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/InverseFlash Check out Scramble season 20! Aug 09 '25 edited Aug 09 '25
The golden meteors slammed Astolfo's wall of anti-magic. The sound was almost deafening. These had to be the strongest shots yet.
"Take us up!" Starkiller roared. "Staying at a distance won't accomplish anything! We'll get above her and I'll drop onto her!"
"Aye aye cap'n!!"
The hippogriff climbed further, the air thinned, and Starkiller never saw the sneer leave the girl's face. "Here's good!" he said. The bullets were a little weaker having to fight against gravity, but he still felt the impact of each one striking the shield. "You finish her off if I can't get the job done!" He moved his legs up to a crouching position.
"Well, about that-"
"By my Authority as a Terminal. Nominating Extra Class: Starkiller. Initiating Demi-Servant fusion."
Starkiller clutched his chest. "Rrrghk-!" He felt like his heart was melting. "Ast…" he tried to ask for help. That was Ciel's voice without question. She's alive?! What is she doing to me..?
That was when the girl struck.
Somehow she'd crossed the distance between them instantaneously. He saw her in the dull reflection of Astolfo's mail before he felt the pain. In fact, if Astolfo hadn't already been turning around at his plea, there would have been no way to defend from the point-blank rifleshot aimed at their backs. For Starkiller, it was too late, as the bayonet on her gun pierced his lung, making him both a target and a tripod.
"Oh?" The girl said with a wisdom far beyond her years.
"No stowaways!" Astolfo shouted. A golden lance manifested in her hand right as her enemy pulled the trigger. This is going to feel really weird, she said in Starkiller's mind, but I think it's the only shot you've got! Also wow! I guess you weren't a Servant yet, huh? It's a good thing you are now! Master doesn't let me talk to her telepathically, but there's no stopping the fun we can have together! But for right now-!
For a moment, Starkiller wondered if it was better to take the bullet.
"La Black Luna!" The lance struck. The trigger fired. An enormous brass instrument manifested in his chest.
Astolfo held quite the bag of party tricks as a Rider. What her lance lacked in offensive capability, it made up for with its unique ability to vaporize their legs, returning them to astral form. This wouldn't make much difference in an event where her enemy possessed natural flight capability, but the vampire's booster only existed on a single leg. With it gone, she would sink like a rock.
The girl's golden energy blast, sure to erase Starkiller's torso and probably everything of Astolfo above the waist, fired into the now-present mouthpiece of the magical sousaphone. This was another of Astolfo's Noble Phantasms which primarily functioned in blowing away minion hordes with large, anti-army sound blasts. The piping was sound in make and built to handle such blasts, so it functioned as the perfect chute to carry the bullet without harming Starkiller at all.
Unfortunately, the horn was a magical amplifier. And in her haste to save her passenger, its bell was now aimed right for her head.
"Oh crap!!" Astolfo shouted and (mostly) ducked. Their hippogriff mount wasn't so lucky—it took a faceful of gold until there was no face left. Their phantasmal steed let out a screech and became a mystery once more. The two of them took after their quarry's lead.
Starkiller watched this all happen without comprehension. Not even the holes in his chest had registered.
The flood of facts entering his mind waterboarded his psyche. Grail, Servant, Master, Spirit Core, Throne of Heroes, Dead Apostle, Mystic Eyes, Magician, Archetype, Code Cast, Elemental, Counter Force. Then, as if it weren't enough, the deluge worsened. Pangaea, Cretaceous, Neolithic, Mongol, cell phone, Mario, he felt a hand grab the back of his neck and pull, and suddenly, he could think.
He gasped for breath in a featureless plane. White ground, blue sky, and standing above him in a pantsuit, Ciel. "I should've realized that the usual information the Grail provides in a summon process would be too much even with your status as a Demi-Servant, so I've closed it off," she said. His mind understood what she meant, forcefully so, but the realization had yet to sink in that he knew exactly what she had said. "This is all you need to know for the moment.
"Long, long ago, there lived a mage. A mage so zealous in his pursuit of immortality, he pursued every theorem, every chance. He even twisted his very soul into becoming a Dead Apostle Ancestor, a blight upon the planet's surface deemed unnatural by Gaia itself. Michael Roa Valdamjong chose such a path because he believed that the universe should be recorded by mankind as their reason for existence. But he fell to corruption, and instead of infinitely reincarnating as a scribe, he now does so as a wraith. A being that haunts a soul through adolescence until they become a killing machine, longing only to find Roa's next host.
"Instead of entering the afterlife, once his soul is recognized as dead, it returns to hibernate within a new host until their body is ready to become his. There's no possible way to fight such a change, even if you know it's coming. One day, you wake up…and you're the copilot." Ciel closed her eyes and sighed. "I've spent my life hunting down Roa. I thought I finally killed him. I…couldn't. It was beyond me. But even in the mess you see right now, I thought, this madness ended with this planet. Then a man falls from space. A man whose first intentions, as I can tell, are hostile, with a soul teeming in darkness. Darkness all too familiar. Roa's hosts can't control their own actions when he wishes for them to do otherwise. Imagine taking your words for his truth. That's as good as welcoming a vampire in with open arms. Now wake up."
His eyes flew open. Wind stung bare eyeballs that threatened to pop from the new burden in his head. His body was falling through space, as were Astolfo and the girl. In front of him fell a choice. Save the paladin, or eliminate the vampire. He heard Ciel's voice whisper in his head.
"Roa's incarnations…you could say they're cheating the system, much like him. If this were a video game, they would be bosses that can only be defeated with specific exploits. Astolfo and I are out to kill all of them. Each Incarnation was raised to record a different Phenomena, following Roa's creed of universal documentation. Tanya's—Archer's purpose was studying holy magecraft. And as my method of killing Roa is holy in nature…I think you're better suited for the task than I, reading your traits. I'll disguise them so others can't do the same. As your Master, I implore you, eliminate Archer with extreme prejudice, Starkiller."
Starkiller looked to Tanya. The girl…was just a girl. He knew that his Master had slaughtered children a hundredfold. He knew he should feel no qualms about this, especially when the first adjectives he could bestow upon her involved "demon" and "mass murderer".
And he didn't. He was perfectly fine with following in his master's footsteps and his Master's orders.
He looked to his dazed, plummeting pilot. A slight warmth stirred in him.
Astolfo took priority.
He took the saber from his belt and threw it like a hatchet. The red blade spun at such speeds it looked to be a solid disk infused with Force lightning. In response, Tanya adjusted her firepower to maximum strength and let loose a volley towards Astolfo. He extended his other hand to reel Astolfo out of the line of fire with the Force. The recoil from Tanya's shots blasted her into a cloud, where Starkiller heard a high-pitched laugh before she was gone.
"You..!" Ciel groaned. "Hff. I'll be there when you two land."
Starkiller caught his returning saber and Astolfo at once. To his surprise, Astolfo was still awake.
"Pfff, you dummyyyy" she trailed off. "I'd be fiiiiine, I'm a Shervant-" Her gauntleted fingers walked up his collarbone. "Thanks, though. And shorry about my Noble Phantashm," she added with wide eyes at the holes in his chest.
He didn't reply. He didn't have an explanation for why he did it either. Perhaps it was because he was finally out of his master's shadow, slingshot across the universe. Perhaps it was because he missed a pilot, and needed one to destroy gacha. Perhaps he simply felt it was what he should do.
Starkiller hit the ground for the second time in under an hour. A plume of earth showered into the air, and he gratefully accepted unconsciousness.
Lights burbles against his astral skin. Galen wakes—in spirit. His body is in the care of Ciel, and his mind is sifting through its new information surplus, so his soul is free to roam, perhaps? Something like that. He doesn't even try to know why he looks like a pale steel shadow. His mind has enough going on, and in front of him, something occurs.
A deep, throaty red. Pulsing like an organ.
A dazzling blue hue. Dashing around like a Pegasus.
A brazen, molten gold. Compressing what it can.
All clashing for dominance.
Galen watches in awe. The itano circus of primary colors scorches, freezes, eliminates his missing nerves. The shape of a soul is the only existence that can view this maelstrom.
"I couldn't agree more," a voice thrummed.
Galen turns around. Another being floats in this void. White skin, black hair. His face indiscernible, his body a haze. He is a white silhouette in the black reach. Nonetheless, Galen feels a chill unlike the metaphysical one offered from the light. If Galen could access his physical body in this moment, he may have prostrated himself. For this man's spirit measured equivalent to the Emperor. In power…and malice.
"Count your days, Galen. I'll be here for the end of them."
He stalks into the darkness despite no floor existing for black leather shoes to click-clack upon. As he leaves, he utters a chant.
"Stars, Cosmos, Gods, Animus, Antrum, Universe, Anima, Animusphere."
The lights snuff out. In the abyss, Galen screams.