Say "You carefully explain that you prefer hot donkey milk[let the-unexpected-meal be "hot donkey milk"].";
Of course the quotation mark screws this up - maybe this wouldn’t work anyway. But can I somehow get quotation mark to do their job inside the brackets inside a piece of text?
You can’t put a text literal inside a substitution, but you can put a text constant in.
Changing your example to one that makes sense, with a “say” phrase:
The-meal is a text that varies. The-meal is initially "cheese".
Every turn: say "You like [the-meal]."
Milk-text is always "hot milk".
To say set meal to (T - text):
now the-meal is T;
say T.
Instead of jumping:
Say "You carefully explain that you prefer [set meal to milk-text].";
The reason I toy around with this is that I want some of the little things to back and haunt the player later. Then maybe they feel a little less like static scenery. Or so I hope.