Part 38: Epilogue, Part 1

Epilogue, Part 1

This series' storyline can be very difficult to follow, partly because it changes every time you close your eyes for a minute. While some of it is open to multiple interpretations, much of the plot is simply buried in a manner that's very difficult to bring yourself to dig for. I, however, lost my sanity some time ago, and hence will try to make this series understandable for the sake of actually figuring out what happened in 6 Days.

Note that some of this is speculation on my part. [Bracketed text] means that the information is thread canon but probably should be part of the actual canon.

What follows is a timeline of the entire series, post-retcons. Essentially, this is the entire history of the world as assumed by 6 Days. Sit tight, we're getting into some very, very crazy territory. In fact, I think we need some...



Very, very long ago: In the Realm of Magic, a large number of...creatures fight and consume each other. Chzo is good enough at this that he ends up consuming everyone, becoming a God of Pain. This process apparently matters despite Chzo being nonlinear. Note that there are people in the Realm of Magic, they just don't tend to stick around very long.

July 28, 56 BC:Having somehow heard about a powerful god in an alternate realm who never interacts with humans or otherwise alludes to its own existence, Cabadath decides that the best way to defeat the Romans is to draw a pretty picture on his cottage wall and unleash an evil god on everyone. Chzo is none too happy about this, and decides to torture Cabadath pretty much forever. After a while, he recants and decides that he might as well give Cabadath a nice outfit and a four-leaf-clover scythe, having him run godly errands like going to the store to pick up particularly evil dinner. The Books of Chzo talk about him taking pity and teaching Cabadath humility, which is apparently done by making him a Prince and giving him carte blanche to do whatever he feels like. Chzo also puts Cabadath's soul inside a tree for safekeeping, which for some reason he keeps in the world he can't interact with 364 days out of the year.

July 28, 1501: A cruel man finds Cabadath's giant soul tree and, according to the Books of Chzo, declares: "What is this Tree that blights our land of constructed things? We will not allow such majesty that was not built by us." He then cuts it down so as to stay financially afloat and raise his child but, as punishment for not magically assuming that this one tree was actually a soul tree, Chzo gives his servant free reign to kill the woodcutter and enact revenge on whoever else he feels like on every July 28 ever. Humbly.

1501-1581: Although the woodcutter was killed, his son drags the tree away and sells it to somebody who makes an inn out of it. The man who creates the inn assumes that there's now a family curse on him and decides to wait around and be punished any day now. Finally, on July 28, 1581, Cabadath takes time out of his busy schedule to set him on fire and then stab his guest for some reason.

1581-1778: The inn gets dismantled and turned into a harpsichord. The person who actually cut up the wood to make this remains unpunished (undocumented in the book of victims, at least), but the purchase of the instrument by one Jack Frehorn is deemed to be an irredeemable sin.

July 28, 1778: Cabadath decides to kill more people on his annual holiday from menial servitude, murdering Jack's gay lover for applying pressure to his soul and almost killing Jack himself. Frehorn, who has also somehow heard about this man, begs for forgiveness only after trying to shoot him, and this stunning display of machismo and foresight causes the Prince to give him a magical knife instead of death.

1778-1779: Jack decides to repay the Prince's kindness by further destroying the Prince's soul then using the knife to kill other people so Cabadath doesn't have to. The knife supposedly makes the soul and mind of the victim under the killer's control, but Frehorn neglects his magic slave-tool in favor of writing down stories that come to him as a result of the killings. He throws some of these stories away and writes the others entirely in past tense, making sure they reflect events as inaccurately as possible.

July 28, 1789: The soul wood, now a crate, is carved up by Mbouta. Cabadath decides that the reasonable course of action would be to kill every single person remotely blood related to Mbouta, the entire crew of the ship he's on, Mbouta himself, and probably some fish for good measure.

1789-1805: Roderick DeFoe explores Africa and finds the carving, taking it to his house and keeping it in a bell jar. Cabadath is surprisingly unfazed.

July 28, 1806: Roderick's wife gives birth to twins. The younger twin, who Trilby will retroactively name John, causes his wife to die in childbirth. [Roderick raises the child through the first year or so of its existence, keeping it from dying of common diseases or malnutrition], then decides to keep him in the house basement dungeon next to some rarely used manacles. The minimal amounts of attention cause John to grow up retarded and deformed.

Some point during all this: Chzo realizes the whole "teaching humility" thing isn't really working out [or decides to just punish Cabadath even more]. Rather than leave Cabadath to die, he decides that he really does need someone to do the laundry, so he sets in motion an unnecessarily elaborate plan to re-open a portal between the realms and choose somebody who happens to be five feet away when he does so. The possibility of enlisting one of the people who actually lives in the Realm of Magic completely slips Chzo's mind. Chzo thus asks Cabadath to make a bridge.

July 28, 1821: Roderick, angry that asking for somebody's opinion on the idol caused his friend to give him his opinion on the idol, decides to finally kill the boy he's hated and tortured for 15 years. In the first of many absurd coincidences, he uses Cabadath's soul as the weapon on the one day that Cabadath can do anything about it. Cabadath's response is to let the almost-dead DeFoe kill his father and brother in retaliation and run a few laps around the house, then start preparing the bridge. The fact that he was nearly killed by some wood from the land of technology that housed the soul of a man from the land of technology is enough to make DeFoe a product of both realms, but at this very moment Cabadath realizes that the bridge is just to replace him (I'm making this up, but no other explanation even begins to make sense) and thus breaks up DeFoe's essence, trapping the mind in his house and the soul in the same bit of wood.

Some other point around here: The Order of Blessed Agonies and Ministry of Occultism catch wind of this, and decide to look into John DeFoe. They decide not to do this for a few hundred years, though.

Late July, 1993: Supposed thief Trilby, attempting to steal valuables but quickly forgetting to do so, becomes trapped in DeFoe's house alongside others in a manner that is far from adequately explained. Upon realizing that touching the idol causes DeFoe to possess somebody, a series of events leads to Trilby binding DeFoe's soul to his body then burning down his mind, which actually results in only one of those things being destroyed... kind of negating the point of the whole process.

1993-1997: Trilby is captured and enlisted by the Ministry of Occultism to do... things.

July 28, 1997: After Simone is stabbed, Trilby remembers that John DeFoe also stabbed people, and decides to track down the idol. This leads him to a hotel that cycles between both realms, a property Chzo refuses to utilize in order to get a guide, and Lenkmann, a very incompetent cultist who wants to complete the bridge. Now that Cabadath has simultaneously made DeFoe the bridgekeeper and stopped the bridge from being made in a manner designed to make my job harder, Lenkmann wants to permanently summon Cabadath into the world so he can tell them what the fuck they're supposed to do about the whole "We need to destroy you to do what our god wants" gambit. Summoning some guy who works for Chzo causes them much more difficulty than Cabadath encountered actually summoning Chzo, so Trilby is able to sabotage the plan by dying and then being revived. The ritual works anyway, however, and Cabadath gets to run around doing whatever he feel like in our realm, no longer constrained by dates.

July 29, 1997:Cabadath, knowing full well that Trilby is prophesized to create the bridge and that the order wants to help him create the bridge, decides that the best way to stop the bridge from being completed is to bring back a blood sample from Trilby to the cult so they can clone him and work together, thus creating his own struggle for the next game.

September 11, 1999: Trilby sends DeFoe's soul wood into space so that it can't be destroyed, creating the bridge. Never forget.

June 16, 2010: Members of the Something Awful forums try to justify the above by saying that Cabadath had to pretend he was a loyal worker so Chzo wouldn't get suspicious. Quovak points out that that Chzo can only look at this side of the world one day a year, and that Cabadath keeping a vital part of the bridge around for safekeeping would probably alert Chzo to this plan anyway.

1997-2189: Cabadath has 364 days per year of complete free reign to do anything he wants, with the singular goal of stopping the bridge from being completed so he can keep serving Chzo (which he isn't doing much of now that he's hanging around a different realm, but details). Noticing that the cult that wants to complete the bridge is growing in power and plans to destroy the mind, which they've located, and that doing so on a certain day would be disastrous for Cabadath's tenure, the Prince decides to make the most of his incredibly advantageous position by doing nothing until a week before the mind is set to be destroyed. Then he'll sabotage it.

July 23, 2189: Theo Dacabe gets trapped with some other sacrificial lambs in the basement of the building that will soon explode. One of his fellow captives, Samantha Harty, decides to clone somebody else who emphatically doesn't want to make the bridge so he can help make the bridge. The resulting Trilby clones suddenly induce fear in John DeFoe despite previously implied retardation.

July 23 - July 27: Cabadath very apathetically decides to stop the destruction by killing a few people here and there. He kills some Trilbies so that John's mind can expand, but neglects to consider that more killing might actually help.

July 28, 2189: Cabadath finally gets around to actually disarming the bomb, but is foiled when the one Trilby he didn't kill decides to burn the place down at the urging of the special man only he can see. The ensuing flame ends up destroying the bomb which in turn destroys John's mind, and, because this conveniently happened at the midpoint of the other bridge events on the one day it would matter (as did the other bridge events) without Cabadath's interference and within tentacling distance of someone pure, Chzo gets a new servant. Cabadath is dropped down a hole and laughed at. Chzo then takes that Trilby and tortures him for a while because he needs something to do now that his 600-year nonlinear plan is over.

July 14, 2385: Malcolm, having dropped out of his online college due to not having learned anything about psychology, decides to listen to his schizophrenia and kill his dad, going into space. [5 other people do the same thing, resulting in a spaceship where nobody has even a basic understanding of how spaceships should work].

Late July, 2385: Due to either magic or the influence of Vladimir-Malcolm (or something), DeFoe's idol is intercepted by the ship on which Malcolm "works". True to form, DeFoe murders people, but a distress call causes another ship to save and then imprison Malcolm.

February 3, 2386: Malcolm, now in prison, gets a gift that turns out to be Frehorn's long-lost knife. By killing himself with it, Malcolm gains control over his own mind and soul, which somehow translates to becoming a nonlinear free magical being. Incredibly meek and at the mercy of a desperate author, Malcolm decides to make all that came before actually happen, whining about it the whole way [while making up profound-sounding statements about destiny].

---

Phew. Now, I've repeatedly said that this whole thing rests on nobody being competent, and I'm prepared to stand by that assessment. What follows is a character sheet of everyone who matters in the series, what their goals were, and why they didn't bother accomplishing those goals at all. Yes, this update is long.



Five Days a Stranger: Characters

Trilby
Goals: Steal from DeFoe Manor, then escape from DeFoe Manor
Actions: Forgets lockpicks, forgets about theft after one room, and forgets that he's supposed to escape in favor of figuring out the mystery behind some wood.

Simone
Goals: Escape from DeFoe Manor alive
Actions: Paces around for five days, leaves the prime murder suspect alone in a shed, and goes along with the plan to give the actual murderghost a weapon and summon him right on front of everyone.

Phil
Goals: Escape the manor alive
Actions: Needlessly antagonizes everyone instead of spreading information about the fact that people get possessed into killing each other.

Jim
Goals: Escape the manor alive
Actions: Forms an arbitrary father-son bond with the main murder suspect, defends said suspect after seeing him try to commit murder.

AJ
Goals: Investigate the supernatural elements of the manor
Actions: Neglects to prepare any backup, demonstrates no understanding of who Cabadath is, refuses to compare notes.


7 Days a Skeptic: Characters

John/Malcolm
Goals: Just go into space
Actions: Impersonates a much older man without using ID despite it being well known that said older man was recently killed, tries to pass for a psychiatrist despite no psychiatric knowledge.

Barry
Goals: Be a decent captain and finish his career on a high note.
Actions: Blatantly disregards the advice to ignore meaningless cargo, insists on keeping it aboard, uses the vacuum of space as a hiding place from a killer, doesn't tell anybody else how to access basic ship functions.

Adam
Goals: Fix engineering problems by being an engineer, stay alive
Actions: Gets Malcolm to do everything instead, refuse to let anybody see the letter that warns of all the different ways people will undoubtedly die.

Angela
Goals: Be logical
Actions: Arrests the person specifically assigned to find bodies for being too good at his job, refuses to look around when warned of incoming murder.

Serena
Goals: Follow procedure
Actions: Blatantly ignores everyone flagrantly disregarding procedure.

Will
Goals: Prove to everyone else that he's mature enough to be in space
Actions: Helps John DeFoe kill everyone in space.


Trilby's Notes: Characters

Trilby
Goals: Be a secret agent
Actions: Makes absolutely no effort to disguise the fact that he's a media celebrity, name drops DeFoe Manor to anybody willing to sit still, assumes that anybody else who says he's a secret agent must be one.

Lenkmann
Goals: Summon Cabadath
Actions: Paper-thinly disguises the fact that he's trying to summon Cabadath, hands out notes about how much he wants to summon Cabadath, tells everybody very loudly exactly how best to stop him from summoning Cabadath.

Abed
Goals: Stay alive
Actions: Becomes a drunk and abrasive jerk to everybody over the course of an hour.

Siobhan
Goals: Follow Trilby around obsessively and only a bit platonically
Actions: Fails to recognize Trilby for a long time, tries using CPR to bring Trilby back from a knife wound.

Roderick
Goals: Get revenge on his son
Actions: Builds a room for his son, feeds his son for 15 years, slowly beats his son, hides his son from everyone, goes through way more effort than necessary before finally trying to kill his son 15 years later, fails to kill his son hard enough.

Cabadath
Goals: Stop the bridge from being destroyed, punish people who mess with the wood that contains part of the bridge and part of Cabadath
Actions: Gives Trilby's blood to the cult, makes it much easier for the bridge to be destroyed, never hides the idol and instead prays that nobody touches it on a day that isn't July 28.


6 Days a Sacrifice: Characters

Theo
Goals: Inspect buildings, survive.
Actions: Investigates the building without anyone knowing his location, goes along with absurd commands, has sex in a cast, chases around murderers, obeys everyone.

Harty
Goals: Escape the complex
Actions: Shows absolutely no understanding of the complex in which she works, refuses to tell anyone else information that would help them escape, wanders into dangerous areas by herself, shows no knowledge of the Trilby/Cabadath murder spree.

Trilbies
Goals: Stop DeFoe from doing things
Actions: Stand around doing whatever people say except for two who needlessly antagonize everyone, make ineffective scarecrows, demonstrate no survival instincts.

Janine
Goals: Stay alive
Actions: Psuedo-rapes a random man, refuses to fully confide in everyone, cowers into little balls every few minutes.

Canning
Goals: Appear incompetent
Actions: Appears competent

Prison Guards
Goals: Guard the prison
Actions: Show no concern about whoever is running around the prison distributing knives.

Malcolm
Goals: Enjoy the freedom that comes with complete god-like powers and nonlinearity.
Actions: Assumes that destiny might be important, refuses to fix any of the problems he easily could, mopes.

The whole thing falls apart when you think about it, doesn't it? I'm almost positive there's at least one mistake in that mess, so feel free to correct me.