Saffron. We loved her before she was Joan.

As an alternate universe? Perhaps Jayne killed Mal and Zoe when they were trying to hire him? Zoe wouldn't be there if Mal isn't.

Jayne helps the other two guys steal the boat, and Wash and Kaylee are always at gun point and scared. Tensions on the ship are always high as Jayne and his two partners snap at each other over their cut of the money. The ship does not remain well repaired because none of them are willing to give up so much of their cut to put it back into the ship as Mal does. Eventually it is grounded, none of the three understand why, and nearly beat Wash and Kaylee to death trying to force them to get the ship flying again when they can't. Then they leave the two of them to succumb to their injuries. The end.

Jayne might be comedy relief in the show, but it would do well for people to remember that however much he cares about his family, or introspective he gets about hero worshipping kids taking bullets for him, Jayne is not a nice guy.

Sooo...attempting a little revival character discussion here, on the Saffron thread. I posted a similar thing at FFF.net, but I'm curious as to what, if anything, folks here have to say about this, given that many of you have written stories with Saffron in them.

Aaahhh, Saffron, our favorite recurring antagonist whom we love to hate! (Well, okay, she's mine anyway.)

Every time she appears, she seems to have a new identity under which she perpetrates her cons, and a different set of co-conspirators, collaborators, or dupes. Many of whom she marries.

So...

In OMR, she's "Saffron," she's in position on Triumph, and she's working with Breed and Corbin (the two guys who are working the "net") and possibly also in cahoots with Elder Gommen. Her game is to lure unsuspecting ships into the net.

In Trash, she's "Bridget" and married to Monty, whom she had planned to sweet-talk into doing the Lassiter job. When that didn't work out, it was Mal she sweet-talked into doing the Lassiter job, and it turned out that on Bellerophon she was known as "Yolanda" and she was married to the Alliance official Durran Haymer. And it turned out that she'd also conned Heinrich the Security Programmer and left him for dead somewhere along the way.

So...what other identities has Saffron worn over the years, what other con games has she perpetrated, who else has she married, and what other worlds has she run her scams on?

I'm curious to hear your ideas, speculations, and creative thinking!

I will add my own just below.

I brought back Saffron in my second Firefly story, Adventures in Sitting. She has yet another identity, and yet another husband, and yet another scam. In this story, she visits another husband of hers, Fergus, a thug who lives in the seedy section of New Dunsmuir. Fergus makes a living as an enforcer for not-so-legal "business" operations in the seedy underworld. He thinks he's married to her, and he's used to the fact that she's away a lot and only shows up from time to time. He calls her "Becky."

I chose the name Becky because of a radio show I listened to one time. It was an extended interview with someone about the whole "Goth" phenomenon...and one of the things she said always struck me as particularly funny....Something like, "You know you are seriously Goth if you can wear pink and call yourself Becky and STILL come across as Goth." So...Becky.

In my current story for Firefly, it's revealed that Saffron has two more identities.

She's working as a saboteur for a mysterious woman whose name and affiliation have not been revealed. The woman calls her Agent Luz.

She's also working for an undercover agent of Blue Sun. This man hired her as a mercenary agent to board Serenity and do certain things for him while there. He knows her as Ilona.

I'm working on a scene right now, in which more of Saffron's aliases and past scams are revealed.

Much approbation. It's always chilling to get a look into Saffron's mind, and her past jobs, and her victims.