's, but this is because it is better made and more protective against the elements, not because women are expected to pay more.
2. Ordinary women's overclothes made of cloth fibers such as linen, intended for all uses. Although men can also wear clothes made of plant fibers, such clothes made for men are hard to find, and most men seen dressed in fiber are wearing ripped clothes that their wives abandoned. A full suit of clothes from head to toe may cost around 100 to 1,000 mač, depending on thickness and perceived durability, with a median price around 300.
3. Washable diapers and women's undergarments intended to absorb fluids and then survive a thorough scrubbing to return to their original clean state. A cloth diaper is typically thin but tightly woven, intended to be used for at least two months and cleaned at least a hundred times before falling apart. A typical cloth diaper will retail for between 100 and 300 mač, out of reach for many families as typical incomes are below 1,000 mac per month per adult in work. Thus cloth diapers are rare in Moonshine society. Moonshine women have reusable menstrual pads that retail for about the same price as children's diapers, because although they are much larger than diapers they are not used as often and do not need to be washed hundreds of times.
4. Cloth underwear and swimwear for women. Here again, women's underwear is more expensive because it is made of a finer material and typically more sturdy than men's underwear, not because women are expected to pay more for what they wear. Though individual pieces of underwear are larger than cloth diapers, they are not meant to perform the same job, and so they are considerably cheaper, on the order of 50 mač for a bikini or bra-and-panties set. (Moonshines generally make no distinction between cloth underwear and swimwear.) Menstrual pads made of the same material typically cost about 35 to 40 mač because they must be more durably made. Men typically do not wear these items because they are not anatomically suitable.
5. Ordinary overclothes for both sexes, made of animal hides, intended for all uses. Because many large animals inhabit Moonshine territory, clothes made from animal skins are much cheaper than similar items made from cloth, but are typically judged less comfortable. Prices for clothes made from animal hides are typically from one tenth to one fifth the price of the comparable cloth item, with little difference in price between clothes made for men and those made for women. Thus, someone who could not afford a cloth outfit to protect them from the elements could still suit up from head to toe in animal hide for a price not far off of 40 mač.
6. Underwear made of animal hides. Here again, thong underwear is much cheaper than that made from cloth, and although women's underwear is again more expensive, prices seldom exceed 20 mač for even the most desirable sets of underwear.
7. Disposable diapers. For many parents, diapers cost nothing at all because they simply scoop up moss into a pile and tie it together. But similar items can also be purchased, with a price around 5 mač being typical.

Even the cheapest clothes sell for prices proportionately higher than garments in modern Western societies on Earth; for example, if the Moonshine income scale were translated into US dollars, a single disposable diaper would cost around $20, while a reusable one would cost hundreds of dollars. A suit of leather clothes for adults would cost a similar amount, and a fur coat could sell for over $10,000.  Another comparison is with food prices; a typical meal in an urban restaurant will have a price in the single digits, with a median around 5 mač for a small meal.  Thus a diaper costs more than the meal it holds.

The reasons for this price discrepancy are that Moonshine garment manufacturers do not have mass production and that Moonshine society is far less advanced economically, and thus overall much poorer, than modern Western societies on Earth. Thus the price of garments is high even though wages for garment manufacturers are low; see Textiles for details.

The pricing is set in a very utilitarian manner, with form and function considered first, comfort second, and all else ignored. There is no mass production, so sometimes two coats intended to be identical will end up with a very different appearance, and the inferior coat will be marked down to a lower price. But few customers will refuse an item of clothing due to a mere cosmetic defect.

Most people will wear the same clothes several days in a row, and wash clothes only once a month.

Typically, people have more items of inner clothing than of outer clothing.  Most people, even the wealthy, own only one winter coat.  They will have several full-body shirts and pants if they can afford to, and possibly dozens of pairs of underwear. 

The same also applies to bed blankets.  A typical couple will share a bed and have one very thick blanket on top, which covers several thinner blankets which the sleepers will periodically rotate so that the same blanket only touches the sleepers for a few weeks at a time.

Moonshine culture is known for the extremely intricate system of politeness, such that even memorizing a list of rules about who is expected to say what is not sufficient.

See below; the person with the highest social status may often be the only one offered any greeting at all.

Other than their own relatives, Moonshine women will typically not greet or acknowledge a man in any way, even if the man is the husband of an invited guest, and even if the man was specifically invited so he could to talk to her. Only when all of the female guests have finished their introductory conversations and mentioned the man's name will the woman turn to address him. Men are required to wait for permission to speak, and cannot ask for permission on their own; a woman must ask the host for them.

These rules are traditionally enforced at the whim of the host and the guest with the highest social status; a kind-hearted host can choose to defy social trends even in a large public gathering such as Parliament where the most formal manners would be normally expected.

At a large gathering that includes children, the common assumption is that the children will want to play, and preferably to play with children near their age.  Thus, the children will be allowed to skip the introduction process entirely and go right to each other, even if it means that some of them do not know the primary reason for the gathering.

If the meeting is taking place on private property, the host will acknowledge the guest with the highest social status, and then turn the conversation over to them to meet the others.

The only rules that apply here are those defined by mutual consent. A third party attempting to correct someone's manners would be soundly rejected even by the party perceived to have been slighted.

Nonverbal communication is poorly developed; every hand gesture represents a particular word or phrase, not an emotion or abstract concept which could be verbalized in many ways. People express their emotions with body movements they consider to be instinctual, though some are learned.

When indoors, Moonshines in general are close talkers. With the world's coldest climate and lowest population density, Moonshines are accustomed to having lots of room to spread out, but to stand far away when indoors is perceived as impolite. It is also considered impolite to back away from another speaker walking towards the listener, or to ask them to speak louder unless the environment is very noisy.

This rule holds for conversations between adults and children.  An adult talking to a young child will typically stand a few hand's breadths away, enough that the child will be able to see their surroundings without needing to walk around the adult.  To stand closer than this is rude unless the listener is one's own child or the child draws nearer on their own, but for the adult to stand further away suggests to the child that they are unclean and, unless true, is even more rude than standing too close.  If the height difference between the adult and child is large, neither partner will make eye contact, as forcing a child to look up merely to carry on a conversation is also considered rude.  

In warmer areas of the Empire, people spend more time outside and buildings are often more spacious, so people do not need to stand so close to each other when indoors, but this trait has spread to the warm areas even so because Moonshines in general are highly mobile.

A woman may cover her nipples with one arm to indicate that she has done enough favors for the listener, and the listener needs to handle their problems on their own.  This is a nursing metaphor that is most insulting when the listener is an adult; however, if a woman performs this gesture in front of her child, she is signaling that dire consequences will soon follow if the child does not immediately learn behavior appropriate for their age. 

Similar is the "squeezed womb" gesture, whose meaning is complex and culturally bound. The angel Yagutīl¹ confines believers within her womb, and can curse anyone, even a priest, by compressing her womb and refusing to give birth.  The gesture is made by slightly crossing the legs and cupping the hands over the womb.  This gesture can be augmented with a boiling pot of water, as the words for womb and stewpot were the same in an early stage of the language, and a womb in late pregnancy is typically imagined to be very hot and crowded.  Thus a woman who dumps a pot full of boiling water on someone's head is signaling that the person deserves an even worse punishment and will earn no sympathy from their injuries.

Another culture-bound gesture involves horns.  Yagutīl is often depicted with paired spiral horns growing from within her hair, and these horns can inflict a curse on a believer.  Priests can also inflict this curse by invoking Yagutīl's name while grabbing their hair with both hands in one of the two places where a horn would grow.  A believer afflicted with the curse can also spread it to another, but typical believers do not have this power under control, and therefore the afflicted are separated from their loved ones so that the curse does not spread.  Women who perform this gesture are not claiming to be spreading the curse, but only implying that the target of the gesture deserves such a punishment.

All of these gestures are used only by women; for a man to attempt one would only provoke laughter among those present.  This is because all three are imitations of the actions of certain angels, and are thus dependent on female anatomy.  Though men lactate, their breast milk is seen as supplementary only, not crucial for a baby's survival.  Likewise men do not have wombs even metaphorically.  Lastly, because the only angels ever depicted with horns are female, horns are seen as part of the female anatomy even though ordinary believers cannot grow them and would not want them.

Young girls will sometimes copy the adults they see, but most children understand only the first gesture, as it is the only one of the three that they will normally see directed at them.  Apart from this, the only insulting gestures used by children are the mildly obscene ones they learn from other children.  The most common involves turning the whole body around to face away from the listener, and then bending to put one's buttocks as close as possible to the listener's face.  When the target is an adult, the child will usually bend over and grasp their knees with their hands.  This mimics the adult practice of turning one's back to an unwelcome conversation partner.  A child who does this only occasionally will earn respect from adults when they do use it, but overuse may lead to parental discipline.

Eye contact is important. In ordinary conversation, one must always make eye contact when addressing someone of superior status. When addressing a listener of inferior or equal status, the speaker usually will also make eye contact, but they have the right to choose not to, or to begin normally and then continue talking while moving around the room. This means that someone of high status can end a conversation by simply turning away from the person talking. If the person being shut out insists that their conversation is important, they may walk around the other person and wait to be acknowledged again. If the person who turned around does not immediately address the person who walked around them, the second person understands that the conversation is lost and is expected to move on. 

Moonshines are so convinced of female superiority that men almost never start arguments with women, even over matters the man deems crucial to his well-being. The man knows that even if he is winning the argument, the woman can simply turn around, and that even the other men in the room will expect the man to stop talking and accept that the woman will do as she wishes and has won the fight. Women also use the same strategies when arguing with each other; here the rules for who can escalate and who must back down are very complex.

It is not considered rude for a man to look straight ahead at a woman standing close by when not actively talking or listening to her, even though women are taller than men and for the man to gaze directly forward will often put the woman's breasts, rather than her face, in his focus. This holds true even when the weather is warm and the woman is not bundled up in thick fur clothes, as is common both indoors and out due to the generally cold climate. This is because women in Moonshine culture do not see a male's gaze as a threat or even a thing worth noticing unless directly engaging them in conversation.  A seated man may even look at a nearby woman's crotch and not arouse attention; he is simply looking straight ahead, holding his head in the most natural position.  But as soon as the woman addresses him, he must look up.

Regarding children, different people have different opinions.  Most adults do not expect their young children to make eye contact with them if both are standing in close quarters on the same surface and to do so would be humiliating for the child but not the adult.  Often, a mother will only say "look at me" when she is very upset, even if she expects the same from her husband during every single conversation with him.  This allows the child to understand when they have done something gravely wrong. Because parents do not expect eye contact from their children, they typically do not kneel or crouch down to speak to their children either.

Most people do not have houses large enough to accommodate large numbers of guests, so invitations typically do not revolve around mealtimes and guests do not expect to get free food.  When the weather is warm, visitors may find that they are more comfortable outside than in.

The only gifts that would be received with disgust are those which are unusable or intended as insults, such as a rolling walker for an elderly person who refuses to admit they need help getting around, or maternity supplies for an infertile couple.

Moonshine society is divided by gender and class, but not by age. Children and young adults use the same terms as older adults in all situations. Moonshine speakers seeing children in faraway societies burdened by the requirement to treat adults as superiors might be upset or at least puzzled, wondering if the children realize they will soon become adults themselves.

Whether something is funny or not is decided democratically, meaning that if all the people in a room are laughing except one, that one person has no right to be offended. 

Women usually cover their breasts even when the weather is warm, and this is for comfort rather than modesty, as breasts are not considered obscene.  Aside from that, Moonshines are typically underdressed for the weather, relative to their southern neighbors; some Moonshines believe that this is because the Moonshines have an inborn tolerance for severe cold.

Most families have their bathroom outdoors, so privacy is taken for granted. 

Urination is not considered obscene, so all people are expected to take just a short time to urinate and to not be embarrassed while doing so. A man or woman who has difficulty urinating when others are nearby is expected to be ashamed. Thus, bathrooms are not used for urination; both men and women pee outside, on their own property, and most people have a favorite spot to go. If the weather is cold, they may use a bowl on the floor instead. It is even permissible for people to continue a running conversation while one party is urinating, provided that 1) both parties are members of the same household; 2) both parties are the same sex and close acquaintances; or 3) the party who is urinating is a small child and does not appear visibly embarrassed.

Women urinate standing up, hands-free, and will not be ashamed if they make a mess as they go.  In warm weather, they may be dressed such that they do not have to remove any clothes to urinate, but in cold weather, urination involves removing several layers of clothing.  Men also urinate standing up; ideally they will curl the front of their pants downward and then aim upward over their beltline; the ability to do this without spilling a drop on one's pants is seen as a crucial part of being a man.

Menstruation is not considered obscene in many social contexts, but the social rules are complex.  Men generally do not bring up menstruation at all, while women will mention it with close friends but not with strangers. A woman does not go outdoors to replace a tampon or pad, even when in someone else's house, and therefore this action cannot be disguised as something else. As this may lead to awkward glances when the woman returns to the room, many women state what they are doing explicitly.  This often embarrasses the men in the room, as men are prohibited from discussing menstruation while women are present, and to even think about it is to make the same mistake in a lesser form. 

Because women typically remain in their homes while nursing a child, breastfeeding is not commonly seen in public.  When a woman must appear in public with her baby, it is usually for a matter deemed important, but nonetheless the needs of the child are even more important, and no one else is allowed to tell the woman not to feed her child.

Children are potty trained while being watched and are expected to have not yet developed the need for privacy during bathroom time. A child who is still not potty trained by the age of five is considered to be a failure; parents may lose interest in their child's wellbeing if the child fails to learn how to use a toilet by the time they go to school, and the school is not expected to train the child either; indeed, the school will typically refuse to admit the child at all. Society often blames the parents, particularly if it is their first child, and some families have been forced to abandon their house and livelihoods simply because their child was not successfully toilet trained and thus could not attend school.

Both of these are determined strictly by social status, and each member of a party is expected to know their exact place on the hierarchy, even if it changes from one situation to the next. Hosts always outrank guests, regardless of their relative economic status. Women always outrank men; because men cannot own houses they cannot be hosts for social ordering purposes. A guest of honor will outrank other guests.  Women in highly valued occupations outrank those in lesser valued occupations. Beneath this, any further social ordering is defined by mutual consent and the reasoning may be opaque to outsiders.

Many doorways in Moonshine dwellings are open, with no solid door between the rooms. Even private rooms often have doors attached only to the sides of the walls. Typically, if a large group of people is passing through the same doorway, the highest-ranking female in the group will choose a man to hold the door open for the others, and that man will only follow the group once the others, including other males, have all passed through the doorway. If there is more than one male in the group, it is customary for the host to choose a different man to hold the door if they pass through a second time.

Because it is impolite to address someone of higher status while standing behind them, a long chain of people walking through a narrow hallway will be expected to remain silent while doing so, apart from the leader. This, too, applies regardless of economic status. However, addressing bystanders and people walking in the opposite direction is allowed.

Proper manners are very important.  It is legal and indeed quite common for someone to lose a job, or be refused a new job they are otherwise well fit for, simply because they said the wrong thing to the wrong person or even the right thing at the wrong time.

Men must defer to women in all social situations according to complex learned rules, and women defer to other women according to even more complicated rules.  Children learn the basic rules of etiquette in school, starting from the age of five.  At first, they mostly learn social rules governing interaction with children their age, but by the time boys and girls reach the age of ten they are expected to know and apply adult manners when interacting with their classmates, as well as with adults.  

Boys and girls enter school as equals at the age of  five, but with each progressive year girls rise in status while boys are pushed further beneath them as they learn their place in a feminist world. Children's manners at home are left up to the parents, and therefore schools teaching children how to behave are only speaking of school and public places.

Rules for children:

1. Children must answer any question asked of them by a teacher.
2. Children are not allowed to make fun of other children for any reason, even if the target of the joke has made a very embarrassing mistake unreasonable for their age.
3. Children must never speak out of turn, except to alert a teacher that they need to use the bathroom.
4. Children must clean up all visible evidence once they are finished using the bathroom.
5. Children must keep their pants clean at all times.
6. Children must serve their own meals, eat their full portions, and not spill or refuse to eat any food.

Exceptionally, Moonshine allows even small children to be charged with a crime. For example, a child who leaves a mess in a bathroom is not merely misbehaving, but actually a criminal. 

A child who soils their pants in school has committed a much more serious form of this same crime, and, after having had just one such accident, is considered to be on the same level as an adult who has just burned down a neighbor's house.  The school lesson will stop, the teacher will forcibly carry the child out of the classroom in a bucket, and then deliver the child to the police force.  The police will arrest and imprison the child, and only then will they alert the child's parents to what has happened.  At the teacher's recommendation, they may also arrest both parents, as failure to properly toilet train a child is also a serious crime, and Moonshines typically blame the parents for such incidents.  If the parents are arrested, then the remaining children in the household also become orphans and are delivered to the orphanage the same day their parents are delivered to prison.

Meanwhile, the child who originally soiled their pants remains in prison oblivious to what has become of their family. Because this type of crime is considered legally impossible to misjudge, the child is not entitled to a trial, and is automatically convicted of incontinence with no chance for appeal.  Children's prisons are exactly like orphanages in that children are made to work for a living and are disciplined even more harshly than are children in school.  In some towns, the children's prison is just a wing of the orphanage, and misbehaving orphans can also be sent there.  The main difference between a child in prison and a child in an orphanage is that the orphan is entitled to legal representation in court that the criminals are not; orphans hope to find a new family to adopt them, whereas children in prison are hidden from potential adoptive families, and from the public at large.  Prison guards are not allowed to physically beat child prisoners, but because there is no contact between the children in prison and the outside world, no evidence of violations of this rule will ever leave the prison.    

Children who remain in school gradually learn the rules they will follow as adults.  With each new year, the code of conduct for boys and girls becomes steadily more like that for men and women.  Men's behavior is governed much more strictly than women's behavior.

Rules for men:

1. Men are forbidden to address any woman who is not facing them, even if they have something urgent to say. 
2. Men are forbidden to physically touch any woman without their permission, even if only brushing against each other. If a woman pushes a man out of her way, the man has violated this rule and must immediately apologize for not paying closer attention.
3. Men must answer every question a woman asks them, unless another woman enters the conversation and agrees to speak for him.
4. If a woman physically strikes a man during a conversation, the man must immediately stop talking and apologize for what he said, and promise he will do whatever he can to make up for it.  The man is expected to know immediately what the woman is upset about, and therefore to know what he is apologizing for.  If a woman senses that a man is apologizing simply because he is expected to apologize, she may pursue further action against him.

The combination of the first two rules leads to embarrassing situations for men in public gatherings with lots of women; in a crowded room, a man can be trapped in the corner for quite a while if a woman or group of women is standing in front of him but do not notice him, since he cannot say "excuse me" nor can he push past them.

Additional rules exist governing men's conduct in public spaces, and in private businesses.  The business owners cannot waive these rules: 

1. When waiting in any type of line, all of the women must always stand in front of all of the men, regardless of their order of arrival.  This means that a man cannot be served unless there are no females waiting in line. 
2. Likewise, in a large public gathering such as an open-air market, where people's attention is focused on a stage or other raised platform, unaccompanied males must stand behind all of the women present, even if the generally taller women obstruct the men's view. 

The rules governing unaccompanied men do not apply to males travelling with female family members.  Thus, a husband and wife will be allowed to remain together, and young boys will not be forced to stand behind adults.

Most of the Moonshine Empire is hilly, and when possible, large public gatherings will be set up in places where those further back in the crowd are on a slightly higher level and can see over the shoulders of those in front of them, but the rules still apply indoors and on flat land.

The above rules apply to men in general, meaning that male employees at private businesses shoulder all of these social burdens, and their female supervisors cannot waive the rules.  On top of all this, male employees at any type of business must also follow additional rules enforced by the government:

1. Men are not allowed to work in any job without women actively watching them at all times.
2. A male employee cannot have command of any female employee; they may be employed as equals so long as a female supervisor is physically present to watch over both the men and the women.

Lastly, a private business will often add a fourth layer of rules, applying only within that company, governing the conduct of their male employees.

Expectations for men are enforced rigidly.  Women will say that men are not intelligent enough to understand nuance, and that all rules for men must be spelled out for them in such a way that the meaning is clear to even the simplest minds.  Because these social rules are so precisely defined, they are easy to exploit.  For example, a woman in a bad mood may block off a doorway and refuse to move when a man behind her wants to get through, and although this behavior is considered antisocial and unwomanly by other women, for the man to so much as ask politely to be let through is considered even worse behavior.

It is easy for a woman to trap a man in a no-win situation, such as by physically obstructing his path, or by asking him a question such that the only truthful answer is socially forbidden, for him to lie is socially forbidden, and for him to remain silent is also forbidden.  Often, two women will stand in front of a man and ask him questions that require very long and detailed responses, quickly wearing him out and not letting him go.  Grown women who derive pleasure from this sport are seen as childish and therefore unwomanly by other women, but a man cannot escape from such a conversation unless another woman present decides to start speaking for him or tells the man to leave.

In a heterosexual marriage, the wife sets the rules of behavior for the man: many women dislike the heavy burden of politeness that men follow in public, but still expect their husbands to treat them as superiors.  So for example, one woman might allow her husband to talk to her even when she is facing away or in another room, but only if he addresses her with the most humble speech register in the language.  Another woman might permit her husband to use some of the words women are allowed to say, but only when no other women are in the room and she is facing him up close. 

Rules for women:

1. A woman seated at a table with other women can join the conversation at any time if she is a stranger, but if the person addressed does not immediately answer, she is expected to remain silent for the entire gathering unless spoken to.
2. Women are not allowed to interrupt other women who are speaking, even if they have an urgent matter to bring up.
3. A woman may not physically strike another woman, even gently, unless in self-defense.
4. Women waiting in line must mind their place, and if they walk away from the line for any reason they must resume waiting at the back of the line.

Social rules for women are written down and taught in school, just like rules for men.  But women in Moonshine society are expected to read between the lines, and to understand when a rule is meant to be followed, when it is optional, and when following the rule will in fact lead one to be a social misfit.  Memorizing a list of rules sorted in order of importance is not enough, because the importance of a rule changes from one social environment to another, and depends on who is present, who is speaking, and many other things that some women have a difficult time keeping track of.

Thus, while men's social rules are more difficult and sometimes impossible to follow, there are some women who become jealous of men's one advantage: a man always knows what is expected of him; a man is always the lowest-ranking member of any social group and does not need to think quickly about when he is supposed to follow the rules of etiquette and when he is expected to disobey; he always obeys, and typically must do the most humiliating thing possible at any given time.  

Women who fail to see the rules behind the rules are confined to a low social status and typically do not speak much.  They have many of the social disadvantages of men.  And yet they are still socially superior to men, and are often the ones who derive pleasure from cornering men at social gatherings and then forcing them to say things which men are not allowed to say.

Some Moonshine states have at times codified speech manners into law, such that a man can be imprisoned simply for speaking to a woman out of turn, or for refusing to acknowledge her when addressed. This would be considered a crime even if that woman was against the punishment. These laws have typically been passed in packages in which freedom of speech is restricted in other ways too, including ways that affect women.  This is because the intent of the speech laws is to provide a structure for society and not merely to further increase women's power over men.

Strangers will generally not bring up religion and politics, but close acquaintances have stronger ties to each other that can overcome differences of opinion.  The political structure of the Empire is so stable that political discussions are typically about local issues, and are scarcely differentiated from gossip.

It is considered grossly improper to make fun of a child for being a child, an elderly adult for being elderly, a disabled person for being disabled, or a stupid person for being stupid.  This last trait is an extension of the prohibition against mocking small children: an adult who is very unintelligent is like a child but typically garners less sympathy from others, and is more likely to attract verbal abuse.  Thus, social pressure is required to prevent this from becoming commonplace.

It is similarly considered rude to withhold information in order to shock or surprise someone, even if the surprise is a pleasant one. This, too, is an extension of the prohibition against using children's helplessness as the target of a joke.  Adults should not ask questions of other people's children outside a classroom.  Adults need not answer every question their children ask them, but are expected to assist them in acquiring basic knowledge about the world and not abandon the child to figure things out on their own.

Much depends on who is talking and to whom.  A woman addressing a man will not worry about whether she hurts his feelings, and the man in such a conversation is not allowed to leave, ask for permission to leave, or even to stop answering her, even if it is clear that the only purpose of the conversation is for the woman to irritate the man.  If the man's wife is present, she may enter the conversation to protect her man, because she will be allowed to say things that her husband cannot.  Other women may do this also, but any other men present must stay silent or leave the room.

Men talking to other men will typically not aggravate each other on purpose, as in many social situations they are each other's only dependable friends, but occasionally women start arguments between two men so that they can enjoy watching how it plays out.  Moonshine men spend less time talking about their anatomy than do men of most other cultures.

Likewise, men have such a low social status in Moonshine society that a woman needing to bring up an emotionally painful topic with another woman will often make her husband start the conversation instead, knowing both that men are expected to be constantly thinking of shameful things and that, at the same time, no full-grown man would dare address a woman about such a subject if he was acting of his own volition; thus, the other woman will realize the man's wife is the one who is really looking to talk.

Anything that reminds the listener of their own physical weaknesses, or their mortality, can be offensive.  Mothers and even fathers are expected to scold their children for misbehavior, but not for such things as failure to potty train, using improper grammar, or spilling food on the floor.  Likewise adults are cautioned to speak very carefully to their aging parents and avoid even gestures of good faith such as offering to help their parents with basic life tasks unless the parents bring it up first.

There are very few voluntary rebels. Most often, someone who has committed a crime and escapes arrest will try to reach a different town and assume a new identity, but such people are often eventually discovered. If they manage to escape arrest again, they will become fugitives and be forced to live in the wilderness.

Anyone expelled from the Moonshine political party loses their citizenship, and with it the right to live within the Empire. Such people retreat to the wilderness and attempt to live off the land, but because even the wilderness is legally Moonshine territory, anyone can kill these people and face no penalty.

Because children leave their homes while still young, teenagers consider themselves adults, and many have already started their own families by the age of 15.  As such, teenagers have no adult authority to rebel against and girls rely on their mothers for parenting advice.

The Moonshine political apparatus has been stable for 2,500 years, so few people take seriously any threats to overturn it. Even when the state of Balaš seceded from the Empire to join a rival empire, there was no dissent from the remaining states and none of them followed Balaš's lead. Thus, criticism of the empire's political leaders does not arouse the anger of those leaders or their supporters.

The state of Flʕrùn is the only one of the five that has any laws restricting free speech, but even here, most cases are brought between two private citizens, rather than a leader bringing to court someone who criticized their actions in Parliament. Flʕrùn also has criminalized silence, meaning that private citizens must answer any questions asked of them by a government official, and men must answer any questions asked of them by a woman.

Poor social skills can lead to embarrassment and prevent someone from realizing their normally expected social status, but such people often become hard workers and end up economically superior even when they are socially inferior. Also, many people with a tendency to say things they later regret learn to feign a speech impediment and simply talk very little. This is one of the few areas in society where men are arguably better off than women; because men are expected to constantly say awkward and embarrassing things, they disappoint no one when they do so. However, there is no reward available for men who rise above these expectations.

Thus, the only sure way to become a social outcast in Moonshine society is to commit a crime that is too minor to merit jail time, and then return to normal life as if nothing had happened.

Someone of very low social status but who remains legally free may decide to flee their town in the interest of safety. Murdering a free citizen is always a crime, but murderers are occasionally acquitted if enough character witnesses appear in court to speak in favor of the defendant.

Even in the largest cities, there are no particular neighborhoods that attract people of disreputable character. Such people instead are pushed out into the wilderness to live off the land. These people tend to live far apart even from each other, because a cluster of humans in a small space would have difficulty finding enough food for all of them.

By the goddess Kwatena, also known as Enōra.  People believe that Enōra herself may punish a person who breaks such an oath, but that such punishment is not guaranteed.  If a person breaks an oath and nothing bad happens to them, they are considered to have justified their action to Enōra in private and cannot be further pursued for justice.

Moonshines are materially poor, and tend to focus on basic things.  A thick winter blanket is worth much more than a painting or statue. 

Moonshines observe strict hygiene codes, but they ignore certain things which some foreign tribes would find alarming. Despite the great amount of attention Moonshine women pay to menstrual hygiene, teenage girls and some lower-class adult women are left to bleed through their clothing, and while Moonshines consider this shameful and regrettable, they do not consider it filthy, and women who have visible period blood on their clothing are not expected to avoid physical contact with others or with objects that will soon be handled by others.  If a menstruating woman leaves visible fresh blood on a surface, she is expected to clean it up, but need not apologize for her mess.  Anyone who refuses to sit where the blood had been will be ridiculed and asked what the problem is.

The Moonshines share with the neighboring Poswob tribes a lack of aversion towards urine, and therefore people of both tribes pee on trees and into fields that people will walk on, and do not mind that when they walk they are likely to eventually step into someone else's urine.  Unlike the Poswobs, Moonshines are also tolerant of children's wetting accidents, even when the smell of urine on their clothing is unavoidable. 

Moonshines enjoy bathing, but due to their climate, bathing can be difficult or impossible during winter, and some Moonshines never bathe at all.  Poswobs by contrast bathe every day. 

Moonshine speech habits are based on an extremely intricate politeness system, with different lists of rules for each individual social situation, whereas the nearby Poswob people have no speech registers at all: men, women, boys, girls, scholars, and sailors are all equally rude to each other in every social situation. Thus, it is impossible for the Moonshines to offend the Poswobs. One must go further south to find cultures who would find the Moonshines' everyday conversational manners to be unacceptable, and Moonshines have no regular contact with those parts of the world.

Occasionally women will slap or shove a man during a conversation in response to a seemingly trivial provocation. Men are not allowed to hit back, and are in fact expected to apologize immediately for making the woman angry before they can continue talking.  Complex social rules govern which women are allowed to hit which men, and for what; any woman who hits a man is likely to attract attention from the man's wife, if present, and she may tell the woman to stop.  Indeed, often a woman who pushes or shoves a man is actually signaling aggression against the man's wife, but because women are not allowed to hit each other, she can only offend the woman indirectly. Women who hit men say that they do so because sometimes physical violence is the only language that men truly understand, but men do not commonly hit each other.

Although the Moonshine Empire has a high rate of child sexual abuse, men are not stigmatized the way they are in the neighboring Poswob Empire and most societies further afield.  Children often meet up with local men in playgrounds with no other adults present.  This is because men are seen as less threatening and more playful than women, and therefore are better partners for small children to play with. 

Small children's emotions are always assumed to be genuine, and when adults express childlike emotions such as crying they are assumed to also be genuine, as the Moonshines' general belief is that crying cannot be convincingly faked.  If an adult or even an unusually wily young child is found to have only pretended to cry in order to earn others' sympathy, they have committed abuse of knowledge and in the case of adults will no longer be fully trusted again.

On rare occasions Poswob women who have learned the Moonshine language have been secretly invited to Moonshine territory, only to be shunned by the Moonshines for their poor manners. Poswobs who study the Moonshine language in school are well aware of the social burdens faced by its speakers in Moonshine territory, and male Poswobs realize that they could end up in prison for simply speaking out of turn if they were to attempt to blend in with the Moonshine population.

Most of the time, a third party who witnesses an offensive conversation between two strangers will stay out of it, unless one party's speech is actually illegal.  Likewise, if a woman (or even a man) is hitting a man who is trying to talk to them, a bystander will leave the matter to the two participants and not interfere, knowing that even the person being hit would likely find their attempt to protect him unhelpful.

Lying is only acceptable when the liar has a credible claim that they or someone else would suffer if the person they lied to found out the truth. For example, a child dying of a debilitating disease may not be told of their fate because the parents know that the knowledge would ruin what little was left of their childhood. 

By contrast, to purposely lie to someone, or even to say nothing when important information could be shared, is considered abuse of knowledge and is frowned upon in the same manner as is laughing at a child for being a child. Though not a crime, when knowledge of what happened comes to light it is common for the local priest to punish the person who lied and warn them of a greater punishment to follow if they lie in a similar way again.

There is no tradition of giving surprise gifts, and someone who expects to see happy faces when they show up at a gathering with an unexpected gift may find themselves shunned and asked where they were born.  Surprise of all types is considered abuse of knowledge, as one cannot surprise another person without earlier withholding useful information.

Theft of tangible goods is always a crime.  Theft of already stolen goods is still a crime, and both perpetrators are liable for punishment.  

Eyewitnesses cannot report a theft to the police; only the victim has this right, and she must be an adult female who has not herself been convicted of theft in the past.  This means that all men and some women are easy targets for thieves and are expected to either hide their valuables in a safe place or simply not have any.  Married men legally transfer all of their property to their wives, however, and nearly all adult men are married; this means that a man who is robbed is allowed to ask his wife to pursue compensation for him.  However, if the wife refuses, the husband must simply accept that he has lost his possessions and move along without them.

Because children cannot legally own property, even personal effects such as clothing, a thief who robs a young child is actually robbing the child's parents, and therefore justice can be pursued as in an ordinary case of theft.  For orphans, the owners of the orphanage take ownership of the child's belongings, but orphans typically live lives so poor that even habitual thieves take pity on them.  

Counterfeiting of money is not considered theft in and of itself, because there is no identifiable victim.  It becomes a crime as soon as the money is spent, but because the person spending the money is often unaware that their money is illegitimate, they cannot be accused of theft either. 

The person making the oath is making a promise to the gods, not to a person, and therefore the oath is not binding if new information comes to light; indeed, the person who lied will almost always be punished instead.

The two people must go to court, where a judge will resolve the dispute. All judges are priests, but this situation is still different from a personal dispute in which they could go to the temple and resolve the dispute with no legally binding resolution.

There are two types of land ownership: the ordinary type, in which a person owns the land and with it the rights to everything that grows or is found there. A person who founds a new town has an even greater right, however: political sovereignty. They are allowed to restrict travel onto their land, even to the point of banning state and imperial government officials from visiting them to collect tax money. A town that pays no taxes receives no government benefits, but this type of de facto secession is perfectly legal under Moonshine imperial law. The Moonshine state of Xema, due to its difficult geography, consists almost entirely of such ungovernable towns.

Most people who found new towns nonetheless continue to pay taxes and cooperate economically with the towns around them. But the right of political sovereignty allows the founder of a town, and their descendants, to become extremely rich by controlling the rights of the people who live within their town.

Theft is defined as any crime in which one person takes and keeps a valuable object belonging to another person.  If the perpetrator simply destroys an object instead, not keeping it, the crime is described as malice.  Spreading false rumors would usually be classified as malice, since the guilty party derives no meaningful benefit from the crime.

All prisoners are allowed to undergo the death penalty if they feel that they would rather die than work in a labor camp.  Someone who escapes prison and goes to live in the wilderness is considered to have given up their Moonshine citizenship, and therefore can be killed on sight by any bystander. 

A group of women called the Honey Poison Pirates, historically also known by several other names, constitutes the largest and most stable criminal organization in the Moonshine Empire. They identify themselves as simply a political party, but because the Moonshine party is the only legal party, the Honey pirates are outlaws by definition, and can be attacked or killed on sight by any Moonshine citizen. The Honey pirates have reacted to this status by resolving to commit endless crimes against Moonshine society, knowing that they already occupy the lowest possible status in their society and that further crimes will not harm them in any way.

The Honey pirates are openly tolerated in the Moonshine state of Wa, the warmest state and the only one sharing a land border with the neighboring Poswob Empire. They are thus able to intercept trade routes and steal merchandise from the Poswobs, and because they also have the southernmost ports in the Empire, they intercept trade by sea as well.

The Honey pirates do not allow men to appear in public; their men spend much of their time at sea, fishing and rowing the boats that the pirates use to get around. Because of this rule, the Honey pirates know that any man they see in public is not one of theirs, and historically they have roamed around Moonshine cities killing men indiscriminately in order to deprive the non-Honey society of its adult male population. The Honey pirates have never sworn off doing this, but they no longer consider it a productive way of life because they have won the support of even many non-Honey people in the state of Wa, and today such crimes typically occur only when the Honey pirates feel that their way of life is being threatened.

People are obligated to help each other as a community, and by helping their fellow citizens, they are doing the will of the gods.  These two goals can never come into conflict.

Moral commandments are local to each temple, and written down in each temple's scripture.  Each temple has its own archangel, and the different archangels have different moral codes for their believers to follow.  These archangels cooperate with each other, and having different moral codes is not seen as a dilemma; people accept that when they move from one town to another, customs will change.

Worshippers believe that the archangels communicate the moral guidelines to each temple's local priest.

Teppalan religion in general could be described as primitive in the sense that it does not distinguish between misfortune and sin.  Someone tripping down a staircase is considered to be in the same category as someone who has just burned a book or insulted a priest; both have just done something contrary to the will of the gods.  That one person did so by accident and the others in full conscience is of no importance.  This trait is common all across the planet, not just to Moonshine culture.

Priests are also judges, but there is a difference between a formal criminal trial and a priest's judgment within the temple; only the former is legally binding, and a civil judgment in the temple cannot trigger a criminal case.

Nearly everyone on the planet belongs to the Ridia religion, where customs vary from place to place but the same gods are worshipped everywhere.

Everything is written down.

Every temple has a physical book of scripture containing the words of the angels local to that temple.  Since different angels speak to different temples, every book of scripture is different, and the priests understand this.  They believe that this is because people in different towns are expected to behave in different ways rather than having people be the same from place to place.  These differences are primarily matters of expression, such as the wording of a particular prayer, rather than gross differences in morality.

Yes, but it varies from town to town, and this is not seen as a contradiction, because behavior is more important than theology.  Only the priests dive deep into scripture to ponder phenomena such as the life cycles of the three generations of angels.

Everyone is reincarnated, but ultimately everyone's goal is to achieve salvation.

By winning the favor of the savior and supreme deity, Malamen, worshippers can achieve eternal salvation.  Salvation can be taken away and regained any number of times, in every case by an act of Malamen.

Only behavior matters; people who disagree with the theology typically do not bring it up, and are thus not noticed.

The year is divided into 39 irregular periods corresponding to the birthdates of the familiar angels.  These are grouped into thirteen months of three periods each, which are also of irregular length.

Teppalan religions could be described as unitary in the sense that there are no evil beings.  The supreme deities are always good, and the angels sometimes commit acts of evil but are on average morally superior to humans. 

There are three supreme deities, and the usual explanation is that although all of them are omnipotent, Màlamen is stronger than Kwatena, and Kwatena is stronger than Yuni.

Young children worship Yuni, and practice a simplified form of their parents' religion. As they grow older, they learn to also worship the other two gods.

All three deities are female, although Yuni is immaterial and can change her form.

There are no sacrifices. People's commitments are to each other, not to their gods. The gods, being invincible, do not need or want humans to give up anything to them.

Nearly all religions on Teppala consider themselves to be different traditions of the same religion. People traveling from one area to another simply adopt the local tradition, and no tradition considers any others to be wrong.

The religion prescribes ritual prayers that can consume a substantial amount of time.  Even though the gods can act instantly, they prescribe the prayers in the belief that human behavior is more easily controlled by such rigid behavioral influences than by allowing instant gratification.  If a believer reciting a prayer makes even a single mistake, they must immediately switch to a different lengthy prayer in which they apologize for their mistake and state that they will strive to speak more clearly in the future, and then they will begin their original prayer all over again.

Few believers actually recite the prayers in their full form.

Priests are immensely powerful.  A priest can require a believer to stay in the temple and work unpaid labor as punishment, even if this causes the person to lose their job in the wider world.  The priest's authority is unquestionable and therefore there is no need for a trial; the priest makes their decision on the spot.

As elsewhere in the Moonshine world, men are punished far more harshly than women when both have committed the same offense.  For example, if a husband and wife both miss service one day, the priest may require the husband to work hard labor on the temple grounds for a week without going home, while for the wife the priest may deem that a week without seeing her husband is punishment enough.

There are three supreme deities, all female: Malamen, Kwatena, and Yuni.

There are a few dozen archangels, all female, who worship Malamen. Many traditions consider Kwatena to be one of the archangels, even though she is also a supreme deity, but this is not canonically part of the religion and those who believe it do not try to convince others that they are correct as there is no scriptural basis for their belief.

There are a few dozen angels, mostly female, who worship each of the archangels who in turn worship Malamen. These are the angels who most often interact with humans.

Yuni, though also a supreme deity, is not part of the cycle of angels and archangels. Her spirits are immaterial and are portrayed as being no more humanlike than they are animallike, treelike, or even rocklike. Yuni is worshipped mostly by children, and most people believe that animals also worship Yuni in their own way.

There are no evil beings. All evil not caused by humans is attributed to the angels, because even though the angels are seen as morally superior to humans overall, they are not completely good. Even the evil that angels commit is ultimately resolved, but not all will resolve within a human lifetime.

Few people will claim to have seen an angel up close, and fewer still will claim to have seen one of the goddesses.  The ordinary angels, the yina, are the ones believed to interact most commonly with humans in physical form; they appear as ordinary humans, mostly female, but are larger than average and can to some extent change their body size.  Because angels have physical bodies, they can physically harm humans, even crushing them to death, but can also help humans as well.  Angels do not have wings, but they can fly through the sky even so, and thus help humans on long journeys over land and sea by physically bringing them to their destination.  All angels can swim as well, and are never harmed by the cold water of the Moonshines' habitat, but only a few angels are known to appear at sea. 

There are three supreme deities, all female.

All three goddesses are omnipotent, but most believers claim that they can be ranked in order from most to least powerful even so. Others disagree and state that the three goddesses have a circular power structure, where each goddess both leads and follows another.

No; the three goddesses always cooperate.  The archangels also cooperate. Only the ordinary angels sometimes have fights, and these fights can have consequences for humans who cannot get out of the way.

It would be difficult for a believer to even express the idea of disbelief, as worshippers take the gods' existence as self-evident and many cannot conceive of an alternative.  There are no alternative religions within the areas of the world known to the Moonshines; their only historical knowledge of a non-Ridia religion was a tribe who had existed thousands of miles to the south and which never came close to Moonshine territory; even that tribe ceased to exist thousands of years ago.

Children worship only Yuni, and learn to worship the other two goddesses only gradually. First, they learn to pray to Kwatena, and finally Malamen. All three are considered supreme deities, but one needs a clear mind to address the higher ones.

There is no distinction between worship and prayer, but there are distinctions between several different kinds of prayers.

All priests are judges and all judges are priests. They neither spend nor earn money, as the temple is funded by the government, and the priests are expected to live simple lives. 

The three goddesses are all-powerful, but do not project their full power into the ordinary material world; instead, humans mostly interact with the angels.

The three supreme deities always agree with each other and cannot sin.  When Malamen decides to deprive a person of salvation, that person then becomes shunned by the community and can be enslaved by the temple.

Some evil is caused by human nature; some is caused by the world around them; and some is caused by the angels' moral faults.  Angels are morally superior to humans, but they are also much stronger than humans, and therefore their moral faults have grave consequences for humans.

Morality is poorly developed.  In many cases, when a person suffers misfortune, the incident itself will be considered the fault of the believer, as though they had consciously called it upon themselves.  Thus, the believer can expect to suffer a punishment in the near future for their perceived transgression against the will of the gods.

There are no sacrifices in any Teppalan religious traditions.

Children worship their own god, Yuni, who is often depicted as a young girl or even a boy.  Children are not expected to think deeply about moral questions but merely to follow the rules that Yuni gives them.  Yuni's depiction as a small child helps children feel comfortable in speaking to her, and the children often complete their worship with little or no adult supervision.

Just as children cannot participate in the wider temple service where people worship Enōra and Malamen, adults cannot participate in the children's service, although some temples do have prayers in which adults address Yuni.

Most people are only familiar with art that comes to them from overseas, but intangible forms of art such as dance and poetry appeal to certain segments of society.

To write a book, one must be an adult female scholar who has studied literature in school; such people are rare.  The scripture is believed to have been written by angels, not by priests.

The founders of the Feminist Compact expressed their femininity with round shapes; the original flag was a sphere divided into eight pieces (four in front, four in back).  This still holds true today.  When one early rival nation designed a flag with sharp triangles and threatened to invade the Moonshine Empire, the Moonshine leaders pointed out that human male anatomy does not feature any sharp body parts.

Most districts support freedom of speech; exceptions for blasphemy and politically divisive writings are confined to just a few towns.

Heavy-set women with large breasts, wide hips, and otherwise full figures are considered the most beautiful. Moonshine women are proud of their wide hips because they feel much less pain during childbirth than do women in neighboring countries where women typically have narrower figures.

Despite the Moonshines' meat-heavy diet, obesity is rare because both men and women have to perform physically demanding tasks to get through the day.  Pregnant women often put on a lot of weight as they suddenly become nearly sedentary while simultaneously doubling their food intake.  After pregnancy they will typically lose the weight they gained, not for the sake of beauty but because they are once again physically exerting themselves every day.  Nevertheless, women are not ashamed to be obese and anyone attempting to insult a woman by calling attention to her swollen belly will receive only a confused expression.

It is far more socially shameful to be thin.  Because of the abundant food supply, even the poorest citizens have plenty to eat, and anyone who remains thin is thus assumed to have an incurable medical disease.  Cultural attitudes towards disease vary; some people will blame the victim, saying that diseases are inflicted by the goddess Enōra and thus that it is Enōra's will for the person to suffer, while others believe that Enōra causes only quick deaths and that someone suffering from a wasting disease should at least be kept as comfortable as possible while they are still alive.   

Women prefer men with broad muscular figures and ample body hair, thus differentiating them from boys even though men are shorter than women.  But some women also like to see feminine traits in men, and say that the most beautiful men are also the most feminine.  There is a difference between what is seen as sexy and what is seen as aesthetically beautiful. Thus, among the Moonshines, both women and men are expected to have a feminine body type, but women do this better than men can.

Sculptures of humans are realistic.  Sculptures of angels and archangels show them in human form, but when angels and humans appear together the humans are either depicted as babies or as much smaller than the angels. 

Beauty is not a goal in selecting clothes; the only people wearing colorful clothing are those who need to be seen from a distance and to stand out from a crowd. 

Contact sports are popular, often involving the entire able-bodied adult population of a town, with the only spectators being children and the elderly. Sometimes men and women compete side by side, and sometimes men and women compete against each other.

Children do not have toys to play with.  The Moonshine Empire was founded adjacent to three societies with very high birth rates that forced children to shoulder much of the burden of manual labor, and allowed them little free time.  These attitudes became molded into Moonshine customs.  Nevertheless, there is no law restricting play time, and children are expected to spend much of their free time outdoors, playing with other children in nature.  In inclement weather, they may also play inside, though space indoors is typically limited.

Most people have careers, but many are in fields where they only need to work for part of the year, or in which they can work from home at their leisure.

The Ghosts of Comfort, a small empire located near Baeba Swamp, are the only cultures within reach of the Moonshines who have theater. This has caused theater to be banned in many jurisdictions, but the police are not always familiar with the concept.

Moonshines are expected to be fully literate by the age of ten, and to know basic math skills in order to handle money.

Yes, but there is no printing technology, and therefore all books are rare books and many are one-of-a-kind.

Even in the warmest parts of the empire, snow is common, and melted snow is always considered safe to drink.  Water is stored in containers indoors throughout the warmer months and retrieved as needed.  There is no public water supply anywhere, as none is needed.  

Full-body bathing is typically done outdoors and only when the weather is warm. Some people in the coldest parts of the Empire never bathe at all, but will still wash their hands by submerging them in freshly melted water before they eat a meal.  Many citizens believe that warm climates are a cause of disease, and that simply by living in a cold climate they are protecting themselves.  Soap is easily obtained in stores but not considered a necessity. 

Plumbing does not exist; water must be carried to the place where it is needed individually each time.

The ideal toilet is a curved wall abutting a stone floor opening into a deep underground cavity which will never need to be cleaned.  Public toilets of this type are found in some cities but seldom in rural areas.  There is no fully enclosed space because the user trusts that nobody nearby will look at them while they are relieving themself, though the wall typically faces vegetation on the other side rather than a second road.

Outdoor public toilets are unmaintained, and thus open to everyone: man, woman, child, and animal.  Toilets attached to schools and government buildings are always on the outside of the building, and can often be accessed either from within the building or from outside it; the people working in the building trust that few if any people would enter the building just to get to the toilet, and that if they did do so, they must have really needed it.  If a school has more than one bathroom, the division is between women and children, not between females and males.  If there are three, the division is still between women and children, with the children getting two bathrooms and the teachers just one.  The only sense in which separate bathrooms for men and women exist is that in the capital city of Wōm and some other cities, certain neighborhoods are restricted to women only, and a public bathroom in that neighborhood is thus also for women only.  Often it will be placed near the boundary with the open-access neighborhood and there will be another public toilet on the other side of the border, making it effectively a men's toilet.

It is a crime to leave a visible mess in a public bathroom.  Very few people are ever arrested for this, and fewer still are punished; the purpose of the law is to embarrass messy people and pressure them to clean up after themselves.  Nevertheless, someone who refuses to clean up will indeed be arrested.  This law even applies to children in school, and the punishment in their case is a mandatory prison sentence with no trial, which is both traumatic and economically disastrous for the child.

Most people live near water, and will make use of nearby bodies of water either directly or as the dumping place for their waste products.

Citizens living in very cold climates try to avoid leaving their homes during the winter, even for a short time to use the bathroom, and so these are the only Moonshines who typically have fully functional bathrooms inside their homes.  Because their homes rarely have walls all the way across between each room, the invasive smell is a difficult problem, and some people prefer to use the bathroom outside even on the coldest of days.

Moonshine medical knowledge is fairly advanced for such a materially poor society; Moonshines have even spread their knowledge to nearby empires such as the Poswobs.  Moonshines understand chemistry, and have a table of various elements, but they do not distinguish between pure elements and their compositions; they just state that mixing two elements together can produce a third element.  Bodily humors and plant products are listed among these elements.

Hospitals are separate buildings, but in small towns, there may be no hospital within a reasonable distance for most people, and it is up to the doctor to visit their patients at their homes.

All health care is provided for free by the government, and there is no private health care available.

A visibly pregnant woman seeking an abortion will go to the temple and address a council of women about her decision. Occasionally, one of the women will encourage the mother to carry the baby to term and then give the baby to the other woman for adoption. Most commonly, however, no objections are raised. Then, that night the woman will recite a prescribed prayer to the goddess Kwatena, drink a medicinal potion, and in the morning alert her husband that she has aborted their baby. If the baby does not spontaneously abort, the woman will return to the temple and again address a council of women. If the women still do not convince the mother to carry the baby to term, a medical procedure will take place in which the baby is physically removed from the mother's womb and disposed of. She will then once again explain to her husband what she has done.

Once a baby has been born, however, the mother loses her legal right to abandon the baby unless a willing adoptive mother can be found immediately; see below.

Moonshines distinguish unborn babies from newborns, newborns from toddlers, toddlers from playing children, playing children from teens, teenagers from parents, and parents from grandparents. A person may become a grandparent at age thirty and then continue living for an additional thirty years, but there is no formal recognition of a change in life stages beyond the birth of their first grandchild.

Elderly adults with declining health often socialize with other adults their own age, but the population is young overall and there are no societies or social organizations specifically set up for the elderly.

Boys become legally independent from their parents at age 10, and girls when they move out.  Thus, children have no obligation at any point in their lives to care for their parents; parents are told to love and nourish their children for their children's sake, and expect to get nothing back.  Parents are not allowed to use corporal punishment on their children, even though schoolteachers often do just that.   

Both parents will pray to Malamen and ask her to bless the mother's womb. The prayer is cooperative and prescribed, with precise words for each parent to say.  If the couple is a lesbian couple, the biological father does not participate, as the legal parents are the two women, not the pregnant woman and the man.

Women leave their jobs when their belly becomes fully round and live at home. They give birth at home and remain until the child is ready to eat solids.

The local priestess will visit the mother several times during her pregnancy, and will also greet and bless the baby as soon as she hears that the mother has given birth.  Often, the priest is already there during the birth itself, but this is not always possible.

There are no demons; angels sometimes commit acts of evil, but as they are more aware of humans' affairs than humans themselves, there is nothing that humans can do to hide the birth of a new baby from the angels.

When a woman is ready to give birth, she will summon her husband and anyone else she wishes to be present. Typically, a priest is also present in order to bless the baby. 

The Moonshine Empire has a government-run and funded school system which children attend from the age of five. It is intended to teach economically useful skills, and so the school system is administered by the Business Department and the children are told to think of themselves as employees. The students are not paid, but are told that they will reap their rewards in the future if they study hard.

Children have the same dress style as adults in normal circumstances, but in inclement weather, or when traveling great distances, they may be told to put on clothes with bright markings to allow other people to identify which family they belong to.  Each family will use a separate symbol, which may be the first letter of their name, but is more commonly an abstract symbol unrelated to the family name.

Girls typically choose boys very close to them in age.  The minimum legal age for a boy to marry is ten, and for girls thirteen, with the exception of orphans, who may marry at age ten regardless of sex.  All healthy boys move to campsites in the wilderness at age ten where they live mostly independently but are watched by female camp guardians. 

In choosing a mate, the girl has most of the power; the camp guards have the right to object, however, and because they own the land the boys live on, they can physically prevent a prospective bride from entering the boys' camp site to select a mate.  The boy himself has no power at all in most cases, though sometimes the women running the camp will respect the wishes of a boy who objects to a particularly unsuitable mate. 

Most girls prefer to select boys who are physically mature enough to build them a house and join the workforce immediately after they wed, so not many of them will select a boy who is only ten years old.  A typical girl aged thirteen will be at nearly her full adult height, and a boy aged ten will be therefore much shorter and clumsier than her.  A girl who deliberately chooses a very young suitor is assumed to be one who is immature for her age and who may not be fully ready to marry yet; such girls are encouraged to wait a few years, and then come back to choose someone closer to their own age.  Rare exceptions are made for boys who themselves are seen as unfit for camp life and unlikely to improve; these boys may be paired off with a girl who will be told that the boy is very needy for his age and will likely not be able to build her a house.  Girls who accept boys like this are therefore usually those who are independently wealthy and do not need a stable income. 

Though Moonshines marry very early, divorces and deaths lead to the reappearance of a substantial population of single adults.  Women of childbearing age who lose their husband must select a new husband from a much more restricted pool of men; see Divorce. The new husband in most cases has no civil rights at all, not even the right to live, meaning that they typically remain in the woman's home and provide relatively little economic benefit. Some women instead seek out already existing married couples and ask to join as a second wife, expecting that they will be subordinate to the first wife. To do this, they must sell or abandon their house.

When a woman becomes too old to bear children, it is once again common for women and men to be about equal in age, and often the woman will be older than the man.  This is because women above the age of 40 greatly outnumber men above the age of 40.

A woman seeking to divorce her husband needs only to declare that she has done so before a judge; the divorce is executed immediately, all property goes to the wife, and the husband becomes homeless. If a woman wants to divorce another woman she must go through an often complicated legal process which both parties earlier agreed to when they signed the marriage contract.

Moonshines and nearly all other human cultures on the planet believe in simultaneous reincarnation, meaning that when a person dies they are losing only one of their many incarnations and are thus still alive somewhere else in the world. 

Bodies are typically buried at sea. There are no cemeteries.

Moonshines believe in reincarnation, and that one who commits suicide will be reborn in another body. Importantly, Moonshines believe in simultaneous reincarnation, meaning that people are already living in more than one body at a time, and merely have divided consciousness. Therefore, a person who commits suicide is killing only one of their incarnations.

Most people who commit suicide do so by leaving their family and running into the wilderness, where survival is difficult. Most will leave a message to a trusted friend or relative if they have one, but many people who commit suicide are those with no trusted acquaintances at all. Most people do not have access to weapons with which they can easily kill themselves, so a passive method of suicide is preferred; many people will deliberately chase down predators so that they can be quickly eaten.

The household relatives of a person who commits suicide may be charged with murder, even if it is clear that the person died by their own hand. If the person committing suicide lived on their own, however, there is no crime. Men often sign marriage contracts which state that the man becomes the woman's property by marrying her, and in such a case, a wife whose husband commits suicide cannot be charged with a crime either, even if she was very abusive.

Prison guards must honor the requests of adult prisoners who want to commit suicide, even though prisoners work very hard and their labor is important to the economy. This is because the death penalty is considered even more severe than a long prison term, and any criminal is allowed to select a greater punishment than the law would merit if they wish to do so. Children in orphanages are also worked very hard, and their life is often compared to that of a prisoner, but children wishing to commit suicide are not assisted.

A pregnant woman seeking an abortion will go to the temple and obtain a medicinal abortifacient from a council of women. Because the baby has not been born, the mother does not need to explain her reasoning, although she is expected to consider carrying the baby to term if one of the women in the council is interested in adopting the baby.

A baby that has just been born, however, has the same legal rights as any child, and cannot be legally disposed of under any circumstances. Since the mother's family and friends will expect to see the mother and her baby frequently, physical disposal of the baby would make her crime obvious and she would risk imprisonment. Thus, a woman seeking to illegally abandon her newborn will typically smother the baby so that it dies without any visible wounds, and then claim that the baby died of natural causes.

Infanticide is classified as murder, and is prosecuted as such. The woman accused is immediately imprisoned, whereupon she will await a trial before an array of female character witnesses who will each attempt to convince the judge that the woman either must or must not have killed her baby. The husband is legally prohibited from appearing in this courtroom, even if requested by a third-party female witness. Because none of the women testifying are eyewitnesses, none can prove or disprove the crime even if they are considered trustworthy. Thus, the judge makes her decision solely on the basis of her perception of the mother's character.

A woman's decision to abort her baby cannot be questioned under any circumstances. The only illegal abortions are those in which one person physically assaults another and causes a miscarriage; this is nonetheless prosecuted as assault, not murder.

Visibly deformed babies are usually not killed, because in nearly all births, other women will have seen the baby immediately after birth, and will then appear in court and alert the judge to what they suspect has happened. For a mother to get away with this crime, all of her close female friends must be in on the conspiracy and then, if the crime is discovered by an outside party, appear in court to back up the mother's claim that the death was unpreventable.

Uneducated women sometimes abort for superstitious reasons, but women in general are well-educated about the birth process and will choose abortion only after consulting with a priest and usually several other women at the temple.

Among newborns, boys are more likely to be killed than girls, but women typically give birth surrounded by friends and relatives, so a baby seen alive shortly after birth and dead soon afterwards will always arouse suspicion.

Because babies must be smothered in secret, there is no meaningful chance of an outside party rescuing the baby.

For legal purposes, a crime is defined in objective terms, so any crime that results in a human death is classified as murder, and the guilty party is imprisoned immediately. For a male perpetrator, the usual penalty is death; for a female, the usual penalty is several years in a labor camp. But both males and females have the opportunity to plead their case before a judge and attempt to convince the judge that the crime was an accident or otherwise unavoidable.

Nearly all accused murderers are expected to produce an alibi, and for some situations, the expected outcome of the trial is complete exhoneration from the beginning. For example, a logger who tripped over a rock, dropped the wood they were carrying, and accidentally crushed a bystander would be let free with no penalty at all if an eyewitness in good community standing testified in court that the incident was indeed an accident.

Most cases are not so clear-cut. If two men set out to sea to catch fish, and only one comes back, the survivor is immediately charged with murder. In this case, there can be no witnesses in court, and the man's fate will be determined entirely by the testimony of character witnesses, who will attempt to convince the judge that the man either must have or must not have killed the other man on purpose.

Many of those accused of murder are new parents whose babies died shortly after birth; both parents are always charged, regardless of the circumstances.

Because it is illegal for non-citizens to enter Moonshine territory, and because the court system can strip a criminal of their citizenship, violent actions against such people are legal, including homicide.

A similar argument involves murder in self-defense; if a person is attacked without cause, and they overpower and kill their attacker, they are again charged with murder, but will show their injuries in court and explain that they killed their attacker because they would themselves have been killed had they not done so. Most people do not have access to dangerous weapons, so most fights are hand-to-hand combat. If someone does acquire a dangerous weapon, attacks against them, even unprovoked, can be justified in court as self-defense.

Execution of male criminals is common; execution of female criminals is extremely rare.

All crimes have maximum penalties defined by law, so even a highly despised person cannot be given the death penalty if they have not committed either a murder or the rape of a child, which are the only two crimes defined by law to merit the death penalty. However, criminals may be exiled for lesser crimes, even if it clear to all involved that the person is not physically fit enough to survive in the wilderness and will soon die of starvation.

Most victims are executed by drowning and are then buried at sea.

The drowning pool is adjacent to the courtroom and the guards of that courtroom act out the execution process. The public is not invited to watch, but neither is the pool hidden from public view. The same is true of the burial; it is easy for citizens to watch the burial process from a nearby cliff or hilltop.

Girls and boys study together in classrooms from the age of five until the age of ten, after which point they are guided into radically different paths. Moonshines have different words for the different stages of schooling, but when they speak of "school" plain and simple, they mean the elementary school that both boys and girls attend from the age of five to the age of ten.

Early in their history, the Feminist Compact was politically affiliated with a private school system calling itself Save the World (STW), which operated in the neighboring Thunder Empire.  STW accepted children by invitation only, considered them to be employees, and deliberately traumatized newly enrolled children to ensure they were up to the task of graduating from the world's most difficult school.  These punishments were inflicted not by the teachers, however, but by other children; thus, children being traumatized realized that they could escape the abuse if only they could hang on long enough to become one of the children doling out the abuse instead of only receiving it.

The founders of the Moonshine Empire copied this system and therefore also deliberately inflicted severe punishments on their children.  They rapidly turned against this idea, however, and came to cherish children's rights.  This was also borrowed from the Thunder Empire; merely from the other political side of it. 

Nevertheless, even the reformed Moonshine school system was based on harsh discipline and forced labor, as they knew nothing else.  And the Moonshine government was so rigid that little further reform took place as the Empire grew.  School is not deliberately traumatic but it is very difficult, and a child expelled from school loses any chance at a fulfilling career, and many leave town to lead a life of crime in the wilderness; see Discipline for more.

Schoolteachers sometimes use corporal punishment on their young students.  This is illegal, but it is very difficult for parents to complain about a teacher, because the schools are run by directly by the Business Department, which is the most powerful branch of government, and wields great power over even other government employees.  Sometimes, a teacher who has injured a child will contact the local police after the school day is over and blame the parents.  When this happens, the parents are immediately arrested and held in prison until their trial date comes up.  Then the teacher can go back to teaching her class until the incident is forgotten.

Parents are required to send their children to school because school is necessary to achieve financial self-sufficiency.  Failure to do so is child abuse, and both parents will be punished very harshly, often being sent to a labor camp.  Upon discovery, the children will be removed from their parents and sent to an orphanage, where they will be also worked very hard in order to help them catch up with other children their age.

Schools are open every day of the year, but each year nonetheless has a beginning and an end, so all children start school on the same day.  Children are allowed to show up to school literally every day if they or their parents believe it is in the child's best interest to do so, but quite a lot of these days are "play days" where little or no academic lessons are taught, and the children attend because they want to have fun playing with children their own age.

Boys cannot attend school beyond the age of ten; girls are allowed to stay in school as long as they wish so long as they pass all of their classes, but most do not go beyond their early teen years.  Women with advanced educations have narrow career paths because they will have been made to specialize in only one subject area, and therefore an advanced education is of little use to most women.  Most girls study the same subject that their mother or another adult woman did, so that they can continue their education while at home.

All education is provided free of charge by the Education Administration, a subdivision of the imperial Business Department. Teachers are paid and employed directly by the government. All teachers are female. Because children are made to work manual labor while in school, it could be said that school is not free after all, but the work they do stays within the school and does not intersect with the mainstream economy; they only prepare meals, clean up messes, and move furniture around the school.  This is because the Business Department runs the school system and does not want child laborers to compete with adult laborers. 

Formal schooling begins at the age of five. When it ends is a matter of definition; boys are let loose shortly after they turn ten¹ to live in the woods and teach each other how to live as adults. They have little adult supervision in their cabins, but they are not considered legal adults while they are living there either. Girls remain in school until at least the age of thirteen, thus having completed eight grades; having eight grades has been the tradition among both the Moonshines and their neighboring peoples for nearly 3,000 years. At the age of thirteen, a girl becomes marriageable and many will find jobs in the workforce and marry a boy of their age or older. Others will remain in school for many more years and pursue the life of a scholar. Scholars almost always marry as well, but they typically do so in their late teen years or even beyond. Scholars are much rarer than the girls who marry in their early teen years.

Girls are expected to stay in school for at least eight years; boys are limited to five.  During those five years, boys and girls are taught in the same classrooms. 

In first grade, which begins at age 5, children learn the basic skills of self-care and how to interact with others their age.  Very little academic material is taught, and children spend much of the time playing with their peers.  Basic life skills included in first grade include proper eating habits, bathroom habits, and the ability to empathize with others.

Children learn how to cook meat and vegetables in the first grade, and to overcome their fear of fire.  They cook each meal very slowly and carefully, under the close watch of the teacher.  They are expected to grasp the basic concepts of kitchen safety, to know precisely when a meal is ready to eat, and to be able to feed their parents when their parents are sick, but are reassured that even in such a dire situation other adults will likely be able to help.   

Children in first grade are also taught how to identify dangers around them, and when it is and is not appropriate to trust an unfamiliar adult.  The teacher will bring her students on field trips into dangerous wilderness areas and expect them to find their own way back, without relying on her advice.  This teaches the children the skills they need to survive an emergency, and also teaches them to cooperate.  In accordance with a strongly held custom, however, the teacher must announce the date of each wilderness trip well ahead of time, and must also make it clear to the children that their trip is only a test and that the teacher cannot actually abandon a failing student to die in the wild.

In second grade, the first academic subjects are taught.  Children quickly learn the alphabet and how to read and write.  The four speech registers are introduced here; the teacher will introduce a list of words that only girls are allowed to say, and teach the boys the various politeness morphemes they will need to use for the rest of their lives.     

Counting and shopping skills are introduced here. Children are made to count and sort money, and to make proper change.  Most schools have a small store set up where the employees are 2nd graders, and the customers are other students, from all grades, looking to buy school supplies.  The teacher participates only to stop shoplifters and to help the children carry heavy items.  This store is within the school building, and is open only a few hours per week throughout the year.  The male students move the supplies and fixtures into the store each week and then remove the unsold merchandise when the store closes. 

This weekly sale event is intended to reinforce the second grade math lessons with concrete applications so that the repetitive math curriculum will not tire out the students.  The money needed to buy the school supplies is given to the customers free of charge, as if it were a salary, but each student is given only what they need, and those who spend unwisely will not be allotted extra money.  Children in the lower grades are supervised by the teacher as they shop, but by the end of the second grade, students are expected to make purchases without adult assistance. 

A common method of teaching shopping skills is to ask the students to choose one of three or four similar products, differing by quality and by price.  The simplest scenario involves three similar items, such as a pair of gloves, where the most expensive choice is also the most durable, and the cheapest also the least durable.  This means that all three answers are permissible, but the students must explain their answer.  Once the students have learned the pattern, the teacher will disrupt the pattern in various ways, such as making the most expensive item only the second best in quality, or adding a fourth item that is both very cheap and of very good quality.  This teaches children that price generally correlates with product integrity but not reliably so.   

Second graders are also taught basic mannerisms, and for the first time are taught how to properly interact with adults and with older children, not just with their peers.  Girls begin to diverge from boys, though they remain seated together in their classrooms. 

In second grade, girls learn to wield authority and begin to assign boys minor chores such as sweeping the floors of the classroom, carrying eating trays between the kitchen and the classroom, and stacking chairs in the corner of the room when the day is over.  Yet the girls are taught not to overstep their authority by pushing the boys too far, and must always obey the teacher in every situation.

Because boys spend much of their time doing menial tasks, they spend less time studying academic subjects, and girls noticeably pull ahead of boys by the end of second grade.  Thus, girls are better spellers and are better able to handle and count money than are boys.  On the other hand, girls typically have more free time to play, and the division between girls who are strongly motivated to succeed academically and those that are less motivated is already apparent by this stage.

In third grade, the manual labor workload is increased.  Boys are taught basic carpentry skills; when they misbehave, their chair will be broken, and they will be made to stand up until they repair it.  On one specific day towards the end of the school year, the girls in the classroom will break all the boys' chairs and watch the boys put them all back together.  Boys also clean the kitchen after every meal and pick up trash that lands on the floor. 

In warmer areas of the Empire, children spend time in the garden outside each school; boys remove unwanted weeds while girls plant and tend to the growth of ornamental flowers and sometimes vegetables.  The teacher will inspect any vegetables before the children are allowed to eat them.  Boys are taught how to shovel snow, but are not expected to perform this task unless the usual adult laborers are unable to come to work that day.

Third grade is where mathematics beyond addition and subtraction are introduced.  Again the teacher uses money to illustrate the mathematical operations she teaches, and children see large amounts of currency for the first time.  The teacher will bring them on shopping trips outside the school to help them learn how to buy clothes and other basic necessities.  This time, the children must bring their own money rather than drawing from the school's endowment; thus, children also learn the difference between rich and poor.

The teaching of proper manners intensifies in third grade.  Boys are seated in the back of the classroom and are made to wait behind the girls at mealtimes and whenever the teacher calls the students up one by one.  Both girls and boys are expected to remain silent through the entire day until a teacher calls on them or releases them into unsupervised classroom activity.

By the end of third grade, girls are expected to be far ahead of boys academically, and those who fail to reach this mark are privately shamed by the other girls even though shaming is expressly forbidden.  The girl's parents will typically be warned that their daughter is falling behind and will not be able to secure a high-paying job as an adult if they do not immediately make rapid gains in their school studies.

Children are still allowed ample free time to play every day, but by third grade, the boys and girls are expected to separate from each other at play time rather than forming one large group as they had in the earlier grades.

In fourth grade, girls begin to separate from each other into smaller groups defined by interest in a particular career path.  In large towns, the groups of girls may each have their own classroom, but in most towns, there is still only one fourth-grade teacher, and the girls merely divide into groups within their shared classroom. 

Boys in fourth grade have little time left to participate in the academic lessons, but are expected nonetheless to listen to the teacher and the girls as they perform the daily chores the girls assign to them.  Girls who plan to pursue manual labor jobs also begin to lose interest in academics by this stage, and spend more class time with boys than with the other girls.  The teacher will assign these girls to supervisory roles where they watch over the boys and judge the quality of their work, but they are expected to also do similar tasks themselves rather than merely standing around giving orders.  This reflects the typical situation in the adult world; although women are given power over men, verbal-only jobs in menial industries are restricted to disabled people who cannot otherwise work, and to certain administrative government officials who are not tied to any one particular company. 

In fifth grade, children learn to study independently, and their ability to ask the teacher for help is restricted to various uncommon situations. 

By sixth grade, only girls remain.  All of them are ten years old when they begin the sixth grade.  Here the paths of the different academic groups diverge further, though they still meet in a common room at the beginning and end of each day, as well as at lunchtime. 

In seventh grade,

In eighth grade,

After boys have completed their five years of basic education, they move to a cabin in the wilderness where they live with other boys. Girls usually remain in school at least three years longer, and in some cases will remain in school for most of their adult life.

Mentally healthy students are fully literate by the age of ten at the very latest. Unlike most languages on the planet, Moonshine uses an alphabet rather than a syllabary, so there are fewer symbols to memorize. Spelling is somewhat difficult because there are silent letters and some pairs of letters that share the same pronunciation, but a misspelled word can nonetheless be easily understood.

Even scholars admire the people who work strenuous manual labor to make a living, and would say that in many ways, loggers and trappers are more educated than scholars. Moonshines are proud of their society's education system as a whole, but people are not inclined to look down on people who aren't well-read.

Elementary education is done locally and children walk to school on their own unless physically disabled. There is typically only one teacher for each grade.   Education beyond the age of thirteen may involve moving to a new town, and girls who do this no longer consider themselves children.

Education beyond the age of thirteen is administered directly by the corporation or arm of the government that the student is intending to enter; this includes the priesthood.

Parents will help their kids throughout elementary school, and potential government employees may be helped by those who plan to hire them, but these people tutor their prospective interns for free.

The imperial capital city, Wōm, is the only city with a fully planned layout. It is also the capital of the state of Safiz. Wōm is nearly 3,000 years old, and its original structures are mostly still in their original places. The center of the city, where only females are allowed to enter, is the location of all of the government buildings for the imperial government as well as those of the state of Safiz. It is in a remote location, designed to be difficult for invaders to reach, but the leaders have insisted on keeping the city in its original location despite knowing that the threat of invasion has long since passed.

Houses are built for one family only and are typically very small to conserve heat.

Houses are intended to last for the duration of one marriage, but often nature will destroy a house while a couple is still living in it.  In such a case the husband will build another one.

Even those who live in warmer areas of the Empire rely on hunting and fishing for their main food supply rather than farming.

The only severe storms are snowstorms.  Rain is common in summer in all but the coldest areas of the Empire, but people tend to build their homes in areas that resist flooding even though snowfall is often more severe on hills than in low-lying areas.  Winter storms can also bring high waves, which encourages people near the sea to build on higher ground as well.

People own any food that they can find on their land, including wild animals.  Animals who stray onto private property effectively become owned by the head of that household by so doing.  However, Moonshines' weapons are very primitive, and more food is taken from bodies of water than from land.

Even in rural areas where land is plentiful, houses are typically small because of the need to keep the house well-heated during winter.

The husband is expected to continually repair a house that is damaged by winds, but if a severe storm destroys the entire house all at once, the government will place the family in a new house provided a safe one can be found. 

People enjoy bathing and will never pass up an opportunity to clean themselves, but with such long winters, it is not always convenient, and some people in the very coldest parts of the Empire never bathe at all, though even they will wash their hands with recently warmed snow before they eat if they plan to eat with their hands.

Washing clothes and bedding is approached likewise; it is easy to get clothes clean by submerging them in water and scrubbing all the dirt out, but often difficult to get them dry if the weather is cold.

Urine is considered safe, and someone who accidentally wets themselves will move on as if nothing had happened, though they may change their clothes if spare clothes are available nearby.

Menstrual hygiene is very advanced, in that women have many choices of what to wear, but importing the soft plant fibers that Moonshines make pads and tampons from is expensive, so many women are forced to reuse pads for many months or even years.  Young girls on their first few periods find this disgusting, but soon learn to accept it as they come to understand the meaning of money.

Very poor women may not be able to afford menstrual products at all, and will bleed visibly through their clothing. This is common for teenage girls who are not yet fully part of the workforce, and contributes to teenagers' dislike of menstruation, but for a grown woman to live in such a manner is a source of shame.  

The population density is low enough that people don't worry about pollution, and consider their waste products no more harmful than those of the animals around them.  All waste products are either burned or dumped into a nearby body of water. 

Most families make do with a single bed and a single table. If the bed becomes too crowded, they may buy a small second bed, but especially in the colder parts of the Empire houses are built very small to retain heat and a family's entire floor space could be used up just by two beds and one table.

Beds, chairs, and tables are all made of wood. Chairs and tables typically do not have cushions, but especially in cold climates beds are amply covered with thick soft blankets and luxurious mattresses beneath.

Chairs for women are twice as wide as chairs for men, and therefore, a woman cannot comfortably sit in a chair designed for a man.  Freestanding benches are usually unmarked, but on a banquet table the bench will often be painted with lines between each intended seat, with men's and women's seats clearly marked.  This means that women have plenty of table space to spread out their meals, but men may be cramped.  One solution to this problem is for men to eat with their arms by their sides rather than resting them on the table. 

Chairs that face tables or counters are built at the same height for both men and women; since men and women are of similar height from the waist up, this puts men and women at nearly the same eye level when seated at a table, though women are still taller because of their wide hips.  Conversely, the seat of a freestanding chair made for a woman will often be higher off the ground than one made for a man, since women's legs are much longer than men's legs, and both sexes generally prefer to rest their feet on the ground.  This amplifies the height difference that is otherwise much smaller when sitting. 

There is no distinctive furniture design for pregnant women; women in the late stages of pregnancy will still fit into an ordinary women's chair, but may be unable to sit at a lunch table regardless of the chair's width.    

Some families buy chairs with higher seats for their young children to sit at the table, and then give them away or hand them down when their children grow too big for them.  Freestanding chairs for children may either be very small (to allow them to rest their feet on the ground) or raised well above the ground (to allow them to interact with adults at eye level).  In the latter case, the chair may abut a raised platform to allow the child to get up and down without adult assistance.   

People at a large gathering will enter the seating area in order from highest to lowest status, and the first ones in the room get the best choice of seats.  Sometimes a well-renowned woman will choose a humble seat out of respect for the others, but she has no obligation to do so. 

Much carpentry work is done by young boys, and such furniture is not intended to last for generations.  Every once in a while, a chair, bed, or other piece of furniture will collapse, and this is not taken as a mark of bad workmanship, but rather attributed to normal wear and tear.  Furniture that is intended to last for a very long time will be chiseled from large stones rather than from wood.  

Books are available, but there is no copying technology, so there is often only one copy of any particular book.

The Moonshines have access to metal but little use for it; their only weapons are knives and fishing spears, which are often made of stone or even of wood.

Moonshines believe that prayer works instantly, which could thus be described as magic. They believe that their priests can wield the powers of the angels, which also work instantly, and that in rare instances, common people can do the same. All of this is part of the belief system of their religion, which is the same religion practiced by the majority of the human population on planet Teppala.

A clear-thinking priest wields the power of the temple's local archangel.

Prayer is magical, and can do absolutely anything the worshipper desires; prayers can even defy the rules of logic.  But people pray to angels, and angels pray to gods: there is never a guarantee that an individual's prayer will be heard, let alone answered.

Priests rule their temples and mostly stay within their hometowns.  Because each temple has a different archangel, each priest prays to a different archangel.  However, priests also have the ability to pray directly to the goddesses, and some worshippers believe that when many priests recite the same prayer at the same time, the goddesses are more likely to grant their wishes.  There is no scriptural basis for this belief, however, and priests do not seek to coordinate their prayers with those of other priests.

Ability to pray is not linked to age, but to clarity of mind.  Very young and very old priests are the ones most likely to have trouble, but mental problems can appear at any age, and some priests retire prematurely when their abilities start to falter.

The goddess Màlamen controls the power of prayer.  Sometimes Malamen rejects a prayer; this is common and does not imply any fault on the part of the priest.  Separate from this, however, Malamen may punish a priest by taking away her power entirely, and this is considered to be the priest's fault; they are removed from their position and the new priest will reveal what punishment the outgoing priest deserves.

In the southern states, some fruits will grow, but the Moonshines' diet consists primarily of fish and meat.

Houses are meant to hold one family.

Moonshine houses are small because of the need to keep warm.

Most often, people travel by foot for short distances and by boat or sled for long distances.  Travel downstream is quicker than travel upstream, but much of Moonshine territory is near the sea.

Most people remain in their town for years at a time, and often for their whole life.  Exceptions are those working in trade and diplomacy, and in some areas also hunters and fishers.  Long-distance travel is usually by water.

Large cities have hotels, but otherwise people will either camp out or stay with another family, typically a young couple who do not have children or an older couple whose children have moved out.

The temple is the center of any town, and anyone wishing to communicate a message to a large number of people would go to the temple and speak to the people there before the service.  Even if their message is not related to the service, the priest may grant their request.

Written communication mostly involves birch bark; paper must be imported and is used less often.

Few people are interested in events outside their town; those who are typically already work for the government and focus mostly on their particular department.  There are no newspapers or other mass media because the Moonshines do not have the ability to quickly copy written words. 

All books are handwritten, and therefore rare.  There may be only one book in the whole town: the scripture book in the local temple.