Day 1 - Family

The inspiration for this story comes from the video game "What Remains of Edith Finch", allow me to give you a quick summary of the game. "What Remains of Edith Finch" is a first person exploration game developed by Giant Sparrow. The story follows seventeen year old Edith Finch, the last living descendant of the Finch family as she returns to her ancestral home for the first time in seven years. She uncovers her family's mysterious pasts and tragic deaths. This story is based strongly off the video game, and if you like it, I recommend you play the video game, or like I did, watch Matpat's video on it. Well, on to it, then.

Looking up at the looming form of her childhood home, Elizabeth Foster began to question her life choices. The manor hadn't been inhabited for years, so there was always the risk of the buildig collapsing on her, as well as pests or even worse, intruders. She hadn't seen many squatters in the area before, but you never knew, and the ones she'd heard about from her friends were almost always violent in some way.

Elizabeth would never have visited the house had not she finally decided to honor her grandmother's wishes as read out in the will. So in the place of her daily commute to her workplace, she had travelled back to her ancestral home. The reason for Grandmother Elizabeth Foster the first's request that her eponym specifically be the one to carry out this task was unknown. The will had been written before Elizabth the younger's older sister was killed in a freak accident involving a train door and had been left unedited since, so it could easily have been Dhalia that she elected to reexplore the grounds.

But the thing was, Elizabeth had a gut feeling that her grandmother somehow knew Dhalia would meet her untimely demise before she passed away herself. Every time somebody died, she would act like she expected it, and leave some memento of their death. Instead of a family mauselum with bodies, Granny Elizabeth kept one in her very own bedroom with whatever the person was carrying, or a newspaper clipping of the tragic accident. Odd? Yes. Morbid? Certainly. Creepy? Most definetly. But many of the townspeople had defended her, saying she had simply lost it after her son and husband's deaths in the same earthquake. Elizabeth barely remembered anything from that summer except clinging onto her mother for dear life, her six year old life being threatened to be cut short by the debris crumbling down around her.

Taking in a deep, reassuring breath, she pulled a slightly rusted keyring with equally rusted keys dangling from it and fumbled for the correct one. A faded, laminated label reading "Front Door" marked the right key. Releasing the breath, Elizabeth slotted the key into the lock, but couldn't shift the pins inside. For a moment she prayed the mechanism was too old and faulty, but the door yielded. The hinges moved out, bit by bit, the gears creaking against each other with age and overuse.

Is this really what remains of the Fosters?