Fast forward to the first Saturday after January 1, 2042. The size of the field is just massive for what she expected from a charity ChGK tournament. Several dozen teams are attending so that the tournament raised more funds than the initial target, along with other donations made by attendees.

Good thing this tournament is sanctioned by the IAMG, or International Association of Mind Games, that is, the international federation of ChGK, so we can protect our MAK rating (kind of like Elo rating in chess) should we do well. However, the tournament attracts teams as far away from Kansas as Tashkent or Baku, for whom this tournament is at night whereas it's morning for us, Patricia muses, while waking up in the early hours of the morning, realizing she mostly ran the synchronous tournament on her lonesome, with an appeals committee made up of 3 of the remaining 5 players: Bohdan, Vira and Yakiv. So of the original team members, only 2 are playing at the Achievement Junkie Invitational.

But because the team knows that the Achievement Junkie Invitational wouldn't count as much towards their MAK rating if there are more legionnaires (i.e. players not on the regular roster) than players on the regular (basic) roster, they know they can only get 2 more players.

I guess, Sergei and the sixth player will have to play shorthanded, so who could fill the gap? Ainslee? No. She appeared too one-dimensional intellectually to succeed in ChGK. Bohdan's wife accepted to play since she will be on the appeals committee at State on Mardi Gras. So it leaves me to find the final player we are allowed to field. There's Stephanie or Catria. My first choice would have been Stephanie since she's the TD of State, but Sergei told me she couldn't. Which leaves me with Catria. Even though Catria isn't as erudite as Stephanie, she is far from brainless or intellectually one-dimensional. Hopefully her brain has sufficiently healed from her alcoholism to allow her to play, since she didn't relapse, Patricia muses before calling Catria for help. Luckily, Catria lives in the same neighborhood as she does...

"Hi Catria, it's Patricia from the Congressional debate club. I wonder if you're free later this morning"

"Hi Patricia. Why?" Catria asks Patricia.

"One of our players became sick and cannot play at a charity ChGK tournament"

"ChGK? What's ChGK? You never talked about ChGK to me!" Catria shouts through her phone.

"Suffice to say that ChGK is a team riddle contest. In a way, playing ChGK is much like questioning in a Congressional debate session, in that you must come up with ideas quickly" Patricia explains as succinctly as possible to the soon-to-be college student.

Is that the only thing that translates from Congressional debating to ChGK? a puzzled Catria thinks about other similarities to Cong that ChGK might have and that could make her get settled in playing ChGK.

I don't harbor much hope for the team at this charity tournament since I don't think Catria's knowledge base is going to substitute for mine. Maybe for Vira's; Vira isn't that erudite. Sure, Catria has some intellect, but as a ChGK player, she's a complete unknown, Patricia muses while waiting for a response from Catria. Speaking of Catria, she asks her parents about whether she can play ChGK, but her parents are missing some information.

"Where and when?" Catria asks Patricia.

"I will take you to the tournament myself, in Overland Park. It starts in an hour, so you need to decide quickly"

Because this tournament is a charity tournament, I don't expect this tournament to be a tournament laden with too many teams in contention for Worlds. Probably a couple of teams with a player or two struggling with addictions of some sort. Normally, I wouldn't leave the team in this condition, but since I organize this tourney for a cause I believe in, I am willing to take the risk. Catria might like playing the game, as she might not, but there are about a half-dozen teams in contention for Worlds playing, Patricia reflects on how her teammates will approach this tournament.

Meanwhile, at Catria's home, she enters an argument with her parents about being a substitute in a ChGK tournament...

"Riddle contest? You want to play at a riddle contest called ChGK? I don't know, college is about to start soon" Catria's father asks her daughter.

"I wonder what Patricia could see in you that makes her want to have you play ChGK as a reserve player. I mean, you're smart, but I don't see how it's going to help you" Catria's mother retorts, puzzled by the sudden mention of ChGK in front of her.

"It's my last chance to experience something new before college starts! No alcohol involved" Catria retorts to her mother.

And the argument continues, with each side expressing concerns, but at the same time, she feels like she needs some mental warmup before college starts so that she isn't going to be out of shape, intellectually speaking. Of course, they knew that it was typical for people to start college energized but a little rusty intellectually. Or academically even.

"It does not force me to play later down the road" Catria responds to her father's objections.

"Just this once. But your teammates have to bring you home as soon as this tournament ends" her father strikes a deal with her.

"Thank you"

And then Patricia proceeds to pick Catria up, while also mentally running down the packet so that she makes sure there is no question about addictions, drugs or alcohol. After all, it would not make any sense for a charity tournament held for the Partnership to End Addiction to have questions about addiction since it could trigger relapses in some players! I guess I'm lucky no Green Wave players even wrote questions about drugs, addictions or alcohol. Maybe a medical question but for what I know, there could be more than one player recovering from a zavisimost playing, Patricia muses while driving.

When they arrive at Yakiv's place, everyone is getting settled and the equipment is being readied for a livestreaming of the tournament, so that emissaries across the world would be ready to listen in on her reading the questions and keep scores.

"Welcome to the first edition of the Achievement Junkie Invitational. All proceeds will go to the Partnership to End Addiction" Patricia starts her welcome line, first in English, and then in a Russian heavily laden with a Kansas accent.

So I must remit all the proceeds from this tournament to the Partnership to End Addiction as soon as the results are entered in the IAMG's system. But it appears I am running late to answer each of the 8 questions I asked during the first Achievement Addicts Anonymous meeting and that I failed to answer in subsequent meetings because I was a volunteer, Patricia muses while trying to come up with an answer to these questions she asked the achievement addicts. She snaps out of it by the 60s alarm, then gives the answer to the first question in the packet.

Speaking of proceeds, there were over 90 teams, contributing a total of over $35k to the Partnership to End Addiction. The entry fees only covered about $7k of it, some players ended up being donators who wouldn't play ChGK otherwise.

When the second question is asked during the first game:

"In the Middle Ages, this metallic symbol of medieval Syria was made using different methods from their modern counterpart. What is this symbol..." Patricia reads the second question of the first game in English first, and then in Russian, again with a Kansas accent.

"Medieval Syria? Metal? If only Patricia wasn't the TD of this tournament..." Lanisha laments, while filling in for her husband.

"The major cities of medieval Syria were Damascus, Homs and Aleppo. Unless some smaller Syrian city was somehow a major center of metallurgy in the Middle Ages, the answer must contain one of these three cities in its name" Sergei comments on this aspect of the answer.

"However, Syria doesn't have a lot of metal ore on its territory" the 6th player adds.

Why, Patricia? Why do you have to ask a question about Syria, when my parents endlessly told me about the Syrian civil war and, its consequences in my youth, especially in social studies? Catria then gets flashbacks from some of these discussions, I guess I never told her about my origins.

"There's only one symbol of medieval Syria that's actually metallic. Damascus steel" Catria then adds her answer.

Catria may not be as seasoned as a ChGK player as Vira, but she seems to have the potential to play well, the sixth player muses while the rest of the team keeps quiet for the last few seconds they have remaining.

"Do we all agree our answer is Damascus steel?" Lanisha, the black player, asks the other players.

"Yes"

Catria's flashback about her parents talking about the Syrian civil war are further amplified by Patricia reading the next question in Russian after the English one. About the destruction the Russians wrought in siege warfare. About the Russian savagery, which included exactions of all kinds on the civilian population.

The next 2 1/2 hours happen mostly like this (thoughts on achievement addiction followed by the revelation of answers on the packet), from Patricia's standpoint, since a typical ChGK game lasts for around 40 minutes, with no protests being made, much to her surprise.

Once the tournament ends, Patricia enters all the scores earned by each team on each question into the ChGK equivalent of SQBS (a statistics software used in quiz bowl) as the scores come in by the emissaries. After the scores are tallied, and submitted for IAMG consideration, Patricia asks her teammates about the two new players:

"How do you feel, Catria and Lanisha, about playing this game?"

"I don't like being the one having to deal with answering questions, that's why I would rather be an emissary than a player. But if actually playing the game would make me a better emissary..." Lanisha answers first.

"This game forces me to think harder, but it's not like Congressional debating since the aim here is not to have a better speech or better arguments than the neighbor" Catria answers the TD's question.

"Lanisha tries her best to contribute but doesn't always have an idea of how to do so. Catria, on the other hand, is a little raw as a player but she has pretty solid erudition for her level" Sergei comments on both.

"With this roster, we feel back to the days before you started playing. But I had to pull more weight than I used to. Even then it feels like Catria and Sergei were doing the bulk of the work" the sixth player comments in turn.

Seeing her own team finish this tournament in 10th place with 2 players new to playing the game makes her happy, however. Temporarily, but she then knows the training regimen paid off. Even though they (Catria and Lanisha) don't plan on entering the state championship on Mardi Gras. At least not as players since Lanisha serves on the appeals committee for that ChGK tournament.

But before Patricia takes Catria back to her home, Catria has some confessions to make to her.

"I should have told you this before, but it's only because of a question at this tournament that I feel the urge to talk to you about this. My parents came here as Muslim Syrian refugees before I was even born. I couldn't even drink alcohol at home, nor could I eat pork. So it went downhill in culinary school, and it was at a party with fellow students in culinary school that I discovered alcohol for the first time in my life. And then, you know, I was hospitalized for abusing cooking wine"

"I'm sure you told that to Ainslee but not to me. All my interactions with you dealt with Congressional debating and getting you to college. Speaking of which, it starts in a few days for you" Patricia nods.

"One more thing: I wonder why you saw fit to ask a question about Syria and then I get triggered about what even caused my parents to come here to begin with!" Catria laments, and then starts crying. "Russian exactions on the civilian population, killing and other stuff such as rapes"

"Catria, don't hate stuff from a country because of past actions that country is unable to reproduce. Today's Russia is mostly powerless militarily, they would not be able to do any kind of military adventurism of the kind they did back then. And the military has come under fire from the public there in the past few years now" Patricia then attempts to rebut Catria.

I took Russian courses in undergrad with Derek, my quiz bowl teammate of the time, and both Derek and Imélie told me about why the Russian public disliked the military back then, albeit in different contexts, Patricia then has flashbacks of her time at Tulane.

"In a sense, in ChGK, I'm lucky that players don't look at me funny, but that's about it. Not like in school, where people made fun of me whenever religion and, to a lesser extent, my Middle Eastern ethnicity, is brought up" Catria then comments about the Kansas State Team's tolerance in ethnic and religious matters.

"You must realize, Kate, that, in ChGK, and it's especially true of international ChGK tournaments, like the one you just played in..."

"Really? This was an international ChGK tournament?" Catria gasps upon hearing about the Achievement Junkie Invitational being an international ChGK tournament.

"Not only the world of international ChGK is mostly online, but because the barriers to entry are pretty low, there is a large skill difference between the top echelons and everyone else. What I was saying was that, in international ChGK, question writers can't control for the personal histories of the players. If you want to keep playing ChGK in the future, you must keep your emotions towards questions in check. One last thing: there just isn't a whole lot of teams in Kansas that are active on the international ChGK circuit" Patricia then explains the harsh realities of international ChGK she feels are relevant to Catria.

And, since the questions were based on past quiz bowl submissions by Tulane for ACF tournaments, many players were bewildered by just how heavy on science the Achievement Junkie Invitational was compared to other tournaments. On how it feels too heavily academic and, with it, ACF topic distributions because it was very close, as close as it could possibly have gotten when dealing with fractions of quiz bowl packets. On how the AJI feels like a "wannabe Worlds qualifier". Some emissaries commented on how science questions came at the expense of pop culture, which is more common in ChGK than it is under ACF quiz bowl. Maybe for future editions of the AJI, I could base it on high school quiz bowl packets instead because these emissaries are probably right. These were supposed to come from the easiest bonuses in collegiate quiz bowl; I kept hearing about how good ChGK sets were supposed to be answerable with high school-level of erudition, Patricia ruminates on the mistakes in question selection.

She then takes Catria back home, and promptly wires the proceeds of the AJI to the Partnership to End Addiction.