Headscratchers / World's End

A page for Headscratchers and unanswered questions in the World's End series.

• Why is the series called "World's End"? So far, it has nothing to do with the end of the world or anything of the sort. Where did such a title come from?
• The opening scene shows Ivan sleeping on a pile of straw in Tevoran's hideout. The implication was clearly that they're too poor to even afford a decent bed for him, but later on during a fight in Tevoran's hideout in Chapter 3 we very clearly see that there were plenty of beds upstairs. So what was Ivan doing sleeping on a pile of straw? Do they really despise him that much?
  • As it turns out, there's actually only two beds in the rest of the house, so this makes sense.
• Healing between battles is a useful gameplay function, but it's never justified story-wise. For the later Chapters, you could argue that the groups healers fixed everyone up between battles, but for some of the earlier fights that happen back to back within minutes of each other before they had healers, there really is no valid explanation for this one.
• Why does Boris Beleyav hide money and a pair of magic gloves in his well?
  • For that matter, who rigs a garden statue in their yard to explode?
  • Dude keeps all of his guards coked up on whatever shit Casimir cooks up. Someone probably did all that stuff in a drugged-up haze (quite possibly Boris himself).
• Undoubtedly played for laughs, but what was Casimir doing to Vadim when the gang left for Uncle Milan's in Episode 3?
• At the end of Chapter 1, Zofia gives the gang 4,000 zloteks for letting her live. What's more, when you load a previous save up to Chapter 2, this sum is clearly factored into the statistic for total zloteks earned for the previous chapter. But when you actually start playing the playing the game, the 4000 is nowhere to be found. So where did all the money go?
  • It's even more glaring in the transition between Chapter 2 and 3. The save file will list the player as having around 20,000 zloteks, which no normal player would have anything even close to.
• Who was the man who put the hit out for Zofia? He's been obliquely hinted to repeatedly but never named or described in any specific terms? Is he unimportant to the plot or is it setting up a big reveal?
• It's a minor one, but how did Tevoran and Company end up in Tierva in the first place? None of them have a drop of Tiervan blood in them: Tevoran is Voronese, Ysabel is from the Solet archipelago, and Ivan is Phorian. This makes it even weirder when Tevoran and Ysabel refer to Ivan as "the Foreigner". It's not continuity, because this information was available from the beginning. Hypocritical humor, perhaps?
  • Again the supplementary material helps out. Ivan is half Tiervan (making Ysabel and Tevoran's teasing of him decidedly hypocritical), and Tevoran was a good friend and fellow adventurer with Tomasz Vaclav, Ivan's father who was originally born in Tierva. Given his love of travel, it can be assumed that he must have eventually returned to Tierva bringing Tevoran (and by extension Ysabel) with him.
• The fact that Vadim was somehow able to keep his knives when being thrown into prison in Episode 5 was hand-waved as a Refuge in Audacity moment and "because the plot demands it". But it isn't just him. ALL of the thugs you release from their cells walk out fully armed. Did the guards only decide to search Tevoran and Ivan? It makes no sense.
• Practically every enemy the gang encounters is named, including the spiders. Who named the spiders?? Are they sentient beings?
• During the interval in Zofia's elevator, she mentions that she's going to have to use "that" ^note  Meaning the self destruct mechanism to blow up her house . Tevoran misunderstands this and freaks out, saying that she's 100 years too early to try something like "that". Most likely this was an innuendo or another case of Tevoran thinking something was an innuendo when it wasn't. But that aside...what did Tevoran think Zofia was about to do?
• During the final battle in Episode 8, Zofia's Hellcar is shown being driven by two subhumans, who stop it to let off the other miners and then press on further into the tunnel. Two things: how did they stop the car when Zofia admits is had no brakes, and later on, when they find the Hellcar abandoned up the tunnel, what happened to the two subhumans that were driving it?
  • Also the lampshaded question from Zofia of how the miners got the cart over their gaping pit in the first place, but that's quickly hand waved aside in favor of more important concerns.
• Also, who pumped Zofia's Hellcar before Tevoran & Co. came along? She says she used the tunnel for smuggling, but it doesn't look like she could possibly work the machine by herself.
  • Possibly the mercenaries she hired.
• Where did the Sewer Shaman get his powers from? The priests of Ecthain are all explained, but his magic seems to be an altogether different variety from the red stones and there's no mention of him ever having one. If he was just an ordinary man before, who granted him his powers?
• The flavor text during the battle in the brothel lobby says, "Seems business isn't doing too good here." But...the place is literally piled high with the fresh corpses of it's "clients". How can business not be doing good?
• Why do the cacti in Niendam only attack you and not the Niendans? Have the Niendans "tamed" them?
• How did Vera make it from Tierva to the mountains of Niendam by herself in Episode 12? More importantly, how did she even find where the gang was without killing herself? It's made abundantly clear that Niendam is full as wild dangers that nearly demolished the entire Company. And Vera is so fragile and prissy she can barely handle being carried across the wilderness. How could a girl armed only with a magic staff make it that far alone?
• What's going on with Vadim? This one will probably be answered in the next Chapter, but suffice to say, in the Epilogue of Chapter 3 he's seen walking around inside some kind of massive stomach (implied to be Aizu's), clothed and fully sentient. What's happening or where he is anyone's guess.
  • Interesting fact: during the Mushroom Samba segment in Episode 12, everyone hallucinates Vadim... including Martin. Martin never met Vadim.
• In Episode 6, Tevoran seemingly gets excited by the prospect of the mysterious box containing a "buxom Niendan courtesan". Except...that pretty much describes Oksana, whom no man in the gang could possibly be less interested in. And from what we've seen of Niendam, Oksana's body type and personality are par for the course on what a typical Niendan is like. So how is the area known for exporting high class courtesans?
• There's a bizarre absence of mothers in the game. Seriously, their are no mothers anywhere. None of the women in the game are mothers, and no one in the game even mentions their mother is passing, with the sole exception of Zofia. This is most puzzling in the cases of Martin, Vera, Rudolf, and Cordelia, who clearly talk a lot about their fathers but never even drop hints as to who their mothers were.
• The pigmen we encounter in the Tiervan wilderness have clearly been affected by magic, but why were they wearing Voronese soldier uniforms? Where did they find them from so far from Tierva?
• In Chapter 3 we meet up with and trade with the merchant again. Except...there's a better than average chance that the player robbed him of his loot in the last chapter. So why does he still agree to trade with us? Did he not put 2 and 2 together and realize who stole his stuff?
• How is Uncle Milan still rich? You'd think after losing 100,000 zloteks to his nephew's gambling and splurging 250,000 on porn, he would be cleaned out, but he's still as wealthy as ever. And bear in mind, from what we've seen in the game, both of those sums are literally enough cash to outfit an army. Add to this that Milan has no day job and hires several guards to secure his place...where is his money even coming from?
• Tevoran implies in Episode 13 that Milan is biracial representing both halves of the city, meaning that he's half Bronoi and half Tiendai. But his brother, Tomasz, and his nephew, Ivan, are both Phorian. How does that work out?
  • Some of the supplementary material explains this a little better. Milan and Tomasz had a Bronoi mother and a Khendai father, but Tomasz, being stricken with wanderlust as a young man, moved to Phoria and married a Phorian woman. So technically, Ivan is only half Phorian, making it all the more ironic that Ysabel and Tevoran call him "the Foreigner."
• During the siege of Vorona, one of the Voronese soldiers has a bottle of Doctor Gheft's Burn Emolient. How did he come across that?
• Who and what is Nidh-Perquunos?
• On a related note, how did the gang end up escaping the Niendan cave? We never do actually see them finding the entrance again.
  • It's quite possible the disappearing entrance was simply a delusion caused by Nidh-Perquunos' mind control.
• On a similar note, who is the Triangle Guy and what is his deal with following Tevoran and Company?
• At the end of Chapter 3 King Oskar is dead, Rudolf's dead, Duriken's fled the scene, Vera has gone missing, and Martin leaves Vorona to go searching for her. So who's running Vorona? Who did Martin leave as his regent?

Duriken

• Duriken carries an artifact known as the "Tranquil Chime" a ridiculously powerful curative item that grants one the game-breaking "Charge" status. The nature of these objects is mysterious enough, but the only known place to get them from is to defeat an Eldritch Abomination. Did Duriken slay one such monster? And if so, why, considering there are hint's he working with them.
• The second time you fight Duriken, during 13-5, he's somehow regenerated his Grandiose Cape. Does he just have stacks of these things lying around?
  • The third time you fight him, he's traded it out for an artifact called "The Tyrant's Cape", whose main purpose is to cancel out the curse effect of his even more powerful suit of armor, "The Blackened Plate". ...So why didn't he just bring this gear to the fight in the first place?
    • Possibly the Blackened Plate is very painful to wear. It is cursed and saps your life out, after all.
• Duriken's mooks. The guy often employs Voronese soldiers, assassins and priests to come help him take out Tevoran & Co., but it has obvious to those serving him that he's fraternizing with the enemy, knee deep in intrigue, manipulating the King, engaging in black magic, and basically doing anything BUT looking out for the interests of Vorona. So are these Voronese citizens just his faithful elite, or do they just not care?
• The fact that he uses mooks makes it all more puzzling why he didn't bring any outside help in for the final battle in Chapter 3. Clearly he thought Aizu was going to be enough to take care of Tevoran & Company, but why wouldn't he cover all his bases if he was wounded and severely outnumbered? Whatever his motives, it was clearly a tactical blunder: most of the players who got this far wiped the floor with him.
• How did Duriken know where Martin and the others were going to emerge from that exact sewer pipe out in the wilderness? Even if they were being followed, how did he manage to get ahead of him in the sewers?
  • There's some indication that he was actually tracking Aizu's power signature, which he could sense was nearby. But what that implies...
• Duriken is set up to be a mastermind and chessmaster style intrigue character. But he keeps getting pelted by Tevoran & Co., mere mortals. You'd think he would have recognized how much of a threat they were and stepped up his game by now.

The Cloaked Woman, a.k.a. Fallon

• Why does Aizu instinctively know to avert the Cloaked Woman? She goes into defense mode the moment Fallon appears, but claims to never even have heard of Duriken ^note  Granted, he's using a pseudonym, but even when he appears to her in the flesh, she seems unafraid of him. Combined with the fact that Fallon claims she "owns" Aizu...what sort of sordid past did these two have?
• What sort of "arrangement" did Fallon and Duriken actually have? They claim to be working together at one point, but we never actually see them striving towards any common goal together. Mostly all they do is squabble over having the same goal: acquiring Aizu.
• What's beneath the hood? It's almost certainly not human, whatever it is, but how bad can it actually be to require such concealment?
• What sort of relationship did Fallon have with Duriken? Some of their dialogue indicates they might have once been more than business partners, but it's quite difficult to imagine, given how disdainfully she treats him.
  • For that matter, why is Fallon constantly harassing Duriken when he's so much stronger than her?

Aizu

• Aizu refers to herself as "Aizu of Setora". No further information about Setora exists in the codex, none of the other characters can offer even a morsel of information about this mysterious village, its location, or its populace. There's even some question as to whether it's a real place. The only detail Aizu gives us is that she "liked to chop wood back there."
  • Some fans postulate that the crater Aizu is overlooking at the end of Chapter 1 is the remnants of Setora. Aizu blew the entire village up with her self destruct.
• There's still the oft-handwaved question of what's with the blue hair.
• How exactly did Aizu make it from the dungeons of Vorona to Tierva while she was reforming? It's implied that she might have been somehow been following them, but what drove her to Jedmesz's slaughterhouse, and how did she get in? It seems like she warped there out of thin air.
• Why does Vera believe Aizu is a blue fairy? She clearly has a sort of obsession with the girl, but why did she intrinsically gravitate towards her? She may have been wrong about the precise nature of her identity, but she's not wrong in believing Aizu to be extremely special and important. Does she have some kind of sixth sense to recognize these things? Does it play in to her ability to use magic?
• The battle at the tunnel pit with the Subhuman miners in Episode 14 raises some interesting questions. First, what happened to Vadim's corpse, and second, how did Aizu's arm end up in the cavern?
  • Given Aizu's displayed propensity towards cannibalism, it's possible she may have eaten poor Vadim. He finds a dismembered ear wherever he ended up at the end of Episode 14, and Aizu clearly bites off Bernard's ear in Episode 4.