Spoilers below!

At the center of the House of Eternal Return is the Selig-Pastore family: artist Piper Pastore, her musician-inventor husband Nicolae, their twins Lex and Morgan, Piper’s eccentric twin brother Lucius, and her scientist father Emerson. The family once lived inside the seemingly ordinary Victorian home visitors enter at the beginning of the exhibit—until an experiment tore holes through reality and caused the entire family to disappear.

Many members of the family possessed unusual creative abilities connected to a cosmic force called the Anomaly. Piper could glimpse other realities through dreams and transform her visions into art. Nicolae discovered that music could manipulate physical matter and built a laser harp capable of channeling that energy. Morgan communicated with plants and animals and could sense things beyond ordinary reality.

The trouble began decades earlier with Emerson’s experiments involving a machine called the “Transducer”. One test accidentally gave the family hamster, Nimsesku, a form of immortality. During the experiment, Lucius was struck by the machine’s energy and fell into a coma. When he awakened, he had gained an extraordinary connection to other dimensions, although those abilities later faded.

Lucius became obsessed with recovering his powers. He eventually created Portals Bermuda, a questionable interdimensional tourism operation that allowed people to visit strange alternate worlds. After a mysterious organization known as “the Charter” shut the project down, Lucius returned to the family home and began searching for Emerson’s research.

The family was already struggling with the recent death of Piper’s mother. Lex became especially frightened by mortality and began studying the apparently immortal Nimsesku. Lucius secretly encouraged him to use Emerson’s stolen notes and the Transducer in an experiment intended to uncover the hamster’s secret—and possibly restore Lucius’ lost abilities. Instead, the experiment caused Lex to slowly fade from physical existence.

Unable to abandon Lex, the family combined their abilities and everything they knew in one final rescue attempt. Emerson prepared the Transducer, Nicolae connected his laser harp, Piper used her visions to search through alternate realities, and Morgan helped guide them toward her missing brother. The machine opened a passage into the space between worlds—but the experiment spiraled out of control.

At 7:06 p.m. on March 17, 2016, dimensional fractures erupted throughout the house and the Selig-Pastore family vanished. Their home became tangled with the alternate worlds they had contacted, producing the portals, creatures, forests, laboratories and impossible environments visitors explore today. The dining room remains frozen near the apparent center of the disaster.

Within the story, the Charter later contained the house and presented it to the public as an art installation. Visitors are therefore wandering through both the abandoned family home and the aftermath of a multiversal accident, piecing together what happened through diaries, photographs, recordings, computer files and objects left behind.

There is no single hallway that explains the entire plot. The story is deliberately scattered throughout the exhibit, and you can spend hours investigating it. While you’re exploring, keep your eyes peeled—the immortal hamster Nimsesku may still be hiding somewhere within the exhibit!