User:Ch4zm/November 2025/Fargo Lore Jam

Fargo Flea Flickers lore jam

Team Overview

The Fargo Flea Flickers did not officially exist in the Hellmouth Cup era, but their legend was born in the shadows of the league, drawing on the long tradition of sports barnstorming.

Barnstorming Brigands: Before joining the league, the Flickers were a traveling troupe of Golly outlaws. They barnstormed across the Midwest in a fleet of beat-up pickup trucks, challenging local collectives to unsanctioned "parking lot matches" and projecting their grid onto the side of grain silos. Their football-inspired "trick plays" were developed in these unregulated games to hustle unsuspecting opponents.

Rainbow Cup

Second Place Ceiling

...

The Consultant's Gambit

(Rainbow/Season 18): During their "Second Place Ceiling" era, a desperate faction within the Flickers secretly hired a legendary Golly consultant, "Mr. Sterling," to break their curse. Mr. Sterling gave them brilliant new patterns that carried them to the Rainbow Cup finals. In the last game, as Fargo was poised to win, the patterns suddenly collapsed. It was revealed that Mr. Sterling was a high-priced contractor for a DECO-owned firm, and the patterns he sold Fargo were designed with a fatal, time-delayed flaw - a form of planned obsolescence that guaranteed they would fail at the most critical moment.

This unprovoked hustle was business as usual for DECO, but Fargo simmered over the incident for years.

Hellmouth II Cup

The Amicus Curse

(HII S2): Entering the Hellmouth II Cup era, Delaware Corporate Shells, repeatedly frustrated by the unpredictable chaos of teams like Fargo, pioneered a new form of corporate warfare. Unable to guarantee dominance on the grid, they decided to weaponize the rulebook itself. They assembled a rapid-response legal team to craft "Amicus Injunctions" - pre-written, hyper-specific legal challenges against unorthodox patterns that could be filed in real-time to disrupt a game from thousands of miles away. Their primary target was Fargo.

The strategy was tested in Hellmouth II/Season 2. The Flickers proved their superiority on the grid by defeating DECO 3-1 in the Division Series. While the loss stung DECO, it played directly into their larger plan. When Fargo reached the Cup Final against the Sacramento Boot Lickers, DECO was waiting. In the deciding Game 6, as Fargo deployed a brilliant "Statue of Liberty" pattern to win the Cup, the injunction was filed. The cosmic arbiters, forced to evaluate DECO's claim of "computationally unsound" play, attached a parasitic "auditor" algorithm to Fargo's pattern. The audit drained its momentum, causing it to decay just before completion and handing the Cup to Sacramento.

(HII S3): Hellmouth II/Season 3 was a bitter repeat. Fargo once again proved their dominance by sweeping DECO 3-0 in the Division Series. They fought their way to the final to face the Baltimore Piano Tuners. In the epic Game 7, as Fargo unleashed their ultimate trick play, a second Amicus Injunction was filed from Wilmington, this time citing a violation of "inter-dimensional acoustic resonance." The now-infamous auditor pattern attached itself to Fargo's formation, and for the second year in a row, the Flickers watched their championship get buried under a mountain of metaphysical paperwork.

Fargo had two pennants but no Cups to show for them. They were twice defeated not by their opponents, but by DECO's legal department. Fargo, frustrated yet again by the seemingly indifferent DECO, channeled their rage into inventing new trick plays that were not only brilliant, but also "lawsuit-proof."

Hellmouth III Cup

The Injunction is Lifted

The Hellmouth III/Season 5 Championship Series saw the Flickers pitted against the Shells. Even as they clinched the pennant in Game 5, the Flickers' celebration was muted. They knew from the brutal experience of the Amicus Curse that winning the pennant was only the first step. The final boss was not their next opponent on the grid, the Long Beach Flightless Birds, but the legal department in Wilmington, headed by the notorious Amicus Injunction, Esq.

The entire Golly world watched anxiously, wondering what new legal chicanery DECO would invent to deny Fargo a third time.

Fargo, however, had learned. They concluded the only way to win was to change the game. In the week between winning the pennant and the start of the Hellmouth III Cup Final, an unassuming crew of Uncivil Engineers from a newly-formed shell company ("Interstate Water Management Solutions LLC") arrived at DECO's holographic corporate headquarters. Citing a non-existent municipal order, they gained access to the actual Delaware Corporate Shells headquarters, located in the adjacent building's basement parking garage. The original plan was for the Uncivil Engineers to break a water main. But, being systematic professionals dedicated to their craft, they sabotaged the entire block's piping so that the sewer and water lines would all empty into the garage, flooding the DECO servers and wiping out their rapid-response injunction-filing system.

By the time the Hellmouth III Cup Final began, the Shells were completely out of commission. The series against Long Beach was a grueling, hard-fought battle, but it was a fair one - no last minute injunctions, audits, or phone calls from Wilmington. The Flickers finally won in a tense 4-3 series, winning a two-fold victory - a Cup on the grid, and the amicus injunctions off the grid. The Flickers had shown that they were capable of fighting fire with water. The "Delaware plumbing incident" was never traced back to the Uncivil Engineers.