I think I have a lead here, so if one of you fine gentlemen would give me your opinion I'd appreciate it greatly.
Here's what seems like is happening:
Most of the characters in my text are the dashes (-). When I look at the string both in the original text file, or when it's stored in a string variable within Unity/PM, it looks correct.
This time, while paused at runtime I copied the string from the PM string variable and pasted it into Notepad++ to compare it to the original strings, and this is where I saw the difference. Instead of the dash, the first character of the string is replaced with this odd character (I can't even copy and paste it outside of npp, hence the screenshot):
I don't even know what this character is, but it only appears when:
1) The string is pasted from Unity into Notepad++
and
2) Only if the string is the very first one in the text file.
My guess is that this is an irregularity caused by my npp using UTF-8 encoding. Sure enough, when I converted the text file to ANSI, the level loads correctly.
I hope all the pain I went through here might maybe help someone else avoid a bug?