Sometimes when our viewpoint is inside, people will knock (or pound) on the door - but I don't recall actually encountering any locks.

No, wait, I take it back: in The Reorganisation, Nyx gets locked into an RC by the DIS. She specifically hears the lock click. That is, however, a very old RC (while Nyx gets the dates slightly wrong, it still has a portal - actually plothole - generator which dates back close to two decades). So they might not all have those.

Ultimately, your last suggestion is probably closest - as Neshomeh recently pointed out, the 'rules' of PPC HQ are 'whatever's funny'. Unless seeing people muck about with keys is wildly amusing, don't bother writing it. If a locked door is funny, use that; if an unlocked one is funnier, use that.

I will say that there's next to no precedent for locks, so spending a lot of time on it would probably get you some odd looks. But if you're just thinking 'Agent B has to camp out in the corridor until Agent A shows up', you could probably get away with it.

(In general, we treat RCs more like offices than living quarters. While my Real World office does have a lock, I don't tend to use it while I'm a) inside, or b) anywhere on-site. Bedrooms, for those agents who have them, are off the RC, and have their own doors)

hS

If they're not too bad, recruit 'em, shove 'em in front of the Marquis de Sod, and send 'em off for what we laughingly call training.

hS

They have the physical characteristics of what they turn into. Then when they go back to their normal state, things affect them, if it is still in effect. Although it can be used for more minor alterations of clothing, skin color, hair styles without changing species, which is what I do with my two humanoid agents, since they are mostly only cosmetically different from humans (on the outside).

Actually your idea might work, in the arrows-in-Ent-backs incident with Jay and Acacia, the only arrow injury that hurt when they got back was the one that still had an arrow lodged in it. So, if she didn't have food in her stomach when she dropped the disguise, then she'd be okay, right?

Not at all familiar with the game, so I don't really understand the reference. Can you explain the effect that description has?

Fanon is kind of a grey area I think. Others might have a different take on it, but that's mine.

A popular fanon in the Marvel cinematic verse fanfics is that Phil Coulson and Clint Barton are in a relationship (or begin one, or any of the other shipping variations of stories). I really think they are never on-screen with each other. Coulson mentions Clint's name once during a phone conversation. It's not from historical comic sources, Coulson didn't exist in the comics until after he got popular in the movies. I haven't watched 100% of the Spiderman cartoons where he's a character, but I don't remember seeing Clint in them.

The only interaction I've actually seen between the two of them in canon (admittedly I am horribly behind on the Marvel Now series) is Coulson infecting Clint with mind controlling nano bots and setting him up to be tortured by bad guys and then killed by Nick Fury. The bullet Fury shot him with had repairing nano bots in it, so they fixed all the damage from the torture, then the ones Coulson infected him with erased the whole series of events from his mind.

Anyway, point is that there is this huge body of fanon that says they destined for one another. It is completely unsupported by the canon, in any form of the canon that I know of. A lot of the fanon is well-written (and vastly preferred reading over the Fury and Coulson in the comics that I want to kill slowly (in narrative form of course) based on that incident I talked about). Does that make fics based on that fanon charge worthy?

I don't think it does, but someone else might get very infested in that comic series and really hate that Coulson's character is derailed into someone who wouldn't do that to another human being, and be all for killing the story.

I'm not sure I am following what you are trying to say, overall.

As for Board minis, pointing those out are usually just kind of mild teasing over typos, since errors can't be edited on this Board.

You can PPC bad humorfics like anything else if they fail because the writing is objectively terrible. If you personally just don't find it funny, though, it's probably not worth it. We discourage sporking on the basis of personal taste alone. Your Kink Is Not My Kink, and that's okay.

Regardless, I must object to PPC interludes being classified as "deliberately stupid." I'm pretty sure we're all striving for at least moderately clever here. {= P

~Neshomeh

The second Moriarty one, that is. Crazy! Really makes you think about the nature of fictional characters and self-awareness, doesn't it?

But yeah, fics are judged based on the information that was available when the fic was written. It wouldn't be fair to hold a fanwriter accountable for facts that nobody but the creators could have known.

As far as Metroid is concerned, Phobos tells me it was revealed that Samus is a woman at the end of the first game, so the only excuse for not knowing that would be not playing through the whole thing. You may or may not consider that a good excuse—I'm told the early Metroid games were hellishly difficult, but still, the information would've been available.

~Neshomeh

The trouble is, most of the time, "OC" + "bad enough to spork" = "Mary Sue." The things that go wrong in an OC-centric story tend to go wrong because they have to in order for the OC to do what she's doing, which is basically what makes them into Sues. Plenty of them whine that they don't want this, they didn't ask for it, it's not their fault, they just want to go home, etc., but that's just to create momentary sympathy. They're not going to behave in a manner that would actually support those statements, because that would never end in joining the canon adventure, being awesome, and finding romance with a hot canon character, would it?

Not saying it's impossible, of course (someone I know is actually working with a similar concept right now), but due to the nature of the beast, I don't think good candidates will be very easy to come by.

~Neshomeh

Trojie and Pads once hacked other agents' consoles to get Discworld missions (link possibly NSFW). But that was because they were banned from the Discworld, not because the agents who got the missions weren't able to complete them or something.

Martin and Mira are out of commission, so they aren't getting any assignments in the first place. There's no need to steal LoK missions from them. O.o

Also, what does a team looking for a recruit have to do with a team stealing missions?

~Neshomeh

I was thinking that since the analog CAD is cheaper, it still has failures. It's just that it's more likely to snap a spring or have a wire burn out before the entire device catches on fire... usually. Part of their beauty is that not running on magic smoke and not exploding makes them easier to repair.

Another disadvantage is that the way you tell a character rupture from a character replacement is to watch the OOC dial and pay attention to just how the spring underneath the dial snaps and how hot the case gets. Or carry the strips as backup.

"So, that new CAD is supposed to be safer, right?"

"Yep, just have to work a little harder. No pain no gain."

"How much safer is it supposed to be, exactly?"

"The way I hear it, they almost never malfunction."

"That's pretty impressive."

"Oh yeah, old school stuff is pretty nice."

"No, it's impressive because yours just caught fire anyway."

Have you seen litmus strips?

And in this mission, Jay and Acacia demonstrate conclusively how the physical changes work.