User:Ch4zm/October 2025/Ground Effect Crown

These fragments are intended for both teams' pages

Hellmouth

Formation of the Ground Effect Crown

The rivalry between the Salt Lake Turbulence and Long Beach Flightless Birds began almost the moment that Salt Lake joined the league in Hellmouth/Season 16. The rivalry was a natural one: the Turbulence, an Air-element team, are analytical, mathematical, and elegant, while the Flightless Birds, an Earth-element team, are chaotic, unpredictable, and instinctual. Whereas the Turbulence live their motto, Inveniam viam aut faciam (I find a way, or make one), by overcoming adversity and finding ways to rise above any challenge, the Flightless Birds motto, Omnia adscendentia convergunt (Everything that rises must converge) serves as a direct threat to the Turbulence - a promise that gravity will always overcome and pull high-flyers back to earth. The matches themselves were ugly clashes between patterns from the Turbulence, based on complex, elegant equations of fluid dynamics, and patterns from the Flightless Birds, hare-brained brute-force schemes that would come together in the end more often than not.

The Inversion Layer

In the Hellmouth Cup, the Long Beach Flightless Birds represented a frustrating gravitational barrier for the Salt Lake Turbulence . The Flightless Birds, Masters of the Ground, had no business obstructing the Masters of the Air, and yet they consistently and effectively held the Turbulence back, and just like a cold layer of air trapping the smog and pollution of Salt Lake on a winter day, the Birds smothered the Turbulence with exhaust from their own patterns.

In Season 18 of the Hellmouth Cup, their first postseason faceoff, the Long Beach Flightless Birds managed to overcome the Salt Lake Turbulence 3-2 in a brutal, ugly League Championship Series that truly set the tone for the rivalry going forward - a titanic clash of order versus chaos, with the winner taking everything. Long Beach knew better than to try and outmaneuver Salt Lake in the air. Instead, they dragged them down into a chaotic tussle in the dirt and the mud, clogging Salt Lake's perfect patterns with grit and unpredictability. The Turbulence were humiliated, grounded by a team of Flightless Birds, and were sent packing at the end of that LCS with a chip on their shoulder that would never disappear.

In Season 21 of the Hellmouth Cup, the Long Beach Flightless Birds and Salt Lake Turbulence were set for a League Championship Series rematch, with the Turbulence desperate to prove themselves to the fan base after being bested by the Birds in the Season 18 LCS. Salt Lake adapted the second time around, proving the superiority of their analytical approach. In another 3-2 series that was another ugly brawl between the forces of order and the forces of chaos, the Turbulence held tight, emerged victorious, and went on to bring the first ever Hellmouth Cup to Salt Lake.

Toroidal

War of the Suburbs

The "Birds" vs. "Burbs" nickname confusion between the Long Beach Flightless Birds and Salt Lake Turbulence boiled over into a full-blown psychological conflict during the Toroidal Cup era, inadvertently sparked by the radio announcer for the Elko Astronauts , Mission Control - a cold and detached chorus of engineers making observations on ongoing matches. In an inadvertent mixup, Mission Control began to refer to the Turbulence as the "Birds" (rather than the "Burbs"), and refer the Flightless Birds as the "Burbs" (rather than the "Birds").

The irony of the mix-up was particularly delicious because of how cold and clinical the incorrect nicknames were as Mission Control called the games. Clips of the mixed-up nicknames made the rounds on social media and went viral. The two teams had very different reactions to the whole affair:

• The Long Beach Flightless Birds found it hilarious, leaning into the absurdity and irony of the nickname. Fans began to show up to matches with lawn chairs, plastic flamingos, and portable ovens for baking apple pies, mocking the idea of their dense industrial port city having a suburban core.

• The Salt Lake Turbulence were incensed by the mix-up, which they considered a case of stolen identity. That their stolen identity was handed to their chaotic, jobless, and beach-dwelling rivals was an unbearable insult. In the leadup to the Toroidal/Season 11 LCS (the first half of the DPRR), the Burbs announced the start of the War of the Suburbs, dramatically increasing the stakes of the LCS faceoff.

Newton's Third Law

In Golly lore, the Long Beach Flightless Birds became famous for the Double Pennant Revenge Reversal (DPRR) in Toroidal/Season 11 thru Toroidal/Season 14. Sure enough, the team responsible for the first half of the DPRR was their Ground Effect Crown rivals, the Salt Lake Turbulence .

• The Action (Toroidal/Season 11): Newton's Third Law stipulates that for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. The action, in this case, was the Toroidal/Season 11 drubbing of the Turbulence in the League Championship Series. The Birds bested the Turbulence 3-1, clinched the Cold League pennant, and won the Toroidal Cup. They asserted that the "ground effect" was inescapable, even on the looping topology of the torus. The Turbulence, meanwhile, began thinking of the Birds as a physical force whose grip, like gravity, couldn't be loosened.

• The Reaction (Toroidal/Season 12): The equal and opposite reaction happened the next postseason, Toroidal/Season 12, as the Turbulence swung the pendulum back in the other direction, riding out the chaos and defeating the Birds by the same margin, 3-1, before going on to win the Toroidal Cup themselves. It was a perfect, equal, and opposite reaction, and was a testament to Salt Lake's ability to analyze a problem and engineer a solution. As the Turbulence would say, the equations were balanced.

Rainbow

Mutually Assured Obstruction

In the multi-team chaos of the Rainbow Cup, every rivalry was forced to adapt, and the Ground Effect Crown was no different. The flame of the rivalry burned bright, with each team accumulating a lot of scar tissue from regular season chafing and repeated Championship Series reversals. In the Rainbow Era, the rivalry naturally evolved into a fight to ensure the other team failed - and that often meant losing sight of the higher goal (winning the Rainbow Cup) in pursuit of the lower aim (knocking out their rival).

In Rainbow/Season 7, a chaotic West League Championship Series saw the Salt Lake Turbulence focus on creating a spoiler vortex, distracting from maximizing their own score but aiming to knock the Long Beach Flightless Birds out of the postseason. The gamble worked - the Birds were knocked out, and the Turbulence advanced to the Rainbow Cup series - a victory born of pure mathematical spite.

Nine seasons later, in Rainbow/Season 16, the roles would be reversed. The Flightless Birds, embodying their motto, "EVerything that rises must converge," entered the LCS with a singular goal: bury the Turbulence, deep in the earth, as deep as they could go. The Birds used ugly, inefficient, HEAVY patterns that created stagnant zones on the grid ("gravity wells") that disrupted the airfoil formation of the Turbulence, sending them into a tailspin and crashing into the heavy Birds formations. The Flightless Birds barely clawed their way into the Rainbow Cup (finishing a forgettable 4th place), but their real victory was exacting revenge on the Turbulence by grounding them.

Klein

Symmetrical Annihilation

The unusual and non-orientable topology of the Klein Cup had its impact on the Ground Effect Crown: it led to wild swings, back-and-forth crushing victories answered kind.

The Anomaly (Klein/Season 3): the Flightless Birds, through sheer chaotic instinct, accidentally mastered the grid's bizarre physics to achieve a humiliating 3-0 sweep over the analytical Turbulence.

The Correction (Klein/Season 6): the Turbulence, having studied the anomaly, delivered a mathematically perfect and equally brutal 3-0 revenge sweep.

This established a trend: a coin toss for total victory.

Hellmouth II

The Ganja Gambit

After being swept by the Salt Lake Turbulence in their first Hellmouth II encounter (Hellmouth II/Season 1), the Long Beach Flightless Birds were forced to evolve. The two teams met again in 19 seasons later, in the League Division Series matchup in Hellmouth II/Season 20. It was the usual brutal neck-and-neck affair, par for the course for the Ground Effect Crown, taking the series to the maximum 5 games.

The Ploy: Frustrated that their usual antics weren't enough to break the stalemate, the Birds resorted to a trick learned from their East Coast rivals, the Jersey OSHA Violations. The night before the decisive Game 5, they invited the Turbulence to a mandatory inter-team "Safety Meeting." The literal-minded Turbulence, assuming this was a formal discussion of grid protocols and safety compliance, attended with notes and binders. The "Safety Meeting" was a Jersey Safety Meeting - meaning it was a massive hotbox session. The Burbs and Birds both got so thoroughly baked, the Birds were certain there was no way the Burbs would be able to see straight the next day.

The Backfire: The next day, the Turbulence arrived at the match not dulled, but enlightened. Far from hindering their analytical minds, the cannabis had unlocked a new level of mental performance. For the first time, they could see and feel the div, curl, and grad of their patterns instead of just calculating them. Their formations became terrifyingly fluid and intuitive, weaving with a creativity they never knew they possessed. They fused mathematics and fleeting form like jazz. The Flightless Birds were dismantled in Game 5 by a beautiful, unpredictable, giggling opponent. The Birds' attempt to turn their rivals into "dopes" had backfired terribly, giving Salt Lake a 3-2 series victory and and a glimpse of Enlightenment.

Hellmouth III

Season 3 Day 49: The Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day

The Ground Effect Crown rivalry was in full effect as the Hellmouth III/Season 3 regular season drew to a close. At the end of Day 48, with just 1 day left before the end of the season, the Salt Lake Turbulence and Long Beach Flightless Birds were tied at 25-23 and were both making a mad dash to win the Cold Fire division.

On Day 49, the Salt Lake Turbulence won their match against the Albuquerque Solarpunks , and Salt Lake began to celebrate another trip to the postseason. But as other Day 49 matches drew to a close, the Long Beach Flightless Birds also won their match, posting an identical 26-23 win-loss record to the Turbulence. Then the Phoenix Freshrolls , vying for a wild card spot, posted a 26-23 record, as did the very same Solarpunks that the Turbulence had beaten. Four teams, three playoff spots.

The division winner tiebreaker came down to total points scored: The Turbulence clocked in at 13,046, while the Flightless Birds came in at 14,043, throwing the division title to the Birds.

The first wild card tiebreaker went to the Freshrolls, with 15,707 points. And the second wild card tiebreaker went to the Solarpunks, with 13,978 points. The Turbulence came away empty-handed, eliminated entirely from the postseason. This was made all the more devastating given a late-season surge that had put the Turbulence in a clear first place, only to slide right back into a tie in the final stretch.

Day 49 of Hellmouth/Season 3, which came to be known as the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day, naturally triggered a crisis of faith among Turbulence fans, and a crisis of identity among the team.

The Great Salt Lake Civil War

Ever since the Ganja Gambit in Hellmouth II/Season 20 had led the Salt Lake Turbulence to inadvertently ingest copious amounts of high-octane marijuana, achieve enlightenment, and mop the floor with the Long Beach Flightless Birds , there had been an internal debate raging between two camps:

• The Enlightenmeh, who believed in embracing enlightenment, setting off on the yellow brick road lined with Electric Lettuce, and channeling vectors through hyperspace with the aid of ganja.

• The Orthodoxeh, those who believed the team should stick to their traditional ways, ignore the illusory siren call of the Devil's Lettuce, and get back to no-nonsense, hard-nosed mathematics.

Flightless Takedown

The Hellmouth III Cup saw the Flightless Birds take down the Turbulence twice in the League Division Series.

• Hellmouth III/Season 14 saw the first postseason meeting of the Hellmouth III Cup between the Birds and Burbs, and Long Beach delivered a thunderous smackdown of the Turbulence, in a series that seemed a lot less close than the final 3-1 series tally would suggest. The Birds reasserted their role as Masters of the Ground.

• Hellmouth III/Season 21 saw another decisive smackdown of the Turbulence by the Birds, this time a 3-0 series tally, giving the Birds a clean sweep. The Turbulence seemed stifled, their normally eloquent equations failing to find any traction against the dominant ground game of the Flightless Birds. The internal strife of the Great Salt Lake Civil War was taking a clear toll.

Hellmouth IV

(The Salt Lake Turbulence did absolutely horrendously in Hellmouth IV Cup... all due to the Great Salt Lake Civil War, tearing the team apart)

Hellmouth V

The dormant rivalry roars back to life...

Lifestyle Weed

In Hellmouth V the Salt Lake Turbulence discovered Lifestyle Weed - plant material that can be smoked like marijuana, that smells like marijuana, causes the same side effects (mega red-eye) as marijuana, but with no negative psychoactive effects (no mental fog). This struck an acceptable middle-ground between the Enlightenmeh (who still had something to write home about) without the unacceptable psychoactive effects of marijuana the Orthodoxeh objected to.i

As a result, the Great Salt Lake Civil War was resolved, and after a long period in the wilderness (the entirety of the Hellmouth IV Cup), the team was back in the fight - mathematically flawless patterns, intuitive fluid motion, and precise control. Like Popeye eating a can of spinach, the Salt Lake Turbulence would hoover up Lifestyle Weed and exhale points. They could pretend to be baked, but still knock out a full three-dimensional integral by hand, in pen, holding their breath the entire time.

They came out fighting in Hellmouth V/Season 3, taking every series to the max (3-2 over the Tucson Butchers , 4-3 over the Tucson Butchers , and 4-3 over the Milwaukee Flamingos ) and bringing the Hellmouth V Cup home to Salt Lake. They would repeat the feat in Hellmouth V/Season 22, defeating the Milwaukee Flamingos to take home their second and final Hellmouth V Cup.

Ganja Gambit II

(Hellmouth V/Season 20): Seeing that their major rivals, the Salt Lake Turbulence , were on the verge of stabilizing their internal infighting and bringing about a resolution to the Great Salt Lake Civil War via Lifestyle Weed, and finding themselves up against the wall in another 2-2 League Division Series matchup, the Long Beach Flightless Birds decided to resurrect the Safety Meeting playbook, conveniently mis-labeling a box of High Octane Couch-Lock Indica Indoor Fire joints as "Lifestyle Weed". As the Safety Meeting got underway, the Turbulence, imbibing highly psychoactive weed, felt the fragile stability of the Calculated Serenity crumble. The Great Salt Lake Civil War re-ignited. The Flightless Birds did hardly any work to seal the deal and win the series in Game 5.