Pony Fantasy VI Remake

A separate problem, spent a few hours on this one to no avail. With Umaro replaced, after beating him he now gives you an item. No problem there, got the whole event working perfectly. The problem I'm having is what comes after; namely, once you've spoken to him once and you've gotten the item, speaking to him again just prompts a basic dialogue box and nothing more.

I started rebuilding the code from after the check for if Mog is in the party. The below is just as the game does it, only with the branch redirected to generic dialogue (I can confirm this part still works).

Code:

CC/D793: DE    Load CaseWord with the characters in the currently active party?
CC/D794: C0    If ($1E80($1AA) [$1EB5, bit 2] is clear), branch to $CCD81C

I decided to use an event bit to see if you've gotten Umaro's item or not. I went with Bit 244, which is apparently unused, and figured it would be easy since Bit 243 is used for the art gallery and I can lift my coding for 244 from that stuff - the Umaro item event sets Bit 244 and then I added a bit to when you talk to him to see if Bit 244 is set and then branch to the generic dialogue..

Code:

CC/D79A: C0   If ($1E80($244) [$1EC8 bit 4] is set), branch to $CCD81C

CC/D817: D4   Set event bit $1E80($244) [$1EC8, bit 4]

For some reason, it doesn't work. The game variably hangs, crashes, or ignores the second check to branch if you've already spoken to Umaro. I've tried rechecking the bit being set, the check for the bit, where it branches, multiple times, including rewriting from scratch multiple times. Again, Bit 243 is used in the game, so I've been copying my code from where it is checked for if its set and how it is set, just modified the 43 to 44 in Hex. I'm obviously overlooking something though. Here's the hex itself to go with the documentation.