Project Overworld

'I'm finally finished!' Keith thought while standing in front of his large habitable module.

Now that he was looking at it in full size, though, he was actually wondering how he would be putting this thing onto a launcher. Not that it mattered to him anyways since he was there to test out his new ideas after all.

Even if the launch of this module did fail, he had the option to send some separate parts into space and assemble it there directly.

He was not that worried about building his space station. Even if it required double the number of launches he actually planned for, he would still be making it in the end.

With that being said, Keith turned his head towards his spatial room. This time, he had to create a rocket about one point five times bigger than the previous generation of 'Satellite' launchers.

This would be quite the challenge for his since it only worked on paper for now, but he knew it was physically possible. The ISS had been, in fact, orbiting around the Earth for quite some time. Those spatial engineers from other administrations around the world must have gone through the same limitations. While he was alone, he had the advantage of being in a game which helped him a lot with the building part of the rocket. As for his designs, those were the most challenging for him to work on.

He had to think about every parameters for it to work properly. Obviously, those parameters were a lot less determining than in real life, but there were still some mathematics, some geometry and some physics involved in this process.

Fortunately, the NASA was kind enough to publish some of their discoveries only so Keith had a huge lead to actually designing his rockets.

Afterwards, his experience in the game made up for his lack of knowledge.

Focused on his task, Keith did not see time passing by. Whenever he raised his head towards the clock he had built a long time ago, he suddenly realized it was past two in the morning.

'Hey, hey, I've got courses to attend to tomorrow.' Keith reprimanded himself. He then disconnected from the game and took a quick shower.

Before going to bed, though, he checked his phone and noticed a single message coming from Amber.

'What does she want at such a late hour? Oh, this was sent more than six hours ago lol.' Keith realized. However, what surprised him the most was the actual content of the message, consisting of only one sentence : "I need to talk to you about the terrorists."

It was as mysterious as it could get. Did she want to thank him for the informations he had sent to her? Or was it that she thought he was part of them? Regardless of what she actually meant, he was more or less forced to reply to her.

'I should send her a message tomorrow morning. Now that I think about it, this last message from her would be quite dangerous if taken out of context.' Keith ironically laughed.

He then laid down on his bed and immediately fell asleep. The next morning, just before going to the university, he wrote down a reply to Amber stating that he would be available in four hours from now.

With that out of the way, he focused on today's lessons since the exams would be taking place in a month and a half.

He was not really having a lot of difficulties, especially since he was taking a portion of his time to study at home before spending the rest of the day within Project Overworld.

However, paying attention in class always proved to be profitable to him. Even before opening his books at home, he would already be understanding a good portion of his lessons.

After a long morning of work, he got back home to prepare himself a meal. He had one full hour before going back to the university for the afternoon's classes.

After eating as fast as possible, Keith took his phone and waited for Amber to call him. Fortunately he did not have to wait for long.

- "Hello Keith."

- "Hey. So what did you want to talk about today?"

- "Well, you see, your informations proved to be quite worthwhile. I have to thank you in behalf of both Midgard and Niflheim as well every player of Project Overworld." She explained.

'Midgard and Niflheim? Was this the ultimate aim of this new terrorist group? Good thing I purged them with fire before anything bad happened.'

- "No big deal. Anyways, that wasn't all, was it? You surely did not want to call me just to thank me out, right?"

- "You guessed it right, Sherlock. I actually have been wondering for quite some time about who could be behind the destruction of the terrorist base at the north-east of Midgard. Was this someone from our continent, or was this attack coming from overseas? And just like that, recently, another group of criminals just got eliminated in a matter of hours." As a figure of speech, she took a small break in her talk. "This benevolent player is becoming more and more protective. I should thank him out if I cross him in the future." She said in an ironic manner.

- "I don't see where you are going with this." Keith could not help but interject.

- "Where did your powers of deduction go, all of the sudden? My point is, I find it hard to believe that two different informants gave us some valuable infos concerning the same event. One warned us about suspicious movements in the forest, which turned out to be a group of terrorists in the end. The other one told us to prepare for a large forest fire, and guess what? This also turned out to be a valuable warning. Now, albeit anonymous, that second informant was clearly aware of what would be happening, right? Otherwise how could he have predicted that a missile would be detonating in the area, leading to a forest fire?"

- "Makes sense." Keith replied.

- "What distrubs the most now is your responsability in all of this. How were you aware of the gathering of terrorists in that particular forest? And how were you related to the first missile attack back then? You've actually been writing down a lot of comments on that event, and I can't seem to understand why. You've never lived within Midgard, nor was your base ever found out. Or maybe you've never tried settling down after leaving our guild? Anyways, you've participated in that third Inventopia at Midgard with an actually good invention, just to disappear from the surface of Earth yet again. You've then come back several months later to warn me out about a group of terrorists? Quite strange isn't it?" She took a break after saying those words. Keith did not want to interrupt her, so he kept quiet. "What if there was only one informant to begin with? That's my actual trail of thoughts."

- "That's... Not possible is it? Or that would be making me the one behind those missile attacks, right?"

- "Exactly!" She exclaimed.

- "Well, you've found me out. What are you going to do about it?" Keith capitulated.

- "That why I've been wanting to talk with you, actually. I wanted to make your name known to everyone because you have been protecting us for so long. Not to mention, everyone would be so relieved to know your real intentions. But I know you won't agree to this so I've come with another proposition to thank you in a more subtle way. I'd like you to name your continent."

- "What?"

- "You've certainly been the first to settled down on that north continent, so I'm saying you should be the one to name it. If you don't, I'll name it after your name anyways." She said as a threat. He knew she would actually be doing it. "Send me your choice by the end of next week, if possible. By the way, I should really thank you on behalf of everyone else in the game. Thank you. If you ever need our help in the future, you know where to join me."

With that being said, she hung up the call.

'Well, that was unexpected.' Keith thought. 'I don't really care about everyone knowing my name, though. If they ever come close to my base, ally or enemy alike, I shall defend it with all my power. They were about to discover it anyways, so it may be better for them to know the full extent of my striking force. Beware, as I hold the power of intercontinental missiles!'

Without giving another thought to that last conversation, Keith prepared to go back to the university for another three hours of lessons. 'Ah, this is really tiring me out.' he thought while climbing on board of his car.

At the end of the day, he finally connected to his favorite game and continued to assemble the various parts of his new rocket design altogether. This series shall be called "SSL X" for "Space Station Launcher X", "X" being the number of the rocket in that particular series.

'Oh yeah, I should also be thinking of a name for my continent, I don't want it to be called Keith's land or something like that.' He laughed.