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.
3
u/Artemisia846 Aug 09 '25 edited 28d ago
Caster had spent a long time in that room. Thinking and watching, the cameras all linking to her nest. What did she want?
She didn’t want to just stay. Freedom on the streets of F Corp was not freedom at all, just a new hand over her head, without any additional joy. If anything, it just meant that she’d need to find a new job.
Did she want to go down, and help her coworkers? That would certainly result in her rising in Fixer Grades, and maybe being treated with some respect for once. But the thought of going back there now, even if it was to save them, left a knot in her stomach.
She only realised when she saw Starfire beset by the frost, fighting for her life. She yelled out her name, without even meaning to, and had to ask herself why. Why did she care so much? Care for a woman who… Who she made a promise with. A promise that more than anything, she wanted to keep.
Being a sensible person, instead of climbing up or breaking through six different floors, she used the elevator… And arrived to see Y’shtola simply standing in place.
She had never really been taught how to fight, but it didn’t take a genius to know how to hit things in the head.
…The problem being when those things got back up after, looking down at her with contempt.
”Why are you here, little mouse? I gave you two perfectly reasonable options, and you insist on getting yourself killed?”
The bite had left her words, clearly shaken by whatever she had seen. The hammer swung, coming down fast, and it took all the speed that she had to roll away back towards the elevator.
“This is the problem of working with children. They don’t understand how the world is supposed to work. You pick the option that is the absolute worst for you, out of what. Honour?”
The hammer swung down again, this time shattering her staff as it was hastily held up to block. Caster felt tears welling in her eyes. She didn’t want to die. Not like this. Not so close.
Using the shattered piece of her staff as a stake, Caster jammed it in Y’shtola’s eye, buying her a second to roll back again, dodging another swing.
“Not honour. Nothing so grand. I just… For a moment, I found it.”
She saw a glow behind her, brighter than anything she’d ever seen before. If she was going to die, at least let her die looking at that.
“I found a Star.”
Behind her, Starfire had slotted the Bough into her spear, and it glowed with a green powered light. It was like she burned with all the light in the world as she held it aloft with the time Caster gave her to charge it.
“Starlight Rhongomyniad!”
The blast shook the earth. It burned through dirt, stone, metal… Anything in its path. It did not cease only at the bottom of the facility, for a second Caster thought that she’d felt an earthquake.
…And all that energy was aimed straight for Y’shtola.
She tried her best to get away, but her body disintegrated behind her, leaving nothing even for the crows.
Caster breathed in. And then she breathed out. She was still here. She was still breathing. The glow of the star in human form dimmed, as she descended to the ground, and picked Caster up, wrapping her in a hug.
“You saved me!”
It was only after Starfire had her fill that she turned around, the same sickening wrench as before as the bug truly left her brain, sealed with the Bough in the inside component of her spear.
Despite the hole in her face, Caster had never seen Starfire happier. The woman snapped from emotion to emotion so quickly, it was almost dizzying. But she knew one thing. It made her happy too.
“You’re free!”
Starfire tapped her on the shoulder.
“No. Not just me. We’re free.”
Her heart leapt in a way that she hadn’t felt… Ever in her life. She was free. There was something that she wanted to do, and she could damn well do it. She had a reason to walk towards the sun.
And so she did. Hand in hand with Starfire. Step by unsteady step.
She was free. She, Caster was… No. Not Caster. A Caster was someone whose purpose was to cast. If she was free, she was no longer The Caster of Altria.
“How did you choose your name? I… Don’t think I want to be Caster anymore.”
Starfire pondered for a time, before getting serious. “For me, it just came to me. I think a name is something that… You know when it’s right.”
Try as she might, Caster couldn’t think of anything, and her shoulders sagged. Starfire squeezed her hand.
“Why don’t you try something temporary, then? Something that’s like what you have now, just cuter? Like Casty.”
It sounded nice. It was a functional replacement. But most importantly, it felt like hers.
“I’d like that a lot.”
And with that… They walked into the day.