30 - Crafts//Paxton

As Paxton began to cut into the soft aluminum sheet, Navy watched him with skeptical eyes. It was the exact same look he'd gotten from Nora and Lea, so by now he was used to it.

"Trust me," he said. "This will work."

"I don't know," Navy said. "A crafts project that transforms people into supernatural magicians? Maybe you're just crazy; or I'm just crazy."

"What we really are," Paxton said, wrapping the first piece of metal around the purple Noiz. "Is lucky that this Noiz was already sealed up; if it wasn't, our escape would need to wait another day whilst the wood spirits dried out."

"What is this seal, exactly?" Navy said. "It just looks like it's encased in plastic to me."

"All of the Noiz were sealed when they were transported from the Godeillic kingdoms," Paxton explained. "Touching a raw Noiz makes the magic inside go loopy and break the laws of physics. I'm not a geologist or a chemist or anything of that sort, but I do go to high school. I think that warrants a hazarded guess?"

Navy gave him a non-committal nod.

"Some of the seals probably degraded when they were exposed to acidic soils," Paxton explained as he started to cut into his second piece of metal.

"You're pretty smart, kid," he said. "No wonder you figured this stuff out."

"I'm just lucky that people believe in me," Paxton said, not sure why he felt so at ease around this man who was part of the team that had kidnapped him. "My grandma, my friend, the intellectual community..."

"I believe in you too," Navy said, looking straight at him. Paxton took a heavy breath, suddenly acutely aware of the time limit they had on them. "I don't know why."

"I told you I didn't believe in magic," he said. "But I do."

"When I was a kid, I was kind of a punk," he explained. "I was bullied a lot, so I skipped school to hang out in the woods. Nobody could ever find me there, and I'd pretend I was the president of the world."

"The president of the world?" Paxton repeated, feeling giddy inside for the first time in days. "What did you do?"

"Declared every day free Doodle Cake day," he said. "It never came to fruition."

Paxton giggled and Navy's nostalgic smile grew even wider.

"At least until they leveled the woods around my neighborhood and put in a Nullmart Superstore, you know the sort," he said, his smile fading a little.

"So I started loitering around there, watching people come and go. The guards would chase me off on occasion, but I got to stay if I bought slushies, so I stole change from my mom's purse; anything to get out of school."

"One day I'd had a few too many slushies and had to lay down," Navy said, setting himself down on the bed on the side near the window. Though Paxton could still see the nostalgia, Navy was much more serious now. "Sugar crash and all that."

"I was laying on the concrete in the early evening, looking up at the Nullmart mascot," he recalled. "It was a butler back then. I don't know if you're old enough to remember that. A glowing neon sign with a butler that promised to take care of your every need."

"The sign spoke to me," Navy said as Paxton was about to wrap the second metal plate around the Noiz. Paxton couldn't help himself, he dropped both and focused all of his attention on Navy.

"I'm serious, that strange light-up sign spoke to me," he repeated. "It told me I would never be president of the world."

"What a downer, right?" Navy asked, still smiling. "But before I could argue, it said I could change the world one day. If, and only if, I dedicated myself to serving a great man."

"Don't you think it could have just been a dream?" Paxton asked. "You were in the midst of a sugar crash."

"It might have been," Navy agreed. "But this is Paradox City, and you're currently making magic jewellery."

"From then on, I studied hard and never skipped school, even with all the bullying, because I knew I had something to work towards," he continued.

"I think that might have been you, Mr. Phipps."

Paxton opened his mouth, but he couldn't think of anything to say. Navy responded by holding up another plastic bag from a convenience store.

"By the way, I brought you some doodle cakes, Mr. Phipps."