Yes, I'll be putting smut in this story. It's a part of life, and I plan to incorporate as much of "regular life" (including but not limited to: violence, romance, mystery, humor, and smut) into this story as possible.

There're also two tributes in this story: one to Avatar: The Last Airbender, and to our own fireflyfans.net author "geekUSA". Ten points to whoever guesses them both.

P.S. I honestly, truly thought of a Saffron/Inara catfight. Woulda been hot. However, between Inara's Companion training and Saffron's desire to *not* get spaced, I decided that they would both be smarter and that, so I skipped right past what would have been a fairly tedious and repetitive scene.

————

The messenger smoothed his already impeccably ironed suit down, and stepped through the door into the Coordinator's office.

The Coordinator never bothered to look up; he simply said, "Report."

The messenger took a deep breath. The Coordinator wasn't the type to kill a messenger for bringing bad news. Good messengers were hard to come by, and couldn't be blamed for the contents of their messages.

However, the Coordinator was still the most powerful man in the Blue Sun Corporation. Even the official CEO and the board were simply puppets, made to dance at a twitch of the Coordinator's fingers. His men were loyal, in fact, they loved him, and thus hated to bring him bad news.

"The Agent we sent died attempting to retrieve the Asset. The three students we sent with him were also terminated."

Now the Coordinator looked up. To the messenger's surprise, he almost seemed to be smiling. "I told that fool Hue to send more than one agent. I also told him that it would be unlikely that the Asset would still respond to the safe word. And what happens? He gets an agent killed."

The messenger squirmed.

"Don't get me wrong," the Coordinator continued, "Hue's a decent employee in most respects. He simply never properly understood some of our projects. Tell him that I'm going to give him one more chance, before I give this