The truth shed set you free: 'House of Eternal Return' expands its multiverse with new room

Apr. 12—7 p.m. March 17, 2016.

That's when the world changed for the fictional Selig family at Meow Wolf's "House of Eternal Return" in Santa Fe.

The Selig family disappeared after experimenting with interdimensional travel by tapping into a force known as "The Anomaly" in an effort to bring back deceased family members.

This story is at the root of the Santa Fe location, and the world continues to grow as Meow Wolf opens new locations in Texas.

At the helm of the world building is Michael Wilson, the Lore Keeper and Billiam Rodgers, story lead.

"We always tell people to go to the mailbox first, which is where you find the first key for the story," Wilson says. "So when you come into the house, we always tell people to come here first if you want to experience the story, because we basically have this little thing that sets up the mystery of the charter who has quarantined this house."

Rodgers says Meow Wolf is trying to tell a nonlinear story across the house of what happened to the family.

"This mailbox idea is like original to the earliest versions of the house, and it's basically because like, 'Where can we be sure that we have people like right out of the gate?' " Rodgers says. "This is where we introduce them to the story."

Wilson says visitors find out that the house has been quarantined.

"You also find out that there's been a tragedy and a child has disappeared," Wilson explains. "That sort of sets up the mystery of what to go look for."

Since the Santa Fe location opened in 2016, millions of people have visited and many of the rooms behind the house have changed.

In the last couple of months, Meow Wolf has completed one more room in the house essential to the story — the shed.

"This is the first new piece of narrative that's been added since we opened," Wilson says.

The shed belongs to Nicolae Pastore.

"Nicolae is the father of the family. He is a Galaga champion," Wilson explains. "So you're going to see little references to video games all over the place. He's a musician. And he experiments with sound, so there's also a lot of really cool sound interactives. This is where he studies sound because Nicolae believes that sound can be turned into physical energy."

Rodgers says the original concept back when the team was writing the main story of the house was to have each member of the family have their own story.

"We want visitors to sit down and explore their personal stories through objects in the environment or in journals," Rodgers says. "When you go inside the living room, you have Lucius, who's sleeping on the couch. You have the grandfather, Emerson, who's upstairs in his study on his computer. You know, the kids have a room and the two parents, Nicolae and Piper, occupied that master bedroom upstairs. But there's always a reference in the story to Nicolae being a bit of a synthesizer nerd and really obsessed with music and like the strange things that you can do with music. And so in the initial text, we always have been working somewhere on his sound devices and machines and stuff. And so this edition is basically where he has been working on all of these little projects. You can see references to that like throughout the space. We have him in a video and he's messing around with a found audio machine, and you can hear beach noises."

Rodgers says each family member is artistic and that bridges into a magical obsession.

He says Nicolae's obsession is sound.

"One of the things that we wanted to do for his character is to make him like a big fan of 1980s arcade games," Rodgers explains. "I think this came from when some of us would hang out at Back Road Pizza, where they had that cocktail cabinet of the Galaga game. We were like, 'Okay, character affectations.' Maybe this guy is really good at Galaga for anomalous, chaotic sound-based reasons. We have this newspaper article telling the story of his championship. We also have his instruments on the wall to show how he loves music and sound."

Wilson and Rodgers both want to round out the narrative while they continue to push it forward with the other Meow Wolf locations.

Wilson says there is a Meow Wolf app that keeps track of the expanding multiverse.

When a visitor logs into the app and visits any of the Meow Wolf locations, it will vibrate around certain objects so that the visitor will be able to learn more about the story.

The app also has all the storylines available to read.

"We understand it takes time to go through 'House of Eternal Return' and there's a lot of information," Wilson says. "What's great about the app is that it will have the entire story and information available for when you get home."

The app also has the videos that are played inside of "House of Eternal Return," as well as games, information about the artists, merchandise and purchase tickets.