Subject: Another thing is...
Author:
Posted on: 2014-05-15 12:46:00 UTC
... if an agent pair were to fail a mission due to something bad happening to both of them, how would we know? If they don't survive to make their report, then we probably aren't going to be reading about it.
The Wiki notes that the DMS 'has a fairly high turnover rate, mostly due to the inherent risks of bad writing and in confronting beings that, due to their speshulness, are often far more powerful than the agents themselves.', and yet it's very rare to hear about any deaths occurring in missions - that sort of thing was much more common in Emergencies.
My own personal headcanon is that all of the agents that had a couple of missions and then haven't been heard of for a few years are listed as MIA, presumed KIA. Agents do fail missions, it's just that when they do, they don't tend to be able to tell their stories. I'm not saying that agents fail missions all the time (if they did then the staffing shortage would probably be an even bigger problem), but it probably does happen.
A less dramatic possibility for a 'failure' would be to have the agents only be partially successful - maybe a pair of Assassins succeed in capturing a Sue and charging her, but then she breaks loose and escapes via a plothole. Her influence is gone from that particular story, so the agents succeeded in part, but the Sue could still cause damage elsewhere (and now has experience dealing with the PPC), so it could've gone better. That could be a way of setting up a bit more of a story arc if an author had used the same self-insert/character in multiple stories.