Round One

The people who won Round One:

Prompt 1:  The Dangers of Being Alone
Prompt 2:   Human Voices
Prompt 3:  Symptom 1: Paranoia
Prompt 4:  Veritas
Prompt 5:  Fire and Rain
Prompt 6:  Bleeding Hearts
Prompt 7:  Worries, Monsters, and Lies
Prompt 8:  Il suono e l'odore

First off, congratulations on passing the auditions. I really appreciate the effort and creativity everyone has already brought to the table here and am excited to see where the story goes. To help the writers get a better sense of the world, here is another chunk of information on the conflict between the survivors and the Warped: The Original Settlements I will be releasing more pieces of the unabridged history of Eos for the benefit of the writers with each round.

Without further ado, here’s the general prompt for round one: encounter your assigned Warped.

That’s right, of the survivors and the Warped, the “bad guys” found you all first. Maybe they actually found you. Maybe you found them. Either way, you have to deal with one of them.

Now, notice the prompt says “encounter.” You are not required to fight or defeat them. Perhaps you have a cordial conversation. Perhaps you see them coming and run or hide. Perhaps the Warped wins the encounter but doesn’t kill your character. Perhaps none of these things or all of them. The Warped prompts have a wide variety regarding the sort of challenge they present, so the way to handle one probably won’t work as well for another.

The things you are required to include in your round one entry:
1) Your character. This should be fairly obvious, but you do need to tell the story of your particular character.
2) Your opponent’s character. Note that the tournament is on the level of the writer’s only. You are not required to fight their character. You’re not required to cooperate with them either. They just need to be part of your story, but I recommend portraying them well and giving their role weight, whether you befriend them or feed them to the Warped.
3) The assigned Warped. Each pair of writers will have a specific Warped assigned to them, which serve as more detailed prompts in some ways. You do not have to take advantage of all of the information given on your Warped; it's just there if you want to play with it. You can have parted ways with them by the end of the entry or still be in trouble. Round two will have the survivors showing up (and at least one other new arrival), so there is potential help on the way.

Anything else you want to include is optional. Enjoy your creative license. I’ve provided information to work with, but I know there are those of you who have their own sorts of story directions in mind. I’ve tried to leave room for that in the prompts and for all the details I’ve given on each Warped, technically you don’t really have to use any of it aside from the minimal needed to have them show up somewhere in the round.

A few quick notes about these Warped. First, the local stronghold for the Warped is located at the Library (location 2 on the map). Most of these Warped are either from there or travel between there and the Warped’s main city to the east. Second, the names/titles given for them are the ones used by the survivors. The Warped are not very social creatures and seldom use names between each other, so some of them picked up the habit of simply using the survivor’s designations for the times they do need names. Others still prefer to use their old names. Additionally, the Warped officially call their “species” by the name “the Chosen,”  though how much they use one term or the other depends on the individual.

Oh, and the Warped Hivemind is a single person serving as a hub, not a direct Warped to Warped link.

In general, just be creative. If you have any questions about the prompt in general or specific Warped, please feel free to ask. The deadline is February 25th 28th at 11:59PM PST.

-------------------------------------------------------------

The round one pairings and Warped prompts are as follows: