GAME PAUSE + Temporary Pause + Pause Menu?

Hey all,

I made a simple PAUSE for my game using the 'P' key to toggle which works perfect:

As you can see on the image, I also disable the PLAYER's input for both keyboard and joypad while pause is TRUE. so far so good. But now I'm scratching my head for some issues I don't know how to solve.

1 - I have some timescale affecting most of the game but not all, EXAMPLE:

When the Player collecting a special object the game is PAUSE for a quick second, it will PAUSE the game except that MESSAGE SPRITE that appears with fade-in and fade out, than the PAUSE is false again.

So it works great, BUT! I can interrupt it if I'll press 'P' while it happens, which I don't want the 'P' to be able to interfere this action.

So how do I "BLOCK" any input of the keyboard so it won't affect this mini-pause during the game?

2 - In some other point of the game I want the game to PAUSE, Show a MENU to let the Player select an option (with the arrow keys or joypad) BUT! as you can see the current PAUSE will disable the Player's input so I can't do anything.

And if I will enable it, it will move the MENU OPTIONS WITH THE PLAYER... both will be affected.

So how do I make only 1 input affected at a time, like a PAUSE MENU inside a PAUSE that I described.

If anyone can help me solve these 2 questions I'll appreciate it, Thanks ahead!

UPDATE:

I've managed to solve issue #1, the solution was pretty simple (I still have much more to learn)

Basically I've added another sub-group so I can ONLY DISABLE it's input, but not all the PAUSE group:

So issue #1 is solved and that's a nice progress for me.

But issue #2 is more tricky for me to understand, because I still want to control with KEYBOARD or JOYPAD on a MENU selections but... these will also affect the player, sounds like a CLASH between the inputs.

Any idea how I separate or FOCUS on the MENU SELECTION without affecting the player?

I think it might be the same concept of sub-groups... but I'm still not sure how to do that, if anyone have any experience with multi-input control over each other please share your wisdom!

In the meanwhile I'll try to solve this, but help is always welcome!