And now we radically drop out of gear, break the fourth wall, and so on, to hear the thoughts of some of our characters. Also to show that I'm not a total jerk. Plus, BelBel needed some more face time. Once upon a time I knew a young lady that constantly talked about the objectification of women. (And she used the word "crux" whenever possible.) Looking back I think to myself, "We were 19, what did you expect boys would be thinking about?" I know that Renderosity is the kind of place where not many people object to pictures of women just sitting around looking pretty, but I needed the characters to razz me a little for putting them through all this. I was originally going to have them saying what a "drip" I was for making this kind of story, but I feared that readers would not know that I was only talking about myself. That, and there wasn't room. I went through about three very different versions of this page before I settled on this. The savvy among you might think that BelBel and House Mother should be talking to the Poser character "Gloria" here! Well, I don't have her in my Runtime. That, and they needed to be talking to an older, wiser character. Probably very few of you would know who Bruxal is. Fear not, you are not alone! The point is that she isn't a Poser character, and therefore is an "outsider" to this story. Although you might spot her name being mentioned on page 2... Regarding BelBel's first comment: I wanted to fit that little tidbit in someplace for a long time. I saw some rather tragic footage of pretty young Japanese ladies practicing their English. One girl picked up two colored balls and said the colors to the other: "Grin" and "Brew." That was a forehead slapping moment! I shouldn't talk, because if I ever went to Japan, I wouldn't do half bad in a comic book store, but I'd be sleeping under a park bench because I don't know the word for "hotel." I think I made a graphic design faux pas by having five fonts on one page. Oh well! A comment was left in a previous picture that said I had a "clean style." Thanks for that! I think, though, that it means that there are no shadows or shading in anything! True indeed. One more thing: I suppose that I should have drawn House Mother as looking older. Well... page 5 was posted before page 9 was drawn, so that's overruled by an effort to be consistent.