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/corvette1710 Aug 10 '25
Firefly
I thought back to the symbol on my hand. "What gives me away as 'branded'? Is it an Omega Seed?"
"No, it's not the same. They have similar energy signatures, but a Seed is something he put there, like an item or a person, and this brand is something else, primarily a marking for his use. Glamoth's isolation and icy debris cloud hid you for a while. We only picked up your readings after we left Hara Daufan, but we were already on our way here because of Athena, so we had a head start on anybody else."
"Is anyone else here branded?"
Ah Gou smirked, then held up his right hand. On the back was a symbol just like mine. The Generals were much the same as they brandished their Omegas. "The Omega appeared not long after Darkseid's announcement. As far as I can tell, it's almost like a bounty. The clearer and brighter the brand, the higher the bounty."
"So this ship is full of people Darkseid wants to... kill?"
"Or find or track for another reason we aren't aware of yet. More than a dozen of us, yes. That's why we're chasing these Omega Seeds. We are denying him the opportunity to take them for his purposes."
I shut my eyes tight for a moment. I was about to break Article 4 again. I exited the suit. There were gasps, and more murmurs. They hadn't expected a woman. I can hardly blame them for that, given Sam's appearance and voice. The air felt good on my face. It was a little too cold in here, but even that feeling was welcome.
"Do you... have any theories about why I have one?" I was in like company now. No use in hiding behind the suit.
"Some," he said with an impassive nod.
"Such as...?" I prodded. He sure talked a lot. He sure swore a lot. It didn't make sense for him to clam up now.
He looked imperial up on that platform, with his eye-patch and cape, a gun at his hip. His thumb traced the butt of the gun absentmindedly as he spoke. "My working theory has to do with how Glamoth commanded the Iron Cavalry: through Titania." He projected a handful of top-secret schematics of my armor and a dozen documents on the psychic network of Glamoth. It was shocking to see everything laid out, and I couldn't help but gasp. "Your connection to Empress Titania was psychic in origin, meaning it utilized the psychoverse, or psychic spectrum, to relay commands. But it was only one-way. I believe Darkseid thinks you are able to enter his mind, or alternatively that he can use yours to enter others'. No other psychic network at the scale of the Iron Cavalry has existed before or since."
"Impossible," I said.
"Why is that?"
"The Empress is dead; she must be, by now. She was the originator of the psychic network, a load-bearing part. Without her, there is no such network. It would've collapsed."
"But the network still exists."
"What do you mean?"
"That's how we pinpointed your exact location. Either the network doesn't depend on the Empress's life, or she's still alive. Since we have it on good authority that she is dead, clearly the network must be self-sustaining or infrastructural in some other way, so that it stands without her involvement."
"What other way? She was the only one who could command us through it."
"The council of Glamoth set that up. Is doing it twice beyond the realm of possibility?"
"Maybe not," I had to admit. "Do any of these documents say that? Do they mention any other psychics like the Empress?"
"Ah... no." He shrugged. "It's just a theory. Have you heard anyone else in your head like you heard her?"
"No. Nothing like that."
"You don't remember 'Darkseid is'?"
"I really don't know what you're talking about."
Everyone was murmuring around me again. I wished they'd stop. I was already the odd one out. Ah Gou rubbed his chin. "That might be a reason he marked you. Everyone else, everywhere else, remembers that. They heard it in their head, presumably like you heard commands from the Empress."
Ah Gou clapped to stop the whispers.
"So to sum things up, Firefly, we are now in league together. You have a place on this ship and an interest in both resurrecting the warlord and defeating Darkseid—at least, until after we secure the warlord's corpse. Once we do that, if you'd like, you can go wherever you want. I'll buy your passage anywhere you might want to go. That wouldn't be my preference, but if you don't want to be here, I will not hold you, no matter how useful you might be." He jumped down off his platform and extended a hand to me. Outside the mecha, he wasn't much taller than me.
He was right. I shook it. It was hardly even a commitment on my part, as it stands. I tag along, I am not under any obligation to participate, and I can leave when I want.
"Excellent."
Later, Republic approached Eden Prime. Ah Gou reassembled the Great Generals and invited me to the strategy meeting. For some reason, I felt honored to be included.
"The tomb complex is at the top of this mountain near the north pole of the planet," Ah Gou had stated. "The area gets daylight three months a year, and we're not that lucky. It'll be night when we drop in." He pointed to an area on the southern side of the mountain. "There is a farming village here. Scans have indicated unusual activity coming from it and the tomb. We should be prepared to fight. Understood?" He was looking pointedly at me.
"Yes," I said warily.
"Good." He went over some finer points, then dismissed the Generals to prepare for the raid.
I stopped him before he left the room. "Governor, I have a question before I return to my quarters."
He stopped, letting the doors slide shut ahead of him. "You want to know what's in the brig." He didn't look at me.
"I... do, yes. I felt—"
"A dark presence? A crawling unease in your stomach?" He turned, and he had a strange look in his eye.
"Why do you know already what I was going to ask?"
"She has that effect on people, and your room is not far from the brig." He ran a hand through his hair. "We will need her, but she is best kept away from anyone whose morale matters."
"Is she a prisoner?"
He frowned. "No. As much as she bitches and whines, she can leave whenever she wants. Good fucking riddance. But I've paid half what she asked, so she stays while we procure the corpse."
"Is she dangerous?"
His frown turned into a deep scowl. "Extremely. If you want to guarantee your survival tonight, don't even think about her."
"So who is she?"
"Was I speaking fucking Xiaozhou?" he said rhetorically, with no small amount of frustration. "A powerful witch. She will figure out how to extract Dio's powers without awakening him or, alternatively, how to resurrect him and bind him to our service."
"Like a slave?"
He looked at me, nonplussed. "If we bring him back to life, the bastard'll fucking owe us one. If not, he's a goddamn bloodsucker, and he's got it coming."