errors with a simple narc swap: Playing as Elesa in BW

[orig4mi]

So I want to mix my 1 millionth Black playthrough up a little bit and play as a different character, and I've always liked Elesa. I wanted to swap out the overworld sprites, mugshots, trainer pass and whatever else you need to do, really. I am already failing at the overworld sprites for some reason, it isn't quite working as I thought it would.

I downloaded BWOE and Nitro Explorer 3. I extracted the NARC that I needed (the readme said that the sprites are located at 0/4/9 for Black) and I got a file called "9" (no extension)

I opened it with BWOE and can see all the sprites. So I navigated to where Elesa's spritesheet was, exported it, then opened it with MS Paint. Next, I exported Hilda (female mc) spritesheet and opened it with MS Paint as well.

I carefully placed each Elesa sprite where the Hilda sprites were. For the Hilda running animations, I simply used the usual walking animations (I know it was going to look silly in the final product but whatever) saved it as 009.png and imported it into the NARC, overwriting 009. It seemed to have worked with no issue, so I put the NARC back into the ROM and fired it up

For some reason, my player character is now a glitchy mess that "adapts" to other sprites- For example, it would look like Cheren in the beginning, then like the player characters mother when going down the stairs etc. A quick look into the NARC revealed that instead of having sprites at 009 there is just nothing there.

What did I do wrong? I thought it was pretty cut and dry, but apparently I am missing something.