r/whowouldwin • u/OddDirective • Nov 05 '22
Event Scramble 16 Round 3: Twister
EDIT: Round 3 has concluded! While there are no competitive rounds (and thus, no strict need for a voting form), we have put together a form to vote on your favorite round/who you think will win. Please check it out HERE!
Round 3: Twister
Click here to join the email list.
Click here to join the Character Scramble discord.
DAY 5
The mission for today seems oddly easy for your Players. “Enter Tower Records. You have 8 hours. Fail, and face erasure.” They don’t wake up too far from the entrance, and the time limit is very generous. But hey, they’ve been fighting for their lives for a fair bit, so they’re glad to have something of a cakewalk to get to the next day.
That’s not what this is.
The Game Master has decided that the gloves are coming off now. They’ve set a simple task to their Reapers; eliminate every Player you can get your hands on. Not only that, but they’ve set up an ambush right in front of the one way to get to Tower Records, featuring some hand-picked assassins- the enemy team. For whatever reason, your Reaper can’t or doesn’t let your Players know- if they’re the Game Master (or even if not), they might have decided that your team has reached the end of their usefulness, or they could be trying to dodge the Game Master’s suspicion to avoid erasure themselves.
Whatever the case, as your team walks into the trap, they come across a lone Player, one who’s lost the rest of their team. Whether it’s because they’re still fighting, or because Players without a team can’t have gotten this far, your Players are tipped off- just in time for the enemy team to come in. To save their life, your Players form a pact with the solo Player, and prepare to face off in a battle for everyone’s second chance…
Scramble Rules
Let ‘Em Know Who You Are: Every participant this season received four characters on their team, but many of them might not be a household name. To aid with readability, please give a brief introduction and summary of your characters, with enough information so the average reader can get excited for your team before starting. That includes your adopted character this time, too!
This World Ends With You: Your writeup will depict a scenario where your team succeeds. Even if your team has a one in a million chance of overcoming the odds, show what they’d need to do to come out on top against the challenge in front of them!
Everybody Has Their Own World: Writers are allowed to make changes to their characters in their narrative to fit their story, such as allowing power stealers to gain more powers, teaching martial artists new techniques, or having characters gradually grow in strength between rounds. However, you are not beholden to following what your opponent is doing. When facing another team, you are only required to write their characters as they were submitted. This is to help with ease of research, and make things more fun for both sides.
Round Rules
Setting: This round’s original setting is Tower Records, an iconic music store that outlived its American main branch, located in the heart of Shibuya with shelves stocked with all the latest music, in CD or vinyl. The important parts of wherever the location is is that it’s recognizable by the members of the team, and it can be set up for an ambush. There’s also more than enough time for your team to mess around and do whatever their heart desires before going into the ambush, so you can include other locations as well.
Key Points: The main idea of the round is the following. The Game Master wants to eliminate a whole load of Players, and so sets up a seemingly-easy mission to keep the Players off guard. This gives your Players time to do things other than the mission, but when they do pursue the mission, they meet a lone Player, with whom they extend their pact to stay as a team. During this, they are ambushed, and have to fight against the enemy team for their lives.
Union X: Adoptions! That’s right, it’s the adoption round. We’ve decided to be pretty open about this; there are two possibilities for who you can adopt. The first is that any Player on a team that has already been eliminated is available to adopt. We have also curated a list of unpicked backups that you can choose from. All available adoptions are HERE, and be sure to look through to find someone you’ll enjoy writing.
Post Limit: For this round, writers will be limited to 8 posts, or 80k characters. While it is fine to go a little bit over, anything that far surpasses this limit will be automatically disqualified. This limit does not include intro posts, or analysis of the matchup.
Due Date: Writeups will be due at 11:59 PM CST on EDIT: Sunday, November 27th. That’s about two and a half weeks. At that point, the thread will be locked, and voting will go up for a few days afterwards.
Flavor Suggestions
Incongruous: Your team members might be suspicious of such an easy mission. After all, the people in charge of this don’t really want you to win, do they? Would they see this as a chance to take a break, and do things casually? Alternatively, would they rush headlong into the ambush the Game Master set up?
Dancer In The Street: Whoever you’re adopting, your team is going to be meeting them in a difficult situation, either in combat or just having come from it. But you can’t just sideline them, you’ve gotta make sure they shine! What do they bring to the table in terms of synergies? How do they fight when they’re backed into a corner? And importantly, how would your team react to finding someone on their own?
1
u/Proletlariet Nov 28 '22 edited Nov 28 '22
21 elbowed Archer. “Really running out of room to squirm pal. You wanna make this easy on yourself?”
“Never!” Archer shouted.
He seemed to take stock of the situation. His brows furrowed as his frustrated mind tried to come up with a last gambit. Finally he seemed to give up. Instead he spread his arms wide and gave them all a mellow grin.
“Look, alright, maybe it could’ve been me. But that’s not such a big surprise right? I mean I could use my skills to kill any of you. But could isn’t did. I’m not admitting to anything.” He pointed lazily at Laszlo. “Hey, we still haven’t ruled him out right? Spooky vampire is right here to blame. So why does it have to be me, huh?”
This was it. The final nail. Karai found the taste of desperation at the end of a long chase to be exhilarating. Dorothy just found it sad.
Maybe it was the relief of pressure but this time, the answer came to her without effort.
“Komachi told us herself it couldn’t be him.” Dorothy said to him.
“Have you blown a circuit already?” Archer asked. “Maybe that stupid magnet backup plan worked better than expected. She’s dead.”
“But we’ve still heard her words.” Dorothy said. “Laszlo, what did she say to you when you tried to enter through that window?”
Laszlo pondered. “Well I’m not actually sure how to pronounce some of the vampire slurs she used, but the jist of it was, she said I was an idiot and that if I went through that window she would watch me die in agony.”
“What, like you said you’d melt if you stood too close to Kirei?” Hob asked. “No offence.”
“None taken.” Kirei said. “If I’m telling the truth, I’m actually exhilarated that my presence could hurt somebody like that.”
“Hob, when I asked you to look at the wall you said it looked like there was too much space between the hanging album covers.” Dorothy said. “I think I have a decent idea of where those went.”
Archer clutched his carton a little tighter to himself.
“Why would he steal albums?” Laszlo asked. “Especially the rubbish knockoffs they’ve got here.”
“When he tried to frame you, he needed to do two things,” Dorothy explained, “make it look like you did it---that’s what the marks he made with the pen were for. The other thing he needed to do was make it looked like you could do it. Just like he said. Could and did. Archer, I’ll make you a bet. Some of those records you have in that box are broken. If I can get all of them right, you’re guilty. If I can’t, then you can blame whoever you want.”
Archer shrugged. “Hey, if I’m screwed either way. Might as well make a game out of it.”
He offered the carton to Dorothy. She opened it and scanned through each album sleeve. She plucked four without even glancing at the others.
Guns ‘n Roses - Appetite for Destruction.
Black Sabbath - Headless Cross.
Metallica - Master of Puppets
Ozzy Osbourne - The Ozzman Cometh
“See a pattern?” Dorothy asked. She showed them to Laszlo, who instinctively hissed and recoiled.
Dorothy opened each album to reveal that each of the records within had cracked or shattered. “These were the ones you had to throw out the window. You couldn’t climb back down again with a box under your arm.”
“I was tempted to try but I think falling and breaking my ass bone would’ve looked even worse than this does.”
“You fucking moron.” Hob growled. His claws sprung out of his paws and curled peeling strips of wood away from his podium. “You killed our only chance of getting out of here.”
Archer adjusted his tie. “Yeah pretty much. Would it make you feel better if I said she did it to herself?”
“If you won’t even take credit for your crime, dog, then I have nothing more I wish to hear from you.” Dimitri spat. He grabbed his spear and screamed a fervored battle cry. He made it within a hair’s breath of impaling Archer before mechanical hands descended from the ceiling and hauled him up and out of sight.
“This is my show! Tut tut!” Monokuma scolded. “Nobody should get the idea they can take away hosting Punishment Time from me. It’s pretty much all I do.”
“Where’d you take him?” Archer asked idly.
“Puhuhu! Oh, just a temporary time out.” Monokuma chortled. “He’ll be come back with a better temper. Not that you’ll be around to see it.”
Archer held up a finger. “Ah, wait. Don’t I get to explain my crime first so it hits harder when you do me in?”
“Hmm good point!” Monokuma agreed. “That is a fine tradition in this game. Alright go ahead. But make it quick!”
Archer addressed the group. “Yeah I’ll be the first to admit the mission bombed harder than Operation Eagle Claw. Do I regret my actions? No way, I did nothing wrong. Heck I’d shoot you right now if Golden God over there didn’t take my gun.”
Gilgamesh preened.
“But like I said, technically I didn’t actually kill her. She saw me coming for you to finish the job and she tackled me out the window. Sure I flipped her so she was the one who hit the ground. But that was self defence.” He shrugged. “I went out of my way to hit her with sleeping gas. If she’d stayed down, she’d still be alive. Probably. So if you think about it whose fault is it really?”
“Still yours!” 21 snapped. “What’s so dangerous about Dorothy that it was worth dooming us all? What is she secretly a nuke?”
“You got surprisingly close.” Archer said.
“What the hell does that mean?!”
Archer checked his broken watch.
“It means, see you suckers ‘cause I just bought enough time to signal for an emergency evac.” Archer crowed. “Any second now!”
Monokuma guffawed. “Oh! He’s in denial! I love these ones!”
“Aaanny second now!” Archer repeated!
Monokuma raised his gavel gleefully. “Okay everyone, let’s give it all we’ve got!”
“Any second now?” Archer flicked his watch. “Come on, it had a signal a minute ago--wait, there we go!”
Mechanical arms wrapped around Archer’s limbs and pulled them to his side. They dragged him away from his podium and back across the floor.
“IIIIIIIT’S PUNISHMENT TIME!”