Project Overworld

The next day evening, Keith met back with three of his friends as they finished preparing for the intense month of work that would be waiting for them. Jim and Xena seemed to already have connected during the day and managed to sort out a lot of things from the 'Triple S' cargo.

'This situation is perfect.' Keith realized. Tomorrow would sign the end of the week and their preparations were almost done. It seemed like Spacol would be reuinited to start working on their Moon base. With those two days of free time, they had planned to assember the metal pipe leading to the icy south pole of the satellite while progressing on the construction of their base.

For now, however, Keith has decided to keep a watch on his friends and let them discover the Moon at their heart's content. They were not really pressed by time since the EOSS would be launching supplies towards them and even in the worst case scenario they could be going back to the station and take care of these matters themselves.

In any case, it would be a lot better for all the company members to be reunited so Keith could be discussing the assignment of tasks with them directly. Going around the foundations of their future base, Keith did another round of inspection. It seemed like the machines they have sent on the Moon beforehand did a great job with smelting moon minerals and use them as construction materials.

Since they were not able to see much details from the camera robot Leyla insisted on launching on the Moon, Keith has actually been quite worried about what the final result would be. Although the whole construction was a few days off of the initial schedule, there was little to no doubt they would get habitable dwellings by the time their oxygen supplies were depleted.

The only problem of this eventuality would be the actual size of their base. Most of the rooms that were under construction were not even bigger than some of the EOSS modules. The whole site was almost two time smaller than their space station and the only reason it was this large was because of the dozen of greenhouses that were scattered here and there.

However, Keith was not that worried that. Compared to the EOSS, their Moon base could be extended in a much easier way and since there was also gravity around here they would not have to worry about going out of their base and drift away towards the emptiness of the universe. He estimated that their work conditions should be improving in the near future to a point were their space station would become outdated. The only reason they would have to keep it around would be as a relay between their Earth and Moon bases.

'Actually, we should be disassembling a lot of the modules there. We certainly won't have any more use for them.' Keith meditated while starting to help his machines with the construction of their base.

For the rest of the evening, he managed to reinforce the structure of one of their dwellings and expand its roof by an entire foot. The overall shape of these rooms resembled igloos since these sort of buildings could be holding onto themselves. No need for additional support pylons or anything like that. Also it was a much easier shape for their three-dimensional printers to build so Keith obviously went by this sort of design.

Leyla also joined him for a few hours while Michael and Tyler were taking care . For a little while, they had the visit of Jim, then Xena who just started their day. However, after a couple of minutes they both disconnected to attend to their real-life obligations. Xena was at the university while Jim was still in high school, if Keith remembered correctly.

The latter was the youngest of their group but also one of the most motivated about this game. He was actually planning on attending to an engineering college once he was done with high school and Keith could not help but see his young self when looking at Jim. If Project Overworld had launched whenever he was still in highschool, no doubt Keith would have done the same thing and attended a university related to manufacturing or engineering.

In any case, after a pretty calm day of labor Keith disconnected from the game early so he would be in a good shape for his last day at work for the week.

The next day, Jim and Xena were still up by the time he joined the game. It was supposed to be pretty late into the night for the both of them but Keith did not mind. In fact, he took the opportunity to assign tasks to everyone.

In the end, Leyla would be leading a team comprised of herself, Xena and Michael to the establishement of the Spacol Moon base. Their job would be to help their machines with the construction of the various dwellings while designed the hallways which would be linking the rooms altogether.

In the meantime, Keith, Jim and Tyler would be taking care of the water pipe and starting the construction of the ice factory. It currently was the twenty-sixth of the month of March Keith planned to be done with their base as well as the pipe by the end of the following month. Afterwards, they would have a easier time taking care of the factory since they would have access to virtually endless supplies of oxygen.

Though, for that purpose they had to build a facility to liquify oxygen since it was the best way to transport it inside canisters. In fact, most of the reservoirs they took on their journey were full of liquid oxygen.

After a few days of work, Keith realized he should be notifying the playerbase about the current whereabouts of Spacol. He still did not know whether he would be recruiting more people in the future but he was heavily criticized a few months ago for going silent for so long. He still wanted their company to have a great image to the rest of Project Overworld players since he would certainly be treating with them in the future.

He has been talking quite a bit with his friends about that since he recruited them but they did not really help him in that regard. The fact was, most of them did not care about the exposure they would be getting from a few posts as long as no important information leaked out to the public. Thus, after taking a few pictures of the foundations of their Moon base, Keith uploaded them on the forums and stated that they were currently establishing onto the only natural satellite of the Earth.

'Ahhh... I wish I didn't become the public figure that I am today.' Keith lamented while completing the last sentence of his post. Though, he could not really complain about it. The recruitement of the other Spacol members would have been a thousand times more complicated if he has just been a random nobody.

After checking whether his post had really been uploaded to the forums, Keith connected back into the game and joined Jim and Tyler on the construction of the pipe.

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- "Ahaaha!" Amber bursted in a laughter after being notified about the trending forum post of the moment. She had not heard about Keith in a long while but she now realized why he was being so conservative of his informations.

'And here I was, thinking he was slowing down and that we may be catching up to him.' She thought. The fact was, after that post he made regarding the automated rocket assembler Spacol has been making for several months, she had not been that impressed about it. Sure, the structure of this assembler was several hundred feet tall, but they at Midgard also managed to build buildings reaching such heights.

She really expected to see Keith coming down from the pedestal he laid on for so long. However, he just announced that during the last semester Spacol has been working from space and were now working towards the construction of a Moon base.

'During this time, we're struggling mass-producing airplanes and developing our own World Wide Web.' She meditated. 'Maybe I should allocate more resources into Starise, they're only twenty people large after all. However, even if hundreds of the best engineers of Yggdrasil gathered together, I don't think we'd be able to catch up to Spacol in under a year.' She concluded.

Since that conquest of the Moon by Keith, Amber had not really been that interested in developing the space industry a lot. In fact, they already had a lot of trouble maintaining the popularity of this game and creating an enjoyable atmosphere for everyone that she had no interest in forcing people to build rockets.

She was actually fine with Spacol being so well developed and entertaining the dreams of the masses. Thanks to this, people who looked up to them would be more motivated in their own objectives and be less likely to stop playing this game for good.

On top of that, medias would be watching Keith's posts from up close and the whole popularity of the game would benefit from that. Now that he announced they were working on the establishement of a Moon base, not only the traditional medias would be interested in this case but also a lot of space agencies around the world.

'Let's see what the future holds for us.' Amber meditated while connecting back into Project Overworld.