Heh, the impression I got is that the world is torn asunder, but nobody really knows why. From how it feels, enough time has passed since whatever caused this (assuming the world wasn't just always like this) that people are just... used to living in a corrupted reality. The implications I've seen from playing the original and this one are that spellcasters are fairly rare, but not unheard of, so some people have gotten comfortable somewhere to help guide any that come by (although for a bit of fridge horror, I wonder if the corruption could lead to a person losing themselves to simply repeat themselves ad nauseum, an npc in every sense of the word).
As for the face, I actually use it as a smiling bird, but other ascii (and unicode) faces are always just so much fun, and fit surprisingly well into a game like this!
Thanks for fixing the bugs, and extra thanks for the response!