I'm hoping the brackets in the last panel make it clear she's whispering. Usually that means someone's speaking a foreign language, so idk. Normally whispering is a dotted line around the word bubble, but I'm not sure how to make Manga Studio do that. If I figure it out, I'll reupload the page. (Never mind, I just found the dotted line word bubble tool, so yeah, eventually I'll reupload this. But you can read it for now!) Okay! I fixed that word bubble and now I'm happier. For this page, I learned how to draw an espresso machine! Not a thing I normally thought I'd ever have to know. The most significant thing on this page is that I've now firmly established some future shopping trip. We're getting a shopping montage in here at some point, because there is nothing I like better than a shopping montage. Is it foreshadowing if I blatantly point it out ahead of time? Yes, of course. Also, Malaya's mom does most of her shopping, which is why she lives in tshirts and jeans, basically. Well, that and she doesn't go anywhere but work, so I guess either way, she'd mostly wear tshirts and jeans. That's what our theoretical future shopping montage is for, though. I was thinking the other day, it's kind of funny because this is the first really long term story I've written. I did Nanowrimo last year, though I came out hating whatever I wrote by the end, but at the very least it proved to myself that I can write something that long. Unlike anything I've ever written before, though, this story just kind of shows up out of my head. It's the easiest thing I've ever written. I will say that a lot of the formation of this story is based on character driven writing. There's a specific school of writing that basically says, if you have a solid character to work from, you will know what they will do next in any given situation. And it's true! I could throw any character in this story into just about any situation, and I'd know more or less what they would do. It makes for easy writing, but not a boring story, so it's really working out well for me. Plus, that means that the changes in your story and the changes in your character kind of...motivate each other? As the story changes, it forces the character to change and vice versa. And Malaya is getting there. She's reluctant to change, but she's realizing she has no choice, and she's motivated to protect her family, so that's going to change the course of the story going forward. Writing is fun! (Drawing it is hard O_O.) Okay, I gotta go plow ahead with next week's pages because I'm gonna be gone for Christmas and I need to be as ahead as possible for the pages after Christmas to get done on time. Uuuuuugh.