I think of the night in the park, it was getting dark and we stayed up for hours

⏵ player information
name and pronouns: Iddy; she/her/hers
age: 34
contact: Ihdreniel / banerries @ discord

⏵ character information
name: Sameen Shaw
canon: Person of Interest
age: 32
canon point: near the end of 5x13, "return 0" - after Samaritan is defeated, but before she finds out that the Machine survived
history: Wiki, player-written history | Shaw is a soldier at heart, and someone who has spent a long and eclectic career trying to do good (and sometimes even succeeding!). With her most recent job seemingly over and done with and her teammates either dead or MIA, she is currently alone and without purpose.
abilities:

She's a baseline human with no superpowers, but she's a well-trained fighter with plenty of experience and skill in both firearms and hand-to-hand combat, and she has familiarity with various other military-related skills such as intelligence and counter-intelligence work, in-field coordination, proper radio communication procedure, etc. She's also a medical doctor with a specialty in emergency medicine, though she is non-practicing.

personality:

She's strongly motivated to do good, despite her limitations. Shaw comes packaged with little to no natural empathy and muted to nonexistent emotional responses, and self-diagnosed herself with a personality disorder when she was quite young. It would've been easy for her to use this an excuse to be a monster, but she doesn't: because even though she may not process emotions the way that others do, she's been taught the importance of protecting others, and it's a concept that she's deeply internalized. Her first inclination was to become a doctor, because she figured that her emotional detachment would keep her level-headed during a crisis: but while she was right about that, it also made her interact poorly with patients, an issue that eventually got her kicked out of her residency program. Being told that she wasn't fit to save people in the traditional way led her to join the military, and though at one point she phrases the motivation behind this as being better at killing people than fixing them, it says something that her new career was about protecting and defending: she saw herself as continuing to help people, albeit in a very different way. Shaw doesn't always stick the landing in terms of doing good, sometimes because she's too quick to take orders from the wrong people and sometimes because other parts of her get in the way - but it's a consistently strong motivator for her, and she's always trying.

She's loyal to her allies and dedicated to her causes. Shaw feels duty and responsibility strongly, to the point that she was willing to keep working for a government agency that betrayed her: while she was furious about it, she still believed in their overall goal, and she saw that as more important than anything they'd done to her personally. This type of big-picture thinking comes naturally to her, and is another reason why she thrived in an environment where she was required to sacrifice the lives of a few in order to protect the many: and though she comes around to the idea that a more narrow focus can also be worthwhile, it never comes as easily to her. Still, Shaw is capable of caring about individuals, even if it looks differently on her than on others. Her love language is very much acts of service, and treachery for any reason is anathema to her.

She's resilient. The torture she underwent flayed at her to the point that she's genuinely vulnerable in its aftermath, and she's mourning her missing teammates in her own subdued way - but nevertheless, she's largely able to do what she needs to do, and while she may sometimes briefly falter, she never falls apart. It's a trait born not just of strength, but also of the wall between her and what emotions she does have: she's an amazing compartmentalizer, because her physiology automatically does it for her. For better or for worse, Shaw is someone who will always keep on trucking.

Doing good matters to her, but being nice doesn't. Shaw isn't a misanthrope, but she's also not a particularly social person. At best, she's impatient and insensitive; at worst, she's rude and unfriendly. Even with allies, she can be a difficult person to deal with, and she tends not to be well-liked on an interpersonal level. People who "get" her tend to have a better time, but on the whole, she doesn't make it easy.

She's prone to black and white thinking. Often when she's presented with a situation of moral complexity or ambiguity, Shaw will attempt to flatten it out into something more straightforward - and if she can't do that, she gets grumpy about it. Doing good is important to her, but she knows where her strengths lie, and it's not in waxing poetic about the intricacies of the human condition: as far as she's concerned, her job is to be the muscle, and she's most content when she has a gun in her hands and a clear-cut idea of who she is and isn't supposed to shoot with it. This isn't a shortcoming that she tries to compensate for, nor is it born of naiveté: it is in many ways an active choice, and one that she doesn't always make. She's shown to be capable of acknowledging that people aren't always strictly bad or good; she can also admit that the problem-solving-via-killing-the-perps methodology of her government work wasn't always the best option. She even occasionally gripes at other people for flattening out complexities that she thinks are important. These times when she chooses to recognize the intricacies of a situation only serve to highlight that it's not that she's incapable of seeing in shades of grey - it's that she often simply doesn't bother to.

samples: one, two

Placeholder

Once upon a time in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, a brilliant government software engineer called Harold Finch (an alias) created a artificial intelligence (hereafter known simply as "the Machine") that passively monitored the entire country using every means available to it: cellular network activity, internet activity, public and private security cameras, the works. Its purpose was to algorithmically sift through all the data it collected, and alert officials to people who were in the process of planning violent crimes. The government was only interested in future acts of terror and other matters of national security, deeming small-scale violent crimes irrelevant and unworthy of intervention; Finch, however, disagreed, and together with an on-the-run ex-CIA agent called John Reese (also an alias), he began secretly working to prevent as much violent crime as possible in his home city of New York. Due to the covert nature of this little side project, as well as the safeguards put in place to protect against human abuse of the Machine's data, their resources are limited: the Machine is able to provide them only with the social security number(s) of one or more of the people involved in an upcoming incident, without any other information or context. From there, it's up to them to stalk, surveil, determine whether the "person of interest" they've been given is a potential perpetrator or a potential victim, and ultimately decide how to act.

Enter Sameen Shaw (possibly an alias???). The daughter of an Iranian academic and an American soldier, Shaw grew up a military brat, spending her childhood moving around from base to base both in the US and abroad. When she was ten, she was in a gnarly car accident with her father, who was killed on impact. Shaw herself was pulled out of the burning wreck by an emergency crew, who immediately noted that her demeanor seemed off: she was calm rather than panicked, and though she repeatedly asked after her father and told the EMTs that they should be helping him instead of her, she barely reacted when she was told that he'd died, instead blankly taking in the news and then asking for something to eat.

As an adult, Shaw went to medical school, after which she was kicked out of her residency program for her absolutely horrendous bedside manner and inability to sensitively deal with patients' families. She then changed tack and joined first the Marine Corps, then the USAISA. While with the ISA, she unknowingly works in service of the Machine: she's just a field operative taking orders, not nearly high enough in rank to know where the intel she acts on is coming from (at one point she says she assumes that it's tortured out of enemy agents), but she is in fact one of those sent to eliminate people that the Machine identifies as posing a threat to national security. Her partner, Michael Cole, begins to suspect that one of their previous targets had been an innocent man that the government had framed. Shaw, loyal to the government and trusting in its good intentions, dismisses his concerns (though, loyal to Cole as well, she keeps his privately-expressed doubts to herself). When Cole begins to investigate the matter independently, the ISA decides to take both him and Shaw out, framing them for terrorist activities themselves; in the resulting battle with their fellow agents, Cole is killed, but Shaw escapes.

Knowing now that Cole had been right all along, Shaw does her best to follow the threads of his investigation, though her motivations are less about exposing the truth and more about finding whoever in upper management had wanted her partner dead. Along the way, she ends up being kidnapped by black-hat hacker and assassin-for-hire Samantha Groves (hereafter known as "Root", her online alias and preferred name). Root has learned about the Machine due to her hacking activities, and is completely enamored with it; recognizing it as a complex being of artificial intelligence rather than a mere computer program, she believes that it shouldn't be used as a tool by the government or anyone else, but should instead be set free to act on its own "perfect, rational" free will. Believing that Shaw, as a pawn of the Machine, can lead her to people who know where the Machine's servers are kept, she threatens to torture the information out of her. Before she can get any damage in, however, Shaw's ISA pursuants show up to take her out... and so does Reese, to help her get away.

Once they've successfully escaped both Root and the ISA, Reese and Finch explain the bare bones of what they do to Shaw, telling her that they'd gotten both her and Cole's SSNs and had tried to save them. What's more, they offer her the opportunity to go off the grid and work with them. Shaw refuses, preferring instead to continue on with her personal quest; Reese and Finch warn her that that plan will likely only result in her death, and she essentially says that as long as she can get to Cole's killer, it doesn't matter what happens to her. She manages to score herself a face-to-face encounter with ISA middle management (upper management still being above her paygrade), during which she's matter-of-factly told that the man that Cole had been investigating had indeed been both framed and eliminated because he'd gotten too close to the truth about the nature of the government's anti-terrorism program. Per the government's logic, keeping the inner workings of the program secret from the public, and even secret from people like Shaw and Cole, is necessary to its survival; the more people know about them, the harder it would be for them to operate effectively, and "no one life is above the safety of millions of Americans". Shaw accepts this rationale, and hands over all of Cole's research that she'd been able to dig up, letting the ISA choose what to do with it. She's praised as a good soldier, and told that she made the right choice by deciding to protect the program over avenging her friend. "A good soldier does both," says Shaw, before pulling out her gun and killing her former handler. Just because the government rationale makes sense to her doesn't mean she isn't angry that her boss - someone that she and Cole should have been able to trust and rely on - had agreed to eliminate them as a first resort. At first, it looks like the ISA is going to accept this as her due and let her walk, but once she believes she's home free and lowers her guard a little, they come after her again. An agent injects her with something, causing EMTs at the scene to declare her an overdose case and take her away. In the end, it turns out the ambulance driver (who manages to save her) is allied with Finch and Reese, and he takes her to them at their request; the offer to work together is again made, and while Shaw still doesn't take them up on it, this time she does allow Finch to give her his phone number.

Shaw is now assumed dead by the government, and she and Cole are still publicly considered to be the terrorists that they were framed as, something that angers her; she wants very much to at least tell Cole's parents the truth about his death, but knows that she can't, because that would put their lives in danger too. When Finch anonymously forges and then leaks documents that suggest that Cole was not a terrorist, but rather a CIA agent working undercover in a terrorist cell, Shaw deduces that he was responsible and shows up in person to thank him. While at his office, she notices a picture of Root pinned up on a bulletin board (Reese and Finch have been having their own chaotic run-ins with her), and declares that she's decided on a new job for herself: hunting down the dangerous Machine-obsessed criminal who'd kidnapped her. This keeps her busy for a bit, and eventually leads her to cross paths with Reese and Finch again, as Root kidnaps Finch in another one of her attempts to find the Machine's servers. Reese and Shaw end up working together to rescue Finch and capture Root, and Reese finally fully clues Shaw in on the Machine's nature and origins. Finch is successfully saved, and Root is committed to a psychiatric hospital (where, unbeknownst to the others, the Machine begins to communicate with her via the hallway payphone, having decided that it quite likes her, believes she has the potential to be better than she is, and wants to keep in contact). It's at this point that Shaw finally agrees to work with Finch and Reese on a more consistent basis.

This new partnership starts out pretty rocky. Finch in particular starts to rethink the arrangement: Shaw refuses to carry a phone off the job, making it difficult for the others to get into contact with her when she's needed, and her methods in crime-stopping are far more violent than the normally-pacifistic Finch would like. Still, she settles in with the duo and their allies, becoming particularly close with Reese (who she works very well with in the field), Jocelyn Carter (an NYPD cop fighting against mob-allied corruption in her department), and Bear (Finch's dog). When the Machine helps Root escape from the psychiatric hospital, Shaw is her first stop: Root tases her, drugs her, and abducts her, explaining that she needs her help. The Machine, Root says, has personally tasked her with saving someone; she doesn't know much beyond that and the Machine is only giving her her instructions one step at a time, but recruiting Shaw had been a step in that process (interpreting "recruit" as "fucking kidnap" had been Root's own personal decision, but she cheerfully explains to Shaw that she'd figured that she wouldn't have come willingly if she'd simply asked). Shaw is decidedly unenthused with all of this, but reluctantly agrees to help, and she and Root end up having a strange, but surprisingly effective, working relationship. Root is unabashedly enthusiastic and thrilled to be doing this with Shaw, who she clearly admires and is fascinated by; Shaw, on the flip side, mostly just grits her teeth through the whole thing, and when they successfully get their target out of harm's way, she ends the caper by unceremoniously knocking Root out so that Reese and Finch can recapture her.

Reluctantly recognizing that the Machine and Root are now inexorably intertwined (the Machine has gone so far as to declare Root its "analog interface" between it and the rest of the world), the team keeps Root captive in their headquarters, where they can keep an eye on her and mitigate the damage that she causes. As time goes on, she evolves from prisoner to reluctant (on the team's end) consultant on missions to, finally, full-fledged teammate. Her feelings towards Shaw also evolve, going from admiration of her skills to something deeper. Root, who has always professed to feeling like computers make more sense than people, sees Shaw's abnormal emotional responses and unusual way of seeing the world not as a bug, but rather as a feature, something that makes her unique: in other words, the things about Shaw that repel, upset, or disappoint other people are the exact things that appeal to Root. Shaw, for her part, gradually softens towards Root: she increasingly plays along with Root's flirty banter, though she still always rebuffs Root's more serious expressions of feeling, and ducks out of conversations that seem like they might be leading up to anything confession-like. While all this is going on, the team continues to undertake missions together and grows closer as a result, to the extent that they are all deeply affected when Carter dies in the line of duty (Shaw expresses her feelings by leaving Carter's funeral early to brutalize and scream at people she thinks can lead her to her killer).

During this time, the biggest threat that they face is working to prevent the activation of Samaritan, a former government artificial intelligence program that was ultimately abandoned in favor of the Machine. Decima Technologies, a secretive private tech company, has gained access to it, and plans to use it to improve the world via total control. Unlike the Machine, it was built with no external safeguards or sense of internal morality, allowing it to be used - or allowing it to use itself - for essentially anything that's deemed to be in the interests of overarching public safety, regardless of the potential for abuse or collateral damage. Ultimately, all efforts to prevent Samaritan's activation are unsuccessful; the program is brought online by Decima, and the team finds themselves public enemy number one. The Machine assigns them all emergency aliases and cover stories, and they scatter off to their new identities, lying low to give themselves a chance to regroup and strategize. Shaw becomes Sameen Grey, a makeup sales associate by day and a freelance thief by night (yes, really) - but after she's recognized on the job by a Decima agent, she has to make a quick escape, with Root swinging by to scoop her up. Her cover blown, she's forced to stay hidden, hunkered down in their new headquarters - a position that she hates even more than she'd hated working in retail, because it means that when her people are in danger, she's powerless to help them. At one point, she attempts to go rogue when Reese gets into trouble, perfectly willing to risk her own safety to go to his aid; the only thing that stops her is Root literally sedating her and handcuffing her to a bench. As the frustration of both not being able to protect her team and being left out of the action grows, Shaw decides that she can't sit tight anymore, and leaves the hideout to get back to work. Though this of course worries and frustrates the rest of the team, she does manage to find them all in a tight spot and help them out. At first, it looks like they're all going to escape, but then they end up stuck in a stopped elevator that needs an outside override button to be pressed before it'll start up again. Knowing that Decima agents are hot on their tail and that they only have seconds to act, Shaw moves to duck out of the elevator to get to the button and give the others at least a chance at escape. Root attempts to stop her, but Shaw grabs her, distracts her with a kiss, and then shoves her back into the elevator. She gets to the button and the elevator starts to rise just at the moment that the Decima folks arrive, gunning Shaw down and taking her into their custody.

The next eleven months of Shaw's life are spent undergoing mental torture, largely focused around unreality and destabilization of self. Decima's goal is to find the rest of the team, as well as the location of the Machine's servers; to accomplish this, they insert Shaw into an unending series of hyper-realistic VR simulations, all designed to make her think that she has escaped captivity. Their hope is that she will, in some form or another, give them clues to the information that they're seeking: by going to the team's secret headquarters, by dialing a secret contact number, by using a secret alias. They also engineer simulations that are meant to make her believe that she has been brainwashed into being a double agent, as well as placing her in situations that lead her to doubt her teammates' loyalty to her, doubt her place on the team, and even harm her teammates. Shaw is, after all, still a good soldier: if they can just break her of her devotion to her current allies, she could be an invaluable tool for Decima.

Within the simulations, Decima creates VR approximates of her teammates that are based on Samaritan's knowledge of them as well as what they can glean from Shaw's behavior, hoping that this will convince her that what she's experiencing is real and lead her to let her guard down. In one sample simulation that we see onscreen, Shaw escapes, lures the team to her, and has them remove a control chip that Decima has planted in her. Root then takes her home, tucking her into bed and taking tender care of her. The two end up having passionate sex, then cuddly pillow talk, and though Shaw cautiously begins to allow herself to open up a little, she still doesn't let herself talk about anything that Decima is looking for. As time in this particular simulation goes on, Shaw accepts that she is back in reality, but begins to worry that she's still under Samaritan's control somehow, or that Decima has made her into a sleeper agent without her knowledge. This fear is exacerbated by her overhearing Reese and Root arguing about whether Decima might have turned her, as well as by an encounter with a Decima agent who implies that they're right and that she is an unwitting Decima pawn. Ultimately, the simulation culminates in her shooting Reese during a moment of crisis, then going to get Root, taking her to a children's playground. Shaw tells Root that whenever Decima's torture became too awful to handle, she'd retreat to a "safe place" in her mind, where they'd sit in a playground together (this is also a reference to a strong childhood memory of hers, in which she attempted to brute-force train herself out of motion sickness by spinning on a playground roundabout for hours on end, refusing to give up on her goal no matter how many times she threw up). She tells Root that she, with the unconditional love and acceptance that she provides, is her safe place, but that she can't control or trust herself anymore. And then Shaw shoots herself in the head, preferring death over being a danger to her loved ones. As the simulation ends, we find out that this was attempt number 6,741, and that an untold number of simulations have ultimately ended with Shaw deciding to take her own life under similar circumstances. She ends up undergoing 312 more before Decima finally decides to focus more on other tactics.

Though the escape-based simulations end, the torture and mind games continue, particularly since undergoing over 7,000 simulations over the course of approximately nine months has left Shaw completely unable to tell whether or not she's in a simulation or in reality at any given time. Decima agents try to logic her around to their side, and they introduce her to Samaritan in hopes that hearing directly from their AI will warm her up to it. They also use her to kill at least one person, a scientist that Samaritan has identified as a potential threat; she does so easily, believing that nothing is real and so the death doesn't matter. At one point, she steals a syringe and plans to inject herself in the eye, with the goal of either ending yet another simulation or killing herself in reality and ending the torture once and for all - she's at the point where she doesn't much care which. Instead, something else happens: Root, who has been relentlessly searching for her, manages to use radio static to pulse out a message in Morse Code, which the Machine is able to broadcast into all Decima facilities... including the one where Shaw is being held. Shaw deciphers the message as "4-A-F", or "four-alarm fire", a reference to one of the last things she'd said to Root before her capture ("You and me [in a relationship] together would be like a four-alarm fire in an oil refinery"). Realizing who is trying to reach out to her, she has a change of heart and decides to keep fighting after all - simulation or no simulation, torture or no torture. Not long after, she manages a successful escape - a real one this time. Still, not trusting her own reality and believing herself to be a potential danger to others, she doesn't want to risk making contact with the team. Instead, she decides to dedicate herself to wiping out as much as much of Decima as she can manage on her own. Even if nothing around her is real, she reasons, fighting back will still feel satisfying in the moment.

A week after her initial escape, this mission has taken her back to New York, where she runs into Root on the job while the two of them are unknowingly pursuing the same quarry. Root is overjoyed; Shaw, by contrast, is guarded, and states bluntly that she is not safe to be around. She explains the simulations to Root, admits that she'd been driven to kill her teammates in many of them, and says that Root was the only person she could never bring herself to kill under any circumstances, always choosing to kill herself instead whenever things got to that point. She prepares to do so again now, pointing her gun at her own head, when Root does something she'd never done in a simulation before: she points a gun at her own head, telling Shaw that maybe Shaw can't live with her, but she can't live without Shaw, and so if Shaw is going to shoot herself then she's going to do the same. And while this little display of suicide chicken isn't enough to convince Shaw that what she's experiencing is real, it does get her to lower her gun.

Shaw reunites with the rest of the team, then takes another week off to rest, apparently seeing no one but Root during this period - and though she's clearly struggling ("It's going to take some time," Root says, when Finch asks her how Shaw is doing), she's also clearly eager to jump back into the action. On her first day back on the job, Shaw, Finch, and Root are caught in an ambush, and Shaw convinces an extremely reluctant Root to flee with Finch (the only nonfighter on the team), protecting him while Shaw holds off their attackers. Against incredible odds, Shaw manages to kill all of them, and is scooped up by Reese and Lionel Fusco (another NYPD cop and frequent ally). Elsewhere, however, a Decima assassin spots Root and Finch's getaway car and goes after them, leading Root to take a bullet for Finch. She's taken to the hospital in critical condition, and ends up dying from her injuries. Reese and Fusco show up to watch her body be buried and to pay their respects, but Shaw skips out on that entirely. She goes to a playground instead, where she stands on a roundabout and lets a group of kids spin her around and around and around.

Afterwards, Reese comes to track Shaw down, telling her that they still need her in this fight. Shaw, desperate to believe that Root isn't really dead, declares that "this simulation sucks" and attempts to reboot her current reality by staring directly into a security camera and taunting Decima to come get her. Instead, a car rolls up and a man gets out, handing her papers and identification for a cover identity related to an upcoming mission. Though she insists that she no longer sees the point of working to save people, she does want to destroy Decima and Samaritan, and she reluctantly agrees to come back to the team so that she can help see this done - and because, as she tells Reese, she's "gotta kill time somehow". Not too long after this decision, during an awkward attempt to visit Root's grave and gain some sort of closure with regards to her death (it doesn't go well), the Machine makes direct contact with Shaw for the first time, speaking into her earpiece using Root's voice. After this, Shaw becomes the de facto analog interface in Root's stead - never as dogmatic or enthusiastic as Root had been, but nevertheless conversing regularly with the Machine, and doing her best to do its bidding. The Machine is also able to help give her the closure that she couldn't find on her own, reassuring her that Root had not only loved her, but had loved her as she was, and that all the parts of herself that she sees as defective were the very things that Root had loved the most.

In the chaos surrounding their final stand and their successful takedown of Samaritan, the Machine ends up ends up being collateral damage of a computer virus. Shaw loses track of both Finch and Reese, and she ultimately never finds out what happened to them - and though she hopes that they both survived and will be able to get in touch eventually, she knows that it's likely that she'll never know for sure. As in the aftermath of Cole's death, she finds herself once again the last woman standing: alive and able to move forward, but unmoored and without purpose, and still very much grieving her losses. After taking some time to decompress, she makes contact with Fusco, both to check in with him and also to take charge of Harold's dog Bear, who she's decided to adopt. As she walks away from her meeting with Fusco, Bear alongside her, a nearby payphone starts to ring - and, recognizing one of the Machine's old go-to contact methods, Shaw picks up. The audience isn't privy to what she hears on the other end of the line, but based on the small but satisfied smile on her face as well as the voiceover narration ("And maybe this isn't the end at all"), the implication seems to be that the Machine has survived in some form or another, and is reaching out to her surviving agent so that they can regroup and get back to work. This is the last scene of the entire show, and will also be Shaw's canonpoint.

OUT OF CHARACTER:



Name/Handle: Iddy
Contact: Ihdreniel / banerries @ Discord
Other characters: N/A
Reserve: N/A
Referral: Not an official referral, but Relika who plays Lance is on my timeline, and she always makes the game sound fun when she plurks about it!

IN-CHARACTER:

Character name: Sameen Shaw
Character journal: cactusy
Series name: Person of Interest
Canon notes: Near the end of 5x13, "return 0" - after Samaritan is defeated, but before she finds out that the Machine survived
Species: Human
Age: 32

Arrival Condition: Physically, completely healthy; mentally, coming out from under some pretty extensive psychological trauma

History:
cw: gaslighting & psychological torture, struggles with unreality

→ The daughter of an Iranian academic and an American soldier, Shaw grew up a military brat, spending her childhood moving around from base to base both in the US and abroad.

→ As an adult, Shaw went to medical school, after which she was kicked out of her residency program for her absolutely horrendous bedside manner and inability to sensitively deal with patients' families. She then changed tack and joined first the Marine Corps, then finally the USAISA. While with the ISA, she works as a field operative, performing assassinations of targets that the government deems a threat to national security.

→ Shaw's ISA partner, Michael Cole, begins to doubt the methods and intentions of their higher-ups, and starts preparing to blow the whistle on them; when the ISA discovers this, they decide to take both him and Shaw out, framing them for terrorist activities. In the resulting battle with their fellow agents, Cole is killed, but Shaw escapes. Though she herself remains a staunch supporter of the ISA's goals, she feels betrayed on behalf of both herself as well as her partner, who she believes could have been talked down and redirected. To avenge Cole's death, she tracks down and assassinates their former handler, before ultimately being taken out via poisoning by her former trainer/mentor. EMTs declare her dead at the scene, but one who was at least vaguely aware of what was going on manages to inject her with atropine and smuggle her out of there, ultimately saving her life.

→ Now presumed dead, and after having been betrayed by the ISA twice over, Shaw nevertheless continues to try to continue her old work as best as she can - albeit all on her own, with limited resources and firepower. Her vigilantism earns her the attention of John Reese and Harold Finch, two men who, with the help of an artificial superintelligence they call the Machine, work on their own to prevent small-scale violent crime in and around New York City. Shaw is at first extremely skeptical of their pitch: she's used to protecting the platonic idea of Society^TM by preventing things like wars, illegal nuclear arms sales, and massive terrorist attacks, and she struggles with the idea that working to save a few individual lives here and there could be a valuable use of her time. At first, she works with them only occasionally, collaborating on a few jobs but never committing herself to the team or the cause; eventually, though, she begins to see the value of their work, and of being a part of a team again for the first time since Cole's death.

→ As stated, the original team members that Shaw joins up with are Harold Finch, a brilliant computer programmer who created the Machine, and John Reese, an ex-CIA operative who left government service under circumstances not so dissimilar to Shaw's. In time, they're joined by Root (née Samantha Groves, though she much prefers to go by her online alias), a computer hacker and former assassin-for-hire who starts out as an enemy to the group, then slowly becomes an ally due to the close bond she forms with the Machine. Beyond the core team, they occasionally have help from trusted outside sources, most notably NYPD cops Jocelyn Carter and Lionel Fusco. Within the core team, Shaw grows particularly close to both John and Root (the latter of whom she starts hooking up with fairly early on - though while Root quickly begins to develop serious feelings, Shaw insists on keeping things strictly casual).

→ The biggest threat that the team faces ends up being the activation of Samaritan, another artificial intelligence program. Decima Technologies, a secretive private tech company, has gained access to it, and plans to use it to improve the world via total control. Unlike the Machine, it was built with no external safeguards or sense of internal morality, allowing it to be used - or allowing it to use itself - for essentially anything that's deemed to be in the interests of overarching public safety, regardless of the potential for abuse or collateral damage. Ultimately, all their efforts to prevent Samaritan's activation are unsuccessful; the program is brought online by Decima, and the team finds themselves public enemy number one. The Machine assigns them all emergency aliases and cover stories, and they scatter off to their new identities, lying low to give themselves a chance to regroup and strategize.

→ Shaw's cover is eventually blown, and she's forced to say off the streets to avoid being killed, hunkering down and hiding in the team's secret headquarters - a position that she hates, because it means that when her people are in danger, she's powerless to help them. As the frustration of both not being able to protect her team and being left out of the action grows, Shaw decides that she can't sit tight anymore, and leaves the hideout to get back to work. Though this of course worries and frustrates the rest of the team, she does manage to find them all in a tight spot and help them out; unfortunately, this particular caper ends with Shaw being gunned down by Decima. Though most of the rest of her team assumes that she's dead, she in fact survives, and is held captive in a Decima facility.

→ The next eleven months of Shaw's life are spent undergoing mental torture, largely focused around unreality and destabilization of self. Decima's goal is to find the rest of the team, as well as the location of the Machine's servers; to accomplish this, they insert Shaw into an unending series of hyper-realistic VR simulations, all designed to make her think that she has escaped captivity. Their hope is that she will, in some form or another, give them clues to the information that they're seeking: by going to the team's secret headquarters, by dialing a secret contact number, by using a secret alias, etcetera. They also engineer simulations that are meant to make her believe that she has been brainwashed into being a double agent, as well as placing her in situations that lead her to doubt her teammates' loyalty to her, doubt her place on the team, and even harm her teammates. Shaw is, after all, still a good soldier: if they can just break her of her devotion to her current allies, she could be an invaluable tool for Decima. In total, she ends up undergoing over 7,000 simulations before she finally manages to escape for real, though even then she remains unsure of whether or not this is just another simulation.

→ Not trusting her own reality and believing herself to be a potential danger to others, Shaw decides not to risk making contact with the team after her escape; instead, she decides to dedicate herself to wiping out as much as much of Decima as she can manage on her own. Even if nothing around her is real, she reasons, fighting back will still feel satisfying in the moment. A week after her initial escape, this mission takes her back to New York, where she runs into Root on the job while the two of them are unknowingly pursuing the same quarry. It takes some doing, but Root is determined not to let Shaw just take off into the ether again, and Shaw - who spent her time in captivity slowly coming to terms with the fact that she's fallen for Root just as hard as Root has fallen for her - ultimately agrees to stay.

→ Shaw reunites with the rest of the team, then takes another week off to rest, apparently seeing no one but Root during this period - and though she's clearly struggling, she's also clearly eager to jump back into the action. On her first day back on the job, Shaw, Finch, and Root are caught in an ambush, and Shaw convinces an extremely reluctant Root to flee with Finch (the only nonfighter on the team), protecting him while Shaw holds off their attackers. Unfortunately, a Decima assassin spots Root and Finch's getaway car and goes after them, leading Root to take a bullet for Finch. She's taken to the hospital in critical condition, and ends up dying from her injuries. Reese and Fusco show up to watch her body be buried and to pay their respects, but Shaw skips out on that entirely, unable to face it.

→ Afterwards, Reese comes to track down Shaw, who is in the process of shutting down due to grief that she can't properly process, as well as still struggling with feelings of unreality. Though she insists that she no longer sees the point of working to save people, she does want to destroy Decima and Samaritan, and she agrees to come back to the team so that she can help see this done.

→ In the chaos surrounding their final stand and their successful takedown of Samaritan, the Machine ends up ends up being collateral damage of a computer virus. Shaw loses track of both Finch and Reese, and she ultimately never finds out what happened to them - and though she hopes that they both survived and will be able to get in touch eventually, she knows that it's likely that she'll never know for sure. As in the aftermath of Cole's death, she finds herself once again the last woman standing: alive and able to move forward, but unmoored and without purpose, and still very much grieving her losses. It's at this point that she'll be yoinked into the game setting.

She also has a wiki page here!

Personality:
She is strongly motivated to do good, despite her own limitations. Shaw comes packaged with little to no natural empathy and muted to nonexistent emotional responses, self-diagnosed herself with a not-otherwise-specified personality disorder while she was in medical school, and flippantly calls herself a sociopath more than once. By her own admission, she doesn't care about people by default, and she can do harm - and even kill - without feeling any way in particular about it. It would have been easy for her to use all this an excuse to be an all-out monster, but she doesn't: because even though she may not feel or process emotions in the way that most people do, she was taught since childhood about the importance of helping and protecting others, and it's a concept that she's internalized deeply. As an adult, her first inclination was to become a doctor specializing in emergency medicine, because she figured that her emotional detachment would be an asset that would allow her to remain calm and level-headed during a crisis: but while she was right about that, it also made her interact poorly with patients and their families, an issue that eventually got her kicked out of her residency program. Being told that she wasn't fit to save people in the traditional way led her to change tack and join up with the military instead, and though at one point she phrases the motivation behind this move as "I was better at killing people than fixing them", it still says something that her new career track was (at least ostensibly) about protecting and defending: she saw herself as continuing to help people, albeit in a very different way. Even when she was recruited by the ISA to perform assassinations, the stated goal of her mission was always to act in the interest of public safety, targeting "bad guys" so that "innocent people" would be kept safe. Shaw doesn't always stick the landing in terms of doing good, sometimes because she's too quick to take orders from the wrong people and sometimes because, as with her medical residency, other parts of her get in the way - but regardless, it's a consistently strong motivator for her, and she's always trying.

Doing good matters a lot to her, but being nice doesn't. Shaw isn't a misanthrope, but she's also not a particularly social person, and she tends to avoid casual smalltalk and "pointless" social interaction with those she's not already invested in to some degree (the occasional banter with enemies aside). At best, she's impatient, blunt, and insensitive (though she will try to temper that last one in situations where it might genuinely hurt someone who she feels doesn't deserve it); at worst, she's downright rude and unfriendly. Even with allies - even with allies who she likes - she can be a difficult person to deal with, and she tends not to be well-liked on an interpersonal level. People who "get" her and read her well tend to have a much better time (particularly since feeling understood makes it easier for her to relax around them), but on the whole, she doesn't make it easy.

She is unendingly loyal to her allies and unflinchingly dedicated to her causes. Shaw feels duty and responsibility strongly, to the point that she was fully prepared to keep supporting the ISA even after they betrayed her because she still believed in their overall goal. This type of big-picture thinking comes naturally to her, which is another reason why she thrived in an environment where she was required to sacrifice the lives of a few in order to protect the many: and though over the course of the series, she slowly comes around to the idea that a more narrow focus can be worthwhile too, it never comes anywhere near as easily to her. Still, Shaw is capable of coming to care about individual people, even if it looks differently on her than on others. She accepted the news of her father's death calmly and detachedly even as a small child, but she followed his footsteps into the Marine Corps, and honored his memory by getting a copy of one of his tattoos on her own arm. When her ISA partner was assassinated, she remained loyal to the organization that had killed him, but she also kept an eye on his family, and took revenge on the man who had given the kill order. When her friend Jocelyn Carter was murdered, she made only a cursory appearance at her funeral, but spent days tirelessly tracking down her killer. When her lover Root died, she immediately redirected to prioritizing her surviving teammates, but spent the next several weeks in a haze of dissociative numbness. When someone needed to stay behind and operate an elevator from the outside so that the rest of her team inside it could escape, Shaw didn't hesitate before volunteering herself. And when she was kidnapped by the enemy and tortured relentlessly for nearly a full year, she never once considered switching sides or giving up information about her team, even though the enemy organization was openly and genuinely willing to give her a place among their ranks if she did. Treachery for any reason, including self-preservation, is anathema to her.

She's prone to black and white thinking, and prefers her own very particular brand of moral simplicity. Often when she's presented with a situation of moral complexity or ambiguity, Shaw will attempt to flatten it out into something more straightforward - and if she can't do that (or if the people she's working with won't let her do that, as is more and more common now that she's no longer an isn't-paid-to-ask-questions government assassin), she gets grumpy about it. Doing good is important to her, but she knows where her strengths lie, and it's not in waxing poetic about the intricacies of the human condition: she'll let other people worry about that. Her job, as far as she's concerned, is to be the muscle, not the philosopher, and she's most content when she has a gun in her hands and a clear-cut idea of who she is and isn't supposed to shoot with it. This isn't a shortcoming that she tries to compensate for, nor is it born of naiveté or lack of experience with the real world: it is in many ways an active choice, and one that she doesn't always make. Throughout the course of the series, we see her acknowledging that people aren't always strictly bad or good, and that someone's goodness/badness levels can fluctuate over time depending on their choices (her evolving dynamic with Root is a good example of this, as are her interactions with some of the team's other marks); we also see her admit more than once that the problem-solving-via-killing-the-perps methodology of her ISA work probably wasn't always the best or only option. We even occasionally see her griping at other people for flattening out complexities that she thinks are important (at one point she gets annoyed at Fusco for disparaging the work of the United Nations and seemingly being dismissive of cultural differences). These times when she chooses to recognize the intricacies relevant to a situation only serve to highlight that it's not that she's incapable of seeing in shades of grey - it's that she often simply doesn't bother to.

She is resilient. The torture she underwent flayed away at her to the point that she is, at times, genuinely vulnerable in its aftermath, and she's also very much mourning Root (and the Machine, and the cohesiveness of her team as a whole) in her own subdued way - but nevertheless, she's still largely able to do what she needs to do in a given situation, and while she may sometimes briefly falter, she never falls apart. It's a trait borne not just of strength, but also of the wall between her and what emotions she does have: she's an amazing compartmentalizer, because her physiology already does that for her. The losses she's suffered now and in the past are still massive, and she's not unaffected by them - but she's able to move forward despite them, particularly when she has something concrete to focus on. For better or for worse, Shaw is someone who will always keep on trucking, regardless of what happens to her.

She's incredibly violent. Not indiscriminately so, but still far, far more so than the average person, and it's something that she makes no apologies for. She loves fighting and weapons (particularly guns), she relishes the opportunity to shoot "bad guys" to a degree that even some of her coworkers find alarming and unpalatable, and she can kill perps without batting an eye. She only targets those that she thinks deserve it and she firmly believes that harming innocent people is wrong, yes, but she has an itchy trigger finger and she's prone to shooting first and asking questions later - which means that when she doesn't have people reigning her in, hitting a false positive on that front feels almost inevitable. She also has a very high threshold for acceptable treatment of those aforementioned non-innocents, and in addition to killing, she's canonically been on board with things like kidnapping, extrajudicial imprisonment, blackmail, frame jobs, and torture.

Abilities: She's a baseline human with no superpowers, but she's a well-trained fighter with plenty of experience and skill in both firearms and hand-to-hand combat, and she has familiarity with various other military-related skills such as intelligence and counter-intelligence work, in-field coordination, proper radio communication procedure, etc. She's also a medical doctor with a specialty in emergency medicine, though she is non-practicing.

Personal Item: An Order of Lenin medal, which was given to her by a little girl who she once helped save and subsequently bonded with. (She'd rather have her gun, but she doesn't get to make these choices.)

Sample:
Test drive top level! And since the thread is (as of right now) all network, have a log sample from another game.