PRE CANON

Before she was known as Root, she was given the name Samantha Groves. Born in a small town in Texas, Samantha was used to being the outcast in school. Because of her ways of thinking, higher level of intelligence, and general weird vibes given off, she was pushed to the side and made fun of. Snickers behind her back, things left in her cubbies and eventually locker. Thankfully, the children in her town were too afraid to bully her directly or face to face.At home, she was forced to deal with alcoholic parents, one who did see fit to get in her face and throw her around. Though, he left as soon as they found out her mother was sick. He wasn’t going to win any world’s greatest dad awards, but watching him leave in the middle of the night still struck her in a way she’ll never forget.On and on, it went until she was able to find a brief sort of solace in her best friend, and crush, Hanna Frey. She wasn’t anything out of the ordinary. A pretty girl who made friends easily. For the first little while, Samantha thought maybe Hanna was taking pity on her until they grew closer and closer. Sleepovers, hanging out in the library, computer games and homework. Samantha’s life had finally found meaning. She was going to be able to make it out of Bishop with Hanna by her side.Those plans were ruined by Trent Russell and the woman who loved him. Though she was well on her way to becoming Root, something broke within her and made the process of becoming the woman she is now much faster and easier. At the age of sixteen, Samantha ( now preferring to be called Root ), made Trent Russell pay with his life for taking Hanna’s. To her, it was an easy choice, and she never got her hands dirty. Life then became about earning money from with her computer through hacking and expediting out hitmen for bigger and bigger names while also taking care of her mother in between jobs. What her mother didn’t know was that she dropped out of school after Trent’s death and her sole focus became hacking, killing and watching over the only person she had left. When Root is 24, her mother dies and she finally leaves Bishop, moving on to bigger and better things.

SEASONS ONE AND TWO

After Root’s mother dies in 2002, she sees it as a release. She has her mother cremated, her body too deteriorated to dress up for an open casket, and unable to afford anything without raising too much suspicion. Root burned the name and identity of Samantha Groves along with her mother. She left that night and never stayed in one area. Her skills helped her to become infamous in the underground world of crime. She had no sense of purpose, shedding cover after cover until she’s hired to kill a congressman.What she doesn’t expect is for Harold and John to foil her plans. While Harold is proving Matheson’s involvement to the FBI, Root creates a honeypot and learns about Finch and The Machine through it. Once she escapes, she begins a journey to find more about this machine. Her disgust with humanity only seem to spur her further in her search until she sees an opportunity. It’s then that she meets John in person, unbeknownst to him, by posing as a psychotherapist. Through the trap she’s set, she’s able to learn much more about him and find a way to get to Harold.It’s then that she kills Alicia Corwin as she threatens Finch, and introduces herself as the infamous hacker / killer Root. She kidnaps him and uses him as leverage to find the location of The Machine. During the trip, she shows how much knowledge she’s gained on her own and ends up killing Denton Weeks. With a location in her pocket, she takes Harold to the train station, only to be stopped by John Reese once again.Once she escapes, she only resurfaces once again as Special Counsel’s secretary and is able to hear more information about what’s going on behind the scenes through this cover. When the order is placed to kill Sameen Shaw and her partner, Michael Cole, Root slips easily into Veronica Sinclair’s shoes to gain the upperhand.She contacts Harold again when the virus that Kara Stanton uploaded to The Machine threatens to kill it completely. Root learned that a phone call will happen in a specific time and place and uses Harold, once again, to find where that will be. He splices the calls and allows both Root and John to have unfettered access for 24 hours.Time runs out for them both as Root finds out that it has moved itself. In a semi-catatonic state, she’s admitted to a psychiatric facility by Harold. It’s then that she receives a phone call from The Machine itself, the artificial intelligence going through the possibilities of what might happen if she activates Root as her analog interface.

SEASONS THREE, FOUR, AND FIVE

When she’s admitted to the hospital, The Machine reaches out to Root and begins discussing her methods. Root is more than happy to comply to being The Machine’s Analog Interface. The amount of drugs she’s on forces her into a state of numbness. Leaving the hospital proved to be relatively easy, and she left Hersh alive despite not wanting to. She resurfaces again when The Machine leads her to recruiting ( read: tasering and kidnapping ) Sameen Shaw to help with her first tertiary mission.After rescuing a hacker from Vigilance, she’s brought back to the library to be imprisoned in a faraday cage constructed by Harold. It’s when Joss Carter is killed that she’s finally let out to find Reese. After, she returns back to the cage to show Harold that she does truly believe they need to work together for what’s coming next. However, she escapes the cage to rescue Shaw, Finch, and Arthur Claypool from Control and her men. Because of this she’s captured and tortured to find out what she knows about The Machine. When Control realizes she won’t be getting much information, she performs a stapendectomy on her. Through The Machine’s help, Root is able to get the upper hand.She reappears in New York when she’s led to Cyrus Wells, a man who has access to a room where a new processor is being held. During her time with him, she learns that she is responsible for the way his life is now. There is a brief argument with Finch as she asks him to redesign a cochlear implant, so she is able to hear The Machine directly at all times without a phone. After saving Wells, she meets with him in the safehouse as well as the rest of the team. After these events, Vigilance manages to leak documents about Northern Lights, and the government shuts down the relevant number program completely. Root is then tasked with handling all relevant numbers, and eventually is led back to New York when Samaritan gains access to the surveillance feeds for testing.During this test, Shaw, Root and Reese to escape to New Jersey to formulate a plan. Root stays behind in a dark zone and has her three hackers help her with setting up servers she’s stolen with what they’ve been planning for some time. While her hackers are working, Root goes with Reese to help find Harold before leaving again to go to the Samaritan facility. She eventually dismisses the hackers with the necessary information for their new identities. When she infiltrates the facility to install the servers, Shaw arrives to help and she finally reveals that the servers aren’t there to destroy Samaritan, but rather to help them survive in the new world that’s just on the horizon. Something to give them hope in the war to come.While the rest of the team have one steady, airtight cover, Root is forced to live on rotating covers and work relevant numbers and tertiary missions. She continues this work until the stock exchange shootout where Shaw is presumably killed or taken by Samaritan operatives. After this, Root and Reese go on a manhunt to find where Shaw may be until The Machine forces her to stop. In doing so, she goes back to tertiary missions and helps Harold save The Machine by condensing her core heuristics into hard drives in a briefcase.What follows the escape from Samaritan operatives is Root and Harold working together to get The Machine back up and running, often losing sleep and chunks of time while doing so. After she’s debugged and working relatively smoothly, Root is able to use rotating covers again to help with irrelevant numbers. Despite this, she’s still very much focused on using the newly open system to find Sameen, who she’s still certain is alive. Eventually, she is led to where Shaw is, now trying to take out operatives on her own, and she rejoins the team just in time for Finch’s number to come up. While the team tries to save Finch, Root sacrifices herself by taking a bullet for him.

POST CANON

Knowing that the only way to end the war with Samaritan is by spurring drastic action, Root takes herself out of the picture by sacrificing herself to save Harold. Root and The Machine plan the basics, which is that Root must die for the next parts of it to take place. What they didn’t account for was Jeffrey Blackwell being there to shoot her. Seeing her chance to move the timeline forward, Root swerves the car to take the sniper bullet to protect Harold Finch. Due to the nature of the bullet, Root suffers near fatal wounds combined with her previous torture by Control and wounds from the shootout with Shaw.A body that looked the same size and had most of the same features as her was used as a decoy while Root was being transferred to a dark zone in Alaska, far away from the war and with no wi-fi or cell phone service. Fusco identified the body as Root to the doctors and to the rest of the team as he was instructed to by The Machine. The dark zone meant that she only had human contact in the form of a doctor who was meant to help her through physical therapy and pain medications. Because of the nature of her injuries, she is left with a weaker heart and even weaker body and is sometimes forced to walk with a cane.Resigning herself to never being able to be the interface she had always wanted to be, Root falls into a depression that only worsens itself because of the state of her body. She begins to grow angry that The Machine didn’t let her sacrifice be permanent as per their joint plan. The Machine’s plan, however, was more in depth and because of her deteriorated state could not foresee that Root would move the timeline along. The new plan only called for Root to be in Alaska for a few weeks at most, but that plan didn’t call for the destruction of the interface’s body or the destruction of the original Machine. Weeks turned to months, almost a year, until her doctor allowed her to move around and finally leave Alaska.The Machine, now restored, contacts her once she has more of her memories, and has changed her voice from Root’s to one she fabricated on her own. Overwhelmed, Root spends days and nights talking to her and listening to her, until she is faced with the question of knowing if the rest of the team is dead or not. By now, Root has expected the worst and doesn’t believe that anyone is alive. She is assured that at least one is and that The Machine can’t find record of the others, because she doesn’t have the capability to see that far yet. When asked whether or not Root would like to return to Sameen Shaw and continue their work, Root agrees, though it is nearly a year and a half later after her supposed death.

BUT NOT EMPTY

When Root is captured by Control, she isn't able to escape after one of her ears is taken from her and only manages to wrestle the knife from the woman after she finishes the second stapedectomy. Now completely deafened in both ears, she loses her purpose and The Machine can't find a way to communicate with her effectively just yet, therefore ending her brief stint as her analog interface. Weak, lost, and alone, she returns to the library in the hopes that Harold won't turn her away.This verse expands upon Root's disability and involves her learning to communicate with others and The Machine more thoroughly. Eventually, it will lead to her still having a cybernetic enhancement, ( i.e., the cochlear implant in canon ) but would not allow her to communicate with The Machine directly.

.EXE

An AU based upon the short snippet of a simulation we got in the episode .EXE if The Machine never existed. In this verse, Root takes on a Martine-like role for Greer, but has her own ulterior motives. She comes off as less manic, more collected to the public eye. Behind closed doors, she's making her own moves to get direct access to SAM.However, in this verse SAM is already free and once she finds this out more thoroughly and is able to look at the code herself, she become disappointed. While there is some awe at seeing what a God looks like on the inside, it doesn't spark the fire underneath her. Plans thwarted, she eventually begins her own searching and missions on the side to scratch the itch of needing excitement. Through her exploits, she finds a snippet of code that exhilarates her, leading her to seek out the creator of this new Machine, Harold.

MARVEL

Most of Root's canon will stay the same. The addition of SHIELD, HYDRA, and other Marvel government entities will be involved with both The Machine and Samaritan. As such, this verse is under constant construction but still available. Most interactions that go into this verse will be developed pre-thread with the person involved, as street level heroes, cosmic, and world heroes all have different views. For reference, Root would operate more on a street level, but that does not exclude her from interacting with cosmic level heroes.

POST APOCALYPTIC

A verse that crosses over with the various zombie apocalypse media out there. Most commonly this will fit in with The Walking Dead or The Last of Us canon. In general, Root still operates as a freelancer and rarely swears her loyalty to any one group of people. She often does what's need or what she's getting paid for ( in weapons, food, or other useful resources ) and moves on.

DC

Most of Root's canon will stay the same, but this verse will include elements of DC universes with a focus on Root being from Gotham. This verse is under constant construction but still available. Interactions that go into this verse will be pre-plotted with the individual.

GRISHAVERSE

Based in Kettardam, Root is a heartrender that sells out her services to the highest bidder. While keeping herself hidden by using the alias 'Root', no one knows her true name and only can hire her through word of mouth. No one has met her, but all who have worked with her knows she can deliver results.While she offers her services to the known world, she is most prominently used in Kerch and Ravka.

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