A day in the shop lasts a day

The shop has one room and no windows worth mentioning at ground level. All of its light comes from above, through three glass domes, and from the candles.

The sun rises at quarter past six. It crosses the domes over the course of a full day, moves down the shelves as it goes, and sets. Then the stars drift, the moon runs its phases, and the whole thing happens again. It is not a two-minute cycle pretending to be a day.

We built it that way because of what light does to glass.

Bottles wake up

A potion sitting in a sunbeam is not the same object as a potion sitting in shadow. It glows from the inside, brighter and busier, with roughly twice the particles moving in the liquid. When the beam passes on, the glow does not cut out — the bottle stays enchanted for a few seconds and fades.

Moonlight does the same thing in a colder register. A shelf that was warm and amber at four in the afternoon is silver and quiet at midnight, and the bottles you are looking for are genuinely harder to pick out. Not as a difficulty mechanic. Just as a fact about light.

The colour lives in the liquid rather than the glass, which is why it goes dark where a bottle is thick and bright at the edges. The glass itself mirrors the room around it: the candles, the domes, the shelves, the other bottles. Turn one in your hand and the reflections travel across it.

The lantern is not a floodlight

You carry a lantern. It is a finding tool, not a light source: sweep it across a dark corner and the bottles it touches glow back at you, which is how you locate the last three greens under a table at two in the morning.

It never gets properly dark. There is always candlelight. We tested a version with real darkness and it was immediately a different genre — this is a shop, not a horror game, and being unable to see is frightening in a way that has no place here.

Weather

Rain and thunderstorms roll across the domes. They change nothing mechanically. You will never be asked to do anything about the weather.

They are there because a room you are going to spend twenty hours in should not be the same room every time you look up.