We’ve spoken a bit about Victor and Gloriana Graves’ early years, but I’m not sure if I want to stick to a strictly chronological timeframe. As my mood shifts and changes, I go backward and forward in time in their fantasy world. Recently, I’ve been focused on their kids.

  Thousands.

  Thousands of kids.

  Victor Graves is a sperm donor (and Gloriana and Victors’ other wives are fertilized egg donors, but that’s a bit out of our scope for right now), but not one in the traditional sense. He has his own sperm repository that he gives samples from. Who does he give them to? Gravers. I haven’t spoken about them yet. Those are his fans. In addition to being fans of him, he goes a step further. He creates an institution for them to be a part of. He’s weaponized his fanbase.

  There’s a chapter in every city, and not just the major cities. He has fans in every county in the country, or at least that was his original goal. To utilize the county system as a means of propping up his fledgling institution. We’re getting a bit off topic here, though, back to the sperm.

  He gives the sperm to either high ranking Gravers or ones whom can afford the price (wealthier Gravers are of interest to Victor Graves, but not so much to overturn the axiom that ‘All Gravers Are Equal’). The sperm is not a mandatory thing, by the way. Everything is done by consent. By the time he starts giving out his sperm, he’s displayed himself to be a very capable man. This isn’t done so much out of genetic superiority, though. It’s not eugenics, not yet. In the same way he created an institution for the Gravers, he wants to create an institution for the Graves Blood Dynasty, for his family. It is to have a patriarch/matriarch that’s been chosen to rule it, to help administrate Victor and Gloriana’s vast wealth once they’ve been euthanized. A ruler that can be chosen from a large population, so as to allow competition to foster. Victor wants to build schools and cathedrals and cities.

  He wants to build a culture. A people.

  And he did.

  Or at least he did in my fantasy world.

  Victor Graves will die, as all men do. His aesthetic and philosophy and everything else, his Geist, is so profoundly focused upon that as a fact.

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

  Anyway, back to what we were originally focused on: the kids. The Gravespawn. The Graves Blood Dynasty. The Graves Family. Everything has multiple names to reiterate the fact that a name is not the thing, but just a sign that points to it.

  The Graveskinder. They live in the city of Victoriana in the state of Gravesland, a very small state, a city-state, that was created from ranchland that Victor bought up for cheap early on in his life (not too long after selling his Minecraft to Microsoft) located in Wyoming, which is a beautiful area, home to Yellowstone National Park.

  There is property in Gravesland, and all of it belongs to the Graves Family. The city itself is located on private property.

  Victor Graves gobbles up a whole lot of property during his life. I need to remember to go into the specifics of how he did that. Minecraft was sold for a few billion dollars, but you need a lot more than that for the level of property that Victor has by the end of his life. He is a trillionaire before he dies, the first one and I think the only one, too, as the notion of property changes by the time he is euthanized. And I know Trillionaire sounds a bit ridiculous as I write this in the year 2025, but it’s true (true in the fantasy world). I tried to make him getting to that status as realistic as possible, so as not to mess with the suspension of disbelief. He really works hard for it. But those are tales for another time.

  Anyway, back to the kids.

  (I pause writing here to consider what direction I want to take, it takes me some time to consider.)

  The kids have their own culture. It’s intimately tied closely to the culture of the Gravers, of course, who are now their own institution that exists independently of the now dead Victor Graves. And most of the kids end up deciding that they, too, want to become Gravers and join that institution when its their turn to decide whether to join.

  The culture is all about family first, but not in a sinister way. Remember: utopia. It’s the same ‘family first’ you might have about your own family. It doesn’t mean you’d rob someone in broad daylight just so you can buy your children a pony, although that goes the other way, too, as many of us would transgress norms to help a family member in dire need. But they aren’t in need, these Gravelings. Victor Graves brought home the bacon before he went away for good. They’re set up nice. And what do they want?

  They want to bring Victor back.

  They want to create an afterlife and bring people back from the dead. Victor and Gloriana. All the Graves family. All the Gravers. Everyone else in the world, everyone else that has ever existed.

  Dr. Frankenstein did this in the early 1800s, so it shouldn’t be that hard, right? Wrong! It’s very hard to bring the dead back to life, or at least it is in the real world, as I’m sure you already know. While the Gravesverse is a fantasy world, where I could make anything happen at any time, I want it to be heavily influenced by our own world, so as not to mess up the suspension of disbelief.

  Maybe I’ll go into their strategies for doing that at some point, but for now, we’re about at our thousand words again, so I’m signing out for now.