And so our young conquerors had rallied their Gravers, had simultaneously negotiated with each of the thousands of movie theater owners in the country, and had started the Gravers’ first quest: to bring back physical copies of the movie to their local theater.
I don’t think I mentioned it before but Victor and Gloriana were LA natives. There is a version of the Gravesverse where they were originally from Texas, but I think LA is better for the direction I’m going with this particular lore. The pair had had the movies manufactured, either through a traditional Hollywood factory or maybe somewhere in China, and had shipped them to the center of the country, to Kansas.
And so, the pair had a shipping container or two located in a rented out field in Kansas. They had a skeleton crew, too. Victor had picked up several concubines during the time prior to and the time during their creation of Minecraft and had even made a few of them into wives. Not wives equal to his Gloriana, of course, but a step up from concubine. I’ll have to go into how he convinced these 21st century women to come along with him as his concubines at some point, but in a nutshell he spoke to them about his true ambitions in life, what he planned to do. These concubines weren’t just idle trophies, either. They were his executives. They helped him with everything, from acting as a personal assistant to being a programmer or artist or community manager or even an accountant or lawyer, depending on their education. These were smart and capable women.
They had also gotten to Kansas a bit earlier and had done a meet and greet or signing (V&G had published a book by this point in some versions) with local Kansan fans and had rallied them to their cause prior to putting out the beck and call to the Graver Nation. This allowed them to set up the ‘convention’ that they had promised and would allow them to distribute the physical copies of the movies once the Gravers started to arrive.
The convention was… well… not great. I was inspired by the real-life event of DashCon, which if you’re not familiar was considered to be one of the worst conventions of all time. So the field where they hosted things had a ball pit in a kiddie pool and a bounce house and that was about it. The reasons for this wasn’t because V&G were incompetent, though. They hadn’t had the most time to prepare, being so busy with the making of the movie itself in the lead up to the release, so they decided they were going to try to make it as bad as they possibly could.
Their strategy was a success. The Gravers were, for the most part, amused by the poor quality and it started to trend well on Twitter. Aside from the ‘festivities,’ though, there were several long tables set up and roped off walkways for people to funnel into and out of. Gravers, over the course of two or so days, arrived at the location, organized into the groups they arrived with, and came through and purchased their collector’s edition IOU paper for whatever amount they wished to pay and would have their names entered into a database, as detailed in the previous chapter.
This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
They got the physical copy of the movies and enough for their local theater and a few extra just in case there were manufacturing errors. Then they went down the line to meet Victor and Gloriana Graves, who had a concubine acting as a photographer with a custom built camera. The photographer would take a picture and a code would print out on a receipt. The code on the receipt would direct them to a website where that picture would be later posted, allowing them to save it. This piece of technology sounded more interesting back when I originally came up with it, back when the internet was a much newer place. Victor and Gloriana were always coming up with these little inventions to streamline things.
The meeting with Victor and Gloriana was a brief affair, as the two had explained to the Gravers in an email. They had to manage their time well. They’d come as a group and V&G would each have a custom built stamping machine that they’d use. This would allow either of the pair to put a photograph of themselves in the machine and stamp it with their signature along with a code which would indicate when the autograph was created and also to verify its authenticity. First Gloriana would use her machine to stamp the photograph and then hand it to Victor to do the same with his machine. This was mostly considered to be an amusing way to receive an autograph at the time.
The machine they use to autograph would get more streamlined and technological throughout the course of their lives. Again, it seemed more impressive to me when I first came up with the idea, but it might be a bit dry to read about in today’s age. After the autograph, they’d get a quick picture. Not a selfie that the Graver took themselves, but one from the photographer as outlined above. As an added bonus, they also received a silicone bracelet with ‘Graver’ on it and a ring pop (V&G had shared the story of their engagement ring while on a press tour some years before). These bracelets were each marked with a unique code and would one day be worth quite a bit of money.
And then the Gravers were allowed a few moments to partake in the festivities, of which there was very little to do (this being a nice side benefit from V&G’s perspective. Get them in and out fast) and then they were off again. Back from whence they came. They came in round the clock, 24 hours over the course of those few days. V&G didn’t show any level of tiredness, they had prepared for this.
And so this was the first Quest for the Gravers, of many, many more to come. There were, of course, a lot of hiccups and stumbling blocks and problems that arose, but V&G were prepared for that fact and responded to each one as best they could. But having hiccups was considered to be a feature in the Graver Institution, a selling point. It meant they were doing new things. It meant they doing things at full speed. Victor and Gloriana spent much time talking about the nature of small problems and how one should expect them to arise in life. It was a feature of the universe, of the laws of physics. That law would be on full display for the entire life of Victor Graves, as he continued doing new things at breakneck speeds.
