Editing Openai/69222f9d-2638-8007-9915-0903b93b1150 (section)

==== Scenario 2: Two hours of prep, no sniper advantage ====

Two hours of prep massively changes the weighting. Now we’re asking:

: Who turns a neutral environment into their personal kill-box with limited time and materials?

This favors tradecraft, explosives, deception, and shaping the battlefield, not just raw shooting.

Here’s who gets the biggest relative boost:
* Michael Westen – This is literally his thing. Give him two hours in an urban environment and: - Every doorway is a funnel. - Every likely approach path has an IED, tripwire, or distraction device. - Sightlines are managed to force people into angles where he wins. - He’ll have fake positions, misdirection, and probably get two or three people killed by walking into his traps before they ever see him.
* Jack Bauer & Jonas Blane also prep well: - They’d create kill zones, fallback positions, and ambush points. - But their prep style is more “small-unit military op” than “MacGyvered death maze for multiple elite opponents.”
* Nikita & Sydney Bristow: - With prep, both would lean heavily into stealth, disguise, and misdirection. - They might try to isolate and pick off targets one by one, possibly posing as civilians or using decoys to lure others into traps.
* Reese: - Still terrifying, but he loses his normal superpower: omniscient intel from The Machine. - With prep, he’ll set some simple traps, choose high-ground/cover, but his biggest edge is still real-time execution, not Rube Goldberg battlefield design.

Given just two hours, constrained to what you can actually scrounge in that time, the person who gets the most bang (literally) for that time is:

: Last one standing (two hours prep): Michael Westen

Why Westen here?
* His entire show is about turning short prep windows and junk materials into asymmetric advantages against better-armed, better-trained people.
* He doesn’t just set traps; he manipulates people: - Fake meeting spots. - Noisy distractions to clump others together. - Booby-trapped chokepoints that channel them into each other’s line of fire.
* He’s also disciplined enough and experienced enough to avoid getting emotionally baited, which is often Bauer’s flaw.

Probable late-game in the prep scenario: Westen vs Reese/Nikita/Jonas. But in a pre-rigged urban arena, walking into Westen’s playground, I’d expect him to thin the herd at range with traps and finish the final opponent in a position he picked, not them.

===== Quick TL;DR =====
* Zero prep: → John Reese is most likely last standing – he’s the most consistently lethal solo operator in sudden, chaotic firefights.
* Two hours prep: → Michael Westen takes it – short-window environmental prep, improvised explosives, and psychological manipulation are exactly his wheelhouse, and those two hours multiply his lethality more than anyone else’s.

If you want, we can tweak assumptions (e.g., specific environment: office tower vs ship vs mall) and see how that shifts the winner.