Variable keep changing name

Hi, I'm having a vary strange problem.  I'm building a game with 6 characters. The player can as the same 20 questions to each of the characters. To achieve this I made duplicates of the original slide and changed 3 things. 1: the character images in each states. 2: the text/answer in the callout bubbles.  3: I added a suffix to all the variable names to identify each variable to it's character. After doing that I thought that Storyline would treat each slide and variable distinctly but that's not what is happening. Instead, Storyline keeps using the variable I've create for one of the characters and applying it to all.  Absolutely maddening!

At first, characters were on the same page, different layers. I tried different slides, and different scenes. It didn't solve it. In a last ditch effort I've created each character in it's own variable  Storyline project. All the characters work when they are alone but as soon as I try to put them all in the same project the problem is back. Storyline applies the variables of one of the characters to all of them. Yet each character was created with his own differentiated names. Also I've made sure to  clear/delete all project variables before I start putting all the characters together. I've noticed that Storyline always chooses one particular character's variables. Not sure why that one. There probably lies the crux of the matter.

Don't know what to do, other than to turn to this community and hope that someone has encountered something like this before. Let me know if you have any ideas.