Partner

⧽ "Remind me again," said Acacia, "why we were assigned to be partners."
⧽ "Something about stabilizing me and curbing your bloodthirsty tendencies? And something about you imitating Teatime, but I don't see what four-o-clock has to do with anything..."

—Acacia and Jay, "Protector of the Ringbearer"

A partner, for the purposes of the PPC, is the other agent (or one of the others) in a pair or trio of agents.

Remember, though, that your partner is not your lover; though this has occasionally happened before, the Legal Department, the Department of Internal Affairs, and FicPsych would like to remind you that engaging in the second definition must be consensual for both parties, or there shall be trouble.

It is strongly suspected that partners are deliberately assigned for maximum personality conflict potential.

Due to understaffing, agents are not always assigned partners. However, there are several good reasons they usually are.

Most PPC agents work in teams because:

• Partners help each other stay objective in the face of Lust Objects.
• Partners help each other stay sane at a reasonable level of insanity.
• Partners who have divergent interests and strengths can cover more fandoms and/or a wider array of badfics.
• It helps if one partner can subdue a Mary Sue or possessed canon while the other proceeds with an exorcism or assassination.
• Agents can get very angry about the abuse of their favorite canon characters, so it's often necessary for one agent to restrain the other from killing the Sue before a proper charge list can be assembled.
• Agents who have been injured (by accident, by a character from the fic, or even by the fic itself) will need their partners to drag them back through the portal to HQ.
• Gathering charges and analyzing a badfic is often easier when two people can bounce ideas off each other.
• If the worst happens and an agent is irreversibly turned into a Mary Sue, their partner can take them out. Fortunately for most agents, even ex-Sue agents, there are medications that can prevent this if it's caught early enough.

And also because:

• In the beginning, PPC missions were usually co-written by two authors with one agent apiece. Sometimes this still happens, because it's fun.
• Having two (or three) characters playing off each other makes exposition and comedy much easier to achieve than having just one character monologuing to themself.