Project Overworld

'So, let's show them who they are trying to fight against.' Keith thought. He has been trying to determine what he should be doing about this group of inventors who were already building rockets on their own, and concluded that he should be revealing himself to the world.

His plan was simple. Whenever those players landed on the Moon, he shall already be there waiting for them. The timing would be pretty narrow because he would only be aware of their launch after 'Ericality' started livestreaming the event.

However, he would have quite an advantage over them : he would already be wiating for it in space. He estimated that he had several months to work around before those guys became proefficient enough with spatial engineering to build giant rockets. During this lapse, he shall be completing his own space station while also working on the design of a space shuttle, destined to make him travel to the Moon and all the way back to his orbiting base.

He was really excited about this perspective, and had another source of motivation for the time being.

Though, the next two weeks should be pretty grueling to him as he was about to hit those final exams of his scholarship. Afterwards, he would be starting his job as a worker in a factory and, although he should have stricter hours, he would also have some more free time at his flat since there would be no more lessons to learn.

All in all, he was thinking this should be a pretty similar timetable.

'So, what are the most important modules to first integrate in our base?' Keith was trying to determine. Since he would be racing for the conquest of the Moon, he was thinking that his spatial base should have the strict necessary for his own survival while having some functions such as fuel tanks, electricity generation and other things that would be useful for his future space shuttle.

Overall, his plans were not affected too much by these new competitors. Going to the Moon would be a complete waste of time in his opinion, but he would have had to build a space shuttle and an efficient spatial base in the future anyways.

Alternatively, he could annihilate that base of theirs, but since Amber knew about him and people may discover that those guys were, in fact, innocents, this would be pretty dangerous for him to resort to such means.

'Thinking about Amber, I need to send her my choices of name for the continent.' Keith realized. He had thought of a few names in his head, but none really sounded good. In the end, he wanted to choose something simple, yet different than the naming style of Yggdrasil. Since nordic names were finite, one could not simply name every continent after this mythology.

Although the company 'Advanced Simulations' had chosen the real world as a model for their game, they had made several changes to improve the gameplay experience of their players. Those changes included changes to the initial planet's disposition. Every continent featured various landscapes so that everyone could have access to the same resources regardless of where they established onto.

Keith noticed that the map recreated by his satellites showed off a planet quite different from the real-world Earth. Because of that, he could not really name his continent after real world continents such as 'America' or 'Europe'. This was such a dilemma to him, as this name would probably be used by hundreds of thousands of people every day.

'Well, there's still a few names of the nordic mythology not being used yet. What about Jötunheim? This continent holds a lot of giant mountains and really large trees for what I've been able to see. Quite befitting of the title Kingdom of the Giants. Alternatively, I could try and think of something totally different.' In the end, Keith decided to send two propositions to Amber to choose from. One would be 'Jötunheim', using the same style as they used for the naming of their cities and continents up until now, and the other would be 'Shyram' which was a name he imagined using some fantasy presets.

He sent a message to Amber resuming both of these choices before continuing working on his space station project.

_______________

After that incident with the 'sylvan terrorists', normal life went on within both Midgard and Niflheim. Amber had been taking care of planning out their future developement within the other continents while settling down various problems emerging throughout the city.

Most of these were due to power shortage or disputes regarding access to electricity. Even though it was generating so much trouble around the globe, they were also living the fastest developement they had ever known. Lots of vehicles were being constructed, roads had been upgraded to better accomodate such means of travels and finally the city was going throught as lot of visual changes.

Everyone wanted to use this new power to activate lights and other devices. It was really nice to see the city flourish with such diverse sources.

People started settling down on other islands or contients and everyone was living the golden age of civilization. Just looking at the images taken by 'Ericality' during their launch a few dozen miles away from land made her shiver in awe.

'What a beautiful game.' She thought. 'I hope Keith has not forgotten about naming that continent of his since people are certainly going to establish there in no time.' She could not really assess the technology he had in his hands nor the amount of people working with him, if there was any, but she knew he was certainly more advanced than those people who just started working on rockets. In fact, this guy knew exactly where to shoot his missile from all the way overseas. If that was not a hint that he had installed some long range communication using some satellites, she would not be calling herself Amber.

'Speaking of which, I should try and hire a few people to start developing planes. It would be pretty useful to be able to travel within cities using the air way.' She realized.

She was more pumped than ever. She felt like everything could be accomplished in a matter of months, maybe years at most.

Not only that, new players were flowing in the game like crazy and they had to expand upon the cities so that they would be able to host this large number of people.

'Well, let's start to build a new city within that continent at the west of Yggdrasil.' Amber decided.

_______________

A month has past since the Starise group started working on their drilling units. They had done a satisfying job and were now mostly focusing on the production of rockets. Some were still working on automated devices for the base since or other types of electricty-powered creations.

Eric and his friends now had a lot of pressure on their shoulders. Not only the community of Project Overworld backup up their progress, they were also racing against people who had developed long-range missiles.

However, they were also really develop in rocketry since the last launch they had livestreamed. They were doing less mistakes during the conception of the vehicle and were also improving bit by bit the capacity of fuel it could hold. With their latest design, they were expecting to reach at least fifty miles up in the skies.

It was only a matter of time until they created a large enough shuttle to bring them to space and all the way beyond.

Eric was walking throught the main hallway of their base to the spatial room. Two of his friends were already working there and welcomed him as he walked in. A giant computer was showing a huge plan in front of them.

This was the plan for their next rocket. This was such a futuristic-looking way of working to him, although the computer itself was clearly designed after the late eighies of the human history.

- "So, how is the engine doing?" He inquired.

- "Pretty well. The changes we made to the fuel and the combustion chamber seems to be working as intended. However, we noticed a bit of heat gathering around this area." The man pointed at a spot on the large engine.

- "Yeah, I thought as much. It was to be expected that we would need to improve the cooling system as well. Leyla, you take care of that while me and Larsen work on c.o.c.kpit. Once the others connect to the game, they will take care of the staging process and the overal structure."

He took a brief pause in his talk before remembering : "Oh yeah, we should make a larger c.o.c.kpit so three or four of us could hold inside it. It would be a lot better for my audience to notice such upgrades."

Leyla imperceptibly shook her head as she knew they would have to increase the whole rocket size for such features to be possible.

Eric looked at them getting busy with their recently assigned tasks and breathed out of relief. He was really happy to see this kind of project come into life.

"Let's go!" He said. "We have a Moon to land on." He completed, trying to motivate his crewmates.