Therein lies the conflict.







One nice bit about throwing usually-Earth-centric heroes into Star Wars-type space conflict is that it is possible to ramp the possibilities for harming them up without compromising the character's defencive capabilities on a day-to-day basis. Advanced tech societies are likely to have advanced tech countermeasures to superpowers.

More specifically, in a Parodyverse where shape-shifting, mind-reading, computer-possessing, energy manipulations, teleportation, etc. are all abilities of known species (not just one remarkable individual) then savvy competitot races will have worked out alarms and countermeasures.

To put that back in our wheelhouse: I expect that your advanced Trader civilisation would have contingencies in place against identity-theft Skunks or robber teleporters, against Reticulum Matrix data-sentiences occupying or altering their financial records, against telepathic scanning of proprietary financial data etc. In a universe where all those attack forms are possible, no advanced civilisation could endure without capacity to detect and deter such things.

So therefore, when we send the LL and Lara into a space war against advanced forces, we can logically expect that there are weapons and defences capable of harming the heroes. It means that the Earthling just need to deal with that one extra threat level and avoid the energy-disruption pulses and work round the shields preventing power manipoulation or whatecver, but it gives the battle a different context.













Proceed.










The Hood does find such conversations stiumulating.




Hatman sees the Hood as an obstacle to beware, best dealt with through teamwork and collaboration of good people. Mumphrey sees the Hood as an absolute villain who needs to be put down like a dog when a way can be found without there being disproportionately bad consequences. Mumph would have no mercy or hesitation.




There's a nice rationale there, and I hope that folds into your longform literature using the Traders.

I've been trying to work out the geography of the PV prime universe. Like ours, the habitable galaxies where planets best form and sustain life occupy a flattish disk about 2/3 of the way from the core. Like ours, there are streamers" of dense stellar clusters radiating out, with most sentient civilisations occupying goldilocks zones on the rims of these where suns can maintain the necessary stability to sustain persistent satellites.

So Sol is currently travelling in an outer strand of the Orion arm of the Milky Way galaxy, specifically in the fictionally-named Mutter's Spiral (term pinched from very old Dr Who) strand. Sharing the Orion arm, effectively flanking Earth in that torus of occupiable, useful star systems, are the former Skree and Skunk empires. That's why Earth was a potentially useful strategic staging ground in the Skree-Skunk War. A bit further round behind the Skree in the neighbouring Andromeda Galaxy was the Shee-Yar Empire, but everything there was wiped out by the Carnifex so it is now mostly-dead worlds.

Past the Skunks and a bit further out are some minor races like the (now also dead) Videans, the Caphans, the computer civilisation of the Reticulum Matrix, the (now also also dead) former territory of the Thonnagarians. Plxtragar is roughly coequal between the former Skree, Skunk, and Thonnagarian territories and is well placed to be either Geneva of somebody's missile base. The forces of the Tyrant of the Dead Galaxy have assembled a strong new coalition/Empire along the away-from-universal-core rim of the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies.

In the other direction is the Triangulum Galaxy, a bit off to one side and therefore slightly less accessible from the others; that would be a good location for the Traders, since it explains why they aren't tangled in "local" Earth affairs as much as other races. It's a bit like how, say, China has some influence on the European economy but isn't an immediate on-the-ground player in the area's political and economic determination.

All of this occupies one local subgroup of galaxies within three megaparsecs of Earth. It's unimaginably vast territory but a tiny fraction of the universe. The "local group" - Andromeda, Triangulum, and the Milky Way Galaxies for one part of the "local sheet" of galaxies that are on the fairly remote edge of Virgo Supercluster that stretches out to 30mpc. Seperating off the bits of space we know from the rest of that supercluster is the Dead Galaxy, a buffer that has had a similar effect on space travel, even faster-than-light travel, as a range of mountains did to old Earth colonisation.

So far we haven't charted what is in the rest of the Virgo Supercluster, but there is no reason to believe that the "local" prevalence of humanoid lifeforms might prevail, that life would be mostly carbon-based, or even that life requires matter or time. Beyond that is Laniakea, a collection of about 500 superclusters around the Hydrus-Centaurus supercluster and the Great Attractor. In the Parodyverse, the subspace and superspace of that area do not support travel so it remains unexplored.

Further out from the universal core there are far fewer planets and far less life forms, almost none of them sentient. Resource-mining is possible but rarely economically viable. Nearer to the universal core the conditions for life prevent much happening and limit the kinds of craft that can travel there; think of a submarine with depth limits, except here depth is replaced with gravity shear, cosmic radiation, and timespace alterations. At the very centre of the universe, maybe 10,000mpc off, sleeps Great Azafroth, "father" of the Fairly Great Old Ones, a galaxy-sized creature of absolute madness who really should not be there; it is a bad idea to go sightseeing.