Hey, sorry I've been so quiet--been working my butt off on the word count!
Coding
I know I said it was gravy, but keeping track of if a player has already seen a parallel passage ended up being really useful. I was twisting myself in knots trying to come up with a way to write neutral to whatever the player had already seen--which is completely unnecessary! This if/else bit checks if someone has been to a passage at least once--if they have, they get one piece of text, and if they haven't, they get the other.
When I can't decide on a setting bit, or a name, or some other ultimately useless fluff, I do this :T Voila, instant card game. It's not CRUCIAL to the gameplay or the story, but it's helping me by taking the pressure off picking the PERFECT line. I'll let RNG piece it together for me.
Writing
The good news is I'll definitely have act 1 finished as a playable demo by the deadline--if I really pound away at it, I might have act 2 done as well! I'm at about 5800 words (I wasn't kidding about the novel thing), and I have another 1200 to go to round out the first act. Granted, players won't see all 7000 words, the nature of the beast is they only get 1/3 of what's going on in an individual playthrough. But one of my goals is to make a game people want to play at LEAST three times..