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/OddDirective Aug 10 '25
Karja ground the cart to a halt as we reached the inner depths of the kobold city. Here, the sulphur had been replaced with carbon dust that stuck to your clothes, and crystalline-shelled coblyns skittered away from any sudden movement. And in these dark caves, amber crystals shining dull light, we found the stockpile our mission focused on.
I allowed myself a small smile as we hopped down. This would keep Limsa safe for moons. But…
“She’s not here, either, huh?” Karja pointed out. “That doesn’t make any sense.”
I pulled my hat down. “We should be careful. I doubt she’d go back on her word, and she’s stronger than we are.”
A quick sweep of the room, weapons drawn. The crystals were glowing green, slowly pulsing with their aetheric content, the cave dust repelled and never settling on them. There were too many to load completely onto the minecart we rode in on, but we could probably still do it in one to two more times.
And there was a lone crystal on a bench, covered in sackcloth, that Roxas found. It was green like the others, but it glowed a bit more brightly, and it looked like it had already been worked on- hexahedral, with two ends forming into points. He called me over to take a look.
I had enough on my mind. Things didn’t add up, elementally- you could try to summon a primal using crystals of any element, but the ones you used would contribute to their strength. Titan was an earth-aspected primal, so wind crystals would be weakest for opposing earth. And if this one was separated from the others, it was for a reason.
“Keep an eye out, you two,” I said. “We should probably bring this in to Maelstrom Command. I’ll take it-”
My hand reached for the cloth, but a finger landed on the surface of the crystal. It shone like the sun, and my consciousness drifted away-
Hear… Feel… Think…
There is a fog surrounding a world of metal and concrete.
There is a thing that wears her face, confronting her deepest fears.
...She is not alone facing this thing. But she cannot accept it.
There is a tall young man, who she can’t make out the details of.
There is another girl, with blue hair, short. She too is lost.
Together, they walk towards a bright future.
I’m thrown from my vision violently, tumbling to the ground and dropping the crystal to skitter along the floor. The pain in my chest… isn’t physical. But there’s something about it that feels so rough-
Hard footsteps on stone draw my attention. Across the room, a girl in a dress bends down and picks up the crystal I dropped. She has blue hair. Blue eyes. She smiles. Nothing feels right about this.
As Roxas helps me back to my feet, Karja calls out to her. “Hey. What are you doing here? This place isn’t safe, you shouldn’t be here.”
The girl tilted her head. “Is that so? I’m sorry, I just followed my detective’s intuition. This would be the place all the crystals are stored, right?”
That much was obvious from the room. “What happened when you touched that crystal?” Roxas whispered to me in a low voice.
I didn’t know. But I had to know what her intentions were.
“Miss-”
“Erika Furudo.”
“Miss Furudo, we’re here as part of the Maelstrom, helping to stop a primal summoning,” I explained, “If you could return that crystal, we would be in your debt.”
The smile on her face faded, and Erika sighed. “Is that so…? How droll. Even you, the Detective Prince, not realizing it-”
Karja spoke up. “Hey! If you have something to say, say it. Don’t play any games with us.”
Erika held both hands up. “If that’s what you want. Tell me, where exactly where you all born?”
I knew the answer. In Higashi, all the way to the east of Eorzea. Roxas seemed to sway at the question.
Erika asked another. “What enemy do you fight?”
The blue haired girl in my vision, both of them, jumped into my mind. Why…?
“Who is your partner?”
“Rrrgh, enough!” Karja shouted, “Start making sense or we’ll take you back with us by force!”
“Threatening a fellow pirate? I had hoped better, Miss Karja. And I hoped better of you, Detective Naoto,” Erika monologued. “None of you know who you are. You really, really don’t know! And that’s why you don’t know… [you’re not supposed to be here at all.](bl.ue)”
Roxas gasped. “What?”
A scythe appeared in Erika’s hand, crackling with energy. “Shall we go down the line, hm? Eeenie, meenie, money, moe, catch a-”
We drew our weapons. But as soon as we did, Erika’s eyes fixed on a point above our heads.
“Ahhh, my wonderful master~! Your presence here-” she spoke, but her face screwed up afterwards. “No, I was simply removing the obstacles from- It would be so simple to- …Understood.”
The scythe dissipated, and Erika stepped towards our minecart. “You should count yourself lucky. My gracious master has stepped in, and allowed you to remain here as pieces. But before I go, I have just one question for each of the rest of you.”
Shadows pooled in the amber light, and several more of the hulking monsters from before appeared, their claws, their horns, the masks on their faces. “What are these monsters called?”
The word leaped to mind. Shadow.
“Griegr,” I heard Karja mutter.
“Heartless.” was Roxas’ response.
Erika hopped into our cart, and pulled a lever- the monsters in the way blocking the path as she ascended out of view. Yes, [the voidsent shadow monsters, heartless, resistant to normal weapons, called the Griegr as a class](bl.ue). That deduction was… right, wasn’t it?
“Skitr,” Karja exclaimed. “If we leave them be, they’ll head up to Camp Overlook, and nobody there’ll be able to stop them. Are you ready?”
I nodded, and Roxas charged his key with light. We leapt into the fray.
But I was watching the whole time. And I felt it, in the way we fought. Roxas with his single weapon, and Karja fighting solo. Myself, fighting with a summon and a weapon, some word or concept that was just… missing.
Together, we slew each Griegr, and made our way out of U’Ghomoro. Karja was the first to speak, as usual.
“Alright, I don’t know who that was, but I know she stole something important from us, and she was going to kill us but for something else gettin’ in the way,” she declared. “So that means we’d better hold a Thing about finding her.”
“...a Thing?” Roxas asked.
“Yeah, a Thing. It’s the way we decide on a course of action,” Karja explained. “You’re coming along too, seeing as it seems like she wanted your head just as much as ours.”
“O-Okay. Sure.”
And everything had been decided, our mission a success, our next objective clear…
But the feeling in my chest hadn’t gone away. It wasn’t just the bandages, it was just like back then- which was when? It was a feeling that something about this wasn’t right, that something was extremely wrong, that if only I had been born differently…
I boarded the airship Sandras, the words rattling around in my brain.
Were we even supposed to be here at all?