#also do you think there’s an “agent nine” that always gets confused with Sasha when getting called in?

[sheltershock]

Thought of the evening: how does the nuances of the agent [surname] system work?

Because it seems like most agents just use their surname(Oleander, Nein, Vodello, Mentallis, Forsythe, etc.), but some agents have numbers(33)?

But also, what if your surname changes? Hollis has a line about a husband, so does that complicate the naming system? In her memory vaults she was going by Forsythe since her intern days, so either she was married back then or it’s possibly her maiden name. Do all agents go by their maiden names? If Milla and Sasha got married and changed their surname, they’d have the keep the old names right? You can’t have two “Agent Neins” or “Agent Vodellos” that would cause too much confusion.

But what about sibling agents? Norma and Lizzie are sisters, and are both in the intern program. Are the Psychonauts going to have two Agent Navidads? Or if Frazie joins to be an agent, would the chaos of having two “Agent Aquatos” cause problems? Maybe in the case of siblings they’d go by their middle names? So Agent [Middle Name].

And what about the numbered agents? Did the Psychonauts start at one and have since climbed to thirty-three? Why do some agents get to have their surname attached and not others? My personal headcanon for the numbered agents I thought of while planning a fic is that numbered agents are actually agents recruited who are part of a witness protection program, and thus it’s to hide/contend with changing identities. But there’s no in-game explanation as far as I’m aware.

Also not really apart of the Agent thought, but there’s the tiny paradox of Sasha and Milla being “international secret agents” who work for an espionage agency, but also being celebrities in universe and are getting their names and faces printed on magazines. Does the world assume that the names “Sasha Nein” and “Milla Vodello” are false identities? Honestly the idea that True Psychic Tales and all the terrorists they fight believe that these are fake names/stage names when in reality they’re just their real names is a little amusing. That they just believe that they wouldn’t be open enough to use their real names, but its like reverse psychology. Or the idea that they’re able to sneak in places and not immediately get caught is because their enemies are like “no, that can’t be Agents Nein and Vodello, that would be too obvious.”