Someone’s mother was enormously rich. But at a young age she suddenly dies. And then it turns out her entire bank account is empty.
The only thing she left behind was a gigantic abandoned piece of land that she had bought: Starland. There were plans to rename it into the most beautiful amusement park in the world. All the evidence points to many of those plans also having been carried out, that those attractions would have been built, but nobody can really find the park or the money.
She often plays there as a child, while her entire family searches that terrain looking for where the money really is. For clues. For answers to the puzzles and challenges that appear. For what Starland is.
We follow her while she grows up, becomes older, becomes a mother herself, etcetera. And all that time she regularly returns to Starland. Just searching for that solution again. Just playing again, just seeing the final work of her mother again.
Until at the end she finally unravels the puzzle. There is no large bag of money at the end, only a relatively innocent amount. The most important thing was the game, the adventure, the challenge, with which she gave her daughter pleasure and tension for an entire life.
So she resets everything and tells her own children the same legend about Starland, and encourages them again to go discover it as well … because who knows someone might ever find the solution :p
(This comes from that dream in which someone flees over rooftops and suddenly sees a whole piece of land that otherwise cannot be reached. Before you know it you are in secret stair systems, tunnels, buildings that block off other areas, etcetera.)
That whole story of the Dutch theme park Land van Ooit is really a great foundation for this.
- Super successful, unique idea, amusement park where you “have to do it yourself” and the attractions “have to be operated yourself”
- Then money problems and dramatic opening (only one month) of second park.
- Then to prison for siphoning off billions to another park/another country shortly before going bankrupt.
- Only daughter escapes it and continues to run amusement parks. (The main character? Mother of the main character?)
- Then those Frank and Polle, their nephews, who were probably “at the wrong place at the wrong time” (witness of criminal assassination or something) and therefore were themselves murdered without reason, perpetrator never caught.
@IDEA (STORY): Two different families are put into the same cart of a theme park ride. (Same cart on roller coaster, or same boat on river rapids, or some cart on dark ride, something like it.) An accident happens. Only the (youngest?) kids survive that accident. The theme park denies any wrongdoing, doesn’t want to pay damages, lies to the press, etcetera. For the rest of their lives, they fight against this, while they obviously share a very strong bond from now on.