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Entry Sixteen

  Victor and Gloriana Graves’ Music Video Extravaganza was a resounding success. It went viral. It went gangbusters. It smashed box office records. It was the talk of the media for some time. Or at least that’s how it worked in my fantasy world.

  It was a perfect storm for a media sensation: 1. It was a hit movie, 2. It was a unique movie, 3. It was a legitimately artistic work, 4. It was created by incredibly young entrepreneurs, self-made billionaires, an orphan, 5. It had already generated news after V&G had rallied the Gravers, 6. It had been given away for free to the movie theaters, which were empty shells of what they could have been, being sucked dry by Hollywood, 7. There were more angles, but that’s enough to talk about.

  The Victor and Gloriana Graves Flex on Hollywood was next, an after party hosted some few weeks past the movie’s premiere. A block party to be hosted at midnight central time at the movie theaters parking lot, the place where it had all started.

  This time, they’d play the Twitch stream not just on the phones, but through their car speakers via Bluetooth. Music played for them, intercut with V&G talking up what they had all accomplished. Music from the Extravaganza, and other music, too. In some versions of the universe, great effort is given towards getting permission to use the music in the few weeks leading up to the block party.

  The Gravers are mobilized online, asked to lobby their favorite artists for permission to possibly use their music for V&G’s Twitch and more Extravaganzas. Every musical artist. The Gravers spammed them like no tomorrow. An excel document was created on a Google Doc that listed every musical artist in existence. Once proof of permission had been found, they’d be crossed off on the spreadsheet. They didn’t get everyone of course, and it started irritating the musicians who didn’t want to participate, getting spammed and hated on by a mob of unruly Gravers. The Graves told everyone to stand down a few days prior to the block party, so as not to irritate everyone online.

  “…And who do we have to thank for all this success? You guys. I really mean that. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to downplay my and Gloriana’s own accomplishments. I think we did good, real good. But this success wouldn’t have been possible without you Gravers. Do you see what we can do when we organize? Do you see what we can do when we…-“

  Organization. A powerful, powerful force. The ability to (quite literally) move mountains. The ability to (literally) reach for the stars. Victor talked this up a bit during the Block Party, what they could accomplish together. He quoted Spiderman in saying that great power comes with great responsibility. He said that if they ever felt like Victor had gone off the deep end, they could always step back and away from him. He said that he wanted it so that they could communicate to him, in mass, about the direction he’s taking with his career as a 21st century conqueror and he would answer them. He said he wanted them to become a Gundam, with him as the pilot. A great machine. An enhancer of one’s abilities.

  Victor told them they needed a place to meet, first and foremost, and to try and get permission from their local movie theater to either be able to meet in the parking lot or even inside the building every so often. Most of the theater owners agreed, seeing a good business opportunity with this.

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  Victor said, though, that he wanted to go further than that. That he wanted this to be a bona fide social club, something they could belong to for the rest of their lives. Something where they could make friends, organize events, whatever else. He talked to them about establishing Chapterhouses. Guild Halls. Gravers Dens. He had a proposal in mind, and it was just a proposal. If they didn’t want to go for it, they didn’t have to. And if a portion wanted to go for it and a portion of them didn’t, then that portion that wanted to stay out didn’t have to either.

  He wanted to buy property. A small property in the area of each movie theater in the country. A place for them to call their own, to meet up and chill, but also to organize and plan. Victor said he wanted to purchase all of these pieces of property himself and allow the Gravers to use them. The only problem was he didn’t have enough money to do that. V&G had spent considerable money on the Extravaganza, and didn’t charge the movie theaters to play the movie, although money was rolling in now, but they wanted to use that money for the next Extravaganza, for Fatebook.

  His proposal was this: he wanted them to, collectively, purchase the properties on their own, each paying a little bit, whatever they could. And they didn’t have to pay anything if they didn’t want. The only catch was, he wanted them all to do it in his name. He’d own the property outright, even though they’re the ones that are paying for it.

  The Gravers were feeling a bit critical about this. Billionaires weren’t popular in the world at the time of this. They were seen as money grubbing Lord of the Rings’ style dragons, sitting on vast hordes of wealth and roasting anyone who so much as eyeballed it. Some derided this idea immediately, particularly on Twitter.

  “Don’t let them fool you,” one commenter posted, “they’re rich fucks now, they’ll take your money and won’t give it back.”

  Victor told them about a system he wanted to experiment with, and bigged up the idea of experimentation, harkening back to the founding of the nation, when states themselves were supposed to be like petri dishes, that it was important to try new things in the world, to see if improvements could be made. He wanted to a create a system that would allow him to govern. He said if the property was bought in the Gravers’ names themselves, then he would eventually be bogged down always having to bargain collectively with thousands of people at once each time he needed to use the property to do something.

  He needed the ability, like Julius Caesar, to make decisions about things, sometimes without consulting the Gravers, at least in the matter of property.

  Many were still skeptical, but there was enough of them that buying a small property for the mass to use would be actually really cheap for the individual Graver. It was the sheer scale of the operation that allowed them to do this. They were really, really popular at this time. The talk of the town. Of every town. And they capitalized on that fact. What’s a mortgage when it’s been divided a hundred times? Two hundred? I haven’t worked out how many Gravers there were, but there were a lot. It was a bona fide youth movement (although anyone of any age could join, it was mainly the young that had participated, them being plugged in to popular culture and having more free time to spend).

  They were still skeptical, but it was so cheap, wasn’t it? And they could quit paying whenever they wanted to. The houses were in V&G’s name, not theirs. The onus was on Victor to convince them to keep paying. For the most part, the housing initiative was a success. A few holdouts, to be sure, and a not insignificant amount of Gravers that decided they were going to purchase the house in their own name, regardless of what Victor had said.

  So they had the organization, and now they had property to conduct it in. All was going well for Victor and Gloriana Graves.

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