Author's Note: Sorry I'm late, guys. I had to nurse my laptop back into health.


Chapter 7: Itty Bitty Munchkins


Tony's first day of classes started with a bang. Which should have been fine, since he was a sucker for dramatic entrances, except it turned out to be more than just an appropriate figure of speech.

Hermione Granger was the first person to storm inside his classroom for the second-year Muggle Tech class. She made it halfway across the room, unasked questions and scholarly enthusiasm blazing in her eyes, before she skidded to a stop like a deer caught in headlights and with a bewildered expression, actually took in the sight in front of her.

"Oh, it's you," Tony said, somewhere in the middle of dousing the dais with a miniature fire extinguisher.

"Hello, Professor," she replied, looking very confused. "Er, what happened?"

The automagic doors slid open again, and Ron and Harry stumbled inside with a towering stack of books in their arms. Ron dumped his books onto a nearby table while Harry doubled over, wheezing from exertion.

"See your redheaded friend?" Tony jerked a thumb at the two Gryffindors. "His brothers happened, that's what."

Ron frowned. "Uh, sorry?"

Resisting the urge to roll his eyes, Tony gave the dais a once-over and threw the mini extinguisher aside, his impromptu firefighting done for the day. It landed with a muted thump on a pile of mats he loaned off Hooch earlier. It would have been easier to get someone to blast a water spell on it, but he'd decided he wasn't that desperate for magic. Yet.

"I encourage explosions," he said. "They show how much everyone's taking my class seriously. But that was the lesson I taught the fourth-year kids, not you. Like what I did to the room so far?"

Tony gestured toward the walls.

He'd stared at the bleak stone chamber assigned as his classroom for all of ten seconds before deciding to rip it apart. It now stood unrecognizable as a sleek, modern lab, the ceiling curved and high and tiled, the walls a polished grey. A whiteboard and a dozen work tables were scattered around the room. It matched the decor of his office right down to the frames, and all it had taken was a good bit of wheedling for Dumbledore to whip out building permits left and right.

Harry's mouth was rounded in a large o. His gaze was fixated on a display screen. "Is that magic?"

Tony shrugged. "Magic, science, magic, more science, take your pick. Took the base off a corporeal charm and realigned it. You want the details, stick around for office hours."

Hermione blinked away what remained of her initial stupor, looking like she wanted nothing more than to have those office hours right there, right now. "But I wonder, how do the spells even—oh! I almost forgot!"

She rummaged through her book bag, pulling out . . . books. Really, it should have been obvious.

She was talking in that rapid-fire way of hers, stacking the books in a neat stack atop a desk. "I wasn't sure what you had in mind for the class, Professor Stark, so we had to run to the library to look up books on science and magic. Not that there was much I found, but I thought some preparatory reading would do us wonders—"

"Miss Granger." Tony cleared his throat. "There's no preparatory reading you can do. The library isn't stocked enough."

She cast a perplexed glance back toward the door, which had slid back shut after their entrance. Realization dawned. "But the Hogwarts library is the best one in the country!" she cried. "We weren't even told to bring a textbook for class!"

He shrugged. "That's why this is an optional course. Besides, all wizard books on Muggle science are crap. I read 'em all."

Hermione gaped.

"Oh, good." Ron slid his books off the table and straight into his bag, sounding disgruntled. "She was going ballistic in the library, too. Kept saying something about how it must be a riddle, there must be something we were missing, there was no way a class like yours didn't have a textbook."

"I'm just glad I don't have to read some more," said Harry. He wore a very relieved grin.

"But aren't there some, some supplemental reading you'll assign us, Professor?" Hermione pleaded. The disbelief was bleeding out of her as she spoke, though. "We're early! May I please go through them before we begin?"

"What, really? Early, huh?" Tony drew back his shirt sleeve with a flourish, feigning shock at the numbers on his wristwatch. "That's a brownie point for you, kid, but there is no supplemental reading, either. And find a seat to sit down, you three, or else everyone else is going to be left standing."

Because a curly-haired Hufflepuff and a Ravenclaw boy were standing behind them now, too, who looked equally confused and no less astonished at the interior of the room (or maybe it was the smoking dais).

Dejected, Hermione claimed a bench. The other four followed soon after.

"Alright, kids." Tony snapped his fingers. Recovering from PTSD with PTSD, always a classic. "Seems like you're all here, so listen up."

It was just him, the three Gryffindors, the Hufflepuff and the Ravenclaw in the room. He wanted to be surprised there wasn't more, but to be fair, it was probably magical instinct for people to run screaming in the opposite direction at the very sight of him. Wizards wouldn't survive being five thousand feet within Stark Industries. Chickens.

"Welcome to Muggle Intercommunal Technology," he began. "Or MIT, but I'll skip the acronyms for the time being. You were smart enough to sign up for the course and step in through the door. Congrats on that. We'll be seeing a lot of each other over the year, so congrats on that, too. I hope I don't scare you off."

He was most certainly hoping otherwise. The less he saw of these kids, the better.

The Ravenclaw boy put up a hand. "Excuse me, Professor," he said. "This is the right class, then? One of my House prefects was complaining, she said there was no difference between the sixth-year and the first-year material."

"What's your name?"

"Terry Boot, sir."

"Uh, well. She was right to be worried, Eagle in Boots. Five years' education gone to waste is a Ravenclaw's worst nightmare, isn't it?"

There was some weak laughter that echoed from both Hermione and Terry.

Tony shrugged. "But yes, your prefect's correct, there is no difference. You're all starting off a clean slate as far as your genius professor is concerned, and he also happens to believe age is a deterrent in the fab process of learning. Repeat after him. Age is a deterrent."

It took them a few tries, but the answering murmurs were nice and clear.

He let the silence stew for a while before giving them the whole truth. "Also, I thought it was less work preparing one class instead of seven. This way I get to rehash more stuff if I feel like you're not getting it. Don't tell the grownups I said that, especially your dashing, darling, and frankly terrifying headmaster."

Hermione's mouth was a quarter inch from being unhinged.

It was mad to think that Dumbledore had wanted to make the course mandatory for first and second years. Tony just about fainted at that suggestion, because getting trapped in the same room thrice a week with preteen and unwilling smart-asses was something equal to eternal torment for him. Eternal torment for anybody barring Dumbledore, since the man was so much of a masochist he'd decided to stick around the castle for decades after passing full retirement age. At least everyone knew the headmaster was batshit crazy.

When Tony's counter-plan of sitting the kids down in a giant chamber somewhere for showings of A Space Odyssey and The Terminator got shot down pronto—monthly book reports weren't enough of a workload to be considered educational—Dumbledore threw in the towel. Professor Stark could teach the course as an optional subject, he said, on material deemed academically appropriate, as long as there were proper lectures and proper grades given out at the end of the school year.

There were too many conditionals in that offer for his liking, but in the end Tony manned up enough to throw in his towel, too. They shook hands on it like proper gentlemen and everything. It was great, it was horrifying. Tony never wanted to be stuck in a negotiation with a wizard again.

He explained this all in quick and simple words to his small group of second years. (Except the batshit crazy part, of course. What kind of a bad language man would they think he was?)

"So I'm willing to let anyone who wants to be here enter the room," he finished. "No talent is required, no previous knowledge. Maybe some homework. To be fair, I won't grade you on the wrong answers you'll come up with."

They were staring at him with eyes that were bigger than Galleons.

"But, Professor." It was the Hufflepuff. "What in the world will we be learning?"

"Name, kid?"

"Justin Finch-Fletchley, sir."

"Reason for taking this class, Mr. Finch-Fletchley?"

"Er." The boy thought for a moment. "I'm Muggle-born. I'll be taking Muggle Studies next year, too, I think. My parents bring in tutors for me over the summer, but they want me to know a bit of everything if, uh . . ."

"If you ever have to venture out again into the Muggle world," Tony finished for him. "See? Mr. Finch-Fletchley's parents have the right idea. Smart man and woman, your parents."

Justin seemed to be stuck somewhere between pleased and affronted. "Thank you, sir?"

Tony walked toward the whiteboard and whipped out a blue marker.

"Because I'm a genius who loves research as much as he does his side projects," he said, unscrewing the marker top, "I've learned over the past few months, uh, years, I mean, that the magical community is close to being overrun by Muggle tech, and everyone remains happily blind to this development. It's my job as your instructor to teach you about these changes, and how not to end up as some clueless idiot who can't tell apart the Web and a web."

Ron made a strangled sort of noise at the back of his throat. "We're not clueless!"

"Please, Mr. Weasley, your father told me in person the other day he doesn't know what cable television is, let alone closed-circuit surveillance systems."

Tony jotted down two words on the board in bold blue letters. Down went MUGGLE, down went MAGIC.

"I know the Prophet talks shit about me and my obsession with Muggles, but believe it or not, I'm not going to brainwash you into thinking that one culture is better than the other. Surprise, surprise." He did roll his eyes this time. "The majority of you will be living magic the rest of your lives, so discriminating against it would be a very stupid idea. In the case that, you know, one of you pull a Monte Cristo and this lesson comes back to bite me in the behind fourteen years later."

The marker squeaked as Tony sketched two misshapen boxes around MUGGLE and MAGIC, and for a moment he considered bringing up JARVIS to do the artistic labor for him. He didn't think he could deal with a kid dropping unconscious, though, and he was trying his damndest to deliver this lesson in the most harmless, "Muggle" way possible. It was the single reason why something as analog as a whiteboard dared stay in his classroom. That, and he needed a reminder that every genius needed his own box of scraps sometimes.

CCTV went in the blank column below MUGGLE. He tapped on it. "Somebody tell me what this does."

Hermione's hand shot up into the air. "Video surveillance, sir," she said. "They record what happens in a place and play the footage back when there's something bad happening, like an accident or burglary."

He flapped a hand at her. "Take five points for being fast and accurate."

Hermione beamed.

"Okay." Tony circled the floor, arms tucked behind his back. "Let's say . . . five or ten years from now, max, you have to Stun some Muggles because they caught you with your wand out in the middle of a spell. You Stun them, wipe their memories clean, and leave. Nobody's the wiser.

"And let's say," squeak-squeak went his marker, and there was SECURITY HAZARD added below CCTV, "fifteen years from now, you're careless enough to make that same mistake again. Except you're not in a dark, dingy street somewhere that you could mug a man and walk free, but under a surveillance camera recording your every move. What do you do?"

Silence.

Ron's nose scrunched in thought. "Uh, blow it up?"

"The Muggle or the camera?" Ron looked terrified at the question. "Just pulling your leg, Reds, take a chill pill."

Terry had half his arm raised, fingers wiggling in uncertainty. "You could blow up the camera," he said. "And Confund whoever owns it. I'm guessing they don't spend every waking hour with their eyes glued to a lens."

"Mm." Tony added that to the list. "Ingenious, even if you're a bit young for the Confundus. Take five for Ravenclaw."

The length of the column increased at an alarming rate after that. Ron, Harry and Justin seemed content to sit back and pipe in with a suggestion every now and then, while Terry and Hermione fought it out like a pair of machine guns.

"It won't work," Hermione was saying. "They can take pictures of Earth outside from space, you know, through satellites—"

Terry threw up his hands. "Who's ever going to search a bloody satellite because a dumb Muggle couldn't remember where he was for five minutes? It happens all the time! And wizarding London is tiny!"

Hermione scowled. "Why are we even assuming this takes place in London? The Muggle could be somewhere more important than the Leaky Cauldron! Like, like Buckingham Palace, see if they don't believe what the Queen says—"

As much as Tony wanted to sit back, too, and find himself a box of popcorn for a particularly illogical episode of High School Magical, this was supposed to be when the responsible adult stepped in.

(Responsible. Responsibility. He hated the sound of that word.)

He clapped his hands twice. "Hey, kids, break it up."

Terry was red in the face. Hermione's hands were inching toward her books. Whether she meant to use them as intellectual ammunition or a handheld weapon, he would never know.

"You're both right, to an extent." Tony paused to let that sink in, then continued. "Most Muggles would wave off magic as a trick of the light. That's how minor Memory Charms work. As long as you don't try something really dumb like, let's say, blow somebody up on a street full of eyewitnesses, you could get away with pretty much anything.

"What it doesn't mean," and squeak-squeak-squeak went his board marker, "is that you can ignore Muggles for being Muggles. They're smarter than the books give them credit for, and by that I mean a lot, even if the best part of the intelligence is limited to a few elites."

Like me, he meant.

"See here." Squeak-squeak-squeak-squeak. "At some point Muggles are bound to notice there's a pattern to their memory losses. They'll know three-quarters of these happen in areas like, uh, the street where the Leaky Cauldron is, or Kings Cross Station on September 1st. When they come in with their cameras blazing, you . . ."

He turned to switch markers for some decent color-coded emphasis, and noted with a mixture of surprise and pleasure that the whole room's unwavering attention was focused on him. Hermione was scribbling like mad on a piece of parchment, the debate with Terry shelved for later. Ron was nodding along to every word. Harry had his chin propped against the back of his hand, his face was rapt with attention.

Huh, Tony thought. It looked as if his charisma was very much in working order, after all.

Feeling one side of his mouth quirk up in a grin, he turned back to the whiteboard and resumed talking:

"So, kids, sometime in the near future, Muggles will find out exactly how much they've been missing thanks to those crappy Concealment Charms wizardkind so blindingly trusts. To save ourselves from certain disaster, I'm going to introduce you to what the US military calls the Global Positioning System, except now it'll have my last name on it . . ."


"Sir."

"Busy, JARVIS."

"Sir, there is someone at the door—"

"Busy, I said."

"Sir, she requires your immediate attention."

"Anthony!"

Tony was startled out of another intense brainstorming session by a voice ringing crisp and loud over the door to his office. He swiped the holographic screens away as he pushed himself up from the floor, of course he'd been lying on the floor, and rubbed both hands up and down his face to rub the fatigue from it.

"What? Who? When?" he muttered. Half his mind lingered on the list of Hogwarts alumni he'd been plowing through earlier. "What happened? Did Snape fess up his undying love for me? Was Binns finally exorcized by some higher power?"

Because it was McGonagall who was making her way through his cluster of rooms, head held high and posture immaculate. JARVIS hadn't even attempted to waylay her at the entrance. They both knew how futile it was. Ol' Minnie was a missile with feet.

"Anthony Stark," she said, looking down her nose at him. (She had to, he was still sitting on the floor.) "Kindly explain what Mr. Boot is doing in the hospital wing, bedridden by a horribly modified Muggle-Repelling Charm!"

"Who? Terry?" Tony yawned, working the cricks out of his neck. He had the perks of a de-aged body and all that, but fifty years of bad lounging to grow out of. Ow. "Kid must have taken the lesson to heart. And hello there to you too, Grievous. How'd you get in here?"

She had on that expression, the one she reserved for the pop culture references that flew straight over her head. "The door to your office was open, because there was no portrait guarding it. I've told you five times to find a new one."

"Nah. I'm sure Maya's just stuck in another frame somewhere." Despite it, his curiosity was piqued. "Did it work?"

McGonagall's entire features were pinched. "Excuse me?"

"Did it work, I mean, you said the kid's down there because of a modified charm?" Tony was pulling his screens back together in one fluid motion, summoning the footage and side memos he obviously had of his last second-year class. He was always prepared. Uncle Scar's musical number had nothing on him.

"See that? They've been talking about the point of making Muggle-borns' houses unplottable, never mind the poor delivery guys. So I handed them a bunch of magic GPSes and redirected the lot toward individual projects, told them to go wild—"

"Individual projects?"

And that was a red light right there. He paused in the middle of accentuating a close-up of Hermione's cramped, detailed notes, and tried hard not to squirm. "They're smart kids," he managed.

McGonagall sniffed. "Filius will want a word with you, I presume."

"A word. Okay." Judging by how much Flitwick liked to talk Charms with him, Tony would be lucky to escape with the rest of the day intact. "You didn't seriously walk all up to the seventh floor to talk about a Ravenclaw, did you. Or are you here to stare at my office? I'm proud of it."

Over the past week or so, he'd added a lot of stuff to the room, including a lift table, the spray booth, several store-bought monitors he needed to take apart ASAP because they were ancient and too Muggle to work inside the castle, an Iron Man bust, another Iron Man bust, and seven display cases that were glaringly empty. Maybe putting up the second bust had been a bit overkill, but it gave a nice je nais se quois to the resulting decor.

Tony was also kind of hoping that the bust was flashy enough to hide the entrance to his secondary, more experimental lab. He scooted sideways to block the red light of holographic Stunners pulsing from the chamber, where his fourteenth Stupefy simulation was being conducted. By his bots.

Thankfully, McGonagall chose not to comment on his other abnormalities. "I suppose your living quarters are fine. Although they do leave me wondering where a bed would fit into this . . . mess."

Tony could tell she'd struggled to find a word as neutral as mess. "I sleep on the couch," he explained.

Her stare was icy. "Do you?"

He nodded, wishing that he didn't look as helpless as he felt.

"As for your other question, I was already on the floor for a quick word with the Gryffindor Quidditch captain," she said. "The Slytherin team's antics are getting out of hand. Severus refuses to restrain them."

"Quidditch, right." That was another aspect of Hogwarts he wouldn't be enjoying. Because, seriously, soccer on brooms? Tony had far better things to do with his time, which people used to weigh by solid gold. Like testing out the endurance of his new magic gauntlet, and dousing other burning pieces of furniture with a fire extinguisher because those jinxes put on one hell of a fireworks show when combined with metallurgy.

Flying in itself, though . . .

He filed the thought away for future reference, and tuned in to whatever McGonagall was saying.

". . . to drop by for a quick word, seeing as you had missed dinner, again. Gilderoy was asking after you."

His grin froze in place. "I'm sorry, say what?"

McGonagall's lips were curled in definite exasperation. He would know, he'd been on the receiving end more often than not. "Gilderoy Lockhart, our Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher," she began, the words coming slow and loud like Pepper's did whenever she was pissed as hell, "was asking after you. He planned to come up to your quarters as soon as Mr. Potter's detention was done with."

Shit. "When was this?"

"Two hours ago, Anthony."

He scrambled onto his feet, out of dread than anything else. Gilderoy Lockhart talked and acted like a poster boy for dentists, but the man wouldn't understand no if it hit all four of his grandparents in the face, and Tony used to have a thousand fanboys on his résumé. On other occasions he wouldn't have given a shit about it, but that man happened to live under the same roof as him. Even if it was a large, seven-story roof.

"And you're telling me all this now. What did he even want to talk about?"

McGonagall's mouth was thinned back into a firm line. "To offer you advice on your class, I presume."

"Say that again?" He blinked once. Then twice. "Advice?"

She snorted. "Gilderoy has taken up the hobby of . . . offering us all advice on the how we teach our classes. Apparently, he does not think the teaching methods here are up to his standard."

So, apparently, Lockhart had even less self-preservation than Tony did.

"Okay," he said. He was mussing up his hair, damn any motor oil that ended up there. "I think I'll run down to the, um, library, I've suddenly got a shitload of stuff to read."

He thought he heard McGonagall shout "Anthony, the library is closed!" over his shoulder, but he was already halfway down the seventh-floor corridor. The hour must have been later than he thought, because it was far too quiet for somewhere near the Gryffindor dorms.

"Sir," JARVIS spoke in his ear. "I could easily devise a method to seal the doors without the aid of a painting—"

Tony snorted. "Yeah, where's the fun in that? Better to leave the asshole waiting on an empty room. But," he stopped. "Where am I, JARVIS?"

He couldn't be lost. Again.

After all this time, the castle still went out of its way to make life hell for him, and its antics included—but was far from limited to—switching rails, dissolving steps, painted doorways he would run smack into and lanterns hanging upside down, just so they messed with his vestibules. By the last week of August Tony had developed the common sense to take IDITH with him wherever he went, and it was a hard-won victory.

He flipped up his glasses. Immediately, the floor was bathed in a pale blue light.

JARVIS hummed. "A stray staircase has taken you down to the second floor, sir."

"All five floors, huh? Faster than escalators, magical stairs." He squinted through the lenses. There were two blue-purple blurbs fluttering down the hall. "That's Lockhart's office is, isn't it. And Harry Potter with him."

"It appears so, sir."

Tony turned in a loose circle. Apart from Lockhart's office, the second floor seemed to be completely uninhabited. As it should be, since all it had were a couple empty classrooms and broom cabinets. He thought he saw something orange flash in the corner of his eye, but that was where the infamous girls' bathroom was—if there was something he hated more than a sentient, angry castle, it was the group of ghosts that lived in it—when suddenly, there was something hissing in his ear.

The noise came from a gigantic canvas that stretched over the expanse of maybe six feet, depicting a grassy pasture where three young bucks lay sleeping on the earth. As he watched, a small snake slithered over the first animal to edge closer to the corner of the frame. It was a tiny green thing, no thicker than the width of his pinky, and for some inexplicable reason he got the distinct feeling that he'd seen it somewhere before.

It was hissing at him.

"Sorry," he said. "I don't speak snake."

It kept up the steady stream of noise, though, and somehow managed to sound oddly frustrated.

"What's your problem? What's with the hissy fit, huh?" Hiss hiss. Tony stepped closer to the painting. "Except it can't be a fit if you're pitching one every five seconds. That's, like, the equivalent of my caffeine addiction. Maybe yours can be a hissy addiction, but it sounds so wrong—"

"Professor Stark?"

He almost screamed.

A small, redheaded girl was standing mere inches away from him, her face curtained by the strands of her hair. With the flaming torches on the walls casting deep shadows across her cheeks, she could have been a scene out of a horror movie. But she looked cold, lost and thoroughly miserable about this fact, and Tony had enough of a heart not to yell like a banshee at some poor kid. It helped that she was in his first-year class, too.

"Miss Weasley." Deep, calming breaths. "You realize this is a school that's actually serious about curfew?"

"I . . ." Ginny Weasley appeared to be at a loss for words. Her face flushed red, white, and red again before she opened her mouth and a stream of words came pouring out. "I, I'm sorry, Professor! Fred and George were so noisy, I think I wanted to get—some fresh air? but when I got out of the common room, I couldn't find my way back—"

So he wasn't the only person in the school with an unusual penchant for getting lost. He didn't know if he should be relieved or concerned, and tried a little bit of both.

"Here." He steered her with a metaphorical hand toward the other end of the corridor. "See that light? Right around that's the set of stairs that takes you up onto the next floor, got that? Can you make it that far?"

"Er—I think so."

Then they were staring at each other in silence. There was none of that talkative, assertive first year who'd argued against Colin Creevey about film usage in the girl in front of him, and after a few seconds she ducked her head to mutter a thanks and scurry down the hallway. Tony knew he retained some of that hard-to-approach, mysterious aura smart, unfamiliar adults were supposed to have, not that he knew from experience, but he'd never intended himself to be intimidating. It was an image he associated with someone like that principal from Matilda, and it wasn't a good one.

Disgruntled and a little peeved, he trudged down another flight of stairs to pick the lock on the closed library doors for some secret late-night reading.

He returned to his room hours later to find his gauntlet missing.


Notes: One line in and I could sense that I wasn't going to be happy with this chapter. But there are things you have to write for the sake of writing (and plot development), so here we are. I couldn't put this off forever.

And YES! My laptop kicked the bucket last week and it was a disaster. RIP. Still a disaster, since my new one didn't arrive till yesterday. Hence the late update, and I'm sorry about that.

Sticking with the premise that Terry Boot is a half-blood. I wish I could've included one more girl in Hermione's class, but apart from Padma Patil we never get proper characterization on the female Ravenclaws. Terry has enough lines that I think I can write him occasionally, but not them.

Review for your belated Hogwarts letter!