User:Ch4zm/October 2025/Seattle Lore Jam

https://gemini.google.com/gem/9f780849d3df/a71ce4eaa60e23f6

	I am working on lore for a sports team for a competitive cellular automata league (golly.life). The team is the Seattle Sneakers. For the past 192 years, the team has had limited success in the postseason - unlike some teams, they have not had a total drought of Hellmouth Cup series appearances, and they have managed to win the Cup a few times, but only three or four times in 192 years. Meanwhile, they have had multiple near-misses and heartbreaks, long playoff droughts, coming in second or runner-up two years in a row or 3 times in 5 years, etc. I would like to devise lore for a curse affecting Seattle. I would like to incorporate Seattle lore, geography, or sports history somehow, and was thinking "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" (Mariners tie-in) could be fruitful. Please provide 5 ideas for a name and brief description of the curse afflicting the Seattle Sneakers.

1. The Albatross of the Salish Sea

Name: The Albatross of the Salish Sea

Description: This curse is a direct riff on your "Ancient Mariner" idea. In their inaugural Cup-winning season (one of those rare, tantalizing victories), the nascent Sneakers collective, in a display of emergent hubris, "killed" an ancient, beautiful, and harmlessly neutral "glider-albatross" pattern that was migrating across the game board. This entity, a native configuration of the cosmic Salish Sea, was not an opponent, but simply there. Its disruption has hung around the collective's "neck" ever since. It doesn't prevent them from making the playoffs—in fact, it compels them to wander the postseason wastes ("water, water, everywhere..."). But in critical, Cup-clinching moments, the "rime" sets in: their patterns suffer a sudden, catastrophic "pattern decay," becoming becalmed and stagnant, unable to find the "wind" (momentum) to make the final kill. They are doomed to be the Mariner, forced to watch others celebrate while they, and their fans, are left "alone on a wide wide sea" of postseason mediocrity.