YJK 3, and some Em Tee Dee

 YJK continues to be bad. Book 3 is The Lost Ones. Rather than continuously whining about Moesta and Anderson's writing, here's the short version:

Brakiss, Tamith Kaii, and the other Shadow Academy characters are back. I never got past Shadow Academy as a kid, so I assumed they were one offs. Apparently the main villains for this arc (or maybe even the whole series?) are approximately as competent as the anime version of Team Rocket. Not nearly as funny though.

"The Lost Ones" are a gang of Coruscant street urchins. They show up for maybe 10 pages in the whole book, but somehow get the whole thing named after them. They get recruited by the Shadow Academy, along with Jaina's friend Zekk.

Brakiss calls the leader of the new Second Imperium and we find out it's Palpatine. I'm 99% sure he's for-real-for-real dead at this point. Hologram? Imposter?  

Again... sigh...

One thing that is kind of interesting is that (at least in Anderson-Moesta's take on the canon) the Empire and Republic have both beat each other up so much that nothing is working. Coruscant is on the verge of falling apart and a single (admittedly large) transport is worth the Empire deploying their super secret space station to capture.

Besides whining about the book, let's talk about MTD a little. Like all "Lucas Accurate" protocol droids, he doesn't actually know anything about social situations. He's specifically programmed for Human-Wookie relations, which means he's vaguely racist against Wookies from time to time. He's fluent in at least six forms of communication (a take on Threepio's six million). Trying to figure out what they probably are.

We know:

1. Basic
2. Shyriiwook

Speculatively, I'd say:

3. Bocce (gotta know space Italian)
4. Binary/Droidspeak (these should be two separate languages, but whatever)

And really reaching:
5. Huttese seems pretty common/practical (possibly a reason not to include it, actually)
6. Ewok? (I like the idea of Threepio putting it in there for the one time he saved the day.

He calls everyone Master/Mistress, because the M&Ms apparently think Threepio does in the original movies. He calls Luke (you know, his actual owner) Master and Leia (his previous owner) Mistress. But no one else. Chewbacca isn't Master Chewbacca, Han is Captain Solo, etc. From a real world etiquette perspective, Master is also appropriate for Luke since he's young. I guess the Solo kids are too, so maybe it's not totally off. (I'd have to go look and see what he calls Peckhum). 

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