@bombus-pratorum bcuz i couldnt resist answering your tags ;w;
mercverse assassins, from my understanding, can fall into that line of work for a number of reasons (though, i’d say more often than not it’s either because you fell in with the wrong crowd, desperately needed money or wanted revenge against a specific person(s) and couldn’t accept anything but a personal approach) but there are very few that actually /make/ it as an assassin.
i guess assassin’s used here as more of an umbrella term, if you’re not working for one of the organizations you’re probably more of a mercenary, and sometimes those jobs involve killing. from there, if you’re good at it, you might get headhunted by the Agency, which is literally a company in mercverse that specialises entirely in assassins - they’re pretty much like having an agent, they set you up with clients, act as the middle man with arrangements, intel etc, for a cut of your profit (which normally isn’t much of a problem, these jobs are typically very well paid)
mortgate used to work with the agency, but they’re too neutral a party and won’t accept jobs like ‘hunt down the blind eye’ or ‘hunt down astroflare’ because they refuse to get directly involved in a turf war, and the agency tend to have the best people for such a job, the rogue assassins in the city are either a) on borrowed time because they’re not that good or b) will outright refuse on the grounds that either they’re anti-mortgate or they’re not willing to make an enemy out of the blind eye. mortgate’s assassins are better considered highly trained super soldiers, with not nearly as much freedom. the agency’s assassins are free to pick and choose their hits (well, the good ones are)
the blind eye /do/ contain assassins, but that’s not really what they predominantly do, they’re mercenaries mostly used for security, information and now and then az will approve some hits if he thinks the person’s case is solid. (he will absolutely refuse if asked to kill an innocent.)
the agency are INCREDIBLY efficient and secretive, so assassins are typically free to quit whenever they want - each assassin has a personal line of communication which will be cut immediately if said assassin quits or goes AWOL, and every assassin will typically never know the identities of anyone working for the agency - fellow assassin or otherwise. they hold you very much at arm’s length for safety purposes, and they will absolutely have every shred of intel on you, regardless of how hard you try to cover things up. they’re completely and entirely based on profit - which i suppose actually makes them /more/ trustworthy than mortgate. which is... pretty bad. :L
