Avatars and variables!!

Hi there

I'm hoping somebody can help me...

I am a new storyline user, and new to the forum (Hi) and whist very impressed so far with what I have been able to do in under a week I have hit a brick wall with something and after spending 7 hours trying to figure it out today I thought I'd reach out.

So basically on one of my slides I want the learner to select an avatar. To do this I  have put 20 separate avatars icons that I importing into the slide, so not one of the storyline characters. I have duplicated those icons so that on the other half of the page I put them into a hidden state and can then show them as the learner click on one of them. This works perfectly.

So what I would like to do now is have their selected avatar placed on the main menu screen. I created a variable and then created triggers for each avatar which assigned a value to the variable when clicked. I put a reference box and it changes to the correct number when clicking around the different avatars. Again success and I was feeling pretty smug by this point!

So my problem is that no matter what I do I cannot get the selected avatar to show on the menu screen. I have tried to copy all the avatars on the menu screen, hide them, and setup triggers to show if the variable was equal to the assigned number, I tried creating an object with 20 different states and set it to toggle between states depending upon the variable, I tried true/false variables but nothing I do seems to work. 

I'm sure it is something I am doing wrong but only being a few days in I cannot figure out what it is. 

Any help greatly appreciated.

Thanks

B