GARDEN CITY — The abrupt closure of the Carrington Institute has forced leading agent Joanna “Perfect” Dark to accept a role with the global task force Overwatch.
“I’m not sure what happened,” Dark tells Hard Drive. “It seemed like my next operation was proceeding as normal, but then I was informed by mission control that I wasn’t making ‘lines go up’ quickly enough. Now I’ve got to go do whatever the hell it is Overwatch does. I mean, they’ve got a mission, I know that much, but it seems like all they do over there is shoot at each other by day and star in boutique pornography by night. That can’t be all it is, can it?”
The Carrington Institute, founded by noted lunatic Daniel Carrington, was a private military corporation devoted to undercover operations and hanging out with aliens. Dark, a former bail bondswoman, was its lead agent, specializing in undercover operations.
Despite Carrington’s extensive catalog of espionage technology and its role in the successful resolution of an interstellar war, the company had been in a self-described “lull” for over two decades. Plans to get back on the world stage with the Garden City operation were scuttled by a sudden shareholder revolt on Wednesday that ended with the Institute’s closure.
“We simply expect a greater return on our investment than what we were likely to get out of Carrington,” the board of directors said in a press release. “We expect constant meteoric growth in all avenues forever, and in this bizarre magical bullshit machine we call an economy, it was more profitable to kill the Carrington Institute than let it continue to exist. This is a very cool and normal system.”
This leaves many of the Institute’s researchers and operatives looking for work, which has proven challenging in the current environment.
“My problem is that once you’ve got a Grey alien as a sidekick, you’re too silly for a lot of places,” Dark says. “The ICA turned me down, which stung, but what truly rankled me was when I washed out at the BSAA. I’m sorry that I don’t take steroids or get my teammates killed. I didn’t think I needed those qualifications in order to shoot zombies.”
At press time, the first person to announce a port of Joanna Dark’s character model to Source Filmmaker had been found dead under mysterious yet explicable circumstances.
