After months of holding out for better prices, and saving up for additional contingencies, Patricia finally moves to buy a house not too far from her workplace in early November. Once the move is completed, and the starting supplies purchased, she begins the process of changing addresses for bureaucracy.

One week before the Worlds, she invites her teammates over, alongside Lanisha, because of the online tournament she invited them over for. Stage 5 of the Slavyanka Grand Prix.

"Privet; look at who we are playing against..." the 6th player tells them.

"Teams that are among the favorites to win at Worlds next week?" Yakiv asks the sixth player.

"We finished in the top fifty at the Top Thousand, as well as the International League, where they played, too. Several of them are playing at the Slavyanka Grand Prix as well. So playing against them is not special for us anymore. Who could be special enough then?" Vira asks the sixth player, with apprehension.

"First, Patricia is the most money-pinching among us, second... the Central Team of the Army" the sixth player then comments on the rustic look of the home.

"Central Team of the Army? These orcs had no success in competitive ChGK, so why are they entering tournaments alongside teams in Worlds contention?" Bohdan questions why would the Russian military even play internationally.

Ukrainian diasporas referred to Russian soldiers as orcs as far back as the war in the Donbass, based upon the brutality of the Russians on the civilians. To some, however, it may also evoke the conscripts' dumbness.

"Vira's ex talked about the Red Army's lack of ChGK success, and, if Stephanie's right, there isn't a whole lot of erudition to go around. They were implying that they were talking about active duty military personnel. So what makes the Red Army garner that level of fame in ChGK?" Patricia asks them.

"The Central Team of the Army, or the Red Army, if you will, comprises the best two players each from the Army, the Navy and the VVS (the air force) not attached to civilian teams. They are essentially riding on the coattails of the choir, and not the least because one of the players is also a Red Army chorister" the sixth player explains to them.

"Let's stop for a moment to consider who could even play competitive ChGK in the military. Enlisted are intellectually all over the place, and I believe this holds true in Russia and in Ukraine. Officer cadets have a higher intellectual floor, but not all of them are that much smarter either. By now, you know that to realistically play at Worlds, it takes a couple of very smart people, ideally two or three, and everyone else should still have some erudition" Bohdan harangues the team.

And, while all 3 branches do have some smart servicemembers on hand, not many even have the inclination to play intellectual games at that level, but I feel there is something both Stephanie and Vira's ex haven't said about why the military in general, and the Red Army in particular, never performed at the same level as civilian teams. The military pays peanuts compared to other jobs requiring college degrees, especially in the long run, Patricia muses, before issuing one more warning to her team prior to the tournament:

"Just because they are active-duty military personnel doesn't mean we should take them for granted! Down with the Krasnaya Armiya! Down with the Red Army orcs!" the sixth player shouts, fist in the air.

"As far as I could make out, active-duty military personnel tend to be intellectually rigid, almost one-dimensional" Vira adds a comment.

The Red Army, in quiz bowl, is a military entity essentially in funding only. I faced it myself in Moscow, and more specifically in Ostankino Palace. But the Red Army's quiz bowl team doesn't play ChGK under that name, Patricia's flashbacks about the World Cup start to flare up, and leaves her wondering about how Moscow State performs in ChGK. Which then turns to past columns of FTPFTC. So it was actually rather straightforward for the military to convince Moscow State to tack on another intellectual game. They already had their own club for intellectual games. But Far Eastern Federal University in Vladivostok basically hosted a SCT mirror just so that Russia could play at the ICT; its captain scored nothing.

Then the reality of this tournament hits Patricia like a ton of bricks after the tournament ends. The better we play, the more hollow this all feels. I just keep playing because I feel powerless over something deeper within myself. Even after out-playing a good chunk of the teams at Worlds, she has more puzzling questions to ask.

"Why is it that we kept entering ever-harder tournaments, such as the Top-Thousand and the International League?" Patricia asks her teammates, while she is about to cry. "What would playing at Worlds bring our community, or Kansas? Also, why did you make such a big deal of us defeating the Red Army here? It's the first time I ever saw them play in high-end, international ChGK tournaments!"

"It's when we start making a name for ourselves on the international ChGK stage that you are suddenly questioning whether it's even worth playing at this level?" Yakiv starts questioning his captain. "But you do realize that Kansas is not known for erudition. More like the American version of Ukrainian rural areas. Wheat and sunflowers. A little warmer perhaps"

"Exactly: what would making a name for ourselves on the international ChGK stage bring us, Kansas or the US even? I get that your parents, and I am referring to Vira and Yakiv, made this wish on their deathbeds for you two to play at the ChGK Worlds, but for everyone else then?" Patricia asks, even more puzzled than before.

"Just making a name for ourselves on the international ChGK stage is not enough. What will deny political points to China and Russia is winning the ChGK Worlds, nothing else. But we can't do this if can't qualify for Worlds in the first place!" Vira whines in Patricia's direction.

"In the future, the Red Army might become a team capable of playing at Worlds in their own right" the sixth player continues.

"We may have beaten them now, but the insistence of the Russian general staff on using active-duty military personnel will put a straitjacket on their potential to grow as a team because, as I said at the beginning, active-duty military personnel tend to be intellectually rigid" Vira adds one more comment afterward.

Playing ChGK requires mental flexibility. Sometimes I feel like some people are one-dimensional intellectually in that they are really good at one thing but what makes them good at that one thing has limited transferability at best. And yet I feel like they still trust me too much. My teammates make me feel like my intellect is what holds the team together. At the same time, I feel both my brain being the source of my inner strength, and my powerlessness over the hunt for new achievements. And also, my own obsession for ChGK seems to be driven by others on my team. Especially Vira. So what do I hope to gain by playing ChGK that I don't already have? Patricia starts questioning herself, but not over her playing ability.

Mom kept implying that ChGK is currently the most politicized intellectual game. She believes that Patricia will lead us to victory at Worlds, and victory at Worlds will deny political points to China and Russia. But mom is stressing Patricia out, without realizing that ChGK just isn't a theater the United States are willing to fight on, Sergei muses, unwilling to confront her mother regarding the boiling tensions between Vira and Patricia regarding, well, ChGK and the sacrifices they both made for the game.

"Vira, you seem to be implying that us winning the ChGK Worlds would suddenly cause ChGK to become a political tool for us! ChGK just isn't part of American sports diplomacy! You've been stressing me out for months, and it has gotten worse!" Patricia lashes out at Vira, ready to snap, and her face turning red.

"Patricia! I never saw you this mad at me! You're much, much smarter than that, and also smarter than I am!" Vira shouts, bewildered by Patricia's apparent anger.

"You think I'm angry? In reality, I feel... powerless! I made some sacrifices for this team, I willingly accepted to move into this rustic home bought on the cheap so that I could save up for yearly ChGK Worlds participation! Or at least next year's ChGK Worlds, anyhow. I was the one who picked which tournaments to enter, knowing that we couldn't enter more than one tournament per week under our current plan! That we would be better served getting more experience of harder tournaments before we can push for Worlds! That's why we entered the International League, the Slavyanka Grand Prix, the Top Thousand, and all that"

"Powerless? You don't sound like you're powerless, unless you feel that way because our MAK rating is climbing too slowly to get to the top-sixty next year!" Vira retorts.

"I am not sure if you have noticed but I seem to be running on autopilot in tournaments by now... you guys made a much bigger deal of the Red Army as a ChGK team than I did, but Stephanie mentioned that they weren't erudites. Yet, the Red Army proper is a military-operated question writing company, from whom Stephanie plans on buying questions for State. Even if the Central Team of the Army was mentally flexible enough to play, the way I see it is that even if they played well together, their knowledge gaps are too great. This begs the following questions: who even writes the questions for Krasnaya Armiya, and what does the military do with the questions"

It's well-known in the quiz bowl world that NAQT crowdsources questions. Same goes for the 13th sector on ChGK, where the computer draws one question at random from a pool of crowdsourced questions submitted to TV-Igra (the producers of the TV show ChGK) on the day of taping. I guess the military buys leftover questions from TV-Igra, but editing thousands of questions per week? I guess there's AI for that. However, sorting questions by difficulty is not the same as fact-checking them. I won't pretend to know how many questions TV-Igra gets per episode, but it's easy to imagine how many questions get discarded before KA can sell the resulting sets. Ugh... why? I always seem to have flashing thoughts, but right now it seems like my nerves are jammed... Patricia's headaches start to intensify.

However, she doesn't feel like her nerves are pinched, more like her thoughts are generated faster than her brain can process them. Her head feels heavier than as she gets dizzier by the second and feels the need to lie on her bed. The rest of the team promptly leaves her house shortly afterwards.

That night, needing painkillers to even be able to sleep well, Patricia feels like she had another dream about ChGK, but, rather than taking place at Neskuchny Garden, as in her previous ChGK dream, this dream takes place on a tour of a Ground Forces base in southwest Russia.

A linguist stationed in that base immediately recognized her. He started showing her around the base, starting with the living quarters. "The first thing to know about KA is that linguists across the armed forces are testing ChGK, brain ring and quiz bowl questions for gauging the difficulty level, while a few other linguists try to convert ChGK questions into brain ring or quiz bowl questions"

"Is intellectual games question testing mostly a linguist thing?" Patricia's oneiric self asked, wondering what kind of soldier would even play ChGK.

"Signals intelligence seem to be more heavily represented among the units testing intellectual games questions" the SIGINT (signals intelligence) linguist answered her, while Patricia showed him the current, real roster of the Central Team of the Army as publicly disclosable to civilian players. "Nuclear units are, for some reason, excluded from the question testing process"

Despite SIGINT being dominant in the military ChGK circuit, and both VVS players in the Red Army are in signals, RVSN (nuclear forces) are banned from playing intellectual games with civilians in any capacity. The other military specialties that have any actual ChGK presence are clerks and music. It's a very limited world, the linguist thought while an oneiric Patricia took a mental note of which specialty does what before sampling ChGK questions.

Questions that other players at the base find a little troubling, and there barely was one full-strength team in the entire base willing to test ChGK questions. 4 SIGINT players, one artillerist and one anti-aircraft player each. Maybe it was just their knowledge bases making common types of questions submitted for 13th sector consideration on TV nearly completely foreign to them, though.

When she awakens, she feels the dream she just had seemed awfully realistic in its depiction of the Russian military in ChGK. Almost too realistic to be true. These sorts of things happen, but is it my obsession over trying to use ChGK to live some sort of glory playing tricks on me? Intellect does not provide any protection from addictions of any kind! Why is it that I keep questioning why I even keep playing ChGK the way I am doing, without realizing or knowing why? More than ever, I feel powerless over my hunt for achievements, which spanned the past 10 years or so, Patricia keeps thinking while she wastes no time using her social media to pitch an idea and test the waters about it: a 12-step program for achievement addiction.

She is willing to organize the first meeting in her home, not expecting a whole lot of achievement addiction addicts to give what she termed the AAA (which already existed but was not present in the Kansas City area at all). In fact, she believes that 12-step programs work best when the participants are close to each other.

Before she can attempt to schedule one, she takes the time to read more about running 12-step programs. However, what really matters to her as a volunteer, for the time being, is to know what the early stages imply, because she does not expect addicts to get beyond maybe step 2-3 on the first night. Often people feel powerless over their addiction as well as feeling helpless as a manifestation of their powerlessness. This holds true regardless of what people are addicted to. Drugs, alcohol, gambling, you name it, Patricia muses on what she expects out of being an AAA volunteer.