_global.variable not working with .substring

Hi there, I’m not a hundred percent sure what I’m doing wrong here. I’ve checked and rechecked my code (I’m fairly certain it’s not a mislabel of instances or anything like that.) but I still can’t get a _global.variable pulled from outside of a movieclip to work with the .substring command.

The end result should be that the program loads up seperate alphabet tiles from the library, forming four-letter words pulled from an XML file. I don’t know if it’s simply the words pulled from the XML file that are the problem here (they trace fine… but maybe they don’t count as strings or something).

Anyhoo, thanks for your help. :o_rly: