...that is sworn to kill the various undead of his home continuum. He sees the Sues in that light now, so he has no trouble. And like it's been said, they don't count as people. They are the vampires of fanfiction, and certainly not the good kind.

It's more like killing a zombie than carrying out an execution.

They're people-shaped and they look like people, but they don't act like people. They don't have full personalities, and the ones in the published missions are usually not salvageable.

Every once in a while there'll be a salvageable one, and those are the ones that get recruited. Even then, they aren't full-fledged characters at recruitment. They have to go through FicPsych and become more complex and three-dimensional.

But that's just the theory. The actual agents may see it many different ways. Some of them may see it as sad but necessary. Some may see themselves as soldiers and the Sue as the enemy. Some may enjoy getting revenge or just enjoy the challenge (nothing says our agents can't have a sociopathic streak). I even recall one particular dinosaur agent who sees the hunt for 'Sue about the same way a lion would see the hunt for gazelle.

If your character really and truly hates killing things, including Mary Sues, zombies, and cockroaches, they may not survive long in the DMS. Usually, they drift toward Bad Slash, Intel, or the DIC, or a non-action job.

Gotta admit it: Those Sues and Stus do look an awful lot like people. And however much your agents remind themselves that they aren't people, there's a sentimental tendency that says that if it's person-shaped and pleads for its life, it just might be a person. Doesn't matter that it bleeds glitter and makes horribly-spelled entreaties to an ensnared lust object; emotions don't always follow logic and emotions can easily say, "Hey! That's a person! You're not a cold-blooded murderer!"

How do you deal with killing something that looks and feels a lot like a person, at least at first glance? Depends on who you are. I think every agent responds differently.

Unfortunately, I don't think either of my agents are self-aware enough to really give a proper response to the question, so I'll answer from an out-of-universe perspective.

Aaron has a somewhat complex moral code that mostly comes from his home continuum. There actually is a karma scale in the Fallout games, but your karma only takes a hit from killing people if they're good. If it's listed as a hostile, you can kill it in its sleep without taking a single penalty. If the person you kill is evil enough, you can actually get karma points for killing them. So for him, killing an evil being like a Sue isn't something bad; it could even be argued to be a morally good act. In character, Aaron would probably say something along the lines of "They're monsters, just ones that look like humans."

Natasha, to be frank, has probably killed people more innocent than your average Mary Sue; the organization she was supposed to be a member of isn't exactly a pleasant one. Her philosophy is that it's better to kill one person than to allow many people to suffer; she's aware that her home continuum has already indicated that this is an ultimately destructive outlook, and on some level she's accepted that it's her fate to end unhappily.

Not pretty or especially clean, but safer for everyone than leaving it alive.

If it helps your insecurities (which I share, believe me), we don't kill every Mary Sue we come across. Just the ones that are truly beyond help. We let the harmless ones merge with canon, and we recruit the ones with some potential. Heck, two of my agents and a staff member were recruited from badfic.

That's like feeling guilty about every bacterium that dies when you wash your hands or clean the kitchen. It is exactly the wrong way to look at things. The only time I've tried to make a character who thought about things that way was Algie, and... well, Algie has something of an excuse for thinking like that.

You can also look at it like warfare. US military training tends to emphasise teaching your ground troops to totally dehumanise the enemy. That way you don't have to feel any of that complicated "ethics" nonsense in the middle of a firefight and get yourself and your friends shot. I imagine a similar process occurring among the PPC agents kind of by osmosis, with veteran agents becoming hardened to the job (or going flamethrower crazy) and newer ones not feeling the same way. It'd be an interesting take on a central part of the PPC dynamic, and I'd definitely be up for exploring that in Interludes. Possibly involving FicPsych. =]

It's a matter of doing what we're supposed to be doing. We can't just burst into a mission with full intent to kill. That is murder.

Observing the story, what the author is trying to do, and the character(s) within the story as well as what charges can be determined are all very important things to do, as part of procedure.

That limits any guilt, and as for limiting trauma, it's simply something you need to get used to, and the best way to do that is by not taking it too far out of bounds. Sadism does no one good.

She's never come out with a decent answer - just like these people here. It's like they don't understand the simple truth: murder is a sin. By their actions, they condemn their very souls.

---

Oh, is Caleb whinging again? Figures. He's got a real bee in his bonnet about this one. And I mean, yes, murder's a sin, of course it is, I'm not gonna say different - but that's not going to apply to fictional people, is it? If the Father was going to condemn people for offing invented characters, He'd have to start with, y'know, authors.

My little brother refuses to listen to me. Holier-than-thou Light One, thinks he's the last word on morality just because, oh wait, there's no because, he just does.

---

And so we see the lengths to which Dark Ones will twist the truth to meet their own ends. I can hardly believe I'm related to her.

Caleb Perbur, Paladin of the Basel School

---

Shut it, you.

~Deborah, Demas Paladin. Call me Debs.

((Opinions from the future count, right? Deborah and Caleb are both deeply religious - but they still view the whole murder issue in wildly different ways.

And oh yes, the Sundering is still there. You didn't think a little thing like altering the future would get rid of them, did you...? ~hS))

Have you seen what those Sues do to the canon worlds, to the characters? Forcing the canons to act against their most basic natures, forcing the canons to fall in love with them, torturing the canons, killing canons if they get in the way of the Sue's preferred ship? Messing with the laws of nature itself? It's horrible, what it is.

Honestly, the most traumatizing part of the job is having to see what the Sues force the canons to go through. Well... that, and the times when you slip up. Like Agent Laura Dukes said, our various alterations weren't by choice. The Sues won't hesitate to kill you instead. She and I were the lucky ones.

Plus, remember this: there wouldn't be any thought of guilt if the tables were turned. They would either immediately kill you for daring to get in their overly perfect grills or get into your head and make you their slaves.

All this cybernetics I've got? It's not a fashion choice. I hesitated during a mission and paid the price. I was lucky enough that the Sue wanted to gloat. For all the times they didn't? Well, that's why the PPC has a cemetery.

They infect the host and change its programming to suit themselves, spewing toxins and causing catastrophic functional breakdowns as they go. We're the antibodies that clear them out. Unfortunately, they also replicate and adapt to new hosts faster than we can keep up with. Knock one out, a hundred more spring up somewhere else.

— Agent Supernumerary

Sues are no more people than an ant infestation is.

They're monsters, ruining the worlds we love.

The ones that are worth getting guilty over typically don't get killed. They assimilate, or they're recruited.

((You're asking the agents, not the Boarders, so I'm guessing this is supposed to be in-character.))