My avatar is no flunkie, sir. (I'm kidding. I know he's not on the level of a lot of the top agents in the IPO, but he's deliberately that way.)

But yes, I think you have it. The Nine Great Kings and the Magnificent Ten are the creme de la creme of their organizations, and not due to sheer power. Most of them have a great deal of experience in their field, have a level of skill most people can't hope to surpass, and THEN the sheer power to throw at a situation. Jackie Chan, for example, is really just a Detianized human, giving him extended endurance in a fight; the real difference between him and your average martial artist is the depth AND breadth of skill he has, which allows him to do things which surpass his human form.

Big Fire's organization is the key to its danger. More than the Nazis and the Church of Man amongst humans, they are harder to infiltrate due to that. This is why one of the biggest things my avatar brought to the table was information on their organization - information the IPO didn't have, which in a few ways helped balance things (see what happened on Zardon, for example). Most of the branches of Big Fire are different from a lot of the other big bad organizations in that they take care of their people - they demand 'Allegiance or Death', but as we've seen in the case of Clarissa, if you work hard, you get the rewards. They don't have a lot of defectors - they lost Geoff Depew due to a miscalculation in their psych profile, for example.

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Geoff Depew - Darth Mephron
Haberdasher to Androids, Dark Lord of Sith Tech Support.
"And Remember! Google is your Friend!!"