It gets expensive

We go through the door into the auction room. The room is quite large, with a large area where there are rows of chairs. At the far end of the room is a stage with a lectern. Behind the lectern, a screen is down with a projector pointed at it.

There is no seating arrangement, so the front seats are already taken. Reginald, Sylvanas and I sit down in one of the middle rows at the edge.

I sit at the edge of the row next to Sylvanas. Reginald reaches under his chair and pulls out some kind of tablet with a number on it.

Sylvanas sees that I look a little puzzled. "Under each seat is a board with a number. If you want to bid on someone, you just have to lift up the board" she explains to me.

I also look under my chair and pull out the board, it has the number 17.

"Have you thought about who you want to bid on?" asks Reginald looking at me.

"Yes I have, but I wanted to see how high the prices go first. Do you know who you want yet?" I ask back.

"I have ideas" he returns. "How many characters do you actually have?" he asks me.

"Three at the moment, but they haven't been around that long either. I was going to wait to see how I did with the 3 until I got new characters, but then the letter for the auction came. How many characters do you own?"

"Oh, like I said I'm an old hand at this. I own 27 characters at the moment, which live in my mansion" he replies.

"Twenty-seven?" I ask, dumbfounded. "That's a hell of a lot, how do you manage to control them all?"

Reginald grins. "That's why I have my love Sylvanas here" he says, reaching for her thigh. Sylvanas gets a little red in the face at the touch.

"But not only Sylvanas here, I have 2 more characters who are responsible for discipline and are subordinate to Sylvanas." "Interesting," I return.

By now the room has filled up nicely and the door we came in from closes. A spotlight points to the stage and a man in a fancy suit walks up with a microphone. He walks up to the lectern and begins to speak.

"Good evening ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to tonight's RealDreams auction. It is my pleasure to guide you through the upcoming auctions this evening. As I'm sure you know, we'll start with a smaller auction first."

"The auction is for 7 characters from the "Super Mario" franchise, the instance number of the characters is number 76. The starting bid for each of the characters is $25,000. If you would like to bid, please raise your board and I will reflect your bid aloud."

"If you manage to bid on a character, please come to one of the cashiers after the main auction, who will be standing by in the reception room."

"If you would like to order any mods or the like to go with the characters, contact persons will be standing by to advise you. The characters will then be delivered tomorrow, although there may of course be delays here depending on which and how many mods you order along with them. If there are no other questions, we will start the auction."

With that he finishes his speech and the audience gives him a little applause. Since no one comes forward and has a question, the auctioneer presses a head and the beamer shows the first character of the day.

A large picture of Birdo is thrown on the screen. Next to the pink dinosaur a few key data, like age, size etc. are displayed.

Since I'm not interested in Brido, I can take a look at how the auction will work and how much money will be put down for it.

Birdo will probably not be that expensive, I think to myself and the auctioneer takes the floor.

"We'll start with Birdo a female dinosaur of the same species as Mario's friend Yoshi. The starting bid is $25,000."

In one of the front rows, a man raises his tablet. "Twenty-five thousand dollars for number 48," says the auctioneer.

Next, someone in my row raises his board and says "$28,000."

"$28,000 for number 8" the auctioneer returns. "$30,000" again says the man in front.

So it goes on, with more than just the two of them bidding. After a few minutes I wonder how high the guests are going for a character like Birdo.

"56,000$ for the gentleman with the number 8" says again the auctioneer, looking around the room. "56,000 going once, going twice, and sold to number 8."

I look at Reginald. "Fifty-six thousand dollars for Brido? Is that normal for characters which have such a low demand to be given so much money?" I ask him in amazement

"It can happen, especially for collectors who want to complete a set of characters with low instance numbers" he answers.

The auctioneer takes the floor again. "Now that the first character has been sold, we'll move on to Dixie-Kong." He presses the button again to make the image on the screen change.

So the next auctions go on, until characters come up that I think are interesting.