Project Overworld

'Only one month and a half remaining.' Keith sighed. The amount of work he had to provide to his studies was skyrocketing recently. In fact, the end of study exams would be taking place just around the corner and he had to remember all those lessons about accounting, business creation and other economics related formulas.

Fortunately, he had already found a few worker jobs available at a nearby factory. It was not as appealing to Keith as the watchmaking job was, but he wanted to experience as many things as possible. He had several other leads to some interesting jobs if he did not like this one anyways.

For now, he could only compose with this much disturbance while trying his best to develop himself within Project Overworld.

Regarding his progress, he was currently working on a new kind of rocket which would transport parts of his future spatial base. He was already done with everything he had in mind concerning the Earth, and wanted to escape from this land before other players became a disturbance.

It would not be easy, though. First off, albeit only one part of the station would be launched at a time, it would be quite a lot heavier than a satellite. For a fact, every module needed to be large enough to let a human pass through while electrical wires and other kinds of mecanisms would be hidden within the walls.

Secondly, he needed to reduce the number of travels as much as possible in order to preserve his resources. As a result, every module would be at least two times as heavy as a satellite, meaning that the rocket transporting it had to be proportionally bigger.

He had already thought of many designs while working on his surveillance satellites, but he now had to start testing them. Within the few weeks he had at his disposal he was fairly certain he would be able to launch at least one module into high orbit.

'Okay, let's start off by building the engine.' Keith decided.

_______________

Eric climbed on board of the c.o.c.kpit, his friend 'Fanastica' already waiting for him. While checking whether his streamer view was indeed set up, she pushed a button to ignite the engine.

It was the first launch he had decided to reveal to the public. Not that they planned to reach space for the time being but they did not know where other players were at.

The earlier they started showing off their progress, the more recognition they would get.

Regardless, this launch was a special one. They had made their rocket twice as large as the previous ones. Well, they had a test flight with another similar to this one, but it ended up in a failure right at launch.

They hopefully figured out what went wrong during the first one and corrected every weakness in their design.

Once everything was settled with the introduction to his stream, Eric turned his attention back to the rocket's control board.

The structure was already shaking violently, but both his and his friend's face were pretty calm. They were already used to this kind of treatment.

Eric suddenly started off a countdown out loud.

- "Launching phase in ten... Nine..."

Even off-stream, they usually talked out loud so their action would be synchronized. However, this had a greater impact on the viewers of the stream. They all up followed the countdown by sending random numbers according to their own delay regarding the stream.

Some clever ones even wrote down large numbers such as '69' or '420'.

- "Three... Two... One... Launch in progress."

The rocket started shaking even more to the point of worrying Eric and Fanastica. They had already goen through several failed launch in the past and this amount of shaking could potentially weaken the whole structure.

Fortunately, nothing as such happened and the rocket was successfully detached from the attachment pylons.

While everyone in the stream's chat was spaming worried faces a few seconds earlier, they were now all expressing their hype about this launch.

- "Well, looks like we're off to a good start."

As he was saying that, Eric checked back the level of fuel left in the tanks. It seemed like a good ten percent as been used during the launch, but it was clearly way better than during the previous ones.

During their first successful launch, they had lost more than half of the fuel contained within the tanks right off the bat.

A few minutes later, their base was nothing but a small point in the distance now as they lifted off to several miles away from land. They had installed small windows on the sides of the c.o.c.kpit for this kind of view.

- "Nothing has exploded yet." He ironically told his friend, to what she replied with a nervous laugh.

For dozen of minutes, they witnessed the distance from Earth expand by a lot as the fuel level of their rocket's tanks were slowly sinking. Once they were almost emptied out, Eric decoupled the rest of the structure from the c.o.c.kpit turned back towards the windows. The ground was so far away that it was blurry from all the fog contained within the skies.

Large ocean of cloud could be spotted everywhere. It really was a spectacular view.

Once their acceleration reached zero, Fanastica activated the parachute.

- "Well, let's come back to Earth." Eric explained to his viewers.

_______________

'They really are worrying me out.' Keith thought while going through the program of his computer gathering all of his satellites' pictures.

For the days following the strange gathering of players inside a forest on the 'Yggdrasil' continent, he had spotted a lot of movement in that general area. Those people were obviously planning for something, but he did not know what quite yet.

As a matter of fact, Keith published a post on the subject on the official Project Overworld's forums but there has not been a lot of investigation since then.

His post has become quite popular during the last few hours but nobody seemed to know what was happening there.

He had tried to reach the Midgard's municipal team but it did not seem like they were hurried to uncover the truth behind this mysterious sylvan meeting.

'What happened to them? Are they not taking this seriously? They got attacked by a group of terrorist but since they were able to fend off any further attack they got full of themselves?' Keith theorized. 'I should try and reach Amber, she should take this matter seriously.'

Fortunately, she added him on a social network after the third edition of Inventopia. Since she needed his help to furnish the city with paintball guns, she had required a direct access to talk to him. Who knew this would be helpful the other way around?

Several minutes after he had sent the message, a reply came up on his phone : 'I'm currently not connect in Project Overworld, I will be coming back in a few hours. I have designated a team of individuals to go and investigate the area.'

Keith was relieved by this message, but he could not help but send back another message specifying it was a urgent matter. Afterwards he connected back into the game and waited for the results pf the investigation to come up.

His intercontinental missile was already on hold on the launching pad. Although it not leave any space for the rocket he has been working on recently, he was just at the designing part anyways.

'Well, I should just focus on the first module of my spatial station for the time being.' Keith decided.

Every few hours, he would check back his phone to see if Amber messaged him back or if an official post has been made on the subject. However, the more time passed by, the more worried he became.

Not only were there no updates on the current investigation, the movements in the forest were becoming more numerous by each pictures he received.

'Should I just launch the missile now?' Keith was considering. However, if he was wrong and those people were just innocents trying to create some sort of a colony, he would regret this choice quite bitterly.

Not only that, even if these players were really terrorists there would be no way to prove as such. Every Project Overworld's player would fear that the mysterious missile attacks would strike them at any moment and the popularity of the game would drop down. This was not what Keith wanted for his favorite game.

For now, he had to wait for the official investigation team to come across those mysterious players. And in fact, a few dozen minutes later, a post was made by the municipal team on the official forums.

- "Get ready to evacuate the city." Keith was reading out loud. Along with the rest of the post, the municipal team explained that they had assembled a team to explore the forest following an informant's warning.

This warning turned out to be trued as the investigation ran short. They were all found dead in seconds following their entrance in the forest.

No one has been able to see anything before their death, but the responsibles of such actions should be equipped with a lot of firepower.

War was officially declared between this mysterious group of people and Midgard. Everyone in the city was getting ready for battle.

The corners of Keith's lips stretched out into a wry smile.

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