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Orinthia felt like she owed most of her career to Inara Serra.
She'd been participating at a beauty and talent pageant on Odin, playing the piano and showing off her best smile and modeling walk. The prize money wasn't anything to sneeze at, and it would keep her afloat while she kept looking for work and saved up to see if she couldn't get a trade school certification. Orinthia had expected that to be the end of her pageant career that had paid for her school supplies and piano lessons, that she would settle into working retail and hoping for maybe some sort of tech repair job, but Inara Serra had been on Odin at the same time, and she'd decided to spend a few hours of her Saturday watching the pageant and had been waiting at the judges' table afterwards to extend an offer of training at House Madrassa on Sihnon.
Orinthia had jumped at the chance, and by the next morning, she'd been fully packed and was accompanying Miss Serra as a passenger on a high speed luxury transport ship to Sihnon, ticket paid.
"What was it?" Orinthia said after she'd been gathering her courage for a week. "What was it about me and not one of the other girls?"
"It's hard to describe," Inara said. "I think that one day, you'll be able to see it in people too. If you put in the work, of course."
Orinthia had been more than ready to put in the work when they'd finally landed on Sihnon. She'd done a bit of erotic modeling and that did give her a bit of an advantage, mindset-wise, when she started her training. Inara had been there through all of it as a mentor and eventually as a friend. She kept tabs on what Orinthia's teachers were saying, offered her extra help with etiquette lessons that were sometimes glossed over because everyone knows this already, and eventually Orinthia was a registered Companion.
She remained at House Madrassa, partially because she liked it and she wasn't going to spurn the luxury of having guaranteed housing with complimentary housekeeping after an adolescence of worrying about rent, but partially because Inara Serra was the sort of mentor that Orinthia wanted to stay close to. Even once Orinthia had been working for almost a decade and Inara was House Priestess, somehow Inara made the time to continue their weekly talks over tea.
The meetings had always been somewhat casual—it was not the time for formal tea ceremony practice or finely made porcelain cups. Orinthia had a few favorite mugs in Inara's collection: a tall and delicate thing featuring black on gray carved motifs and a shimmering gold luster handle, a round little rustic style lavender colored cup with constellations seen from Sihnon's northern hemisphere painted precisely on its side, a sturdy cup with no handle that was covered with Buddhist aphorisms.
Inara herself always drank from the same mug, a clumsily painted mass market lidded mug that featured a tacky scene of two women in hanfu in a garden. Half of the paint had worn away and there was a chip so deep in the rim that the lid didn't really sit right on the mug at all, but Inara always brought it out, week after week. Orinthia had wondered, certainly she'd entertained different reasons her mentor might be so attached to the ugly thing, but she had never once asked. It seemed like there must be a story attached to it, and Orinthia's instincts told her it was probably a sad one.
It took the beginnings of buzz around the concept of Orinthia herself one day becoming House Priestess for a term for her to consider asking.
"Where did this mug come from?" She finally asked, bringing it out of the cabinet as Inara started boiling water.
"Hm?"
"This one," Orinthia said, holding up the cup in question. "It just feels…unusual for your collection."
"It was given to me by someone," Inara said, warm fondness in her voice.
"A special someone," Orinthia guessed.
"Very special. A woman named Kaylee."
"Was she a client?" Orinthia asked.
"No. No, she was…she was a dear friend," Inara told her, and Orinthia knew what that tone of voice meant. "When I was younger and traveling the verse, I took some risks and I rented a shuttle on a smuggler's ship," Inara revealed. "And she was the mechanic."
"A smuggler's mechanic! What was she like?" Orinthia pressed.
"She was the biggest sweetheart you ever met, always full of optimism, but she never ever lied to you and she always stayed true to herself. If something had gone to the dogs, she wouldn't sugarcoat it, but she'd just try to find the good that she could. And she always could. No matter what. Food provisions went moldy and she'd just say it was a chance for her to get creative with protein mush. Smuggling job went south and she'd just remind us all that we were still alive and had each other. She'd make the best wines out of apple peels and knew how to hang bits of scrap metal up to look like tinsel during Christmas and she showed me how to live life on the Rim."
"That's why you were on Odin," Orinthia realized. "Watching a local pageant."
"More or less. Just exploring a new planet the way that she would have, meeting new folks and seeing what people there get up to in their daily lives."
"What happened to her?" Orinthia wondered.
"She's out there," Inara said.
"Still alive?"
"As far as I know, yes. I hear about the ship occasionally. They're still flying."
"Why did you leave her behind?" Orinthia asked before she could stop herself.
"I don't know," Inara murmured, and then suddenly turned away to busy herself with the kettle. "I don't know."