Project Overworld

During the first few days of the third phase of the competition, the participants got to know each other while working with their team on a rocket. Keith was actually quite satisfied with this organization, and thought that seven people was actually a pretty efficient way of working as a team.

However, the young man also spotted a few quirks regarding the candidates themselves. In fact, some of them really were easily left behind and the workload distribution was completely off. Obviously, most of them had studies or jobs to attend to during the week so he could not really expect them to be connected round the clock, but it seemed a few of them were not really trying that much.

Out of the twenty-one candidates, only twelve stood out in Keith's eyes. The others were either not really good at engineering or did not have the expected behaviour to be part of Spacol. A few even broke the rules by spying over the other teams' work or by sneakily stealing some materials. For now, Keith had yet to see a war break out but it would not be taking that long in his opinion.

There was still over half the remaining time to finish working on those rockets, after all. On top of that, because of the inefficient distribution of the workload most of the project were lagging behind and the hopes of finishing it by the end of the alloted time were running out. One of the three teams was actually getting a substantial lead and the friction between them and the other candidates were becoming more violent.

'Ahah, can't wait to see how all of this turns out.' Keith thought before sitting more comfortably position in his chair. For the few days this third phase has been going, the young man was diving happily in his favorite game whenever he had time to do so. Between his work at the NASA and this intense recruitement session, his mind was constantly being stimulated.

He has not been able to play with his friends for a while now, but he knew it was for a good reason. By the end of the week, he would have recruited a few new members into Spacol to help them with their Earth-related stuff. Because of this, Keith was actually really fixated on what was going on inside the fake base.

'It almost appears as a reality show with the main protagonists quarreling each other over trivial matters.' Keith realized. However, unlike a show this event was for real and the stakes of the situation were really high.

For the rest of the evening, Keith kept on spectating the three teams in turn, trying to theorize whether they would be finished with their work before the end of the event or not. For the time being, the young man was pretty optimistic about this whole situation. The team most behind had actually already built a large portion of the structure and they were starting to implement the necessary devices Keith specified in the rules of the competition.

'Maybe I wasn't giving human beings enough faith. They might be doing it until the end after all.' He meditated.

In any case, it was getting quite late on his end of the planet so he decided to call it a day and come back tomorrow after work.

The next day, when he connected back into Project Overworld, Keith immediately understood something went wrong. At first, he only noticed a few pieces scattered around the room where the candidates were supposed to work. Thanks to his elaborated camera system, he scanned the whole room and noticed even more of those chunks until he switched to one of the cameras capturing images of the rockets.

By that point, he had already seen how much havoc has been made while he was away, but he finally connected all of this to the sabotaging of one of the structure being built.

'Looks like I wasn't wrong, in the end. It happened a bit sooner than I anticipated, though...' Keith furrowed his brows trying to determine what happened there. It was at that point that he realized the candidates were shooting glares at each other while repairing the damage that had been done. Out of the three rockets, only one seemed to not have been touched by any means. It led to an obvious responsible for the sabotage but Keith did not really care about which team was being it and instead explored the various images captured by his cameras to see which player, or players, wanted to harm others work.

- "Ahah, gotcha!" He exclaimed after noticing the guilty ones through his screen. Three people were dismanteling whatever part of the rockets they came across while also meticulously collapsing the platforms that had been installed all around the vehicles for contruction purposes.

'Exactly what I expected. Now, how are the others going to react about this sabotaging?' Keith wondered while switching the cameras back to live footage. In his mind, only one candidate had been eliminated from this act of delinquency . In fact, two of the three criminals had already shown unfitting behaviour in the past few days and Keith decided they would not be joining Spacol by any means. However, the young man was really disappointed to lose another participant just like that.

'Only eleven remaining, let's hope that the others manage keep their cool and not retaliate to this sabotage.' He though while leaning back on his chair.

_______________

Three days later, the competition was finally coming to an end. It has been almost a full week since the start of this third phase, with only a bit over four hours remaining for the candidates.

After two of the teams suffered terrorist attacks from the third one, things escalated quickly. A few members of each team retaliated by joining forces and damaged the third rocket quite heavily. Afterwards, everyone barricaded on their own launching pad and each team organized a schedule so that their structure would always be protected by at least two players.

Though, some of them did not really obey and prefered to slack off like they always did. Keith was startled by this behaviour the most because it showed that these candidates did not care about the job opportunity at all. The players sabotaging other people's work, although morally wrong, at least cared about this competition and wanted to win by any means.

'I don't understand why they even took a few weeks off their schedule just to slack off like that. Was recognition the only thing they were interested in?' Keith pondered. In fact, the young man had no doubt that these same people would post screenshots on the forums to show they had met with the legendary leader of Spacol in person.

In any case, four more candidates had shown inappropriate behaviour by retaliating or participating in aggravating the situation because of their actions. That was why, Keith was now down to only seven members he was potentially interested in. Since yesterday evening, the young man had actually been quite stressed out about how things were turning out. He had set the lower limit to five new members and they were approaching this limit quite quickly.

Fortunately, it seemed like the seven members he had retained were much more invested in their project than the others. There was only four hours left and it would be extremely unlikely that these players also started sabotaging other people's work. Thus, Keith patiently waited for the end of the event while watching the seven promising candidates quite closely, thanks to his camera system.

The rockets had gone through a lot during the week that had been alloted for this third test. From explosive growth to terrorist attacks, they stood still until the end and Keith was quite proud about these three teams. Two of the projects were nearing their end and the young man knew they would nail the rules he had set at the start of the competition.

As for the last one, the one being taken care of by the three initial troublemakers and their four relatively shy comrades, it was not quite finished yet. Although their engineering skills showed promises, Keith had not retained any participant from this team for his final choice.

The other two teams were well organized and their members were working similarly to how Spacol members would, except they were a lot less knowledgeable and were complete strangers just a week ago. In any case, the team at the lead of the competition showed the most promises as five of the candidates Keith had noted in his book. The reason behind this was a good leader and a unifying project. Being at the lead sure did help these people maintain their cool.

However, the young man was much more interested in the two other candidates he had noted, who were part of the currently second team. Even with five troublemakers within their ranks, the two fierce engineers managed to save their team from the disgrace of being last in the competition. Of course, their troublemakers also helped a lot during the construction. Since then, though they went on a full on war with the third team, leaving the two others taking care of the vehicle by themselves.

'Well, looks like it's time already. Let's annonce the end of the event to the candidates and bring the chosen ones back home.' Keith realized before leaving the control room he had been residing in for the entirety of the week.