Project Overworld

'This thing is huge!' Keith exclaimed in his head as he was climbing the retractable ladder on the side of his rocket.

He had finally been able to finish working on his space station module and its launcher. The whole structure was several hundred feet tall and already reached the top of the room without even lifting from the ground. Keith has had to open the ceiling for the whole duration he has been constructing this rocket.

After installing himself in the c.o.c.kpit, Keith activated the automated flying system. This rocket was equipped with similar programs as the previous ones did, so he did not have to do anything and enjoy the ride. In fact, his presence was not really necessary on board, excepting from a few last adjustments he would be making for his module to be launched at a perfect orbit of Earth.

After the main engine ignited, the bottom of the room got almost entirely covered in smoke. Even though the large vents were working as fast as they could, it was not enough to even clear a portion of the place.

'Only thirty seconds remaining.' Keith announced to himself. After a small delay, the rocket finally left the ground with a formidable shaking. The pylons holding it back to the launching pad decoupled themselves off of it and the structure was free to flight off in the distance.

It took a whole minute for the launchers to produce enough power to leave the 'Spatial room'. Once it did, however, the rocket slowly started acc.u.mulating speed. Keith was elated, as the rocket did not dismantle itself during the launching phase.

'Fifty percent of the job is done, let's go to orbit now!' Keith breathed out a long sigh and focused back on the objective.

The ride took a full hour and a half, but Keith was reaching the upper parts of the thermosphere at a few three hundred miles away from land. It was around this area that Keith wanted to start establishing his new base.

He had already decoupled several stages of his rocket and was now onto its last. Though, the current fuel level in his tanks was worrying him a bit. Fortunately, as this was his first test flight, the module he was transporting was very simplified. Both in weight and in size, this module as been reduced to the strict necessary.

If everything went uneventful this time around, Keith had planned to launch materials alongside his next rocket to allow to work on his space station directly from space.

The only problem remaining would be the oxygen itself. It was a game, but a player's avatar had the same limitations as a human body. No oxygen meant that one's character would die from asphyxia in a few minutes.

Fortunately, his c.o.c.kpit was supplied with oxygen so he would be able to survive until the last adjustments were made for his module to be put in orbit.

But his spatial station would not be habitable until he installed a few tanks of oxygen in there as well as some pressurizing gas and a few heating devices. Furthermore, for him to be able to work on his spation would require the development of a fonctionnal spacesuit reproducing an habitable atmosphere just like the station itself.

All in all, he still had a lot of work to complete to completely transition towards a spatial life.

After the rocket automatically made some trajectory adjustments to put itself in a perpendicular angle relatively to the Earth, Keith did a few calculations using the computer in his c.o.c.kpit to check what the best possible orbit this structure could reach.

He then inputed the calculated coordinates into the balancing system of the rocket and prayed for everything to work correctly.

Just several minutes later, the level of fuel in his tanks reached a low critical point.

'Three percent remaining...' Keith started considering what he would be able to do with this but quickly realized he did not have enough power to reach orbit with his module while slowing down the rest of the rocket so it would explode in lower atmosphere.

Either he actually reached orbit but had the remains of a rocket alongside his space station or he immediately started slowed down to let everything explode on Earth.

Without thinking about it more than a few seconds, Keith took the manual controls in his c.o.c.kpit and started slowing down the vehicle. He wanted to make something clean out of this new base and there was no place for such a useless structure. Not to mention, since this was a test flight, Keith had not isolated the module correctly and it would end up being a dead weight too.

In fact, he had already planned for this flight to end up burning through the atmosphere. The only variable he had not expected was his lack of fuel. That was why he has had to manually take control of the rocket to make sure nothing would be left in space.

'Welp, nothing will never really work out as planned. And here I thought this flight was going quite well, seems like I've got some huge improvements to accomplish on this bad boy.' Keith concluded. In fact, if he was to enc.u.mber such an incomplete rocket with the weight of a complete module, he realized it would not even make it past the launching phase.

For now, Keith could only watch the altitude go down until he was sure his rocket was slowing down thanks to the atmosphere. Afterwards, he pressed down a red button to let himself explode alongside the remains of his rocket.

_______________

After a few more successful launches, Eric and his friends did quite some progress in terms of spatial engineering. Not only that, but his popularity skyrocketted after he livestreamed the first successful launch in Project Overworld's history.

With popularity came more money in Eric's pockets and more motivation for the 'Starise' group. Most of Eric's friends now converted to spatial engineering too, and they were actually six working on rockets.

However, they got blinded by success and forgot to gather some more resources. They were now stagnating and trying to find every material needed for their next launch. This was such a disgrace for this group of players, who were so fond of their newly formed base.

Before everyone went working on their personnal projects, there were always a few players assignated to the drills they had planted around the area. Their goal was to check whether there still were some resources in the area they were drilling around and to move to somewhere else otherwise.

With this new problem emerging from the ground, Eric has been trying to find a solution for some time. He has been working on design after design of drilling units which would be much more, if not totally, autonomous. He was always close to finding something worthwhile, but eventually abandonned the tracks after realizing it would take too much time or it would be unefficient.

However, after some of his friends joined him on this task, they managed to design some automated drilling units able to drive themselves underground.

'After we successfully manage to automate the gathering of resources, we should be able to catch up with those people who launched missile all over the place. We shall prove who's the best inventors.' Eric confidently expressed in his head.

_______________

'Hey, isn't that some sort of a rocket?' Keith questioned himself. Since the first terrorist attack at Midgard, he took the habit of rummaging through the pictures taken by his satellites. It was an even more pleasent task to accomplish after he successfully coded a program putting every pictures taken next to the one another.

In the end, it was reproducing a complete map of the Earth updated every dozen of minutes, and Keith did not miss out on a lot of movement across the globe.

And just like that, today, he noticed a quite strange flying object caught by the camera of his 'Watchdog 6'. The fact that it was coming off of the really advanced base he had already caught a glimpse of in the past only made it more worrisome.

The picture actually dated from several days ago, but it was only now that he was finally able to notice it. There were so much territory to go over around the world that he would not be able to check each and every one of the pictures taken by his satellites.

Fortunately, this one did not pass across his radar for too long. Actually, there has been some hints over this matter that led him to check this particular picture.

In fact, people on the forums were all currently all talking about the same thing : a player of Project Overworld, also streamer known by the name 'Ericality', showed off a successful launch several miles away from land. The replay of this event had been circulating in every media and everyone was breath-taken by witnessing the landscape from so far up in the skies.

'Well, well, would you look at that... Seems like some other smart people are also trying to reach space too. Well then, how should I answer this daring challenge? Should I make them explode or should I race for the moon?' While thinking about all the achievements he could go over to come out ahead of them, Keith's smile only grew wider.