The party[] array in Lua scripts is nil

[OnlineCop]

While troubleshooting the coliseum crash when entering Rufus' cabin, I noticed that interacting with the fire calls touch_fire(party[0]), but the party[] array appears to be nil.

It appears to also be nil in the other scrips where party[#] is used, such as book_talk(party[0]).

Do we have any idea where party gets initialized and/or updated? Is it within the Lua scripts, or back in the C++ code like in intrface.cpp somewhere?