The much taller Lowbacca looked down at the human boy as Jacen rattled on. “Do you like animals? Do you like to build things? Did you bring any pets or equipment with you from Kashyyyk? Do you like—”
His father chuckled into the stream of questions. “There’ll be time enough for that later, kid. We spent most of the morning with Luke, and then we got Lowbacca settled in his room. You two want to take him on a tour of the academy, get him familiar with the place? By now, you probably know your way around better than Chewie or I do.”
“We’d love to,” Jaina answered before their father had finished his sentence.
“We’re the perfect tour guides,” Jacen added with a confident shrug. “Jaina and I came to the Jedi academy for the first time when we were only two years old.” He smiled a cocky, lopsided grin—the one their mother always said made him look just like his father.
Lowbacca gave an interrogative growl. “He asked how many times you’ve given this tour,” Han translated.
“Well,” Jacen sputtered, his face reddening slightly, “if you mean in an official capacity, as opposed to, er, um…” His voice trailed off.
“What he means is,” Jaina put in firmly, “this is our first time.”
Lowbacca exchanged a glance with his uncle. Chewbacca raised a furred brown arm, indicated the long corridor with a flourish of his hand, and gave a short bark.
“Right,” Han said. “Let’s go.”
The twins led the group down a set of mossy, cracked stairs to the main level and out onto the grassy clearing in front of the Great Temple. Jacen was eager to prove himself a good tour guide and pointed to each squarish level of the gigantic pyramid as he spoke.
“At the very top is an observation deck that gives one of the best views of the big planet Yavin overhead—unless of course you climb one of those huge old Massassi trees in the jungle,” he said with a laugh. “The top level of the pyramid has only one enormous room—the grand audience chamber—that can hold thousands of people.”
“That’s where the Jedi trainees gather when Uncle Luke—I mean Master Skywalker—gives his lessons,” Jaina said.
Jacen went on to explain that the lower levels had been remodeled in recent years. The larger level directly below the grand audience chamber housed those who lived at the academy—trainees, academy staff, and Master Skywalker himself—and also contained rooms for storage or meditation, as well as chambers for guests and visiting dignitaries.
The pyramid’s huge ground level held the Communications Center, the main computers, meeting areas and offices, and common rooms in which meals were prepped and eaten. It also held the Strategy Center—the chamber that had been known as the War Room in the days when the temple had housed the Alliance’s secret base. Under ground, and completely invisible from where they stood, was a gigantic hangar bay that stored shuttles, speeders, fighters, and other aircraft.
On two sides of the Great Temple and along the landing area flowed broad rivers, and beyond them lay the lush and mostly unexplored jungles of the fourth moon of Yavin. “The temples were built by the Massassi, a mysterious ancient race. There are actually lots of structures scattered throughout the jungles,” Jacen said. “Some of them are just ruins, really—like the Palace of the Woolamander across the river there.”
He described the power-generating station next to the main temple, a series of plate-shaped wheels, twice as tall as Jacen himself, standing on edge and connected through the center by a long axle.
“So you see,” Jaina said, picking up the narration where her brother had left off, “with the power station, the river, and the jungles, the Jedi academy is fairly self-sufficient. Come on, let’s go inside.”
The tour concluded at the twins’ quarters, where Jacen and Jaina delighted in showing their father and the two Wookiees their respective treasure troves of pets and salvaged bits of machinery. Han Solo beamed with fatherly pride. Lowbacca displayed a gratifying if subdued interest in the creatures in Jacen’s menagerie.
When the group moved into his sister’s room, Jacen quickly slid the crystal snake he had been showing off back into its cage and hurried after them. By the time he bounded through the door, Lowbacca was already engrossed in an assortment of gadgets and wiring that he had spread out across Jaina’s floor. He was far more interested in the electronics than in the wild jungle creatures.
“Do you like working on machines, Chewie—uh, I mean, Lowbacca?” Jaina asked, bending next to the gangly Wookiee.
The hairy, creature expressed his fascination with such a long series of grunts, growls, and rumbles that Jacen was at a loss to understand how a simple yes-or-no question could produce such an animated answer.
As usual, their father translated. “First of all, Lowbacca would take it as a great sign of friendship if you would call him Lowie.”
Jacen gave a pleased nod. “ ‘Lowie,’ huh? I like that.”
“And for the rest…” Han continued, “well, I’m not sure I followed it all. The thing he really gets excited about is computers.”
Jaina patted the young Wookiee on the shoulder. “We can do a lot of things together, then, Lowie.” Chewbacca chuffed in agreement.
But Jaina’s forehead furrowed with sudden concern. “Uh, Dad?” she said. “It’s obvious that Lowie has studied our language and understands us as well as Chewie does. But we can’t understand him. After all, it took you years to learn the Wookiee language. How is he going to get by here at the Jedi academy where nobody can understand him?”
Jacen nodded agreement, looking at the young Wookiee. “Who’ll translate for us?”
They were interrupted at this point by a triumphant bark from Chewbacca.
“We have just the answer for you,” Han said, clapping his hands and rubbing them together. “A little something that See-Threepio and Chewie cooked up.”
Chewbacca turned and held out a shiny metallic device for everyone to see. The sidewise-ovoid apparatus was silvery, slightly longer than Lowie’s hand and about four fingers thick, flat on the back and rounded on the front. It looked like a face, with two yellow optical sensors unevenly spaced near the top, a more or less triangular protrusion toward the center, and a perforated oblong on the lower portion that Jacen took to be a speaker.
Chewbacca fiddled with something at the back of the device, and the yellow eyes flickered to life. A thin metallic voice, careful and correct, issued from the tiny speaker. “Greetings. I am a Miniaturized Translator Droid—Em Teedee—specializing in human—Wookiee relations. I am fluent in over six forms of communication. My primary programmed function is to translate Wookiee speech into other humanoid languages.” It paused expectantly and then added, “Might I be of assistance?”
Jacen laughed. “It can’t be!”
Jaina gasped. “Sounds just like Threepio!”
“Almost,” their father replied, his mouth twisted in wry amusement. He scratched under his collar with one lazy finger. “A little too much like Threepio, for my money. But since he did most of the programming on Em Teedee, I couldn’t talk him out of it.” He shrugged apologetically.
“Why don’t you kids try it out during the midday meal? Chewbacca and I still have some business to discuss with Luke, then well take off in the Falcon later this afternoon. We’ve got to see Lando at his mining station.”
The common room the Jedi trainees used as a mess hall was filled with wooden tables of various heights. The seats—chairs, benches, nests, ledges, cushions, and stools—ame in a broad variety of shapes and sizes to accommodate the differing customs and anatomies of human and alien students.