Tuesday, January 8, 2013

Invid's Guide to the Star Wars Universe: Alien Species (#75)

741. Mykes. The Mykes... is that name pronounced "Mike?" Because if it is, that's hilarious.

Ahem. Anyway, the Mykes have fleshy chin... things... and this plus their written language are suspected to connect them to the Sith (there's a species called the Sith as well as a group, and the two aren't exactly the same). Implicitly, they're somehow descended from Sith/human interbreeding.

Rating: 2/5. Does the Star Wars galaxy have proper monkeys? This makes me ask that question.

742. Myneyrshi. The Myneyrshi are four-armed blue guys with sort of anteater snouts. They're really stealthy and perceptive. They don't get along with their neighbors on their homeworld of Wayland, heavily armored beings called Psadans (who will receive their own entry in due time) until the Empire invaded and conquered both groups, at which point they decided to work together (it didn't help much).

Apparently, their lives are dominated by ritual-a Myneyrsh will go through some form of ritual just to walk. Their technology level is quite low, and they spurn off-world technology unless they live off-world, presumably out of necessity.

Wayland was invaded by the Yuuzhan Vong and brutally terraformed; the Myrneyrshi resisted until parasites designed to kill them were introduced into the ecosystem, and even then a few apparently persisted. The rest would flee offworld. Eventually, there was an effort to use adapted Yuuzhan Vong techniques to repair the world, but some jerks sabotaged the effort, causing Myreyrshi who had returned to the world to mutate into spiky things, and they understandably got really mad about this.

There apparently was some success in healing them from this, but how much is unclear.

Rating: 3/5. They're modestly interesting.

743. Nagai. The Nagai are pale and dark-haired virtually human beings. They are described as "looking dead," which I find hilarious and improbable. They apparently like knives a lot, to the point where one of their early "reporting names" when first encountered was "Knives." This is also hilarious.

The Nagai were in the early stages of faster-than-light space exploration when they encountered the Tof, a much more advanced and powerful race. The Tofs followed their explorers back to their homeworld and eventually conquered it, but a great number of Nagai escaped. The Nagai made several allies, such as the Maccabree and the Faruun, but were still on the run.

So they left their home galaxy of Firefist and came to the Star Wars galaxy, eventually getting pursued by the Tof.

Their invasion was a big plotline in the old Marvel Star Wars comics, and generally was supposed to be a big deal even though these guys took knife fighting seriously. This is, once again, hilarious.

Rating: 3/5. I find the Nagai funny for reasons unrelated to the super robot creator Go Nagai; that bit is kind of a freebie of amusement, if you will.

744. Najib. The Najib are diminutive but physically powerful, to the point where one illustration of one basically depicts him as the Najibian Hulk, complete with absurd veining and skin stretched so tightly it ought to burst. Otherwise, they're relatively typical roughly humanoid sorta-primate guys.

Rating: 3/5, at least a little bit because of the amusement value of that one stupid picture.

745. Nalrithians. Nalrithians appear to be ugly four-eyed guys. I'd have judged them to be reptilian, but their entry calls them insectoid. Apparently, they're hatched from eggs in largish clutches, and eggmates (those from the same clutches) have some kind of telepathic thing which causes them to share memories (i.e. each member of the clutch will have all its eggmates' memories as well as its own).

One was a bounty hunter who bothered Han Solo on Ord Mantell.

Rating: 3/5. Despite the discrepancies in their appearance and traits and the fact that technically, information on them is pretty sparse, they're somewhat interesting.

746. Nalroni. The Nalroni are doggish people who use hunting instincts in their trading and negotiations, which sounds distinctly unnerving. They apparently are suspicious of outsiders, but are still willing to purchase prefab housing and droids, because hey, prefab housing and droids.

Their homeworld sits on an important trade route. They apparently very vehemently contain outsiders in the city set up to facilitate this trade in order to minimize contact between their culture and outsiders, and only carefully selected individuals of their own are allowed in.

Sounds fairly reasonable of them, actually.

Rating: 3/5. It's interesting to see a group who is neither too xenophobic nor too happily accepting of outsiders.

747. Nami. All we know for sure is that they could pilot human-built starfighters, which puts some constraints on their size and body types. In other words, they're probably essentially human.

They caused a mess by stealing some TIE/D Defenders, the overwhelmingly powerful starfighters used by the Empire in the TIE Fighter games, and then tried to sell them to the Rebel Alliance. (Overwhelmingly powerful as in "they're so strong in these games that one questions how the Rebels survived their invention.")

Rating: 1/5. Meh.

748. Naplousean. They're described as "tangles of flesh," have "many" glittering eyes," and apparently emit some odd smell when they're angry, causing speculation that they may have emotional pheromones.

Rating: 2/5. They sound vaguely interesting in appearance, but the description's also darned vague.

749. Nartians. Nartians are 1) a little smaller than humans on average and have four arms, and 2) should not be mistaken for Martians, no matter how funny that might be.

Rating: 1/5. There's only one known Nartian character.

750. Narvath. They're long-limbed and humanoid.

Rating: 1/5. I'm long-limbed and humanoid; does that make me a Narvath?

-Signing off.

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