User Name/Nick: Alex
User DW:![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
chatvert
AIM/IM: TeriyakiPickle
E-mail: greencat3 [at] gmail [dot] com
Other Characters: Most recently, Jason Bourne. But now I am unencumbered by amnesiac douchebags!
Character Name: Joanna Dark
Series: Perfect Dark
Age: 20
From When?: Shortly after the end of Perfect Dark: Initial Vector.
Inmate/Warden: Warden. Though that’s a toughie. Joanna’s a born killer – it’s her special talent. If she were a My Little Pony, her cutie mark would be dead people. Regardless, she does always try to do the right thing (when her mind isn’t clouded by ULTIMATE REVENGE) and has a strong moral compass. She is deeply troubled by the fact that she’s as efficient a killing machine as she is, which is basically what pushes her into warden territory.
Item: Her d-PAL (basically, a 2020 iPhone). Granted, it is dataDyne tech, but the damn things are just so useful, and Carrington’s tech is more on the military-industrial side at any rate.
Abilities/Powers: Jo’s an average human being, with no super special magical abilities. However, whenever she’s in a fight, time seems to slow down for her and she can think very clearly. “Situational awareness,” her dad called it. She’s also been training to follow in her bounty-hunter father’s footsteps since she could walk, so she’s agile, an eagle-eyed shot, and reasonably skilled in hand-to-hand combat.
Personality: “Since I think Jo is both a rebel and a sociopath…” – FrenzyTheKillbot, Let’s Play Perfect Dark Zero, Nightclub: Stakeout
Jo’s got a temper on her. And some daddy issues. She has a highly skewed sense of her own self-worth, considering herself a “failure” despite all of the successes she has managed in her short career. This self-image ties into her hero-worship of her father and her inability to protect him from Mai Hem’s bullets, something which she carries a deep-seated guilt about. She does not play well with others – her inability to follow orders ended up getting her entire team killed (and then herself) in a simulation, because she absolutely refuses to leave someone behind to die if she can save them. (She can work with a team in a real-life situation, but prefers to work alone.) This is also possibly tied to her guilt about her father’s murder at the hands of Mai Hem.
Joanna is stubborn – stubborn is perhaps the easiest way to put it. Once she takes on a job, whether it’s a bounty or an assignment from Carrington, she will see it through to the end, no matter the cost to herself. She absolutely craves praise, because appreciation of her combat skills was the only display of love she ever got as a child. The pursuit of praise by those she respects can lead her to push herself too hard, such as when she tore open the stitches on the same bullet wound twice in the span of about a week and refused to let herself rest. Her tenacity is no less even if it’s something as simple as lacing up her boots through multiple injuries to prove that she’s field-ready:
Jo has a bit of a wicked sense of humor, using a porn site as a secure, nigh-untraceable method of communication with Jonathan when he was acting as her handler. She’s also a Deadpan Snarker, and won’t hesitate to mock or taunt an opponent to throw them off their guard. This comes with a flip side – she is absolutely unprepared to wage warfare on an emotional scale rather than a physical one and if the right mental buttons are pushed it is easy to tell that she’s still a young woman with a lot of emotional issues underneath her tough front. (Naturally, if you’ve gotten her this emotionally compromised, you probably have about ten seconds to live.)
Trained from birth to be self-reliant, Jo does not trust others easily, if at all. She’s practical, rather than academic – she has no use for theory and would rather have the information needed to solve the problem in front of her than become an expert on the whys and the wherefores of what the problem is. She is also capable of deep, destructive anger, and can be quite cold-blooded when the mood takes her. This cold-bloodedness slowly replaces her well of rage as the series progresses; she’s still a Deadpan Snarker in the N64 original (chronologically later than the Xbox 360 title), but she will still be a ginger ball o’ rage at the point I’m taking her from.
Her usual method of dealing with criminals is beating them into submission and slapping cuffs on them, so she may have a bit of an adjustment to make when arriving on the Barge. However, this will be beneficial to her, because it will force her to have interpersonal interactions (with people she doesn’t much care for) that don’t end in fistfights. Who knows, she might actually mature and grow as a person.
Path to Redemption: N/A
History: Joanna Dark was born with a broken spine.
Not that you would know it to look at her today. It took years of excruciating physical therapy and experimental treatments, but she could finally walk on her own at age five. This traumatic experience at such a young age is probably a core component of Joanna’s fierce independence. Jo’s mother died shortly after giving birth, so the girl developed a very close attachment to her father, Jack Dark. Jack waited until Jo was seven to start teaching her to shoot and fight. It was in these interactions that Jo most felt she was loved; Jack Dark was a hard man to get along with and didn’t find it easy to express emotion. Jo thinks in one of the books that he found it easier to say “Nice shot,” than “I love you.”
When Jo was reasonably competent and able to take care of herself, her father began taking her around the world with him on his bounty-hunting missions. As a result, her education was in no way standard. She briefly attended an American school in Beijing while her father was attempting to get her settled into normalcy, but was “invited to leave” (read: expelled) after putting a bullying quarterback in the hospital. The rest of her formal education was piecemeal, taking remote and online courses taught by AI lecturers in between chasing down every variety of criminal scum around the globe with her father. However, she did a lot of learning on her own due to her curious nature, and she learned technical skills from Chandra Sekhar, the mission coordinator for Dark Bail Bonds and somewhat of an older sister figure to Jo. A bounty hunter’s life is never an easy one, but Jack refused to deal with any of the hypercorps on moral principle, which made good contracts hard to come by. The hypercorps basically ran the world, in some cases purchasing entire countries (dataDyne, for instance, is the proud owner of Brazil).
Jo was twenty years old when Dark Bail Bonds accepted a contract that would change everything. At first it seemed like no big deal, just your standard retrieval. Their client was going to pay good money for the retrieval of a scientist named Nathan Zeigler, recently of dataDyne, who had defected with his research. They tracked him across seven countries and three continents before ending up in Hong Kong, where Zeigler was in the hands of a Triad boss named Killian. Jack went into Killian’s nightclub to fetch Zeigler, while Jo was only supposed to hang back with Chandra in the speedboat in case additional support was needed.
Naturally, things went south. Jo decided to go in on her own and provide support for her father, which soon became needed as he was pinned down. Unfortunately, by the time she reached him he had made it to Killian and gotten a hold of the badly injured Zeigler; Jo’s entrance distracted him for just long enough for Killian to shoot Jack and make an escape. Since Jack was wounded and Zeigler wasn’t about to leave without his research, Jo was sent to pick it up. She had to fight her way through an abandoned subway station full of goons, but for the most part came out of it okay. When Zeigler was reunited with his research, he promptly grabbed the neurodrive it was in and implanted it into Jack’s head. That done, he finally died.
Come sunrise, Jo and Jack were on the move, scaling rooftops to escape from Killian’s men and get the whole dirty job over with. Jo managed to take out Killian’s dropship with some good shooting, but she got separated from Jack in the process. Jack ended up captured by some thugs and tossed into a van – and for several hours, Chandra and Jo lost track of him.
Luckily, Chandra was able to pick up Jack’s signal from his transponder in mainland China, in the Huangshan mountains. It turned out that he was being held at the nigh-inaccessible mansion of dataDyne CEO and premier combat simulation DeathMatch VR creator Zhang Li; dataDyne was very serious about retrieving Zeigler’s research. Since there was no road access, Jo scaled the mountain and snuck into the complex. It turned out that Zhang Li was having a party for DeathMatch players, and when he saw Jo he mistook her for a professional. She was immediately invited to play against his daughter, the undefeated Zhang Mai – known in DeathMatch circles as Mai Hem. (Yes, pronounced ‘mayhem’.) One problem – Zhang Li’s setup had no safeties on the force feedback, meaning that death in the game translated to death in the real world. Jo couldn’t afford any slip-ups.
Naturally, Mai Hem was insanely overpowered, leaving Jo with light weaponry against Mai Hem’s SuperDragon assault rifle and living statue henchbots. Still, Jo managed to defeat her, but the system was shut down before it could do anything more than injure Mai Hem. In the chaos, Jo managed to escape into the labs beneath Zhang Li’s mansion and search for her father. Finally, she found Jack in one of the detention cells, and due to the effects of Zeigler’s neurodrive, he started babbling at her about glyphs. At this point, the guards had cottoned on to the rescue attempt, and Jo had to take her father and fight their way out of the labs and mansion.
They almost made it, too. As they neared the evac point, they were cornered by dataDyne soldiers and Mai Hem, who was furious at Joanna for beating her. Jack then grabbed Joanna’s gun and ran at the soldiers to distract them while Joanna got the dropship to escape. As she turned back to get her father in the ship, Mai Hem killed him. In retaliation, Jo used the engines of the dropship to set Mai Hem on fire, severely disfiguring her.
Jo seethed with the desire for revenge, and Chandra pointed out that the best way to get back at dataDyne was to find one of Zeigler’s colleagues, Dr. Eustace Caroll, and to get him to reveal just what the hell was up with their research that Jack would die to protect it. So Joanna went straight from China to a dataDyne installation in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, the Trinity Research Platform. Soon after she reached it, her communications with Chandra were cut off and she found herself facing two bounty hunters known as the Brothers. After a grueling fight she came out on top, but still with no connection to Chandra. Jo snuck through the station and managed to find Dr. Caroll and escort him to his lab where they could talk.
In Caroll’s lab, it was discovered that listening to her dad’s crazy babbling had imprinted some of Zeigler’s data into her subconscious, and Caroll extracted it with a neurodrive. It turned out that they had been working on a decryption program for some mysterious hieroglyphs found in ancient ruins in Peru. Before she could learn any more, Chandra showed up, revealed that she had switched sides to ally with dataDyne, and killed Dr. Caroll. She would have shot Joanna, too, but Jo was saved in the nick of time by a strike team from dataDyne’s rival, the Carrington Institute. (CI is not exactly a hypercorp, though it is powerful – Daniel Carrington invented the null-grav technology used in the ubiquitous hovercars and is dreadfully rich as a result, but hates and distrusts all hypercorps, particularly dataDyne.) The Carrington strike team and its leader, Jonathan Steinberg, helped Jo get out of the Trinity platform. Via hologram, Daniel Carrington offered his condolences to Jo as well as a way for her to get back at dataDyne. Jo accepted.
Clad in Carrington’s uniform, Jo fought her way through scores of mooks in the Peruvian jungle to some ruins, where a strange device was being excavated. Jo managed to plant a tracking device on it before it was taken away, which proved useful as Steinberg’s team was captured by the dataDyne forces and taken to a dataDyne outpost in North Africa. Feeling like it was her fault they were taken, Jo volunteered to rescue them, alone. Knowing her capabilities, Carrington sent her off. Jo was able to free Steinberg and his team before getting cornered by Mai Hem, who had survived the fire with skin grafts on her arm and half her face. Jo killed her for real this time, avenging her father, and set off to stop Zhang Li from activating the device.
There was another firefight through ruins to reach Zhang Li, who had set up in an ancient coliseum, and Jo was the only one who reached him before he activated it. The device was called the Graal, and gave its user godlike power and abilities. To finish its activation, Zhang Li needed a human sacrifice, which he found in Chandra. With his newfound power, he levitated the coliseum up hundreds of feet in the air in chunks, taking Joanna with it. After a bitter fight, she finally bested and killed him, and the coliseum fell to earth.
That was perhaps not her best idea, but she survived it, and was taken in by Daniel Carrington. She’d lost the only family she’d ever known and the future she’d had planned in less than a week, and spent much of the next six months in a depression, largely confined to the Institute and playing preposterous amounts of DeathMatch to train herself and shut herself off from the world.
What dragged her into action again was a conversation she overheard between Carrington and Steinberg about a CI agent who had been a mole in dataDyne’s pharmaceutical arm getting captured. Before he had been brought in, the agent had managed to get some fascinating information with terrifying implications out to Carrington, and Carrington wanted him back. Jo volunteered to go into pharmaDyne Vancouver undercover and retrieve him. She assumed the persona of a temp named Amanda Thiesen and tricked her way into the building. After a few hours pretending to do legal work, she helped the Institute’s chief hacker Grimshaw find a way into the pharmaDyne system so she could sneak to the basement labs and rescue the captured agent.
On the plus side, she did manage to get the agent out of the labs. On the downside, he was peppered by a grenade blast and died after revealing a vital piece of information to her. Jo was wounded in the firefight, and had to go toe-to-toe with a drug-boosted psychopath named Laurent Hayes, a dangerous criminal her own age and the adopted son of pharmaDyne’s director, Dr. Friedrich Murray. Jo escaped and returned to the Institute to heal up. After a few days spent in recovery, she ran away, disgusted with her killer instinct, escaping to Japan where she took on a bounty. The bounty led her to Macau, and unbeknownst to her, she was being tracked by a team of dataDyne Shock Troopers, who nearly captured her before Steinberg came to her aid. With him and his team serving as a distraction, she was able to free herself and kill the Shock Troopers. She returned to the Institute. There, she learned more about what the agent had retrieved – information that could not only disqualify Dr. Murray from the running for dataDyne’s new CEO but potentially destroy the hypercorp altogether.
Jo was sent to spy on Dr. Murray and Laurent, and ended up tailing Laurent to New York, where she fought him again. She managed to gain some information about a dataDyne raid on a facility in the Solomon Islands, where they were keeping Dr. Rose, the man who had the information that could destroy dataDyne entirely. There was a midnight firefight between three forces – dataDyne, the facility staff, and Carrington’s forces – and Jo and Carrington’s people won, extracting Dr. Rose and striking a critical blow to dataDyne’s paramilitary forces.
Carrington brought Dr. Rose to a bunker in Wales, where he summoned Dr. Murray and Cassandra DeVries (director of dataDyne subsidiary DataFlow, candidate for dataDyne CEO, and Carrington’s ex), in order to broker a deal. This naturally went south; DeVries knocked Steinberg out and convinced Dr. Rose to commit suicide with Steinberg’s gun, and once Rose was dead, Carrington had lost his bargaining chip. Laurent tried to kill Carrington and Joanna, but Jo bested him. DeVries killed Murray, freeing up the way for her to become CEO of dataDyne, and the “summit” ended in shambles, with no-one the true victor. dataDyne still stood, and nobody would believe Rose’s information if it came from the notoriously anti-hypercorp Carrington Institute. Jo officially went to work for Carrington after that, training to become a full-fledged agent and one day take down dataDyne once and for all.
Sample Journal Entry: [The camera comes on to reveal an attractive young woman with coppery hair and an impish smile.] Do we have a shooting range around here? Somehow I get the feeling the Admiral’s not going to like it if I start putting holes into the walls, and I don’t want to get rusty.
If not, does anyone want to play DeathMatch? I have a couple rigs. Hope someone says yes, ‘cause I’m getting bored, and otherwise I’m going to have to make my own fun.
Sample RP: When Jo woke up, it took her a second to remember where she was. Not her room, not really – it looked exactly like her room at the Institute, but it wasn’t. There wasn’t the constant buzz of readiness, and the air was different, somehow. Air was air, and it was breathable, but she’d been in enough places to recognize the air of London when she smelled it, and however good an imitation this was, that little detail was what gave it away.
She swung her legs out of bed, relishing the sensation of the cold floor against the soles of her feet. Most people hated it; for Jo, it was always a relief. The fear that she’d wake up paralyzed again one day was perhaps a childish one, but the nightmares always did their best to keep it fresh. Honestly, that nightmare was better than the ones that had been visiting her recently, always about her father, how he’d died, how she’d failed him. Just thinking about it made her stomach cramp with guilt, and she did her best to banish the thought and continue with her routine.
Just to make sure her limbs were all in working order, she began her stretches, starting with touching her toes, then moving on to stretching out her arms, her shoulders, her back. Once she had properly limbered herself up, she made her bed, because that was how she had been brought up. When you wake up, you make the bed, her father had told her. That makes it a habit instead of a chore.
Her legs itched to run, and she decided she’d give the CES a try before going up to breakfast. She glanced at the clock – local time, whatever that was, had it as quarter to five in the morning. Definitely not time for breakfast, then. She shrugged at it – good amount of time for a run, maybe she could even hit the gym – and changed into some workout attire. Maybe she’d meet up with a couple of the other early birds on this boat. She knew there had to be some; this place attracted criminals of the worst order, sure, and some of the wardens would not have been her first pick in a dodgeball game, let alone for overseeing a boat full of bad guys, but there were some military types, and she always felt better around them. They reminded her in some strange way of her dad.
She set off towards the CES at a light jog to warm up. It took her very little time to reach it; the hallways were practically deserted at this early hour and she didn’t feel compelled to chat with anyone she saw. She opened the CES without picking a particular setting, willing to let it surprise her. What she saw made her smile. Overcast, green plains, cool, slightly humid air.
The Barge itself may not have done a good job of impersonating the English climate, but the CES more than made up for it.
She took a deep breath, filling her muscles with oxygen, and began to run.
Special Notes: Jo, in her own words:
User DW:
chatvertAIM/IM: TeriyakiPickle
E-mail: greencat3 [at] gmail [dot] com
Other Characters: Most recently, Jason Bourne. But now I am unencumbered by amnesiac douchebags!
Character Name: Joanna Dark
Series: Perfect Dark
Age: 20
From When?: Shortly after the end of Perfect Dark: Initial Vector.
Inmate/Warden: Warden. Though that’s a toughie. Joanna’s a born killer – it’s her special talent. If she were a My Little Pony, her cutie mark would be dead people. Regardless, she does always try to do the right thing (when her mind isn’t clouded by ULTIMATE REVENGE) and has a strong moral compass. She is deeply troubled by the fact that she’s as efficient a killing machine as she is, which is basically what pushes her into warden territory.
Item: Her d-PAL (basically, a 2020 iPhone). Granted, it is dataDyne tech, but the damn things are just so useful, and Carrington’s tech is more on the military-industrial side at any rate.
Abilities/Powers: Jo’s an average human being, with no super special magical abilities. However, whenever she’s in a fight, time seems to slow down for her and she can think very clearly. “Situational awareness,” her dad called it. She’s also been training to follow in her bounty-hunter father’s footsteps since she could walk, so she’s agile, an eagle-eyed shot, and reasonably skilled in hand-to-hand combat.
Personality: “Since I think Jo is both a rebel and a sociopath…” – FrenzyTheKillbot, Let’s Play Perfect Dark Zero, Nightclub: Stakeout
Jo’s got a temper on her. And some daddy issues. She has a highly skewed sense of her own self-worth, considering herself a “failure” despite all of the successes she has managed in her short career. This self-image ties into her hero-worship of her father and her inability to protect him from Mai Hem’s bullets, something which she carries a deep-seated guilt about. She does not play well with others – her inability to follow orders ended up getting her entire team killed (and then herself) in a simulation, because she absolutely refuses to leave someone behind to die if she can save them. (She can work with a team in a real-life situation, but prefers to work alone.) This is also possibly tied to her guilt about her father’s murder at the hands of Mai Hem.
Joanna is stubborn – stubborn is perhaps the easiest way to put it. Once she takes on a job, whether it’s a bounty or an assignment from Carrington, she will see it through to the end, no matter the cost to herself. She absolutely craves praise, because appreciation of her combat skills was the only display of love she ever got as a child. The pursuit of praise by those she respects can lead her to push herself too hard, such as when she tore open the stitches on the same bullet wound twice in the span of about a week and refused to let herself rest. Her tenacity is no less even if it’s something as simple as lacing up her boots through multiple injuries to prove that she’s field-ready:
Carefully, her whole body burning with the sense of failure and humiliation, Joanna straightened up once more, meeting Carrington’s gaze. His expression had softened to something approaching pity, and Joanna hated that all the more.
“I can do it,” she told him.
“No,” Daniel Carrington said. “But you’d willingly kill yourself trying.”
She broke the stare, looking down, and found herself staring at her untied boots.—Perfect Dark: Second Front, Greg Rucka, pg 100
Jo has a bit of a wicked sense of humor, using a porn site as a secure, nigh-untraceable method of communication with Jonathan when he was acting as her handler. She’s also a Deadpan Snarker, and won’t hesitate to mock or taunt an opponent to throw them off their guard. This comes with a flip side – she is absolutely unprepared to wage warfare on an emotional scale rather than a physical one and if the right mental buttons are pushed it is easy to tell that she’s still a young woman with a lot of emotional issues underneath her tough front. (Naturally, if you’ve gotten her this emotionally compromised, you probably have about ten seconds to live.)
Trained from birth to be self-reliant, Jo does not trust others easily, if at all. She’s practical, rather than academic – she has no use for theory and would rather have the information needed to solve the problem in front of her than become an expert on the whys and the wherefores of what the problem is. She is also capable of deep, destructive anger, and can be quite cold-blooded when the mood takes her. This cold-bloodedness slowly replaces her well of rage as the series progresses; she’s still a Deadpan Snarker in the N64 original (chronologically later than the Xbox 360 title), but she will still be a ginger ball o’ rage at the point I’m taking her from.
Her usual method of dealing with criminals is beating them into submission and slapping cuffs on them, so she may have a bit of an adjustment to make when arriving on the Barge. However, this will be beneficial to her, because it will force her to have interpersonal interactions (with people she doesn’t much care for) that don’t end in fistfights. Who knows, she might actually mature and grow as a person.
Path to Redemption: N/A
History: Joanna Dark was born with a broken spine.
Not that you would know it to look at her today. It took years of excruciating physical therapy and experimental treatments, but she could finally walk on her own at age five. This traumatic experience at such a young age is probably a core component of Joanna’s fierce independence. Jo’s mother died shortly after giving birth, so the girl developed a very close attachment to her father, Jack Dark. Jack waited until Jo was seven to start teaching her to shoot and fight. It was in these interactions that Jo most felt she was loved; Jack Dark was a hard man to get along with and didn’t find it easy to express emotion. Jo thinks in one of the books that he found it easier to say “Nice shot,” than “I love you.”
When Jo was reasonably competent and able to take care of herself, her father began taking her around the world with him on his bounty-hunting missions. As a result, her education was in no way standard. She briefly attended an American school in Beijing while her father was attempting to get her settled into normalcy, but was “invited to leave” (read: expelled) after putting a bullying quarterback in the hospital. The rest of her formal education was piecemeal, taking remote and online courses taught by AI lecturers in between chasing down every variety of criminal scum around the globe with her father. However, she did a lot of learning on her own due to her curious nature, and she learned technical skills from Chandra Sekhar, the mission coordinator for Dark Bail Bonds and somewhat of an older sister figure to Jo. A bounty hunter’s life is never an easy one, but Jack refused to deal with any of the hypercorps on moral principle, which made good contracts hard to come by. The hypercorps basically ran the world, in some cases purchasing entire countries (dataDyne, for instance, is the proud owner of Brazil).
Jo was twenty years old when Dark Bail Bonds accepted a contract that would change everything. At first it seemed like no big deal, just your standard retrieval. Their client was going to pay good money for the retrieval of a scientist named Nathan Zeigler, recently of dataDyne, who had defected with his research. They tracked him across seven countries and three continents before ending up in Hong Kong, where Zeigler was in the hands of a Triad boss named Killian. Jack went into Killian’s nightclub to fetch Zeigler, while Jo was only supposed to hang back with Chandra in the speedboat in case additional support was needed.
Naturally, things went south. Jo decided to go in on her own and provide support for her father, which soon became needed as he was pinned down. Unfortunately, by the time she reached him he had made it to Killian and gotten a hold of the badly injured Zeigler; Jo’s entrance distracted him for just long enough for Killian to shoot Jack and make an escape. Since Jack was wounded and Zeigler wasn’t about to leave without his research, Jo was sent to pick it up. She had to fight her way through an abandoned subway station full of goons, but for the most part came out of it okay. When Zeigler was reunited with his research, he promptly grabbed the neurodrive it was in and implanted it into Jack’s head. That done, he finally died.
Come sunrise, Jo and Jack were on the move, scaling rooftops to escape from Killian’s men and get the whole dirty job over with. Jo managed to take out Killian’s dropship with some good shooting, but she got separated from Jack in the process. Jack ended up captured by some thugs and tossed into a van – and for several hours, Chandra and Jo lost track of him.
Luckily, Chandra was able to pick up Jack’s signal from his transponder in mainland China, in the Huangshan mountains. It turned out that he was being held at the nigh-inaccessible mansion of dataDyne CEO and premier combat simulation DeathMatch VR creator Zhang Li; dataDyne was very serious about retrieving Zeigler’s research. Since there was no road access, Jo scaled the mountain and snuck into the complex. It turned out that Zhang Li was having a party for DeathMatch players, and when he saw Jo he mistook her for a professional. She was immediately invited to play against his daughter, the undefeated Zhang Mai – known in DeathMatch circles as Mai Hem. (Yes, pronounced ‘mayhem’.) One problem – Zhang Li’s setup had no safeties on the force feedback, meaning that death in the game translated to death in the real world. Jo couldn’t afford any slip-ups.
Naturally, Mai Hem was insanely overpowered, leaving Jo with light weaponry against Mai Hem’s SuperDragon assault rifle and living statue henchbots. Still, Jo managed to defeat her, but the system was shut down before it could do anything more than injure Mai Hem. In the chaos, Jo managed to escape into the labs beneath Zhang Li’s mansion and search for her father. Finally, she found Jack in one of the detention cells, and due to the effects of Zeigler’s neurodrive, he started babbling at her about glyphs. At this point, the guards had cottoned on to the rescue attempt, and Jo had to take her father and fight their way out of the labs and mansion.
They almost made it, too. As they neared the evac point, they were cornered by dataDyne soldiers and Mai Hem, who was furious at Joanna for beating her. Jack then grabbed Joanna’s gun and ran at the soldiers to distract them while Joanna got the dropship to escape. As she turned back to get her father in the ship, Mai Hem killed him. In retaliation, Jo used the engines of the dropship to set Mai Hem on fire, severely disfiguring her.
Jo seethed with the desire for revenge, and Chandra pointed out that the best way to get back at dataDyne was to find one of Zeigler’s colleagues, Dr. Eustace Caroll, and to get him to reveal just what the hell was up with their research that Jack would die to protect it. So Joanna went straight from China to a dataDyne installation in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, the Trinity Research Platform. Soon after she reached it, her communications with Chandra were cut off and she found herself facing two bounty hunters known as the Brothers. After a grueling fight she came out on top, but still with no connection to Chandra. Jo snuck through the station and managed to find Dr. Caroll and escort him to his lab where they could talk.
In Caroll’s lab, it was discovered that listening to her dad’s crazy babbling had imprinted some of Zeigler’s data into her subconscious, and Caroll extracted it with a neurodrive. It turned out that they had been working on a decryption program for some mysterious hieroglyphs found in ancient ruins in Peru. Before she could learn any more, Chandra showed up, revealed that she had switched sides to ally with dataDyne, and killed Dr. Caroll. She would have shot Joanna, too, but Jo was saved in the nick of time by a strike team from dataDyne’s rival, the Carrington Institute. (CI is not exactly a hypercorp, though it is powerful – Daniel Carrington invented the null-grav technology used in the ubiquitous hovercars and is dreadfully rich as a result, but hates and distrusts all hypercorps, particularly dataDyne.) The Carrington strike team and its leader, Jonathan Steinberg, helped Jo get out of the Trinity platform. Via hologram, Daniel Carrington offered his condolences to Jo as well as a way for her to get back at dataDyne. Jo accepted.
Clad in Carrington’s uniform, Jo fought her way through scores of mooks in the Peruvian jungle to some ruins, where a strange device was being excavated. Jo managed to plant a tracking device on it before it was taken away, which proved useful as Steinberg’s team was captured by the dataDyne forces and taken to a dataDyne outpost in North Africa. Feeling like it was her fault they were taken, Jo volunteered to rescue them, alone. Knowing her capabilities, Carrington sent her off. Jo was able to free Steinberg and his team before getting cornered by Mai Hem, who had survived the fire with skin grafts on her arm and half her face. Jo killed her for real this time, avenging her father, and set off to stop Zhang Li from activating the device.
There was another firefight through ruins to reach Zhang Li, who had set up in an ancient coliseum, and Jo was the only one who reached him before he activated it. The device was called the Graal, and gave its user godlike power and abilities. To finish its activation, Zhang Li needed a human sacrifice, which he found in Chandra. With his newfound power, he levitated the coliseum up hundreds of feet in the air in chunks, taking Joanna with it. After a bitter fight, she finally bested and killed him, and the coliseum fell to earth.
That was perhaps not her best idea, but she survived it, and was taken in by Daniel Carrington. She’d lost the only family she’d ever known and the future she’d had planned in less than a week, and spent much of the next six months in a depression, largely confined to the Institute and playing preposterous amounts of DeathMatch to train herself and shut herself off from the world.
What dragged her into action again was a conversation she overheard between Carrington and Steinberg about a CI agent who had been a mole in dataDyne’s pharmaceutical arm getting captured. Before he had been brought in, the agent had managed to get some fascinating information with terrifying implications out to Carrington, and Carrington wanted him back. Jo volunteered to go into pharmaDyne Vancouver undercover and retrieve him. She assumed the persona of a temp named Amanda Thiesen and tricked her way into the building. After a few hours pretending to do legal work, she helped the Institute’s chief hacker Grimshaw find a way into the pharmaDyne system so she could sneak to the basement labs and rescue the captured agent.
On the plus side, she did manage to get the agent out of the labs. On the downside, he was peppered by a grenade blast and died after revealing a vital piece of information to her. Jo was wounded in the firefight, and had to go toe-to-toe with a drug-boosted psychopath named Laurent Hayes, a dangerous criminal her own age and the adopted son of pharmaDyne’s director, Dr. Friedrich Murray. Jo escaped and returned to the Institute to heal up. After a few days spent in recovery, she ran away, disgusted with her killer instinct, escaping to Japan where she took on a bounty. The bounty led her to Macau, and unbeknownst to her, she was being tracked by a team of dataDyne Shock Troopers, who nearly captured her before Steinberg came to her aid. With him and his team serving as a distraction, she was able to free herself and kill the Shock Troopers. She returned to the Institute. There, she learned more about what the agent had retrieved – information that could not only disqualify Dr. Murray from the running for dataDyne’s new CEO but potentially destroy the hypercorp altogether.
Jo was sent to spy on Dr. Murray and Laurent, and ended up tailing Laurent to New York, where she fought him again. She managed to gain some information about a dataDyne raid on a facility in the Solomon Islands, where they were keeping Dr. Rose, the man who had the information that could destroy dataDyne entirely. There was a midnight firefight between three forces – dataDyne, the facility staff, and Carrington’s forces – and Jo and Carrington’s people won, extracting Dr. Rose and striking a critical blow to dataDyne’s paramilitary forces.
Carrington brought Dr. Rose to a bunker in Wales, where he summoned Dr. Murray and Cassandra DeVries (director of dataDyne subsidiary DataFlow, candidate for dataDyne CEO, and Carrington’s ex), in order to broker a deal. This naturally went south; DeVries knocked Steinberg out and convinced Dr. Rose to commit suicide with Steinberg’s gun, and once Rose was dead, Carrington had lost his bargaining chip. Laurent tried to kill Carrington and Joanna, but Jo bested him. DeVries killed Murray, freeing up the way for her to become CEO of dataDyne, and the “summit” ended in shambles, with no-one the true victor. dataDyne still stood, and nobody would believe Rose’s information if it came from the notoriously anti-hypercorp Carrington Institute. Jo officially went to work for Carrington after that, training to become a full-fledged agent and one day take down dataDyne once and for all.
Sample Journal Entry: [The camera comes on to reveal an attractive young woman with coppery hair and an impish smile.] Do we have a shooting range around here? Somehow I get the feeling the Admiral’s not going to like it if I start putting holes into the walls, and I don’t want to get rusty.
If not, does anyone want to play DeathMatch? I have a couple rigs. Hope someone says yes, ‘cause I’m getting bored, and otherwise I’m going to have to make my own fun.
Sample RP: When Jo woke up, it took her a second to remember where she was. Not her room, not really – it looked exactly like her room at the Institute, but it wasn’t. There wasn’t the constant buzz of readiness, and the air was different, somehow. Air was air, and it was breathable, but she’d been in enough places to recognize the air of London when she smelled it, and however good an imitation this was, that little detail was what gave it away.
She swung her legs out of bed, relishing the sensation of the cold floor against the soles of her feet. Most people hated it; for Jo, it was always a relief. The fear that she’d wake up paralyzed again one day was perhaps a childish one, but the nightmares always did their best to keep it fresh. Honestly, that nightmare was better than the ones that had been visiting her recently, always about her father, how he’d died, how she’d failed him. Just thinking about it made her stomach cramp with guilt, and she did her best to banish the thought and continue with her routine.
Just to make sure her limbs were all in working order, she began her stretches, starting with touching her toes, then moving on to stretching out her arms, her shoulders, her back. Once she had properly limbered herself up, she made her bed, because that was how she had been brought up. When you wake up, you make the bed, her father had told her. That makes it a habit instead of a chore.
Her legs itched to run, and she decided she’d give the CES a try before going up to breakfast. She glanced at the clock – local time, whatever that was, had it as quarter to five in the morning. Definitely not time for breakfast, then. She shrugged at it – good amount of time for a run, maybe she could even hit the gym – and changed into some workout attire. Maybe she’d meet up with a couple of the other early birds on this boat. She knew there had to be some; this place attracted criminals of the worst order, sure, and some of the wardens would not have been her first pick in a dodgeball game, let alone for overseeing a boat full of bad guys, but there were some military types, and she always felt better around them. They reminded her in some strange way of her dad.
She set off towards the CES at a light jog to warm up. It took her very little time to reach it; the hallways were practically deserted at this early hour and she didn’t feel compelled to chat with anyone she saw. She opened the CES without picking a particular setting, willing to let it surprise her. What she saw made her smile. Overcast, green plains, cool, slightly humid air.
The Barge itself may not have done a good job of impersonating the English climate, but the CES more than made up for it.
She took a deep breath, filling her muscles with oxygen, and began to run.
Special Notes: Jo, in her own words:
“How can I do that? How can I fire thirty rounds at a moving target while I'm in motion at the same time, and be certain each of my shots will hit? How can I be a better shot than Steinberg? How is it that I'll be in the middle of a firefight and know exactly where to move, how to do it, how to survive unscathed? How is it that when I do get hit, when I am injured, I seem to recover in half the time it would take others around me?
“And why, Mister Carrington? Why is it that when I choose to kill, I do it as easily and effortlessly as breathing?”—Perfect Dark: Initial Vector, Greg Rucka, pg 197
