Character becomes fixated/keeps responding on a single previous message?

Been using Mistral Small Instruct Base/finetunes and noticed in one particular chat, the character becomes really, really fixated on a single message I've sent. The message was 12 messages ago, but it seems that 60% of the time, their next response is just in references to that one message. It's goes something like this:

User: Hey your breathe smells like garlic, did you eat spaghetti or something?

Char: What? No it doesn't, I barely had any garlic.

(10 messages later, I've tried to change the subject.)

User: So what are you doing at work tomorrow?

Char: I did NOT have spaghetti! I can't believe you said my breath smells like garlic. Her words send shivers down your spine.

It's very odd; more than 10 messages on, I've kept having to regenerate responses so that they let go of it, but they keep coming back to it. I feel like it's a ST issue with memory or something because it's not just a single model. I've tried purging chat from DB under Smart Context and purging/revectorizing under Vector Storage, but I'm still running into the same problem. Anyone else ever encounter the same problem?