Chapter One - What's Left Behind
"As far as I am concerned," the curator said in a rather contemptuous voice, "he is dead. Officially, he is assumed to be dead, as he has been lost at sea. Which is why his assets are already in probate. A real headache, all that,especially considering that no one knows where his diaries are, in which he had been keeping notes about all of his... collectibles. I know he's not been taking them with him."
The rushed tour through the ugly building revealed a collection which seemed thrown together without a thought - gems and antique looking clothes, very many pictures, a few statues, medieval weapons, books, parts of buildings arranged in a middle hall with sunlight from above,tools... as it was explained, it was all arranged in the order it was acquired. The pictures were separate from the rest, but here,too, they were ordered by date of acquisition. It was very hard,from all the stuff, to discern what type of taste, if any, the collector really cultivated. It looked a lot more like someone just collecting whatever was hard to get or expensive, and probably both. A few things did not fit in with this idea though, as there was also a room with technological collections,some rather outdated, like an old printing press and what looked like parts of old computers. There were also futuristic looking things, for the most part unidentifiable. Through all the tour, the curator droned on about this and that.
The most important information was that,while all of you would have to play, as she called it, significant parts in the museum's affairs to be able to inherit, you were all free to do what you wanted with the rest of the estate. And that was what the last room was about. Not part of the museum, but also a collection. Scale models of various buildings, from small huts and farms in various sizes to large mansions and even a skyscraper, a whole village build into a mountainside, and single apartments occupied the middle, models of cars, a small plane and a lear jet and one very large yacht were on shelves on the walls. On a very modern glass screen serving as monitor to one side, numbers were slowly running along, one set in green and one in red. It took a moment to register, but the figures seemed to be daily expenses in red and daily income in green. The green number was significantly larger.
Questions during the tour can of course be asked, also, if there is a certain type of picture you'd be more likely to look at let me know and I'll post an image