4 - Real Magic//Paxton

They had been at this for too long.

Paxton Phipps once had an active social life. Well, if you stretched the meaning of active a little bit to include things like going to the library and talking to the ducks in Paradox Park. In fact, it might have not been active at all, but it was a life of his own.

Maybe the problem was that his life was too active now. Having an active social life merely meant that you were really popular and had lots of friends, it wasn't truly 'active'.

Running around in a mask and giant hoodie, trying not to get caught by the Paradox Police Department? Now that was really active.

He had to admit that it had been fun at first, but now they had really gone too far. It was what always happened in the end.

The only thing that had ever been consistent in Paxton's life was studying ancient Goidelic languages. His grandmother had left him a translating cypher in her will when he was six years old, and he hadn't stopped obsessing over the languages since.

Everything else was always shifting around; his parents had gotten divorced, then both had remarried. He went from an elementary school to a middle school, and now he was in high school.

Even the Gaelic study chatrooms online were always changing. In fact, Paxton probably couldn't name the first one he'd ever come across.

A common thread in all of these things was that when they went on for too long, you started getting a sense of it. When it was time to abandon ship, you noticed the holes in the boat and the water filling up. Right?

Right.

Now that Nora had dragged him across multiple borders and an entire ocean on a summer vacation that was anything but, he was starting to think this 'thing' had gone on for too long.

The trip had had started with a trip to the emergency room after a lightning strike that they'd both 'miraculously' survived, and ended with a flustered pair of teenagers trying to figure out where to stash a mysterious glowing stone so airport security didn't get their hands on it.

Today, that same mysterious stone had transformed another teenage girl into a monster that had almost destroyed the hipster part of Paradox City.

Paxton sighed to himself as he tried to focus on reading through the Mooar Shee's section on Raw Noiz usage. Even if he wanted out, there was no way he could leave Nora to proceed by herself.

It was one thing when she'd come to his front door with the tattered pages of Mooar Shee held together by some frayed elastic bands. She looked crazy, and nobody in their right mind would believe her.

But he'd humored her since he had no choice. He didn't live with a legal guardian; her private investigator had told her. It was true. In their never-ending attempts to shuttle him away to the other, his parents hadn't noticed him move into his own place.

With the money he made from translating Irish and Gaelic text for museums, he could afford to be self-sufficient at 16.

Whenever one parent called, he would confirm that he was staying with the other, and they would act as if they wished he would come visit just long enough for him not to feel horribly unloved. That was, of course, just before they hung up and forgot he existed for the next three months.

At first, he assumed she was a stalker who would end his young, wasted life on a dark rainy night. Instead, her strange text had turned out to be the real thing. After a particularly strange midnight trek to Homend DIY, he'd learned that real magic existed.

He hadn't really considered what was in it for him as long as he could put on a crafty necklace fitted with a magical gem and turn into a masked man of wonder, but now he was having second thoughts.

The gemstones, called 'Noiz' in the original text, held the key to the Very Great Thing

For reasons unknown, four of the eight gemstones were hidden somewhere in their humble Paradox City. It was the sort of thing that some of the people in the chatrooms would get excited about; a strange city getting truly magical.

And he was right in the thick of it.