Editing Firefly: Reavers of the Rim - Xiulan (section)

==Background/Bio==
If anyone asks, she used to be the executive assistant at the Lufkin Rubber & Paper Company on Hera, which collapsed in the Unification War when Alliance saboteurs burned and blighted the tree plantations. This is actually true, but it's far from her whole story.

Huáng Xiùlán was born in Lóngmén, Greenleaf, which is ostensibly a logging town deep in the rainforest-covered mountains. Like many such towns in the New Sōng Mountains, it hides a martial temple as an open secret, preserving and refining fighting styles brought from Earth-that-Was. The Lóngmén temple specializes in the ancient art of Jeet Kun Do, tracing their style to the work of the warrior-poet Bruce Lee who built the first monastery deep in the now-mythic hills of Hollywood. Her uncle was next in line to be Abbot since before she was born, and her mother is one of the temple's top talent agents, finding placement for newly minted warriors who feel the need to go out and test themselves and bring money back to their families. She grew up with a lot of expectations. Many graduates of the fighting school go on to the Triads or private security, and Xiùlán's mother already had several Triads bidding for right of first offer. There was just one problem...

Xiùlán didn't want to be a killer. She didn't even want to fight, really.

Before she finished learning the advanced techniques, she ran away, got tattoos that couldn't mesh with Triad tattoos, and looked for work wherever she could get it. In addition to her combat training, she'd helped her mother with the many managerial tasks that came with being an agent, so she had experience she was able to use to land a job as the secretary to a logging company boss on the distant world of Hera.

And then the war happened, and the life she'd tried to build away from fighting burned. So she went back to Lóngmén and begged her uncle to let her resume training with the most punishing regimen possible, so she would be ready to go to war as soon as she could.

The Independent recruiting officer was skeptical of the harmless-seeming young woman seeking to join up until said apparently-unarmed woman had pinned one of his arms to his desk by his sleeve out of nowhere.

During the war, her first assignments involved counterintelligence, disposing of Alliance spies and turncoats that could cripple their bases of support. Xiùlán had already met Mel while working with her former boss, and she was assigned to his entourage as Browncoat political figures came under greater threat.  When Alliance commandos breached the planetary HQ on Priam while Mel was visiting, trying to decapitate the leadership, she went from 'secretary with a uniform' to slitting throats left and right in the blink of an eye.  After the war came to its crushing end, she returned home to pay her debts to her family, but made sure Mel still had her commcode...