r/whowouldwin • u/TheAsianIsGamin • Jul 19 '25
Event Character Scramble Season 20 Round 0: Eden Prime
To determine Roster Seeding, Round 0 writeups will be ranked from 1-5 by our esteemed panel of judges. Seeding scores will be determined by the judges’ averaged ranks of your stories, with higher ranks receiving higher seeds. All three judges will read all Round 0s.
Your Judges are: /u/TheAsianIsGamin, /u/Proletlariet, and /u/Talvasha
When judge voting goes up for this round, we'll have a WWW moderator lock the thread, preventing anyone from posting more. Make sure to get all of your writing done on time!
The Character Scramble is a long-running writing prompt tournament in which participants submit characters from fiction to a specified tier and guideline. After the submission period ends, the submitted characters are "scrambled" and randomly distributed to each writer, forming their team for the season. Writers will then be entered into a single-elimination bracket, where they write a story that features their team fighting against their opponent's team. Victors are decided based on reader votes; in other words, if you want people to vote for you, write some good content. The winner by votes of each match-up moves on to the next round. The pattern continues until only one participant remains: the new Character Scramble champion, who gets to choose the theme, tier, and rules of the next Scramble!
The theme of Character Scramble 20 is Scramble Effect. Round prompts will be based on the many worlds, missions, and memorable moments found throughout the Mass Effect series.
Join the Character Scramble Discord!
Round 0: Eden Prime
Lightyears away from where any of its ancestors once roamed, a rooster crows. The sun turns the purple of dawn into a bright, beautiful azure, and from within the arcologies that dot the land, efficient with both energy and space, the people rise just as slowly. There’s much work to be done, out there on the fields, but mornings like this are worth enjoying. The skies are clear, the land is fertile, and all is quiet. It’s hardly the most exciting corner of the galaxy—and that’s just the way it’s supposed to be.
Until an unexpected discovery turns this once-sleepy idyll into a flashpoint. At first, your team thinks this is a simple mission: Recover whatever it is they found, and slip out to get it where it needs to be before anyone can make a fuss.
But the moment your team makes it onto the planet, a firefight breaks out with an unforeseen enemy. Soon, it becomes clear: Something important has been unearthed, and someone wants it. Badly enough to kill for it.
Round Rules:.
Galaxy Map: Hundreds of billions of stars, each with its own system of planets. Your round doesn’t have to take place on an agrarian colony—or even on a sci-fi planet at all. But a season like this is about discovery as much as anything else. Start to show your audience where you’ve brought us.
Find the Beacon: Whether by being ordered to investigate it, or by chance, your team stumbles upon an object revealing something rather sinister. This object can be an artifact showing you visions, a murder weapon, written logs, a witness, or anything your story needs. But it has to be threatening—something your team never would have expected.
Don’t Worry. I’ve Got it Under Control: A contact or ally that your team expects to help instead betrays you. This contact must come from one of the Class Role Adoption Pools other than the one you adopt from.
The Price of Revenge: The traitor acts swiftly to take or destroy the object—without care for any bystanders or collateral damage. They set bombs, or a computer virus, or something else that would have disastrous effects for everybody around you. You must choose one of the following prompts:
- Paragon: There are lives at stake, right here, right now—and besides, you’ve already seen the evidence yourself. The powers that be will just have to believe you. Let the traitor escape, lose the object, and save lives.
- Renegade: Your newfound mission is too important. Hunt the traitor down, defeat them, and take the object back.
We Could Use Your Help: Your team comes with two characters, but you must select your third from the unscrambled characters of the Class you do not currently have, listed in tables below the roster here.
Normal Rules:
Stand Fast, Stand Strong, Stand Together: Nobody can take on a mission like this alone. You’ve got a team of the brightest, toughest, and deadliest allies a Scrambler can find—use them. We’d love to see your characters make full use of their wide-ranging abilities, both on their own and as a team.
We Will Hold The Line: You know what’s at stake. Failure is not an option. Even if your characters have only a small chance of victory, write that small chance happening!
Special Tactics and Reconnaissance: Saving the galaxy will take more than the same old tricks. You are allowed and encouraged to mix and match powers, and to develop your characters in any way you wish, both on the battlefield and off. However, your opponents are not expected to keep track of these in-story changes, and vice-versa.
Every Life Is a Special Story of Its Own: Feel free to give a brief summary to introduce your characters at the start of your post. If you do, you should mention things like powers, personality, history, and anything else that the average reader should know before reading.
Legendary Edition: Sometimes, Spectres have to go a little outside the lines in service of their mission. You’ll have the same latitude—as long as you go with the broad strokes of the prompts and the rules, you'll be fine.
Round 0 will run from Saturday, July 19th to Saturday, August 9th, 11:59pm US Eastern Time.
The character limit for this round is 4 full length Reddit comments, or 40k characters.
While it is fine to go a little bit over, anything that far surpasses this limit will be disqualified. This limit does not include intro posts, or analysis of the matchup.
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u/7thSonOfSons Aug 07 '25 edited Aug 07 '25
Don’t tell anyone, but lately, Gunha was pretty bored. Yeah, he saved people. Yeah, he stopped crime. And yeah, he did a lot of winning. But lately he’d been thinking about the sun a lot.
If he jumped, could he reach the sun?
Of course he could.
If he punched, could he break the sun?
Of course he could.
Wasn’t that the worst!? Where was the fun in a sure thing! Where was the guts in doing something he knew for sure. But THIS! This here, this Athena and this Elphelt and this Y’shtola and this Bomb, these were new. These were exciting. This was his chance to go all out!
He dashed forward. The cackling bomb gazed at him. This thing was gonna blow in an instant. Let it! In fact, he was counting on it! That was thought as he slammed his fist into the fireball's jaw.
THOOM
It was a volcano. Or maybe a wildfire. It was… something! Searing flames surged outward the instant Gunha’s punch connected. Reds and oranges and whites danced in his eyes. This city leveling explosion focused onto a single point: His fist. Anyone else would be reduced to ash. Anyone with less guts!
Gunha could feel the heat try to scorch his skin. Stupid! His skin was stronger than that. HE was stronger than that. Nothing could beat his Amazing Punch, and that included this phony sun. As for that woman who’d built it…
“Heh.” Gunha opened his hand. The flame that so eagerly meant to consume the station gathered in his palm. It was a trillion degree fire. Who cared! Gunha spun around, he needed the momentum for this one. Y’shtola was getting away. She had all that wind and ice backing her up too. If he was going to do this, he had to burn down the sky itself!
Oh, yeah, that’s what the fire reminded him of.
“Heart of the Sunrise!”
In his palm, Gunha created a solar flare. Just a little one! But enough of one. He hurled the gift of light as hard and as fast as he could. One shot. Just one shot! If he had the guts, he could make it. A shooting star in the middle of the day streaked upwards. He clutched his wrist. The immortal flame that had come so close to evaporating his home pierced the sky and honed in on the one who had birthed it.
Y’shtola looked back just in time. She saw the fire. He hoped she saw his smile. He closed his fist. His sunrise exploded. The bullshit pseudo-sky of the station came alight. He promised Elphelt a show, and a real man never disappointed a woman.
That meant not roasting El’s manager alive either! Her repurposed doomsday weapon mimicked Gunha’s hand: A clenched fist that held Y’shtola in place. He’d predicted it would become a cold fire when it mixed with her icy aura, and (as it so often did) that prediction came true. As he dragged his hand back, he reeled Y’shtola back down here with them. Tug-of-war practice had paid off.
“Ohhhhh, wow, Gunha!” Elphelt squealed. “That was totally amazing! You’ve GOT to teach me that move sometime. It’ll kill at my live shows!”
“Heh, we’ll see about that. Might just keep this one in my bag of tricks,” he said. If anyone had the guts to do what he did, it was Elphelt. He had a good feeling about her, and his feelings were never wrong. Just like he had a good feeling about-
Athena scoffed. She tried to hide it, but she was impressed. Gunha knew. It was the natural reaction to seeing him go to work. “Well done,” she said calmly. “Perhaps you’re worth keeping an eye on, little rebel.”
“Hey tha-” Gunha turned around. There was no Athena. Just Elphelt and the now unconscious Y’shtola. Maybe he’d clenched her a little too hard.
“And did you hear that belter!” Elphelt said, now bouncing in place. “Everyone in town had to have heard that one! They’ll be talking about that for- for weeks! This is my chance. I gotta get out there, there’s many fans I could make!”
“I’m afraid that’ll have to wait, Miss Valentine,” came a stern voice. Marching down the ramp was a man in a full suit, hat and everything. The badge on his blazer showed off a lion, a snake, and a goat. Behind him were about two dozen others wearing the same badge. Unlike the frontman, they were carrying guns. “For the crimes of public endangerment, reckless endangerment, and grand vandalism, Chimera Tech security sees fit to take you into custody.”
Elphelt threw her hands down in dismay. “What? No way! I can’t get busted before I’ve even made a name for myself! Although i would look super cute in a mugshot, and oooh a lot of people are gonna see, and-”
She kept on rambling. Gunha looked down at his fist. It would be easy to take these guys out. Did he want to get arrested? … Not really. But he felt something. A tug on a string he couldn’t see and didn’t know existed till now. It told him to raise his hands. Open hands. Surrender to these guys, just for a little.
“Good choice,” he heard, a voice in the wind. “Let’s see where it goes.” Athena was coming with?
Gunha grinned as they slapped the cuffs on him.
This was gonna be awesome. He could feel it in his guts!