Topic tables

Conversation is a declared table per person: one define topics for <person> … end topics block serving both ASK and TELL. Entity rows (about the silver locket:) resolve like any noun and are checked first. Quoted rows declare a topic plus comma-separated aliases. Each alias is matched by normalized whole-topic equality, which is a direct lookup and never a fuzzy guess. A row's body is ordinary statements (it binds the owner), so a conversation can change state anywhere in the world. A miss falls to the owner's plain on the player asking catch-all if it has one; on a hit the row fully owns the response. Overlaps are compile errors, never runtime tie-breaks.

define topics for tobias
  about the silver locket: phrase tobias-locket-reply
  about "the folly", "the fire":
    change tobias to shaken
    phrase tobias-folly-reply
end topics

A row can also be gated on how recently a topic came up — see Topic recency, which extends this same define topics block, and Characters & Conversation for the wider dialogue layers built on it.