Vloggers often post a clickbait title like that first subject line to tempt people to watch through 45 minutes of pointless blather about what they had for breakfast and what color socks they picked just for the 10 seconds relevant to the subject.





It's also part of the reason she retired from the superhero business back home. There was a call to make them more accountable, and soon after superheroes ended up with as much legal procedure and paperwork as police officers. She refused to compromise results, and ended up warned and fined a few times.

She hasn't really given in, though, and she believes in results over procedures. She's willing to accept the consequences if it goes wrong, but she'll refuse to take any abuse over a simple breach of procedure. It's kind of a sore spot for her now.





The Alliance does have highly advanced tech for following all of those things, which is partly why their ships are so difficult to fight with. Their biggest secrets in that regard are hull and shielding systems that have been specifically researched to be difficult for known weaponry to penetrate, and redundant reactor systems that can be switched on or off in response to outside interference.

So fighting them is like the Earth forces fighting with the ships in Independence Day, except the viruses won't work. Fortunately the Alliance aren't locusts, and are only interested in trade and safety of trade.





Lara would expect a more advanced culture to be able to harm her, as that's true back home. The *other* half of why she retired is the police and military invented devices that can duplicate a lot of the superhero behavior. Not quite hers entirely, but she could see the writing on the wall - that society wanted the abilities, but not the lack of accountability.





I am. Slowly. Working full time really puts a damper on writing.





Lara would never try a tactic like that on someone without some intelligence. She can tell the Hooded Hood is results oriented. She might try to convince him, for instance, that she can safeguard his ultimate goal if he's willing to abandon the part of his plan that irks the Lair Legion and Sir Mumphrey, convincing him that he doesn't really need that part toward the ultimate goal.

She also is aware that she might meet some resistance because he's kind of a bastard, and might insist that irritating the Lair Legion is central to his goals. In that case she's become a deliverer of a warning of what will happen.





Faite would probably suggest that Mumph take the Hood's place if he really wants to put him down, sort of a placeholder to keep all of the plots from collapsing. Of course Mumph wouldn't want that, either.

Back home, Lara has seen many "mini-gods", beings of enormous power who control one small sector of some part of the universe. Like the Hood, they can't be eliminated without causing the entire system to collapse.

The only solution to that is to leave them alone. Or to gradually wear them down by convincing them that they're actually a slave, because they can't take their eyes off of things for a second or everything could collapse.





It will.





I haven't specifically placed where the Trading Alliance hails from except that it's "far away". It would have to be a strand of planets and stars that's far enough away that the other ancient cultures haven't been able to travel there.

Like I mentioned in the last post, the true breakthrough in tech for the Alliance to expand their territory is when they started traveling using artificial wormholes. They could map out the entire galaxy, and basically hop from one place to another without using much energy. That's when, of course, their government had to create engagement rules to keep corporations from becoming conquerors.

Why would they do that? Simply because the Alliance is strong if its members are strong. If sympathy builds for some culture that was conquered and enslaved, rebellion starts to bubble, and the Alliance falls apart in an epic war. So the rules keep everything sane.

They have not made contact with Earth because Earth is too complicated with its many governments and special groups. One of their rules of engagement is not to make contact in such a way as to cause a war among contact cultures, and Earth is sure to do that.

Anyway, that wormhole technology basically makes it so, like the U.S. on Earth, the Alliance can engage with anyone in the known universe, yet their "home" is relatively protected. So protected that worlds who have had contact with Alliance trading ships probably were talking to captains from outer member worlds. No one on the outside has really ever talked to anyone from the core Alliance worlds.

In fact, if the Galactic Government sends carriers to deal with Apostate invaders, *those* captains will probably be from outer Alliance worlds. The core worlds will just be hearing about their progress on the local news feeds.

In the Traders huge novel I'm writing, it's relatively the same - the Alliance itself is unreachable, but there's a war among some of its members. The world Shen Rae is from is on the outer edge of that territory and reachable, and the invaders of that world are also close to the edge. It's fairly late in the story when they actually make contact with some actual Alliance traders.