1. Yes sometimes they do. There was one posted in June about an agent that went home for a visit.
   
   4. An arm band. My agent that wears only a kilt with no shirt uses an armband flash patch. Or a panda could use a collar style necklace flash patch, I suppose.

1. If we're talking about the game system, and by "big enough reputation" you mean the game stat that deals with notoriety, it's no issue. It's not actually canon unless it gets published in a source book or an officially affiliated novel, comic, etc.; everything that happens in people's games (or fanfic, by extension) can be considered AU. (Perfectly valid AU, in fact--but still not canon.) So, essentially, you can do what you like provided you have a decent explanation for it.
   
   On the other hand, if your fanfic is just so popular that you're worried real people will recognize the character, that's different, and you'll have to decide for yourself whether you want to go there or not.
   
   2. As others have mentioned, it does happen sometimes, but usually the sheer amount of paperwork required is prohibitive. This applies to vacations in general. An agent has to be really bloody persistent, and possibly carrying a flamethrower, to make it happen.
   
   3. Calista mentioned Vemi and Penny as a particularly clever example. They had the force of canon behind them; my memory is that the others had something to bargain with, too. Not everyone can find bargaining chips of sufficient worth, though.
   
   4. Doesn't he have a hat? He could attach it to the hat, maybe by means of a hatband.
   
   ~Neshomeh

1. Your canon, your decision, right? But if you want to dissociate yourself as the canon's author from yourself as the author of the PPC missions, you could always have some kind of tech malfunction that duplicated the canon, or recruit him from an alternate universe. One possibility is to recruit him from a badfic where the author has consistently spelled the possessive without an apostrophe, effectively turning a singular into a plural so repeatedly as to duplicate the canon. The extra canon could be recruited (and would probably have a species of "Living Typo".)Canons have been also been recruited to the PPC post-mortem; Team Phoenix is made up entirely of supposedly-dead canons.
   
   2. Yes, occasionally, especially if they're so stressed out that Medical (or FicPsych) says that one more mission will snap them entirely. Other occasions I remember have been honeymoons, graduations, and family illness; and a few agents have taken time off to attend an OFU or a World One university. Younger agents are more likely to get permission to visit home, and often discover that very little time has passed since they left. (OFU time works similarly.)
   
   3. Yes. One pair of assassins I remember became Discworld assassins (as in, the Assassins' Guild), and hired themselves out to the PPC to do their old jobs. Very clever of them, too, I think.
   
   4. You could try a jacket like the one worn by service dogs. Google it if you don't know what I'm talking about; they're quite rugged and will stay on reliably.

1)Don't really know.

2)If they take a while off and leave all equipment behind then yes.

3) Some people, on rare occasions have.

4) Some kind of collar or an armband.