on partnership

A long time ago the hero's guild conducted a survey of its employees, asking us which team/person was the most efficient, or accomplished...in general the "best" hero. I thought the choice was pretty hard...because I just couldn't decide what made a hero the best. Was it necessarily the person (or people) who got the job done the fastest? You know...things like that.

But, I was one of the only ones in the guild who had to think about it. Almost every single other hero in the guild answered Liira and Zept, and it wasn't just because they were the most famous (and the most infamous as well) members of the guild. I hadn't really heard of them at that time, because I was still new to the guild myself, but it was pretty common knowledge to anyone who had been doing the hero gig for a while that those two not only got the work done astonishingly fast...but they did more than they were asked to do, almost all the time.

Of course, the other question on the survey was which person/team was the worst... Liira and Zept got that as well, which was something I just couldn't understand until I finally met the two. It didn't make sense to me that someone could be both the best and the worst...something I couldn't figure out until I found out just why Liira and Zept were considered the best, when half the single agents out there could blow either one of them away on their own.

When it came to Liira and Zept, it was all about partnership. They were fairly impressive as single heroes, but nothing earth shaking. They each had some special talents that you couldn't just find everywhere, but any decent single agent has just as many tricks, and has to just to keep in the business. Hell, I have almost as many tricks up my sleeve as both of them put together. But they combine their strengths, and work together so flawlessly that it actually increases their combined effectiveness to unheard of levels. And they make it look so easy...even though no other team in the guild has ever managed to get the same effect...ever.

They were lovers... It actually took me a long time to figure that one out, because they don't act like it most of the time when they're on the job. They just have a scarily accurate sense of each other, the kind that comes only with long time familiarity. I have worked with them several times...and each time I felt like a third wheel, even though I always managed to contribute to the job... They were close in a way that made me jealous, and that was what made them good.

But, the fact that they were lovers is also what made them the worst team in the guild...at times. Neither one of them was particularly easy to get along with... They both had very strong personalities, and at times even their partnership failed when those personalities clashed. In other words, they would fight...and when they did, disasters happened. Almost all of the major botches in the guild history are because of them when fighting. And the only chance that they would stop fighting was on the job...so if the guild wanted their incredible team back, they had to be prepared to throw a job or two.

And to think, there was a time when I didn't know about them...