i....had just realized my mistake, i loaded one of the prologue saves and after going through the devlogs, that was not the thing to do. after playing through it after restarting, all my problems have gone away. i'm truly sorry for the trouble.
No problem at all! Unfortunately I had to do some significant changes on the backend when I got to Chapter 1. My goals for the number of choices and different possible arcs greatly exceeded the framework I had built for the Prologue. The behind the scenes code was far too simple and basic for what I was trying to do and track. Unfortunately, that meant having to make changes that caused the original prologue saves to be invalidated.