Well, it wasn't Perl. 
I finally got it back up and running but lost everything in the process. Had to start from scratch. 
But I'm not taking it as a loss. I learned a lot in the month I spent working on it and I feel like I can use it to make it better and faster now that I have the knowledge of how to do it, not to mention all of the notes I made and the cheat sheet. 
Plus, I'm quite anal about organization and the NPCs I created with #spawn/#npcspawn create had wonky ID numbers. 
 
Hopefully next time someone has this issue we'll know how to fix it without wiping the database/server clean. 
		
	
		
		
		
		
		
		
		
		
		
	
		
		
	
	
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