to ficathon or not to ficathon

So intoabar is happening this year. Signups are open through July 14. Word minimum is 500, which is usually doable for me. And cracky crossovers used to be my jam. I've never actually done intoabar due to life shit, but I am pondering whether to sign up this year or whether (as so often happens) I'll get an assignment and draw a complete blank.

So the way intoabar works is that you pick one character, plus up to four fandoms that character is not from. Your chosen character walks into a bar (or any establishment where one can similarly strike up conversation with strangers) and meets a randomly chosen character you are assigned from one of the fandoms you picked. You can wind up with some pretty minor characters, and we all know random number generation has an evil sense of humor, so "I would definitely be able to write literally any recurring character from this fandom" is quite a commitment. I couldn't do SG-1, for instance, because the cast changed so heavily for the last two seasons.

I might be able to pull off "Wes Janson walks into a bar and meets anyone from the Mass Effect trilogy". Might. Would it be fun? I genuinely don't know. I'd probably get Thane. ;P

I mean, there's no penalty for defaulting, other than me going "omg i am a Failure" a lot... o_O So I could hypothetically sign up and then if I don't like my assignment just be like "nah I can't write this character I'm out". But in practice, I would keep fretting about it.

Also, the last several times I tried to do ficcish things with time components, I wound up losing my job or being homeless or moving cross-country or something equally disruptive. I'm a little wary there. :S