Nathaniel meets Darryl, a being that only eats bones, swallowing them whole by popping open his neck like a Pez dispenser. They form a hunting partnership wherein Nathaniel eats the meat of their catches and Darryl eats the skeleton. Darryl is several decades older than Nathaniel (who is now thirteen) and has military experience. Along with their stuffians – Haticat, Fred, Doctor Bill, and Mojo (a tiger-like stuffian) – they travel on the outer surface of a steerable, reusable comet. Since they are war heroes (and it will be fun), they put out word that they are now mercenaries for hire.

​Their first job sends them to a city on the treeless planet Fkoojy, home of the Fkoojites, hominids with transparent skins and translucent organs. They are threatened by a large, lizard-like creature. It has a crystal for a head and five more crystals down the sides of its body alternated with its five legs in a zigzag pattern. Its tail wraps helically forward around its body between the legs and ends in its tiny true head. Its crystals are capable of creating a realistic holographic world around it, including the illusion of reflective surfaces. These holograms can in turn project more holograms around corners and even shoot powerful lasers. The creature has complete mastery over light. It hides itself inside of grand illusions. It even creates a grid of lasers to trap people in need of rescue, but how many of those people are real?

Eventually, after stabbing Haticat and nearly stabbing Mojo (stuffians fortunately have no blood or internal organs and heal quickly), Darryl manages to find the true location of the creature and puts a sword through its heart.

​Nathaniel fights alongside footpips (green-furred hominids three meters tall with large, black lips) defending planet Chijug against slimy, air-breathing octopi used to living in very low gravity. The octopi cannot land on the planet, but set up large shooting platforms in orbit. Then the atmosphere is seeded with a deadly virus. Weeks after the main fighting is over, footpips (and all other life forms) start to die off. They show no symptoms whatsoever until suddenly and unexpectedly dying in an instant. Everyone must wear gas masks to go outside. To save the stuffians (which breathe through their skin), they must not be played with so that they can go dormant. Nathaniel survives with others deep underground when they are attacked by an invasion of double crabs. The crabs each have two crab-like bodies at almost a ninety-degree angle to each other with a bridge connecting the two. They also have mouse-like ears and wear gas masks. Those surviving the virus and the crab invasion reemerge to find the planet barren and uninhabitable. The trouble does not stop there, as Chijug is soon overrun by tyrannosaurs, pelycosaurs, ankylosaurs, bears, and raccoons. The raccoon scientists release a bacterium that eats up the materials that the footpip gas masks are made of, so the footpips must steal gas masks from the enemy, but there aren’t enough to go around. With no native food left, the footpips hunt the tyrannosaurs. They fight to a draw until the cobra-like heltas arrive to finish off them off. Finally, a joint force of ninos and humans arrives to rescue them at the last moment. hammer-faces, ninos, and humans are now the three dominant races in the galaxy. All others have surrendered.

​The trizeka war is winding down as Nathaniel eradicates the last pockets of Katie and Allison resistance. Gone are the superbombs and other heavy weapons. None can afford to keep the factories going and all three powers regress technologically. One-fifth of the galactic population has died in the war. As Nathaniel leads the charge on a Katie planet inhabited by monsters made mostly of poop held together by filaments of living cells, the stress of the war causes former allies in every camp to turn on each other. Many non-primate races (snarugi, aqua monsters, bony coleslaw blobs, dinosaurs, bears, zleesnits and nops, spinning top crabs, etc) attack the primate races (meekons, hammer-faces, ninos, humans, mymmonians, extolons). The alien wars have begun. In the end, Nathaniel cannot keep control. No longer in charge of anything coherent, Nathaniel sides with the primates. They welcome him gladly, but the other dinosaurs see him as a traitor. Meanwhile, Katie and Allison disappear and are not heard from again.

Allison’s forces are pushed back to four small pockets on the edge of the galaxy. Nathaniel once again has access to planet Candy. As the war rages on, Katie divides Nathaniel’s forces in two by holding the central bulge of the galaxy between her two opposing quadrants. Nathaniel later takes it back, dividing Katie’s forces, and detonating superbombs around the circumference to prevent the arrival of reinforcements. At the same time, having finally found the last of Nathaniel’s superbomb factories, Allison destroys all of them at once. Allison begins to make a comeback by taking territory from both Katie and Nathaniel, but then Katie plots something desperate.
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She alerts adults everywhere, informing them that Allison and Nathaniel have not “cleaned their rooms.” The adults strike, redrawing the borders and grounding Allison’s and Nathaniel’s forces until every planet is spotless. They are not even allowed to leave their toys on the beach for a few minutes. Unfortunately for Katie, the adults do the same to her forces, claiming she has the messiest room of all – and they also punish her for tattling. As soon as the adult threat passes, the trizeka war resumes, but Katie never recovers from her mistake.

The boy-girl war is not quite over, but the boys are winning. Suddenly, a new group that is neither boy, girl, nor adult emerges and rapidly gains followers. These beings play sports, a form of play that is active like boy play is, but mindlessly suppresses creativity and individual initiative like girl play does. The leader of this new group is Katie. Like girls, her armies are well-unified and skilled at manipulating adults. Like boys, they are fast, brave, and strong. Their smarts are midway between the two. Pretending to be either boys or girls, her millions of agents are able to infiltrate and somehow convert others to her side. Her armies then attack with attendant cheerleading cheeraliens, psychosymbiotic mutants that feed off sports play. Cheeraliens have scaly bodies, skinless faces, eat their own fingers, poop constantly, vomit fire, and worst of all they cheer.
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The losses are catastrophic. Allison takes over what is left of the girls and Nathaniel takes over what is left of the boys, initiating a three-way conflict later called the trizeka war. The war is primarily driven by the force of personality of the three trizekas and it gets very personal.

​Though taking heavy losses, the boys are winning the war, killing many girls and converting others to boyism by force, but the girls have one more trick. They release a contagion of pinkness. Everything touched turns pink across the galaxy. Boys hate being pink and work hard on a cure while they slowly lose their minds. Many blindfold themselves so they won’t see the pink world around them. Whole regions are quarantined and supply lines are affected. In the meantime Katie is stolen, returned, and is clearly starting to slightly favor the girls (now calling herself “she”) before being stolen again.

The boy scientists have been developing superbombs. First they could only blow up planets, then stars, then tens of stars at once. The next generation is now ready to test and these bombs should be able to destroy hundreds of star systems. They explode at fourteen times the speed of light, turning all matter into diffuse plasma. While the girls still only have bombs that can blow up single stars, both sides must adapt to these new weapons. They are careful not to fully control any region and so become a target, instead allowing some resistance to remain as they move on to conquer other regions. The boy capitol is secretly moved off Ninosa to a space station in interstellar space. Patrols circle important areas and detect bombs hours before they detonate by the strange, faster-than-light (FTL) energies they emit. Patrols then pick up the bombs and dump them into black holes where they can explode harmlessly. To detect those that do explode and steer clear of the FTL shockwaves, both sides listen for tachyon static. Each side can only produce fewer than ninety superbombs per year. It is good that there are more than four hundred billion stars in The Milky Way.
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The boys are winning the war. Unfortunately, one of their bombs fails to detonate and the girls capture it in an effort to reverse-engineer it. The Girlbusters are sent to find and retrieve it. Sent after the Girlbusters is a battle robot ballerina assassin with a saw tutu. They boys fail to get back the bomb, but they survive, kill the ballerina, and they do bring back Katie.

A planet is discovered that is rich in exploding fruit, such as cherry bombs. The boys send huge cargo ships to collect it all, some of which the girls blow up. In the battle that follows, the entire planet is in danger of having its atmosphere blown off from a chain reaction of explosive fruit. The adults worry about liability.

In the middle of the action, Nathaniel suddenly wakes to find himself and Allison on board The Mama-And-Daddy, the living spacecraft that created them. They are forced to watch as a new sibling named Katie hatches from a purple egg filled with green slime. “At last all my trizekas are together,” Daddy says (The Mama-And-Daddy has separate mama-heads and daddy-heads). “At least one of them will fulfill the prophecy.” Katie is not a dromaeosaur, but a gross sickness – a creature covered in powerful viruses as part of its immune system. Katie is very fast, very violent, has very long claws, jagged teeth, and fights very well. She destroys the inside of the ship as Nathaniel and Allison use her to escape.
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Katie is clearly neither boy nor girl. It values cuteness and prettiness, but also grossness. It is highly active like a boy, but not creative like one. Still, it is a powerful warrior and the boys and girls steal it back and forth in order to train it to work for their side and adapt to their society. The girls leave out an irresistible pizza with endlessly stretching cheese to trap the boys so Katie can be stolen. The war continues.

Nathaniel accompanies an invasion of a fully water-covered planet ruled by mermaids. The mermaids fly seaplanes, have seaweed hair, and wear no clothing. There are a few “islands” of sea foam that will support light objects. This where a few battles take place. Underwater, Nathaniel looks over some of the technology the girls have been building. He sees a war robot prototype. It is pink, red, purple, and velvety and has numerous hooks and saws to attack enemies. It has windows to view its pretty insides: gears, pulleys, hydraulics, and air ducts. He destroys it. There is also a twin mirror, but he does not know what it is. At the same time in a different part of the galaxy, the girls capture planet Candy.
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Allison is becoming a leader among the girls and girls as a whole are becoming smarter in their own way. They learn how to make twins. For the sake of cuteness, every girl wants a twin. Eventually the girls make twins of the boys. Twins cause massive social confusion. Nathaniel thinks at first that sets of twins are just one creature with two bodies. He thinks his own twin is him. He sees his twin doing things and wonders why he can’t stop doing them. He lets his twin out of jail because Nathaniel doesn’t want to be in jail. It is a weird feeling to be able to see but still be helpless in telling people apart. It is also a weird feeling not to have control over someone that everyone thinks is you and gets you into trouble. The other boys see twins as abominations of nature that must be destroyed at all costs. They hate to lose their unique individuality. The boys give the order to kill every twin. They also attempt to destroy every twin generator mirror. The war continues.

Continuing to seek out allies and control planets in their great war against the girls, the boys contact the blankets of Zek Omega, psychosymbiotic beings that feed on cuddling. The girls also contact the blankets and compete for their affections. In the meantime, the dolls of Livilia Seven – a race that feeds only on girl play – become a major asset for the girls. Livilia Seven is inhabited by hundreds of billions of doll soldiers, some in excess of five meters tall.

Adults interfere and assign homework to the children, unaware that they are busy at war. They see every battle as an isolated event and cannot even see the difference between boys and girls, thinking of them all as just “children.” When the children are too busy to complete their homework, the adults claim that they chose not to do it and punish them, but still the war goes on.

​The dolls launch a strike on the boys, but the boys are fast enough to hit the dolls at the same time, confusing and scattering them. The battle is a draw.