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singillatim
PLAYER INFO
Player Name: Iddy
• Player Contact:![[plurk.com profile]](https://plurk.com/favicon.ico)
Ihdreniel
• Player Age: 34
• Permissions: Here
CHARACTER INFO
• Character Name: Sameen Shaw
• Character Age: 32
• Character Canon: Person of Interest
• Canon Point: Near the end of 5x13, "return 0" - after Samaritan is defeated, but before she finds out that the Machine survived
• Character History:
After a failed attempt at being a doctor and an aborted career as a government assassin, Shaw is recruited by John Reese and Harold Finch, two men who, with the help of an artificial superintelligence they call the Machine, work 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 SocietyTM 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. In time they're also joined by Root, a computer hacker who starts out as an enemy to the group, then slowly becomes an ally due to the close bond she forms with the Machine.
The biggest threat that the team faces ends up being the activation of Samaritan, another artificial intelligence program controlled by Decima Technologies, a secretive private tech company. Unlike the Machine, Samaritan was built with no external safeguards or sense of internal morality, allowing it to do 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, and the team finds themselves public enemy number one. Eventually, a fight against Decima agents ends with Shaw being gunned down. Though 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 her life are spent undergoing mental torture, largely focused around unreality and destabilization of self. Decima's goal is to capture the rest of the team, as well as the location of the Machine's servers; to accomplish this, they forgo physical torture (which Shaw has been trained to withstand) and attempt to manipulate the information out of her, primarily by subjecting her to sensory deprivation and then inserting her into hyper-realistic virtual reality simulations designed to trick her into thinking that she is no longer in captivity and can let her guard down. Though she does eventually escape for real, she remains unsure of whether or not she's still inside a simulation.
Not trusting her own reality and believing herself to be a potential danger to others, Shaw is reluctant to rejoin her teammates, though she eventually does do so. 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. Root is killed, and Shaw loses track of both Finch and Reese - 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. And so she finds herself 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!
• Character Personality:
— Positive Trait: She's 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 government 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.
— Positive Trait: She's unendingly loyal to her allies and unflinchingly dedicated to her causes. Shaw feels duty and responsibility strongly, to the point that she was at one point willing to keep working for a government agency that betrayed her badly: 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, 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.
.
— Positive Trait: She's 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 her missing-presumed-dead teammates, 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.
— Negative Trait: 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.
— Negative Trait: 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 government 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 a friend 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.
— Negative Trait: 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 reining 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.
• Character Skills:
• Hand-to-hand combat
• Firearms (she's very proficient in both using and caring for guns, and has excellent aim)
• General physical fitness (she's very in shape, strong, and durable - not in the superhuman sense, but in the sense of knowing the best ways to take hits, falls, etc. in order to minimize injury)
• Medical skills, including field medicine/being resourceful even with limited or, uh, unconventional supplies
• Character Inventory:
— ITEM ONE: Her primary handgun + a limited amount of ammo
— ITEM TWO: Her combat knife
— ITEM THREE: An Order of Lenin medal (given to her by a little girl who she once helped save and subsequently bonded with)
• Important Notes: n/a
• Writing Samples:
— SAMPLE ONE: Here and here and here (grouping them together because they're all on the shorter side)
— SAMPLE TWO: Here
Player Name: Iddy
• Player Contact:
• Player Age: 34
• Permissions: Here
CHARACTER INFO
• Character Name: Sameen Shaw
• Character Age: 32
• Character Canon: Person of Interest
• Canon Point: Near the end of 5x13, "return 0" - after Samaritan is defeated, but before she finds out that the Machine survived
• Character History:
After a failed attempt at being a doctor and an aborted career as a government assassin, Shaw is recruited by John Reese and Harold Finch, two men who, with the help of an artificial superintelligence they call the Machine, work 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 SocietyTM 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. In time they're also joined by Root, a computer hacker who starts out as an enemy to the group, then slowly becomes an ally due to the close bond she forms with the Machine.
The biggest threat that the team faces ends up being the activation of Samaritan, another artificial intelligence program controlled by Decima Technologies, a secretive private tech company. Unlike the Machine, Samaritan was built with no external safeguards or sense of internal morality, allowing it to do 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, and the team finds themselves public enemy number one. Eventually, a fight against Decima agents ends with Shaw being gunned down. Though 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 her life are spent undergoing mental torture, largely focused around unreality and destabilization of self. Decima's goal is to capture the rest of the team, as well as the location of the Machine's servers; to accomplish this, they forgo physical torture (which Shaw has been trained to withstand) and attempt to manipulate the information out of her, primarily by subjecting her to sensory deprivation and then inserting her into hyper-realistic virtual reality simulations designed to trick her into thinking that she is no longer in captivity and can let her guard down. Though she does eventually escape for real, she remains unsure of whether or not she's still inside a simulation.
Not trusting her own reality and believing herself to be a potential danger to others, Shaw is reluctant to rejoin her teammates, though she eventually does do so. 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. Root is killed, and Shaw loses track of both Finch and Reese - 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. And so she finds herself 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!
• Character Personality:
— Positive Trait: She's 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 government 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.
— Positive Trait: She's unendingly loyal to her allies and unflinchingly dedicated to her causes. Shaw feels duty and responsibility strongly, to the point that she was at one point willing to keep working for a government agency that betrayed her badly: 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, 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.
.
— Positive Trait: She's 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 her missing-presumed-dead teammates, 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.
— Negative Trait: 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.
— Negative Trait: 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 government 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 a friend 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.
— Negative Trait: 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 reining 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.
• Character Skills:
• Hand-to-hand combat
• Firearms (she's very proficient in both using and caring for guns, and has excellent aim)
• General physical fitness (she's very in shape, strong, and durable - not in the superhuman sense, but in the sense of knowing the best ways to take hits, falls, etc. in order to minimize injury)
• Medical skills, including field medicine/being resourceful even with limited or, uh, unconventional supplies
• Character Inventory:
— ITEM ONE: Her primary handgun + a limited amount of ammo
— ITEM TWO: Her combat knife
— ITEM THREE: An Order of Lenin medal (given to her by a little girl who she once helped save and subsequently bonded with)
• Important Notes: n/a
• Writing Samples:
— SAMPLE ONE: Here and here and here (grouping them together because they're all on the shorter side)
— SAMPLE TWO: Here