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 Personnel, and FicPsych would like to remind you that that second definition must be consensual for both parties, or there shall be problems.
It is strongly suspected that partners are deliberately assigned for maximum personality conflict potential.
Most PPC agents work in teams because:
- Partners help each other stay objective in the face of Lust Objects.
- Partners help each other stay
saneat a reasonable level of insanity. - 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, his partner can take him out. Fortunately for most agents, even ex-Sue agents, there are medications that can prevent this if it's caught early enough.
Do note that, due to understaffing, agents are not always assigned partners.