2019-06-07 - Between The Pages

It's a Friday night at Likely Stories and the shop is always open kind of late for a retail establishment, mostly because Elias gets distracted and forgets to close up and go home. The hours of operation are more a suggestion than an actual hard and fast open and close time. Those who have lived in the town for any length of time are pretty used to it. Today, Elias is sitting in a chair behind the counter with his feet up on it, a phone in hand, tapping out messages every so often. There are a couple of customers drifting between the shelves.

It's just as well that the bookstore is open late, because a Friday night is a busy one on the boardwalk, and Julia had to work the shack, delivering fish and chips and other fried seafood goodness to the masses. So she's not in her usual Friday finest, but instead, is in shorts and her Fried Fish mermaid tee shirt, smelling faintly of fish and frying oil. She's winding up her hair into a bun as she hips the door open, palming her purse briefly to remind herself that it's there.

Elias glances up from behind the counter from where he's comfortably sprawled as the door opens, as he is wont to do, watching Julia as she comes in. "Busy night?" he asks, knowing full well that a friday night on the boardwalk is probably the busiest night of the week. "Did you bring me some onion rings?" He flashes her a smile.

"If I knew you wanted them, I would have." Julia actually gives him a smile at that. "Next time you're on the boardwalk and I'm on shift, we'll see what we can make happen." She meanders a bit, sort of back and forth between the occult and psychology sections of the shelves, like she's not sure where she wants to go.

"Alas," Elias says, with a faux air of disappointment, not that he actually expected onion rings to magically arrive. He doesn't bother her as she moves to navigate the shelves and look at the books. He goes back to tapping on his phone until someone comes up to the counter, then he moves to check them out. He takes a few moments to point out a few things that they might like based on what they picked up, and chats for a couple of minutes before they head out the door. He pulls himself up onto the counter at that point and sits on it, cross-legged, watching people as they wander about.

So maybe this is one of those stores where if you need some help, you need to be proactive about getting it. She turns to face Elias when their gazes happen to meet in that inevitable 'where is my waiter/salesperson' kind of way. "Scuse me," she says, admitting promptly, "I'm looking for books on an unusual sort of topic. That's also kind of odd and specific."

It definitely isn't the type of store where salespeople follow you around trying to sell you something or direct you to one place or another. Nope. Elias is helpful, certainly, friendly, definitely, but intrusive or pushy, he is not. So it's only when he catches that look that he slides down off the counter and wanders over toward Julia, "What are you looking for, precisely?"

There's a pause as Julia struggles with how to quantify this, exactly. "Negative emotions, and the idea of how something might feed off them. I don't know if that qualifies as something a brujiera related, or more in the psychology field." As an afterthought. "Or maybe quantum physics, but I'm about as likely to understand that stuff as read Japanese."

"Oh, well, if you're looking for things that historically have been reported to feed on negative emotions, then you're looking more for mythology than psychology, though also some occult studies have some references to that sort of thing," Elias says as he nods up toward the metaphysical/occult section upstairs. "But, for the sort of stuff people experience here in Gray Harbor? As far as I know, no one's written a book on that specifically, at least nothing that we've got in inventory. Though, I could always ask my folks. Memento Mori might have something like that, too. They have rare/old books."

Julia blinks a moment. "Well. That's a refreshingly direct answer." she says, somewhere between relieved and wary. "I think if Memento Mori had anything helpful..." she trails off, not sure how to finish that sentence without sharing too much information. Exhaling, she asks, "If no one's ever written about the phenomenon in Gray Harbor specifically, is there anything to suggest that something similar elsewhere? An area with reports of a similar history?"

"Well, I'm not saying that no one has," Elias says. "It's entirely possible that someone has, and kept it in a private collection, or ran a small print run. But here we carry mostly mainstream big publisher sort of stuff." He nods upstairs, "Except the occult stuff, which is more small press. All I'm saying is that if there is one, I haven't seen it in stock here." He leans up against the counter and says, "There's no point in being cagey about it. If you live here for any length of time, you'll be sucked into something weird you can't explain. It happens to almost everyone, particularly those of us who can sense it."

"Which I'm guessing you can." Julia hazzards. She's a mite disappointed, but Elias offers a reasonable argument, one that she cannot debate. So switching to an entirely different topic, "Do you have a Spanish section?" she inquires. "My mom loves romance novels."

"I can," Elias says. He glimmers, pretty strongly, too. But when she switches topics, he doesn't press the issue and instead nods and gestures toward the back and says, "Third row in from the back, there's a small spanish section. If there's any particular line of romance novels she likes, let me know and I can always order some more in."

Julia doesn't appear to glimmer at a casual glance, but obviously she knows something of it. "I'll ask her." she says. "She's recovering her health, and isn't up and around as much as she'd like. Reading helps, I don't want her watching telenovela all day, you know?" A brief smile at that as she heads for that section, though pauses midway. "I think others may have tried to research it, but maybe it somehow gets lost." Or buried. The dark men have their ways.

"But telenovelas are so hilariously fun to watch," Elias says with a grin. "Though I suppose all day is perhaps a little much without sufficient alcohol." He sobers though and nods just a bit, "Possibly. Things have a way of shifting, until you're not sure if you remember it quite the way you think that you do. It's hard to see patterns when the tide keeps washing them away." He wanders back around the counter then and settles into his chair, putting his feet back up.