Alright, I know I've laid this out before, But I wanted to get some fresh insight into what could be done with my Discworld -Witches/Sisneys Filmore crossover.

To start off, I'm concernd whether the idea of using child forms of Esme and Gytha to represent wards of the state is even plausible.

Would the child Esme, hailing from a small town in eastern Pennsylvanian/the W.V. northern panhandle be able to capture the characters conflicted nature of being born to be the bad witch but needing to be the good one? Perhaps as something of a stubborn mule, sometimes engaging in quasi-bullying by simply staring people into submission... but only really using it on true bullies, those who inflict harm on the weak. I've decided to give her adequate education for her grade level, but having her literacy be mostly functional, not recreational.

The circumstance of her wardship is the aftermath of a domestic dispute turned fatal (father came home drunk after getting layed off from one of the towns last industries, began venting his frustrations on everything in sight, including his wife. Mrs. Weatherwax swung a household implement at his head, hoping to knock him out, but caught his temple with a sharp bit and is now servuing 3 to 10 for manslaughter).

Gytha, on the other hand, is from a mountain farming community on the Missouri Ozark plateau. They were people who beleived in some strange things: they saw charismatic preachers mostly as entertainment, evangelicals as busy-bodies and believed in a school of medicine not so different from Daisy May Moses: Native plants, a bit of superstiton and a big ol' dollop of moonshine. Of course, since a still can explode or the brew render you blind if laced with methanol, Gytha's Maternal grandmother (local midwife, family matriarch and ruler-by-default of the female community in a 10 mile radius) was instrumental in introduing the use of the young shoots of the fibre-hemp crop as a substitute. That however, leads to the circumstances of her wardship: the DEA busted the entire community less than 6 months before the fic begins on having a "marijuana" crop worth a street value of over 25 million dollars. Gythas' mother actually fainted when she heard the amount on the news... because, hey, if the knew they could sell it for that much, would they be killing and butchering their own hogs?

Gytha is.. well, one could say "life incarnate", hopefully drawing parrallels to her pratchett inspiration. She's helpful, especially to people who've been kicked under the wheels of life. She also has an uncertain record in terms of teenage relationships. She's been known to humour advances from males of her own age (or closely above), but certainly lets them know when they've reached the limit. I'll leave that ambiguous.

She was also apprenticing under her mother to be a midwife, so her knowledge of how to help women and girls in relationship-trouble (upto and including threatening the student-council president with a steel baseball bat on the subject of paying for an embryo-termination for his girlfriend) should be her stong point to counterbalance her dearth of formal education.

And that's before they find the scumble still in the undergrowth.

I just wanted to know whether the characterizations were close enough or whether I should make these into OC's.

In fact, is any of this realistic? Is X Middle school able to handle these wards, or are they here because of an excellent record on delinquent rehabilitation?