Richard kept his head down. Not all those cow pies were frozen, and the ones that were could turn an ankle. He'd limited his baggage to a carry-on, so the size 11s weaving their way among the green-brown mounds were meshy black cross-trainers that you could practically fold in half and stuff into a pocket. He could have gone to Walmart this morning and bought boots. The reunion, however, would have noticed, and made much of, such an extravagance.

Two dozen of his relatives were strung out in clumps along the barbed-wire fence to his right, shooting into the ravine or reloading. The tradition had started as a way for some of the younger boys to blow off steam during the torturous wait for turkey and pie. In the old days, once they’d gotten back to Grandpa's house from Thanksgiving church service and changed out of their miniature coats and ties, they would burst out the doors and sprint half a mile across the pasture, trailed by a few older men to make sure that matters didn't get out of hand, and shoot .22s and Daisies down into the crick. Now grown up with kids of their own, they showed up for the re-u with shotguns, hunting rifles, and handguns in the backs of their SUVs.

Much to his chagrin, the details (involving drug money and motorcycle gangs) about the origin of the money that allowed Richard to buy Schloß Hundschüttler and turn it into a ski resort are amply covered by his Wikipedia entry. After he turned daily operations over to people who actually knew what they were doing, Richard found himself with a lot of free time to play World of Warcraft, culminating into what would have been a Lost Decade, had this not given him the idea to start his own online game, focused on supporting a thriving in-game economy, creating a multi-billion company in the process.

The massively multiplayer world of T'Rain had been designed to be as accessible to the all-important Chinese teenager market as it was to the pudgy middle-aged Westerners who were dependent upon those teenagers for virtual gold. The Westerners got to have more fun, and kids like Marlon were actually making money. Playing the game, to them, was a source of income rather than an expense, and most of them are perfectly happy with the arrangement. Marlon decided that he could increase that income even further by creating a virus that would infect T'Rain players' computers and encrypt their files, making them inaccessible until they purchased the decryption key by dropping off virtual gold in the virtual Torgai Foothills. As a direct consequence, the influx of characters carrying ransom money, other characters attacking them to get to that money, and a third group paid by Marlon to protect the first group from the second, turns the Torgai Foothills into a war zone. As an unexpected consequence (especially since he was asking for just $73), the same thing happens to the building where Marlin lives.

That Zula's boyfriend Peter had been using their trip to meet Uncle Richard at his hotel to sell a memory stick full of stolen credit card numbers in Canada was already bad enough to result in a relationship termination event. But it was made much worse by the fact that the memory stick contained a virus, that the virus would encrypt and hold for ransom all the data on the computers of the Russian gangsters behind the deal, that those people would show up at Peter's apartment in the middle of the night just as she was moving out her stuff, and that they would take them along in their private jet to China in order to find the virus author.

Yuxia is from Yongding, where the Big-Footed Women make the high mountain tea. She has learned to speak English from books, movies, and working as a tourist guide for Australian backpackers. She came to Xiamen to sell her hometown's high mountain tea, mostly to wholesellers, but also to tourists on the streets. Chatting up a certain group of foreigners turns out to be a very dangerous idea.

When Sokolov decided to quit active military duty it was mostly because he thought that work as a private security consultant would be less stressful, even if his clients turned out to be rich Russian businessmen with questionable backgrounds. And usually that would be the case. He could probably have remained on top of things inspite of getting involved in clearly illegal and dangerous activities undertaken by his apparently clinically insane employer. But after they stumble into the wrong apartment in Xiamen, his experiences in Afghanistan and Chechnya are barely enough just to keep him alive.

As far as Csongor could tell from working for organized criminals as a system administrator, these people are not like how they are presented in movies. Almost all of what they do is very boring. So when he was asked to go to Moscow for a meeting and upon arrival was instead recommended to board a plane full of certain types of people, he knew that this was going to be highly unusual. But that could not possibly have prepared him for going from drinking beer in Budapest four days ago to hijacking a boat in China, falling in love and killing people.

Olivia had just devoted the better part of a year, and MI6 had spent half a million quid, on setting her up with a false Chinese identity so that she could work under deep cover within the borders of the Middle Kingdom. That cover is blown, and she finds herself on the run, when a blue-eyed Russian-speaking man, who apparently had a big part in the sudden activity (such as fully automated weapons being fired, and what the news would later report on as a gas leak explosion) at the building she was spying on from across the street, comes crashing through her window.