Sparkatale

Overall, great job. I don't usually enjoy reading about the occult (personal taste), but the writing in this story so far is pretty spectacular. Mostly, I liked the theme of her being an actor on the stage. It helped hold the plot of the first chapter together.

I was hoping for a better picture of the physical descriptions of Bridget Cleary, but a mysterious aura is not necessarily a bad thing.

Here are some specific sentences that I would edit:

Near the top: "Nothing in this hand; nothing in that hand." - To be honest, I don't get the significance of there being nothing in either hand. Maybe you can omit it or explain a little more?

"like only using phones while standing on your head"  - I had to read this sentence several times before I kinda got it. I would suggest removing the word only, as it seems a little out of place. I might just not be understanding what you're trying to say, though.

"Joshua still stood still as a tree trunk" near the end of Chapter 1 seems a bit of a mouthful, so I suggest rewording. If you wanted, you could even remove the first "still."

Just because I'm not familiar with these sorts of practices, it didn't really make sense to me, Bridget's slumping and sitting straight up. So depending on what audience your book is geared towards, you may want explain more or not.

Hi, sorry for seeing this sooner. Yours was the first comment I've gotten on this site, so I'd been assuming notifications of such things would show up under "Conversations", but apparently not. 

Thanks for looking at my work even though it's not a usual topic for you. I really appreciate it, this story tends to be overshadowed by my other one on most sites, so it can be tough to get feedback on this one when all anyone wants to talk about is the talking chicken from "Punchlines", heheh.

I was a little surprised that you'd have been interested in more physical details about Bridget. I'd purposely gone light in that area, since I see so many people talking about how they dislike more than minimal/necessary focusing on the protagonist's appearance, but I guess maybe I may have gone a little too light and could expand on it going forward. Not in the two chapters here, since I don't see a convenient place to do so without feeling like it was "interrupting, but it could be worked in naturally in the upcoming part(s) since it can now describe Bridget and Fionna in relation to each other, since like I'd mentioned, they're very much opposites appearance-wise. And when Magraxiel is brought up to earth permanently, it's going to be in Fionna's body, so the idea is to use their respective appearances to drive home how Fionna and Mag's personalities/temperaments contrast with Bridget's.

The "hands" part, I think I could find something to do for a little more context if you think it needs it, but I'd actually meant it fairly literally: the "special effects" that you are about to see in this scene are actually magic, there is no mechanical device on her person to produce them.

"Standing on your head", The idea is basically that the level of pomp and circumstance usually involved in a seance isn't really needed for it to function. Fionna's giant bejeweled ouija board table is extremely over the top even by those standards, but the aesthetic hoops occultists jump through in a seance have (in her opinion) no actual function, beyond possibly putting the human practitioners in an appropriate frame of mind. Talking to paranormal entities is actually very simple according to her, like how the next morning she was even considering using a beer can tab and a restaurant menu to talk to Mag, but was too just weak to do so. Like, all you really need to do to make a phone call is pick up a phone and dial; if doing something silly and unrelated makes you a more confident speaker you can do it, but it has nothing to do with whether or not the phone itself works. I think I might expand the line in the story into something closer to that last sentence just before this one.

"tree trunk" I honestly hadn't noticed the first still, and when I look at the file in ZenWriter, I actually did remove it from the "real" document at some point. I'll have to update the online versions to reflect it.  Thank you.

The last bit, it has partially to do with her hiding the fact that she's controlling both sides of the ouija board by trying to pretend that she's actually channeling a different entity and that therefore her body's not totally under her control. And partially that, in order to keep up that charade until she could get the info and make an exit, she badly over-exerted herself and her powers, which is why she was paying for it physically in the morning, and will continue to be "running on fumes" power-wise for quite a while. I'm not sure how to tie those idea closer together right now, I'll have to dwell on it a little and see what I can do about it.

Again, thank you very much for your time and effort helping me with this project! :)