Hii, Querencia. Pan back again for another review.
"Well, perhaps that isn't exactly the best way to put it," Henry reconsidered. "There's only the one shop, and I suppose it stays in place somewhere. But the doors... they open anywhere they're needed. Nearly everywhere."
Off-topic point, but this idea is NEAT. I need shops like Mr Vaughn's. If I could open my front door and step straight into a supermarket, I'd never be more than twenty feet from a chocolate bar. Or a bookshop. On the other hand, my self restraint would go straight out of the window and I would never not be buying things.
Finnley didn't think this further explanation helped much. His head was hurting a bit. He searched behind him for a chair and fell into it. It wasn't the first strange thing he'd seen here, but still. Couldn't just one thing be normal for once?
I kind of find it strange that Finnley doesn't have more of a visible reaction. Like, there's no nervous laughter, no utterings of 'sorry, what did you say?', no kind of denial or certainty that he's misheard or misunderstood. Maybe it comes from the fact that he's already moderately accustomed to the idea of magic, but it means the shock doesn't quite ring true for me. This is a similar type of issue to what I mentioned about his attitude to Mr Vaughn in previous chapters, and how he seems weirdly unperturbed by him knowing things he shouldn't. I generally feel like you skirt around the mental fallout of uncomfortable revelations or trauma (because Finnley's pretty unaffected by his ordeal in the woods, too). That's probably an early-draft thing, because I know how annoying Feelings™ are to write when you've got PLOT to deal with.
Mr. Vaughn descended the steps much more slowly, as if some fresh weight had been added to his shoulders. He took one look at the pair, and the weight seemed to get heavier.
I like this pair of sentences. It's not massively poetic or monumental or anything, but I often feel that the best sentences rarely are. It's nice. I can picture it.
He couldn't think of any way to explain the store, not in all the endless knowledge he'd learned from school and libraries and hard studying. No scientific explanation, at least. It shouldn't have been possible, and yet it was. Then, a single word whispered up from the depths of his mind: magic.
Would he really be thinking like this? I feel he'd be primed to attribute it to magic from the off, given that it's hardly his first brush with the concept. I doubt he'd spend a moment thinking 'maybe science can explain this!' when he's been seeing what he thought was his sister's ghost for weeks on end. He's had a while to acclimatise to its existence, at the very least.
Instead, I'd maybe expect him to be shocked by how different this type of magic was. So far, he's only really experienced the evil, deceptive side of it - demons in forests and so forth - so his reaction might be more along the lines of 'woah, magic can do this as well?' I'm just spitballing here, because you know Finnley a lot better than I do, but it does strike me as odd for his mind to reach for science.
"The woman who just came in was my sister. She watches things in places I can't always be- this shop is my home." Mr. Vaughn's gaze was a bit unfocused, as if gazing into some past or future that Finnley couldn't discern. "She didn't have good news. Things are stirring, and not just here. Some creatures have been around for centuries, existing in the subconscious and being passed off as a mystery or trick of the mind. You've met at least one of them, I believe, in that Wyoming forest. It's unusual, that forest; I'd almost call it an epicenter- but the point is, there are creatures that have been slumbering for an age, and they begin to awaken."
Interesting interesting interesting. I'm particularly intrigued by him saying 'she watches things in places I can't always be - this shop is my home'. Is Mr Vaughn tied to this shop somehow? Can he not leave it, or at least not stray from it for long? Maybe that's the price for such powerful magic. I wonder.
My brain is kind of making links to Game of Thrones here, but then again 'ancient creatures stirring after hundreds of years asleep' is a pretty common fantasy trope. I have nothing against it, for the record, but I hope that the antagonists are still sufficiently interesting despite adhering to tropes. The problem with universally evil White Walker-like creatures is that they don't really have proper goals outside of wanting to kill and destroy things, which makes them less interesting to me. Either the creatures have to be really, really creepy, or they need to have some essence of humanity to make them interesting. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
This was a good chapter! It got sufficiently more interesting in the second half with the revelation that the woman is Mr Vaughn's sister and Finnley's whole predicament is part of a larger issue - I'm a bit surprised Finnley didn't react to the coincidence of it all, to be honest. The one job he managed to land happens to be tied into his exact quest for the truth. I'd be freaking out thinking some strange forces were at work. Which I suppose there might be, if this shop appears for people who need it in some way...
Nevertheless, I am intrigued. I still think it would be good if this juicy reveal came a little later in the story; it would be good to meet Henry before he starts dropping bombshells and telling all, because we don't really get enough time to process his character. It would be good to see Mr Vaughn making more of an attempt to protect Finnley from the glaring lack of normality, as well, because we never really see him do that at present. It's just - BAM, welcome to your new job in the moving shop.
Keep writing!
~Pan
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