-0-
User Name/Nick: Rei
User LJ: magdaleina
AIM/IM: SchmooeyFoo
E-mail: weirdophreak17@yahoo.com
Other Characters: The Marquis de Sade // impure_tale, Reaver tatty-bye, 21 twoton21
Character Name: Simone Betheson
Series: Saw (the VI and VII movies, specifically)
Age: 28
From When?: After her appearance in Saw 3-D/Saw VII
Inmate/Warden: Warden -- Let's be clear here. Simone is damaged, and she is embittered. She's taking this as a way to restore her arm, possibly, but she also views this as a very risky opportunity to get "out" of this reality she lives in, that's crushing her from the inside, and find some value in her life again, by giving value to someone else. While her ordeals and what they've made of her might lead a person to question her ability to rehabilitate an Inmate, one should not discount her unflappable refusal to give up or be mistreated, to lie to herself or to other people about the state of things, or to suffer excuses being made when it's a matter of right and wrong.
Item: A blackberry phone.
Abilities/Powers: She's just a normal-ass human being.
Personality: Not a lot is known about Simone, in history or personality, since she only appeared in three scenes across two movies. What I have attempted to do here is taking queues from the scenes she does appear in and the choices that her actress made to convey mood and emotion.
What can first be said is that Simone is not and has never been a bad person. She is now an especially bitter, angry person, and she worked as a predatory lending banker, but hardly anyone ever takes a job like that because they relish the notion of taking advantage of other people. Simone certainly didn't. Her occupation is hers because it's available and nothing better has come along since. This "because right now I have to" view of it has since bled into other aspects of her day to day existence, and this is part of the problem. Simone is not one of those Jigsaw victims that had their horrible brush with death and then everything in her life tasted sweeter and smelled better and looked brighter. She does not take greater joy in life than she did as a lender; she'd argue, in fact, that she takes probably a little less, with an increased pessimism for the good in people caused not just by her ordeal but in seeing the Stockholm syndrome evidenced in other Jigsaw victims. She has not reached a level of both inward and outward loathing that she sees no point in living anymore -- quite the contrary. It is her view that she faught tooth and nail to save her own life, so she might as well live it. What she wants out of her experience on the Barge is to have more than just that stubbornness to keep her going.
What she calls "stubbornness" seems to serve her positively in other ways, making her an asset as a Warden. What was mentioned before is her refusal to give up, and she does have that going for her. She's never considered herself to be someone who willingly stands still -- she had the job she had, but she also never stopped applying to new places in the hopes of putting her degree to use in a less morally compromising position. "Survive" was a word often spoken even before, but not in the literal sense. Having the job she did was about getting her foot in the door, not protecting her own life. Since her encounter with Jigsaw, not giving up has taken on something more dire. Her presence on the Barge is testament to the fact that she doesn't want to give in to despair, she doesn't want to be as pessimistic as she's become, and it's a lesson she can teach as well. It's something that she and her Inmate could potentially look for together.
Simone doesn't make excuses for the life she led, and she certainly doesn't allow people to excuse what Jigsaw did to her, or other people, simply because his MO suggests he's trying to teach them to appreciate life. Right is right. Wrong is wrong. Sometimes you're placed in bad situations and it is what it is. That said, she sees a difference between doing the right thing and giving your life for the right thing. It might be the more Christian idea to die instead of doing something bad? But not everybody's Jesus Christ; it's easy for a person to SAY it's better to do one thing over another, but very different in practice. She will probably never be a Warden that tells people they should have chosen to die rather than do something evil. Sometimes your life is all that you have, and it's yours.
One other thing to be said of Simone is that she's brutally honest -- moreso now that she has been in years past, where part of her job was selling the product or, getting people to borrow. A potential problem with this is that she is not especially sensitive anymore, and she's very likely to blame before sympathizing. This reflects upon herself as well. People tell her that she's a victim. She IS a victim. She blames Jigsaw for what she had to do, but she also feels deeply and intensely guilty because in order to survive she had to choose to let a person die in her place. People talk about "kill or be killed" situations like they're black and white. They're not. She doesn't forgive herself for this, and she will not be easily forgiving to anyone that trivilizes another life exchanged for their own. With other people -- it's shown in the movie more with the other Jigsaw victims. She is disgusted and flabbergasted by their willingness to view their shared experiences as "lessons" rather than the torture and personal attacks that they are. As she said to Sydney, a formerly abused wife who chose to let her husband die and felt liberated for it, she shouldn't have had to kill her husband; she should have just fucking left him, and Simone, for one, is not going to pat her on the back and congratulate her for her bravery.
Before her experience with Jigsaw, perhaps the characteristic that Simone would have viewed as her greatest success as well as her greatest flaw was her sense of independence. She's always been prone to forcing herself to do well, as a matter of pride. It's not a matter of coming from poor circumstances and trying to rise above; she's just always been eager to do things herself. She doesn't easily ask for help, and it's painful for her to accept that it's not a mark against her for her to accept assistance. This has not changed. In her most current state of mind, Simone is on government aid -- which she's never been on before -- and living at home again with her family, and she couldn't feel more miserable and belittled.
She's going to be tough on whatever Inmate she gets. It might be very difficult for her to befriend her Inmate initially, because she doesn't view them as a patient or a prisoner -- just another person prone to the same, if not greater, faults than any other person. She may eventually come to wonder if, in staying on the Barge and facilitating ports and lessons, she's just as complicit in the torment of her Inmate as she was in allowing her coworker, Eddie, to die instead of her. She will run the risk of coming to distrust the institution of the Barge if she does not come to full grips with its metaphysical aspects.
History: (I'm going to recount her actual history in the film and then write another section involving assumptions and extrapolations I've made about her early life based on what's presented in the film, with reasonable logic.)
The events of the movie involving Simone are as follows: At the start of Saw VI, Simone, working for what is referred to as a "predatory lending company", awakened in a dungeon with one of her coworkers, each of them with bizarre apparati attached to their heads designed to, after time had run out, bore enormous screws into their temples and kill them. A video depicting Jigsaw's puppet began to play, informing them that because they had ruined the lives of countless struggling families by giving them loans they could not afford to keep up and profiting after repossessing more than they could afford to give, they had extracted their "pound of flesh" from their customers. Now, they would have to give their own pound of flesh in order to survive.
Their "cages" were separated by a wired partition and an enormous scale. In each of their sections stood a table and knives of various shapes and sizes, and rubber tubing. Whoever cut the most flesh from their bodies and placed it on the scale before the time ran out would live. The other would die. Eddie, being overweight, immediately began cutting large sections of fat from his stomach. Simone, being fairly thin, did not have the same advantage and instead used the rubber toubling to create a tourniquet and tried to cut off her hand with a simple knife. She realized that Eddie was cutting enough from himself that he was quickly outdoing her. So she moved from above the wrist to further up, taking up a butcher knife and hacking the limb away with frantic energy. She deposited it into the scale and won the challenge, left with one arm missing and waiting to be set free while Eddie died in the chamber next to her.
She was later visited at the hospital by Detective Mark Hoffman who, unknown to her, had taken over for Jigsaw and had himself designed her trap. He interviewed her briefly, and she insisted that Jigsaw did this to her. "He cut off your arm?" he asked her -- and there was no way she could have known he had an angle in asking her this, but her reaction suggested she at least sensed some of the "knowing" blame there. She admitted she cut off her own arm because he made her do it, because she and Eddie were taking advantage of people and he wanted them to learn. Hoffman asked if she did learn, and in a rage she demanded to know what she was supposed to learn from losing her arm. He left her in the hospital room screaming after him.
She was next seen during a group therapy session held for Jigsaw survivors, wearing a prosthetic arm, where other victims recounted their tales. Simone seemed outwardly disgusted that most of them spoke of the experience was horrible, yes, but that Jigsaw had indeed helped them find their inner strength. She responded with especial venom to another victim, Sydney, who was placed in a trap with her abusive husband and had to choose to knock him into their death trap in order to save herself, and how that freed her from him. Simone insisted she shouldn't have had to kill someone to be free; she should have just left him. She stated with bitterness that there was one way that her life had improved since her experience with Jigsaw: she gets handicap parking.
Canon Assumptions, Early History, and the Barge: Simone doesn't strike me as the sort who had a bad upbringing, who clearly knows the difference between right and wrong and has a sense of epathy. This is not what people would initially think of a person working for a lending company that caters to people that can't afford to take out loans in the first place. I imagine that her family was lower-middle income, with both of her parents working, and hard workers. Ends were met, and they suffered few extreme hardships -- save perhaps the odd period or two in her life when one of her parents might have been injured on the job, and food stamps and the like were used to supplement the sudden drop in income. One of her parents went to college but did not complete their degree. They are still married, she got along just fine with her siblings and she went to public school, where she did well.
Simone's actress, Tanedra Howard, was 27 or 28 at the time of filming, so this puts her a few years past college age or one or two years out of graduate school if she pursued a Masters degree. For this reason, I am going to say that Simone Betheson has a Bachelor's Degree in Finance and had been pursuing a Masters Degree in Economics. After she received her Bachelor's Degree she tried to work and go to school at the same time and could not find any work locally that she qualified for. She wound up working customer service at a discount superstore where the hours were thankless and she never received full time pay or benefits. She eventually withdrew from school when her level of student loan debt got to be too much, and continued to live on her own in that college town, working the same job as before, and applying to various locations hoping to interview into her field. She did a few seasonal jobs as a tax preparer and being certified she could do taxes independantly, but it only made a little extra money on the side at the right time of year.
In about two years her prospects did not improve and with a worsening economy things looked especially bleak. Then she got a job offer with a bank, in their sales division, and with the promise of full time work and opportunities for promotion and benefits, she jumped at the chance to quit her current job and move on to something closer to her field. Immediately she saw the nature of the work for what it was -- she had to reel people in to seek loans with the bank, and they seemed especially interested in getting business from people who really had no business taking out loans in the first place, so that properties could be repossessed. She immediately recognized the job as an immoral one, but faced with the choice of either peddling loans to these people while concealing all the hidden catches or going back to processing soiled clothing returns and angry customers that don't know why their coupons are not accepted for fractions of the pay, she knew she had to keep it. Simone told herself that she would continue to apply to other places and leave as soon as something better came along.
She had a few interviews, but nothing ever panned out. In a couple short years she proved herself an asset and was promoted, eventually hiring a few employees herself, among them Eddie (no last name given in the canon). Eddie was a good salesman but he was less scrupulous about it and struck her as the sort that could probably make a career out of it and not lose a wink of sleep at night.
I assume that Simone had a superior position to Eddie because of the way they spoke to her in their scene together in the movies. He was quick to blame her for their being there, and boldly stated he was not "dying for [her], bitch!" What sprang to mind immediately was the sort of worker who in situations like this often found himself having to turn people down for extensions or extra help would shield himself by insisting that his boss had told him no and that his hands were tied. The sort that would blame to anyone that would hear if it would lead to fewer arguments and less stress for him. I took that scene in the movie to be much the same and it's what I'm choosing to assume.
Simone was aware of this, but most of her dealings with Eddie and situations like that involved her plainly telling him "I'll trust you to make whatever decision you're going to make, but if it goes wrong it's on you." And that he made his decisions -- she was still a safe cover.
Since it's clear that Mark Hoffman designed their trap personally, and Hoffman's traps tend to be personal, it became necessary to come up with why Simone and Eddie were chosen. It's a slight against Hoffman or someone he was close to. (This was discussed with Hoffman's player before assumptions were made.) Rigg, a policeman that Hoffman reached out to in the previous movie, is the chosen link, and we're assuming that there were troubles with debt and that Rigg was already facing foreclosure before his death or his family shouldered that soon after. Eddie was his agent, and since Simone as his boss was said to have made the final decision, both were targetted.
After the ordeal she has had some grief counseling to deal with the guilt that she feels -- survivor's guilt, but also guilt for a murder she feels she was forced to be complicit in. She's also dealing with feelings of helplessness -- she's moved back in with her family, and it's now even harder for her to get work. She returned to the bank and asked them to transfer her to any other position, that she would even work as a bank teller if they'd find room for her, and instead they chose to let her go, citing concern over her psychological state.
Sample Journal Entry: Voice Test from Dear_Mun
Sample RP: What a crock of shit.
Simone climbed into the waiting taxi, getting as far as under the roof of the vehicle before allowing gravity to do the rest of her. She came to rest on the leather seat with an odd thud and threw her purse into the seat next to her. For a moment her eyes caught those of the cab driver in their mirror, and when she suspected he'd looked because he heard the odd clacks of the joints in her prosthetic arm (rather than to juts simply look), she shook it off as simple paranoia.
"East 54th," she said.
There was a lot of that. She knew she thought about her arm more than other people did. She had to tell herself she thought the appendage curled casually over her middle, that settled gently in her lap as an arm would in a fine portrait, was way more noticeable for the fabrication that it was to her than it was to other people. The cab driver didn't give a damn. Most people didn't give a damn, and she was happy that they didn't. It was why she got the prosthetic.
She pulled her purse into her lap and dug through in search of her cell phone. Her thumb flew over the buttons to send a text. Still some packing 2 do 2nite. Will call U when I am done. She hated using abbreviations of words, but she had to admit -- it was faster.
A few more boxes were left to pack in her condo -- well, her former condo. The papers she signed that morning before therapy guaranteed that. Tomorrow she would board a plane and return to a house that she hadn't lived in, actively, for almost ten years. Back to a room that had been her room back when she was still too young to drink.
Simone shoved her phone back in her purse, and it was then that she took notice of the book she had shoved in there, a copy of Bobby Dagen's novel, signed. They'd given them to each of the people at the therapy session, at the door, and she'd put it in there just to get it out of her way. Now she wished she'd left it on her chair.
"Damn."
In the mirror, she and the driver shared glances again. No questions were asked.
Special Notes: There was a supplemental blog posted to promote the final Saw movie, and one of the first person "victim accounts" published there was one by Simone. However, the entry did not reflect the character portrayed in the sixth movie and did not reflect the choices they would make about her personality when her scene was scripted, so I am disregarding it.
Second Sample Entry: So -- when there's a flood or a port and something goes wrong, do you all do anything besides blame the Admiral for it? Or for that matter, when one of you Inmates fucks something up, do you do anything besides blame the Wardens? Inmate or Warden, if somebody does something wrong then it ain't anybody's fault but theirs.
Some things are out of your control. Some of them. Can't predict the floods. Can't stop them affecting you. Ship lands where it wants to. I get that.
But sometimes? Shit happens and there's no point in blaming anybody. Just fucking deal with it.
User LJ: magdaleina
AIM/IM: SchmooeyFoo
E-mail: weirdophreak17@yahoo.com
Other Characters: The Marquis de Sade // impure_tale, Reaver tatty-bye, 21 twoton21
Character Name: Simone Betheson
Series: Saw (the VI and VII movies, specifically)
Age: 28
From When?: After her appearance in Saw 3-D/Saw VII
Inmate/Warden: Warden -- Let's be clear here. Simone is damaged, and she is embittered. She's taking this as a way to restore her arm, possibly, but she also views this as a very risky opportunity to get "out" of this reality she lives in, that's crushing her from the inside, and find some value in her life again, by giving value to someone else. While her ordeals and what they've made of her might lead a person to question her ability to rehabilitate an Inmate, one should not discount her unflappable refusal to give up or be mistreated, to lie to herself or to other people about the state of things, or to suffer excuses being made when it's a matter of right and wrong.
Item: A blackberry phone.
Abilities/Powers: She's just a normal-ass human being.
Personality: Not a lot is known about Simone, in history or personality, since she only appeared in three scenes across two movies. What I have attempted to do here is taking queues from the scenes she does appear in and the choices that her actress made to convey mood and emotion.
What can first be said is that Simone is not and has never been a bad person. She is now an especially bitter, angry person, and she worked as a predatory lending banker, but hardly anyone ever takes a job like that because they relish the notion of taking advantage of other people. Simone certainly didn't. Her occupation is hers because it's available and nothing better has come along since. This "because right now I have to" view of it has since bled into other aspects of her day to day existence, and this is part of the problem. Simone is not one of those Jigsaw victims that had their horrible brush with death and then everything in her life tasted sweeter and smelled better and looked brighter. She does not take greater joy in life than she did as a lender; she'd argue, in fact, that she takes probably a little less, with an increased pessimism for the good in people caused not just by her ordeal but in seeing the Stockholm syndrome evidenced in other Jigsaw victims. She has not reached a level of both inward and outward loathing that she sees no point in living anymore -- quite the contrary. It is her view that she faught tooth and nail to save her own life, so she might as well live it. What she wants out of her experience on the Barge is to have more than just that stubbornness to keep her going.
What she calls "stubbornness" seems to serve her positively in other ways, making her an asset as a Warden. What was mentioned before is her refusal to give up, and she does have that going for her. She's never considered herself to be someone who willingly stands still -- she had the job she had, but she also never stopped applying to new places in the hopes of putting her degree to use in a less morally compromising position. "Survive" was a word often spoken even before, but not in the literal sense. Having the job she did was about getting her foot in the door, not protecting her own life. Since her encounter with Jigsaw, not giving up has taken on something more dire. Her presence on the Barge is testament to the fact that she doesn't want to give in to despair, she doesn't want to be as pessimistic as she's become, and it's a lesson she can teach as well. It's something that she and her Inmate could potentially look for together.
Simone doesn't make excuses for the life she led, and she certainly doesn't allow people to excuse what Jigsaw did to her, or other people, simply because his MO suggests he's trying to teach them to appreciate life. Right is right. Wrong is wrong. Sometimes you're placed in bad situations and it is what it is. That said, she sees a difference between doing the right thing and giving your life for the right thing. It might be the more Christian idea to die instead of doing something bad? But not everybody's Jesus Christ; it's easy for a person to SAY it's better to do one thing over another, but very different in practice. She will probably never be a Warden that tells people they should have chosen to die rather than do something evil. Sometimes your life is all that you have, and it's yours.
One other thing to be said of Simone is that she's brutally honest -- moreso now that she has been in years past, where part of her job was selling the product or, getting people to borrow. A potential problem with this is that she is not especially sensitive anymore, and she's very likely to blame before sympathizing. This reflects upon herself as well. People tell her that she's a victim. She IS a victim. She blames Jigsaw for what she had to do, but she also feels deeply and intensely guilty because in order to survive she had to choose to let a person die in her place. People talk about "kill or be killed" situations like they're black and white. They're not. She doesn't forgive herself for this, and she will not be easily forgiving to anyone that trivilizes another life exchanged for their own. With other people -- it's shown in the movie more with the other Jigsaw victims. She is disgusted and flabbergasted by their willingness to view their shared experiences as "lessons" rather than the torture and personal attacks that they are. As she said to Sydney, a formerly abused wife who chose to let her husband die and felt liberated for it, she shouldn't have had to kill her husband; she should have just fucking left him, and Simone, for one, is not going to pat her on the back and congratulate her for her bravery.
Before her experience with Jigsaw, perhaps the characteristic that Simone would have viewed as her greatest success as well as her greatest flaw was her sense of independence. She's always been prone to forcing herself to do well, as a matter of pride. It's not a matter of coming from poor circumstances and trying to rise above; she's just always been eager to do things herself. She doesn't easily ask for help, and it's painful for her to accept that it's not a mark against her for her to accept assistance. This has not changed. In her most current state of mind, Simone is on government aid -- which she's never been on before -- and living at home again with her family, and she couldn't feel more miserable and belittled.
She's going to be tough on whatever Inmate she gets. It might be very difficult for her to befriend her Inmate initially, because she doesn't view them as a patient or a prisoner -- just another person prone to the same, if not greater, faults than any other person. She may eventually come to wonder if, in staying on the Barge and facilitating ports and lessons, she's just as complicit in the torment of her Inmate as she was in allowing her coworker, Eddie, to die instead of her. She will run the risk of coming to distrust the institution of the Barge if she does not come to full grips with its metaphysical aspects.
History: (I'm going to recount her actual history in the film and then write another section involving assumptions and extrapolations I've made about her early life based on what's presented in the film, with reasonable logic.)
The events of the movie involving Simone are as follows: At the start of Saw VI, Simone, working for what is referred to as a "predatory lending company", awakened in a dungeon with one of her coworkers, each of them with bizarre apparati attached to their heads designed to, after time had run out, bore enormous screws into their temples and kill them. A video depicting Jigsaw's puppet began to play, informing them that because they had ruined the lives of countless struggling families by giving them loans they could not afford to keep up and profiting after repossessing more than they could afford to give, they had extracted their "pound of flesh" from their customers. Now, they would have to give their own pound of flesh in order to survive.
Their "cages" were separated by a wired partition and an enormous scale. In each of their sections stood a table and knives of various shapes and sizes, and rubber tubing. Whoever cut the most flesh from their bodies and placed it on the scale before the time ran out would live. The other would die. Eddie, being overweight, immediately began cutting large sections of fat from his stomach. Simone, being fairly thin, did not have the same advantage and instead used the rubber toubling to create a tourniquet and tried to cut off her hand with a simple knife. She realized that Eddie was cutting enough from himself that he was quickly outdoing her. So she moved from above the wrist to further up, taking up a butcher knife and hacking the limb away with frantic energy. She deposited it into the scale and won the challenge, left with one arm missing and waiting to be set free while Eddie died in the chamber next to her.
She was later visited at the hospital by Detective Mark Hoffman who, unknown to her, had taken over for Jigsaw and had himself designed her trap. He interviewed her briefly, and she insisted that Jigsaw did this to her. "He cut off your arm?" he asked her -- and there was no way she could have known he had an angle in asking her this, but her reaction suggested she at least sensed some of the "knowing" blame there. She admitted she cut off her own arm because he made her do it, because she and Eddie were taking advantage of people and he wanted them to learn. Hoffman asked if she did learn, and in a rage she demanded to know what she was supposed to learn from losing her arm. He left her in the hospital room screaming after him.
She was next seen during a group therapy session held for Jigsaw survivors, wearing a prosthetic arm, where other victims recounted their tales. Simone seemed outwardly disgusted that most of them spoke of the experience was horrible, yes, but that Jigsaw had indeed helped them find their inner strength. She responded with especial venom to another victim, Sydney, who was placed in a trap with her abusive husband and had to choose to knock him into their death trap in order to save herself, and how that freed her from him. Simone insisted she shouldn't have had to kill someone to be free; she should have just left him. She stated with bitterness that there was one way that her life had improved since her experience with Jigsaw: she gets handicap parking.
Canon Assumptions, Early History, and the Barge: Simone doesn't strike me as the sort who had a bad upbringing, who clearly knows the difference between right and wrong and has a sense of epathy. This is not what people would initially think of a person working for a lending company that caters to people that can't afford to take out loans in the first place. I imagine that her family was lower-middle income, with both of her parents working, and hard workers. Ends were met, and they suffered few extreme hardships -- save perhaps the odd period or two in her life when one of her parents might have been injured on the job, and food stamps and the like were used to supplement the sudden drop in income. One of her parents went to college but did not complete their degree. They are still married, she got along just fine with her siblings and she went to public school, where she did well.
Simone's actress, Tanedra Howard, was 27 or 28 at the time of filming, so this puts her a few years past college age or one or two years out of graduate school if she pursued a Masters degree. For this reason, I am going to say that Simone Betheson has a Bachelor's Degree in Finance and had been pursuing a Masters Degree in Economics. After she received her Bachelor's Degree she tried to work and go to school at the same time and could not find any work locally that she qualified for. She wound up working customer service at a discount superstore where the hours were thankless and she never received full time pay or benefits. She eventually withdrew from school when her level of student loan debt got to be too much, and continued to live on her own in that college town, working the same job as before, and applying to various locations hoping to interview into her field. She did a few seasonal jobs as a tax preparer and being certified she could do taxes independantly, but it only made a little extra money on the side at the right time of year.
In about two years her prospects did not improve and with a worsening economy things looked especially bleak. Then she got a job offer with a bank, in their sales division, and with the promise of full time work and opportunities for promotion and benefits, she jumped at the chance to quit her current job and move on to something closer to her field. Immediately she saw the nature of the work for what it was -- she had to reel people in to seek loans with the bank, and they seemed especially interested in getting business from people who really had no business taking out loans in the first place, so that properties could be repossessed. She immediately recognized the job as an immoral one, but faced with the choice of either peddling loans to these people while concealing all the hidden catches or going back to processing soiled clothing returns and angry customers that don't know why their coupons are not accepted for fractions of the pay, she knew she had to keep it. Simone told herself that she would continue to apply to other places and leave as soon as something better came along.
She had a few interviews, but nothing ever panned out. In a couple short years she proved herself an asset and was promoted, eventually hiring a few employees herself, among them Eddie (no last name given in the canon). Eddie was a good salesman but he was less scrupulous about it and struck her as the sort that could probably make a career out of it and not lose a wink of sleep at night.
I assume that Simone had a superior position to Eddie because of the way they spoke to her in their scene together in the movies. He was quick to blame her for their being there, and boldly stated he was not "dying for [her], bitch!" What sprang to mind immediately was the sort of worker who in situations like this often found himself having to turn people down for extensions or extra help would shield himself by insisting that his boss had told him no and that his hands were tied. The sort that would blame to anyone that would hear if it would lead to fewer arguments and less stress for him. I took that scene in the movie to be much the same and it's what I'm choosing to assume.
Simone was aware of this, but most of her dealings with Eddie and situations like that involved her plainly telling him "I'll trust you to make whatever decision you're going to make, but if it goes wrong it's on you." And that he made his decisions -- she was still a safe cover.
Since it's clear that Mark Hoffman designed their trap personally, and Hoffman's traps tend to be personal, it became necessary to come up with why Simone and Eddie were chosen. It's a slight against Hoffman or someone he was close to. (This was discussed with Hoffman's player before assumptions were made.) Rigg, a policeman that Hoffman reached out to in the previous movie, is the chosen link, and we're assuming that there were troubles with debt and that Rigg was already facing foreclosure before his death or his family shouldered that soon after. Eddie was his agent, and since Simone as his boss was said to have made the final decision, both were targetted.
After the ordeal she has had some grief counseling to deal with the guilt that she feels -- survivor's guilt, but also guilt for a murder she feels she was forced to be complicit in. She's also dealing with feelings of helplessness -- she's moved back in with her family, and it's now even harder for her to get work. She returned to the bank and asked them to transfer her to any other position, that she would even work as a bank teller if they'd find room for her, and instead they chose to let her go, citing concern over her psychological state.
Sample Journal Entry: Voice Test from Dear_Mun
Sample RP: What a crock of shit.
Simone climbed into the waiting taxi, getting as far as under the roof of the vehicle before allowing gravity to do the rest of her. She came to rest on the leather seat with an odd thud and threw her purse into the seat next to her. For a moment her eyes caught those of the cab driver in their mirror, and when she suspected he'd looked because he heard the odd clacks of the joints in her prosthetic arm (rather than to juts simply look), she shook it off as simple paranoia.
"East 54th," she said.
There was a lot of that. She knew she thought about her arm more than other people did. She had to tell herself she thought the appendage curled casually over her middle, that settled gently in her lap as an arm would in a fine portrait, was way more noticeable for the fabrication that it was to her than it was to other people. The cab driver didn't give a damn. Most people didn't give a damn, and she was happy that they didn't. It was why she got the prosthetic.
She pulled her purse into her lap and dug through in search of her cell phone. Her thumb flew over the buttons to send a text. Still some packing 2 do 2nite. Will call U when I am done. She hated using abbreviations of words, but she had to admit -- it was faster.
A few more boxes were left to pack in her condo -- well, her former condo. The papers she signed that morning before therapy guaranteed that. Tomorrow she would board a plane and return to a house that she hadn't lived in, actively, for almost ten years. Back to a room that had been her room back when she was still too young to drink.
Simone shoved her phone back in her purse, and it was then that she took notice of the book she had shoved in there, a copy of Bobby Dagen's novel, signed. They'd given them to each of the people at the therapy session, at the door, and she'd put it in there just to get it out of her way. Now she wished she'd left it on her chair.
"Damn."
In the mirror, she and the driver shared glances again. No questions were asked.
Special Notes: There was a supplemental blog posted to promote the final Saw movie, and one of the first person "victim accounts" published there was one by Simone. However, the entry did not reflect the character portrayed in the sixth movie and did not reflect the choices they would make about her personality when her scene was scripted, so I am disregarding it.
Second Sample Entry: So -- when there's a flood or a port and something goes wrong, do you all do anything besides blame the Admiral for it? Or for that matter, when one of you Inmates fucks something up, do you do anything besides blame the Wardens? Inmate or Warden, if somebody does something wrong then it ain't anybody's fault but theirs.
Some things are out of your control. Some of them. Can't predict the floods. Can't stop them affecting you. Ship lands where it wants to. I get that.
But sometimes? Shit happens and there's no point in blaming anybody. Just fucking deal with it.