Upon the suggestion of Shade's father, we replaced both units as apparently the hydraulic stress affects both cylinders equally, and when one fails the other isn't far behind.

old vs new clutch master cylinder. Interestingly, there was no gasket on the car. Maybe the cylinders have been replaced before?

the paper towel in the engine bay is covering the inlet of the slave cylinder while we waited for the parts to come in. I had no idea that the hydraulics were all external, so we could have actually removed the entire system and cleaned it out at any time.

Zetsu doing one phase of the cylinder installation. We ended up finishing at 10pm or so, and then (unfortunately) found out about the taillight problem. We needed to get the car back into town and store it somewhere, so we ghetto-rigged it. I ended up splicing a tap into the illumination bulbs and hardwiring it temporarily into the cigarette lighter.