Project Overworld

Entering the large room where the candidates intensively fought for the construction of their team's rocket for a full week, the atmosphere turned silent. Everyone was patiently waiting for Keith to speak up and the later was taking his time.

Although the competition was over, the young man was in no hurry to announce the results yet. Whether because he wanted to test them some more or because he was globally disappointed by the number of players he had settled on, Keith slowly glared at each of them in turn before finally opening his mouth : "Oh... I couldn't be more disappointed about what happened during this competition. You really thought I'd put yall inside this room without a way to cover your progress?" He inquired before following up : "Yes, I've been watching over you. There were several cameras installed throughout this building and I've spent the past week observing your every movements."

The young man fell silent for a moment, conveying his wrath to the participants.

- "How surprised was I, when I discovered that sabotaging became a common thing between your teams... I thought I'd make it clear, though. The goal of this event was obviously to recruit a new team of engineers into Spacol. Do you really think I'd accept people who aren't willing to work as a team in my company?!" He exclaimed. "However, not everyone present here today participated in agravating the situation. In fact, I've noted a few faces on my book that are more than able to work under my commands." He said in a more controled voice. "In any case, I've talked about some rules, if I remember correctly, implying that I'd establish a scoring board or something like that."

Again, Keith took another pause for the candidates to follow his explanations.

- "I did nothing close to that. Really. There were no scoring involved in this test, nor did the best team have better chances to join Spacol. I don't really care about the construction itself, although I was quite pleased about seeing that Team A and C were able to lead the rocket to its completion." The young man expressed. "As for you, team B, you had a combination of the worst members of this competition, be it related to their engineering skills or because of their behaviour. I am sorry for those who tried their best, but none from your team has been retained."

This had the effect of a icy wind in the room. Some of the douches of 'Team B' immediately voiced out their anger but Keith did not let them have their way and replied by shooting straight at them.

- "I think I did not make this clear enough. I don't care about your feelings, I'm just trying to recruit capable engineers into Spacol." He said in a cold voice. "In any case, I did settle on seven candidates who I wish to test under some real working conditions." Keith explained before listing the names of the seven candidates. "As you may already have guessed, I'm not interested in any other candidates. You may have shown unfitting behaviour or lacking skills during the competition, either way you may now go back to where you came from. Anyways, for those who wish to stay a little longer, let's now test those rockets of yours." He excitedly pronounced.

The young man hooked up a large cable that dangled from the top of the building to his truck and started pushing the accelerator. In no time the huge roof made out of light metal opened up, revealing the blinding light of the exterior. By that point, the candidates fully realized that they have been deceived all along. They really did think they were locked up inside of Spacol's official Earth base but the fact that the roof only consisted of a thin metal plate finally convinced them otherwise. For the rest of the evening, Keith and the other participants who had not left yet spent their time testing the three rockets and seeing how far they got. After each launch, the young man took his time to explain what was wrong with each design while covering how they could have improved it.

Finally, once it was time for him to leave the game, Keith told the seven candidates he had chosen to connect back tomorrow in the afternoon and that he would be leading them to his real base.

The next day, every single one of them were already connected once he arrived. He had not expected this result and even thought a few of them may want to retire after such an exhausting journey. In fact, he did not really care whether the new recruits chose follow him or not. If they were not interested in joing Spacol, in the end, he would not oppose to it.

Everyone followed Keith aboard his truck and the young man drove them off safely all the way back home. Once there, he decided to show them around the place while commenting on every room's utility. By the end of the day, the seven new recruits were all ready to take on their new duty.

- "Let's get along well!" Keith exclaimed with a warm smile. He was a lot more friendly than he appeared to be during the competition, and this threw some of them in confusion. However, they quickly became used to this new atmosphere and Keith could not be more happy about it.

'Well, looks like we should be able to speed things up a bit. I don't really know how much time we have left before the servers of Project Overworld won't be able to keep up anymore, but for the time being we should give our all into it.' Keith meditated.

_______________

For a few days following the end of the competition, Keith supervised the new recruits into the contruction of another rocket. This one was supposed to be a lot larger than the ones they tried to build during the test, but the numerous tools and machines they had at their disposal more than made up for it.

In fact, they also got to study the way rockets were being produced by the automated 'Rocket assembler' consisting of several dozen machines working as one. Thanks to that, they understood how the difference in size affected the overall process of constructing a rocket. By the end of the first week they joined Spacol, their first group project was done. Keith had been a huge help in making the rocket, especially because he noticed during the competition how ignorant they were on the subject. He sure did not expect them to be able to build a rocket on their own, but at least they managed to follow the instructions given on the manuals he handed to them while avoiding some major traps he wrote in there.

'Yggdrasil nor any other continent in this world actually invested a lot on space-related technology, after all. I shouldn't be expecting them to know how to build a rocket yet. Actually, it's a good thing because it actually means we should be getting some more time before people started using some sort of a world wide web. Let's hope Amber does a good job at slowing things up for us.' Keith realized.

During the two months he has been so focused on organized this recruitement event, the rest of Spacol members progressed a lot with their Moon base. So much so that they had started the construction of a large hangar where they would be building spacecrafts and other large vehicles. This was supposed to help them a lot in the future, especially since the pipe system extending towards the Moon's South Pole was already a few miles long. By foot, traveling such a distance took about and hour and this would only get worse.

They designed a moon buggy to roam around the satellite more easily but it sure would be a lot better if they actually made a large vehicle that could transport tons of materials at once.

In any case, this was how Keith and the rest of Spacol envisioned following months, and it sure was going to be quite a busy ride until the completion of their lunar installations.

'Alright, let's teach these new recruits some more tricks and go back on the Moon.' Keith decided. He had already planned to stay down there for another couple of months and he would not want to be spending more time than necessary.