Project Overworld

Keith could have settled things peacefully and explain how his inventions could have improved the city for the better. He also could have come into this competition with something less... flashy.

So anyways, he started blasting!

Shots flew everywhere, and Keith created a chaos.

However, it really was how he had envisioned his perfect introduction. It did, in fact, reveal how powerful his creations were and also proved one thing : those were some fine semi-automatic rifles.

After emptying the weapons' ammunition chamber, Keith took out more from his inventory to demonstrate how easy it was to reload.

This time, however, he calmly stood still while letting people breath out. The initial test has been sufficient for them to understand what all of this was about. Actually, now that he had some spare time to look around him, he noticed that the floor of the arena was already quite erratically spray-painted.

After a few seconds, Keith cleared up his throat and proceeded to describe his creations to the surprised public : "As you may have witnessed, my idea is fairly simple. I noticed there wasn't a lot of things to enjoy in this city and I thought of a little design to fill in this gap." He took a short pause in his speech before continuing : "That is why, today, I came in here with paintball guns. Some of you may be familiar with those kind of hobbies in the real world but I really wanted to show you the capacity of my own creations. Each ammunition can hold up to twelve shots and the rifle is entirely semi-automatic, meaning there is no need to manually reload in between each shot. I've also been thinking of introducing different kinds of paintball guns, so I also brought a few prototypes for you all to play around with."

'What a brilliant idea!' Amber thought. She has been working with a few other players in order to entertain the citizen of Midgard, but they never came up with such a large-scale concept.

'Although, wouldn't these paintball guns be pretty... difficult to produce? What kind of materials has he been using to make them? How did he integrate a semi-automatic system into these small guns? How long has he been working on this project?' She had so many things she wanted to ask, but she would have to wait the end of the event before contacting this particular inventor.

'What's his name, by the way?' Amber wondered while searching through the event's candidate list. 'It should be number twenty-one, isn't it? So his name is Keith, good to know.'

After pronouncing the name in her head, she suddenly had the feeling it sounded quite familiar.

'Wait, this name... Isn't that the young crafter who helped us during the Great War era?! What a surprise! So he did continue playing this game after all.'

She was honestly surprised seeing this player around here, but

With that thought in mind, she continued watching the event with great interest as the candidates' ingenious ideas were brought to the public. She was very pleased by this edition of Inventopia, which felt a lot less boring than the previous one. Because of the filtering crew she assigned to control the entrance to the event, much less attention-seeking players made it to the group of participant. As a result, these challengers introduced really interesting and original inventions such as projects expanding on the motor's invention or. With her spirits high up, she did not see the time flow by until the last candidate finished her presentation.

Amber then opened a vote on the forums so that everyone could give their opinion on who made the greatest invention. Although Keith made it only to the third place, he knew the paintball guns he made would find success in the future. Who does not enjoy some fun cooperative games?

After giving a closing speech supposed to boost the citizen motivation for the next edition of the event, Amber proceeded towards the backdoor entrance of the colosseum to talk with the participants for a bit. She would always do that after the end of Inventopia in order to form bonds with some promising inventors. The municipal team could then contact said players through the in-game message system to contract them on some important projects for the city.

Though it could be expected, she got a bit disappointed seeing that Keith had already left this place. It seemed to her that Keith always was more of a solitaire player.

After giving her compliments to some interesting inventors, she then left the colosseum and got back to her office. Now that the event was finished, she needed to return to more important matters concerning the city.

To her surprise, however, Keith was waiting inside the town hall.

He started the conversation :

- "Hello, I've been looking forward working with the municipal team to provide a new paintball game to the city."

- "Hello Keith, it's been a while. So your speech back in the arena wasn't just for show? Let's talk about it in my office."

After sitting down on her seat, Amber got straight to the point :

- "So, how should we promote your game?"

- "Well, I'm just here to talk about my idea. As for the promoting, I'll be leaving that to you and your team. However, I don't know if you've already played paintball in you life but this game does require a large area to be played. It's also a lot better to do it in the wild, with lots of spots to hide youself from the others."

Amber was about to answer to this last part but she suddenly noticed he had not talked about the price yet :

- "What about your payment?"

- "Some money would be really helpful. However I won't be around the city for long, so I'd prefer a one-time deposit instead of some income shares."

Keith did not really need anything from them because he was that much ahead in terms of technology. However, since he was here to sell his paintball guns, he would collect his due like everyone would in his place. Who knows, maybe it would prove useful someday?

Amber agreed on his proposition and they both settled on a price. It was not too complicated since Keith did not know about the true value of Midgard's currency, but the deal was sealed with both party being happy.

Keith left the town hall, thinking about the future development of the city. His paintball game would somewhat benefit to the city popularity and people would certainly enjoy his game for a while. This was not sufficient to prevent them to leave the Project Overworld, but if more and more entertainements were to be developed by the city, players would stay connected longer while playing with their online friends. For some of them, it could also become their second home.

The more the people stayed connected to the game, the quicker the development of the city would get. That was at least Keith's point of view.

Anyways, it was time for him to leave Midgard and resume his rocket construction. He may be first for now, but no doubt some people would start coming after him.

Several miles away from the city a group of players were getting busy with a generator, inside of a large building made out of stone.

Eric streamed to his favorite platform the whole process of his friends heating up the furnace before activating the machine. Since they saw an Inventopia's candidate introducing a motor, they decided to make something similar in order to produce electricity. They even made a lightbulb which would light up when the generator would be activated.

During the construction phase of the project, Eric has been starting streaming him and his friends adventures, expecting to have some audience. However, word spread a bit faster than he had initially expected and before knowing it thousands of people were currently watching them feeding a furnace with combustible materials.

For a few minutes, nothing happened. A small buzzing could be heard coming from the machine but nothing too impressive. Eric was really disappointed, he wanted to satisfy his large audience with something working on their first try.

'I guess we'll have to optimize the generator before running another test.'

He was baffled, however, when one of his friend suddenly shouted : "Wait, it's coming!"

Suddenly, the machine seemed to unstuck itself for a bit and, albeit for a few seconds, the lightbulb lit up with a vibrant color.

The chat of Eric's stream seemed scroll at lightning speed after witnessing this event. The man thought that he would certainly have to activate slow mode in the future, but for now he was really excited by what him and his friends had achieved.

'That's right, we've produced electricity. What about you, mysterious people laying automated turrets on the ground? How have you been doing recently? I hope you've progressed well because we're coming after you!'

His trail of thoughts stopped there since he had public to entertain. He wanted expose to them their future plans and hype up his stream to get some more attention.