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

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.