When the player first "wakes up" and walks through the room named "Straightway", why are there 5 passages when the game only offers 4 character classes?
This is for handling a special case which may arise in multiplayer mode. If player1 has completed Asensy, and then a second player decides to join in, they will not see Asensy. Instead the 2nd player will see the Apocalyptic version of Asensy, to preserve proper chronology in the plot. So, this is achieved by player1 being forced to walk down the 5th passage in this room sometime after player1 left Assensy. Walking down the 5th passage sets all the other passages to lead to the Apocalyptic version of Asensy.
Why does the text use a lot of short-hand?
ACS allows a very limited total number of text screens in an adventure. Thus, I had rationed a certain number of texts for use in each town. Shorthand is necessary in order to minimize the character count and therefore minimize the number of text screens used. To further complicate matters, ACS has a bug where if a region has reached its max number of tiles (text or otherwise), then if the user attempts to add a text tile, the max number of text tiles irrecoverably decreases by one. Arr.