28 - Plans//Paxton, Nora

Paxton had a plan.

Where before there had been nothing but wheels spinning in his mind was a road that took him from a clear start to promising ending, all thanks to Navy Dempsey. Navy was a tall, young man with dark skin and a wispy frame that suggested he spent more time exercising his mind than any other muscle. Before Paxton knew it, he'd placed his trust in him.

Intellectuals had to stick together, and the information Navy brought him all but confirmed it.

According to Navy, his Noiz was being kept under lock and key by the man behind his kidnapping. Navy was so afraid of him that he didn't dare mention him by name.

"He hired Deanney and I after you broke into his collection," Navy explained frantically. "He said all we would do is get his stone back, but this has gone too far; you're just a boy. A boy who has some strange power that I can't explain, and I really don't care to learn about."

"Woah, slow down," Paxton said. "Why are you talking a mile a minute?"

"I don't know how much time I have," Navy said. "We need to get you out of here; but there's security outside."

"Don't worry," Paxton said. "I have a plan."

"A plan?" Navy asked.

"You're going to get us out of here," Paxton said cautiously.

"How?"

"My Noiz might be under lockdown," he said. "But there's another Noiz in this building; a purple stone that looks exactly like mine. Can you get access to it?"

"Yes, I'm in charge of guarding the whole collection," he said. "But what do you plan on doing with it?"

"Not just the stone," Paxton said. "I'm going to need you to go to the nearest Homend DIY Store too."

"DIY?" Navy asked.

"You'll see," Paxton promised.

-HEIST_ON-

Until she was fifteen, Nora lived a charmed life.

Her parents were both archaeologists who had met on a dig on a site in Europe; two young women unlocking the world's most ancient secrets. They'd fallen in love at first sight. By the time they got home, as they often told Nora, they'd already had their wedding planned out.

In a year's time, her mother was pregnant with Alejandra. Three years later, she was carrying Nora. Unlike their father, their mother fell in love with the domesticity of everyday family life. Digs, usually somewhere international, lasted three to six months.

Whilst their dad would often stay the duration of a dig, their mom would come home after a month or so, relieving their abuelo of the little angels he soon came to know were really 'little monsters'. In some ways, Paxton reminded her of his mother; droning on and on about strange dead languages that nobody understood.

It was a bitter-sweet feeling, but Nora still appreciated it.

They lived in a big house in a nice suburb and went to a wonderful private school. Their mother was the queen of schedule co-ordination; picking Nora up from gymnastics just in time to get to one of Alejandra's soccer games to work snack duty. It was the little things like that Nora ended up missing most, even more than their lavish birthday parties and extreme skydiving vacations.

One memory that still stood out was when her parents had well and truly gotten married. She was ten, and Alejandra was thirteen.

They'd both gotten to be flower girls and, after a quick costume change; ring bearers. That sense of transforming into a whole new person, with her hair done and make up, and then quickly changing into another, with all the make-up stripped back and her hair in a slick ponytail, had stuck with Nora for as long as she could remember.

Little did she know that she would soon get used to transforming into something else entirely.

Everything had gone wrong when their father came home with that book. The book that now sat square on the Allis' coffee table, as if it was completely innocent of any crimes.

After an extensive expedition on a remote cave system on the Isle of Manx, he had come home with the Mooar Shee. Officially, it was a record of the legend that came to be known as The Eight Transforming Stones, but what interested scholars was the interweaving of magic and the records of the armies of the greater Godeillic peoples.

The translators on the expedition weren't fluent in any ancient Gaelic, but even their shoddiest translator could tell that the text was a game-changer for academia.

If only they knew what they were dealing with, Nora thought.

Ancient Gaelic wasn't their mother's forte, but she was as fluent as they could get whilst the mysterious Man of Manx trudged through his awkward pre-teen years. She did a good deal of translation on the first quarter of the book and quickly became entranced with it's tales.

It was an innocent obsession, the sort Nora and Alejandra joked about, and even their dad got in on it. After a visit to a friend in Paradox City, he brought brought their mother a gift from an art sale. A trio of stones that some old coot dug up a hundred years ago that seemed to match the description of the 'Noiz' in the Mooar Shee.

That was the year Nora turned fifteen, when a loving gesture became the flashpoint for the end of the Kaikos family.

Strange things began to happen around the house; Nora would hear her favourite classical music wafting around the house with no source. When she was with Alejandra, her sister would claim it was her favorite bluegrass guitars that she was hearing instead.

Their parents would be asleep and sudden gusts of wind would blow them both out of bed. They were so loud that even Nora and Alejandra could hear them from their rooms across the hall. A bevy of handymen and women checked the house out and found nothing wrong with it, putting it up to their imaginations.

Then all of the trees in their yard, regardless of species, began to grow straight up. Though the horticulturist they hired tried to explain that away as some sort of mineral deficiency in the soil, it was a less likely explanation for the fact that the branches had also all shifted around to grow in one direction, creating perfect horizontal sheets of green at a right angle to the tree.

"It's as if they're... flags," their mother had observed, more awed than confused before she immediately went back to the Mooar Shee.

She became convinced that this strange phenomena, which was now spreading across the neighbourhood, was related to the three stones that their father had brought home. They were the real Noiz spoken about in the legends, buried away in fear they would be used for evil.

Even as a young girl, Nora could tell that their father didn't buy it, but he nevertheless organized a small team of archaeologist friends who piled into an RV and headed out to Paradox City to find out more.

Standing in the driveway and waving at her parents alongside her grandpa, Nora had no idea that she'd never see them again.