A dirty Galdish street rat, Louis was a beggar and thief until his 13th year, when he got into an argument with an apparently schizophrenic, obsessive-compulsive beggar in the streets. The argument became a fistfight, and Louis was arrested and sent to reform school after receiving a crack to the skull. After two years of abuse in reform school, he escaped and joined a traveling troupe of actors. The actors used him more or less as a prop, and he grew tired, robbed them, and moved on. A year later, he ran into the same schizophrenic, o-c beggar, but this time, the beggar was a rich lord. He had somehow transferred his madness to Louis during the fight, become cognizant and capable, then grown rich over the last few years. He told Louis one thing: "Wake up."

And so Louis did, finding himself back in the streets after the fistfight, hungry, bleeding, dying in the cold. Either those years never happened, or he had been sent back in time. He could not tell which. A woman pulled him from the streets and attempted to sell him to the local university as a cadaver, but he woke up and ruined her plans. The scholars took him in anyway, sending the woman away penniless. After being nursed back to health, he was given tasks in exchange for food, mostly copying books. The first book he copied he learned to read from, and soon, he began reading everything, mostly cultish studies. Amongst those was a book about the Cult of Contradictions, and he became intrigued. He began to write letters to known cultists, and he started a correspondence. Eventually, a letter came from a man whose name he recognized as the rich man from his past hallucination. It said one thing: "Wake up."

He woke up again, right after the fistfight, drunk and in a tavern, having a beer with a stranger who was clearly trying to rob him...

For forty iterations, this continued, and Louis has dedicated his repetitious life to finding out why.