A Summarizing of the Contents of the Milky Way

Let's start with the Orion Arm:

At the tip of the Orion Arm, there are various small civilizations that regularly fight among themselves. The The LIR or League of Intelligent Races is expanding into these civilizations, causing them to make large alliances against the LIR and in general fight among one another less, although scuffles do occur on occasion. They're far too varied to summarize but most of them, even if it's a newer development, put a lot of resources in their militaries due to both their close neighbours and the very, very big one that's coming into their territory.

Further up from them, we have our sexy, amazing, that's a real varied

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pornographic industry

bois the LIR. Their empire is too dummy THICC for its own good, essentially being a confederation of different, largely confused, species that came together for security reasons that, over time, became more centralized due to Toppers (top lads in the LIR) being a bunch of Illuminati-level control freaks (they started cults among primitive races, most importantly Sagwalli and Tartles (badass and sheer numbers, respectively), to increase their political influence), the passing of time and the loss of their common enemy the Goners (3-4 foot tall lizard/velociraptor people) to Mostly Hairless Monkeys Without Tails (Humans) showing up out of, at least from the perspective of everyone except the humans, nowhere and destroying the Goners with a war crime called Goner remover 9000.

Then there's the Robnik Zone. This was created as a result of The Jeff/Geff Wars and contains lots of robotniks, most of which are controlled by hostile AIs that were once followers of Jeff or Geff but had to skidaddle outta the CHG when it ended up miraculously winning. Here, they often battle one another, almost always over personal issues like how Matt being mad at Jan for continuing to follow Geff when it was revealed that Geff ate Jeff rather than turn against Geff like Matt led to a massive 3-sided war in which no AIs were actually destroyed but a lot of robotniks went through a lot of recycling cycles. Both the LIR and CHG resist the urge to destroy them due to the risks/costs of doing so (an enemy that grows in number any time it wins through recycling of material may be an enemy best left unfed), the security of how big of a problem these robotniks are for armies passing through (LIR is protected from CHG and CHG from LIR) and how the area is perfect for doing secret stuff nobody should know about, so long as one is good at hiding their activities from robots. This area is not a perfect line across the Orion arm, and more like a blob that takes up most of the length of the CHG (there's still LIR-CHG contact, through which fights often happen).

Beyond the LIR and Robotnik Zone, we have what's fancifully called the Human Zone. Sure, there are humans in both the LIR and in those tip-empires due to immigration and Planet Loki, and there are also non-humans in this area such as the now-irrelevant-but-oh-boy-were-they-a-big-deal-in-their-time Goners, but the sapient population is almost entirely human and this is where at least 95% of humans are eating, sleeping, drinking, *drinking*, and making sweet swee- I mean, reproducing and, more often, taking up reproductive acts that don't result in reproduction. The CHG is basically in charge here: anything beyond its borders but still in this area is a puppet state of the CHG (often complete with their rulers oh-so-mysteriously having grown up in the CHG), and the CHG has been building portals between itself and these locations for a big-brain plan to flash-conquer them so that it can more directly control them and their populations against the LIR.

Beyond this is the Dead Zone, which the CHG and its puppets have been expanding into, most notably using The Orange or Exploration Army. This area is loaded with ancient, ancient robotnik ships built by Old Ones Version 2 that attack any space-faring vessels they encounter (other than one another), as well as space-factories that these ships will yeet asteroids into so that said asteroids can be made into more ships (this has been going on for hundreds of millions of years: there's a lot of ships). It was here that Planet Loki was found, being guarded by a lot of Old One ships that Jeff the insanely intelligent AI had a fairly hard time taking out despite their use of any actual tactics ("Imagine bunching your ships together so that missed shots can still inflict damage" - The Spread-Out Gang) due to sheer numbers and possession of advanced Time Compression/Bending and Space folding tech.

The Dead Zone therefore gets its name from the results of these ships flying around and destroying all space-faring ships they find. You see, when a civilization can't go to the stars, ever, the term "there's no Planet B" ends up actually being accurate (sure, this is initially true and even is so for us at the moment but Elon Musk and Kurzegstat are being rather helpful there) and so civilizations either become single-planet utopias/dystopias or everyone dies because of a nuclear war or climate change. These worlds are pretty easy to conquer due to their lack of space fleets (due to their attempts at having them being foiled by Old One ships, which are also often believed to be the hands of higher beings saying "NO! NAUGHTY!" whenever Little Timmy wants to walk on the moon) at the same time as providing nifty little technologies and inventions that make the CHG and its puppets go "oh, that's awesome but we totally would've thought of that if we weren't so busy making PLANET DESTROYERS", but in most cases are just nuclear wastelands.

Beyond the Dead Zone we find ourselves Old Ones Version 2 and The New Old One Empire. No, the Old One robotnik ships aren't nice to them either and end up proving to be an obstacle when the Thicc War (a placeholder name for how dummy thicc those numbers are gonna be) happens to the Old One expansion, which happens in response to them finding out that the Dead Zone doesn't extend all the way down the Orion Arm (before which they were fine with their extremely slow expansion as there were no threats to beef up in response to). They have the most insane technology regarding timezones and space compression, which is used for industry, travel and the turning of celestial bodies into weapons (imagine the explosion space compression being turned on around a star, causing everything in it to fuse to iron in an instant, and then turned off again to allow the explosion to spread across dozens of light years, causing suns within that range to go supernova and then the roasting of any planets for a good chunk beyond that range due to the burst of heat (planets within that range getting shrubbed goes without saying)), but don't do too well in other areas, which they're fine with because having endless time to rebuild anything lost, armies included, and the fact that they don't really care about basic comforts beyond being able to eat means they don't need to do well in other areas.

Now we're outside of the zone that all these areas are included in: the Loki Zone. This refers to the general space that is inhabited by celestial bodies Loki can/will open portals to, basically meaning the entirety of the Orion Arm. This is all funny talk for the following statement: life is rare here. Very rare. Intelligent life is already rare when life is everywhere in the Loki Zone, with 14 different naturally occurring intelligent species very unevenly spread across ~800 million stars. All of this was largely down to a series of accidents and mistakes by the Precursor Races (ones the Old Ones wiped out) and Old Ones.

This is keeping in mind that the Old Ones didn't just do in the Orion Arm: they diddled the entire galaxy with their planet-melters and other fancy weapons. The Orion Arm just happened to be within range of Loki. That means all life that has arisen has done so in the last few hundred million years. It took us ~4.1 billion years to have intelligent life. I think you see where I'm going.

That's right; the rest of the galaxy is stupid because there are only 7 intelligent species in it, none of which have encountered one another yet and only 2 of which have space civilizations, whereas the others are still whacking rocks together to cook their meals. Disgraceful. What's even the point in them existing if we can't set them against one another? That said they're totally screwed once someone actually comes out on top in the Orion Arm, which is gonna take ages because they keep calling off the wars once they get too expensive.

There is, however, hope for the rest of the galaxy, not in maintaining peace but in making things fun, in the form of Seeding Projects. These are essentially projects where civilization "seeds" are sent out to start up civilizations, usually for the sake of ensuring a particular species, generally the dominant one of whichever empire it occupies, can never die out. The CHG has sent out a tonne of those, particularly being ones of extremely high quality, so those 7 intelligent species are in for a fun time dealing with angsty humans once those seeds arrive.