May 2035. Enter Patricia Halpern, one of the top students at Olathe Northwest, and its outgoing quiz bowl captain, on the Kansas side of the Kansas City region. She returns home after her last final exam before summer break and reads the latest issue of For ten points, fix this community (FTPFTC), an online newsletter about quiz bowl.

Since it is the Friday before Memorial Day, as is usual for FTPFTC, the newsletter covers the HSNCT, or High School National Championship Tournament, organized by NAQT, or National Academic Quiz Tournaments, in-depth. Yet, the various articles on the HSNCT is not what piqued Patricia's interest. What does pique her interest is the article on the Russian five-year plan for quiz bowl.

Some thoughts traverse Patricia's mind as she reads about the plan. Apparently, the plan is spearheaded by the military. Which FTPFTC mentioned, in recent years, was not liked among the Russian population.

Wow: after the past 15 years, which were some of the most turbulent years in Russian history, Russia is so desperate to cling on to any semblance of presence on the world stage that Russia is willing to use quiz bowl for political purposes? a puzzled Patricia thinks, while reading the publicly available details of the plan on FTPFTC. The Russian defeat in Ukraine caused Russia to lose a lot of the influence it used to enjoy on the world stage: now Russia is reduced to a petrostate, a rather large one, but a petrostate nonetheless. How the hell are they even going to follow through with the plan? All FTPFTC seemed to be implying is that Russia had talent but no circuit.

But little did Patricia know was that the college she will attend in Fall, Tulane, is planning on thwarting the Russian quiz bowl plan. And she does not suspect the Russians' source of talent actually made the plan more feasible than she expected.

She doesn't suspect that the Russians also planned on politicizing their flagship intellectual game, ChGK. Nor that she will be introduced to it in short order through friends of Patricia's parents, who first came to the US as Ukrainian refugees.

As for the Russian quiz bowl plan itself,it called for building teams capable of contending for each and every major international quiz bowl tournament, within 5 years. Priority is given to the collegiate ones, the Academic Competition Federation (ACF) Nationals and the Intercollegiate Championship Tournament, or ICT, but they appeared willing to shift focus to the HSNCT or even the MSNCT, or Middle School National Championship Tournament, if necessary.