Thanks for the suggestion. Yeah, it's a player-controlled situation (waiting for input).
I can see how that would work, but... it's quite a bit of a hack to add/remove those tags and rebuild the mesh, especially with multiple other tags in the way, and multiple pauses.
That said, it seems to work well enough if I just add a <d=99999>, and then remove it when the player presses a button (using an event to detect when we've reached this pause, of course).
What's the max value for a delay? This seems like it would work for my purposes - even if the text auto-advanced after a minute or so, it wouldn't be game-breaking; the pause is only there for drama anyway.