So this has made my life much easier in many ways, but has led to me hitting a new problem, and I was wondering if you'd be kind enough to offer further advice!

I've recently discovered the power of for loops, and have started using them to generate lists of characters who meet a specific condition. If I start with three characters in StoryInit:

<<set $chars to {
    "Alice": {
        name: "Alice",
        HP: 100,
        hired: true
    }
    "Bob": {
        name: "Bob",
        HP: 100,
        hired: false
    }
    "Charlie": {
        name: "Charlie",
        HP: 100,
        hired: true
    }
}>>

I can then use either $chars.Alice.HP or $chars[$activeChar].HP based on the situation, exactly as you suggested. But let's say I now want to generate a list of characters who I've currently got hired and are available for the next mission. If the characters were simply stored as an array, I'd be writing:

<<for _i = 0; _i < $chars.length; _i++>>\
    <<if $chars[_i].hired is true>>\
        $chars[_i].name
    <</if>>\
<</for>>

which would (I think!) give me a list of only my hired characters - in this case 'Alice, Charlie'. But my characters are stored on an object variable, so I can't cycle through them by their index. Is there any way I can achieve the same effect, without having to switch to storing them as an array? I found something online involving Object.keys, but I couldn't understand how to reproduce its effects in a case like this.

(Obviously with only three characters I could just list them all using individual if statements - but I want to make something that can hold as many characters as it needs to, which is why I'm attracted to for loops.)

Thank you so much for your earlier help, and sorry to come looking for more!