Tony's glad to see James hadn't been frugal with the credit card Tony gave him. Not that James came anywhere near maxing out the limit; he could have bought a car without having to worry that. Not that he'd need to anyway; Tony's footing the bill, and he never had to worry about pesky things like credit limits.
Tony's slightly less pleased to see that all the purchases are for Harry. Doesn't James get anything for himself?
Apparently not, but he got Captain America and Bucky Bears for Steve.
Sirius returns seeming just as taken aback as ordinary people would be visiting the magical world, though they're meshing together pretty well at the mall they just visited. Harry's brandishing Hulk fists and clamoring to play new games when Jarvis says that there's a situation that requires superhero intervention, right before a call from Coulson.
Coulson informs them that there are hostiles at a mall, the very one Harry and Jubilee had just visited. Not that Coulson needs to know that.
"Are we stopping a robbery?" Tony asks. "Are we looking for people in ski masks?"
"It's not a robbery, Mr. Stark," Coulson tells him, unruffled. "It's not a job for cops."
Jarvis projects holographic footage from Tony's phone of a guy in a red costume hovering in the middle of the mall. His purple cape billows almost as impressively as Thor's. Metal objects swirl around him in a sort of lethal tornado, and the arriving police officers' guns are ripped from their hands to join the maelstrom. Their handcuffs, walkie talkies, and badges are torn away as well.
"I want to do that!" Harry points at the video as he clambers onto the couch. He bounces up and down, clearly trying to imitate the levitation.
Another camera shows the police cars lifted by an invisible force and thrown down to barricade the exit.
Harry stops jumping, and his face falls with him. "Oh, he's bad. Do we have to hit him really hard?"
Harry swings his Hulk fists wildly, still standing on the couch.
"Remember, you're going to be a quidditch basketball star." Tony reminds him. "Looks like you finally caught a break, not getting caught up in this,"
Honestly, he's more shocked they got home before this happened than he is that it's happening at all.
A few shoppers brandish wands, but struggle to get a clear shot at the man. As soon as one object is vanished to open up a shot, another object takes its place. Coat hangers swoop like birds with curved beaks, shirts billowing out like plumage.
The magical people start transforming metal objects into wood or plastic to prevent the man from using them, but a few are hit by high-speed, targeted debris.
As several people flee in terror, the floating man gives an impassioned speech about mutants' superiority to ordinary humans. Apparently he thinks mutants trump magic too.
After Loki and HYDRA have been all over the news, Tony's not surprised that others would try their hand at world domination.
"I don't think he likes basketball," Harry says out of nowhere. "Or hockey."
"Erik," Professor X sounds like he's talking more about an old friend than a villain.
"Is Erik going to be part of our family when he's good?" Harry asks innocently.
Tony glances at Thor, Loki and James. "Just how many times are we going to go through this brainwashed buddy schtick? It's getting old. We just freed your mind a few weeks ago."
He expects some snippy reply from Loki, something along the lines of " yes, thank you for the reminder, Stark, I'd forgotten," but Loki's nowhere to be seen.
Professor X seems unsurprised, and merely continues what he was saying. "Erik and I have vastly differing views on human-mutant relations."
"So he's really a villain." Steve's all business, already grabbing his shield, even though it'll be useless against a guy who can manipulate metal.
"Magneto," Jubilee rolls her eyes. "Such a lame-o name."
Tony rolls his eyes back at her. That's almost as juvenile as Harry's insults.
"He sounds like a mutant Death Eater." Sirius growls at the video projected from Tony's phone, still clearly unused to watching it. He grips his wand.
Professor X turns his chair and leaves, likely to go to the basement with that computer locked behind facial scanners even Tony can't hack.
Tony's itching to suit up and show Magneto just what an ordinary human can do. Well, Tony's not really ordinary, he's a genius billionaire superhero, but still. He's accomplished everything without mutant or magical powers.
Though, Tony has to admit, Iron Man's probably worse than useless against a guy who can control metal. Magneto's powers are bending the metal railings like cheap wire, and Tony's willing to bet that Magneto would either crush his suit around him and puncture vital organs, or rip the arc reactor out of his chest to swirl around with everything else.
Tony grimaces. Or Magneto would puppet the suit to make Tony punch his own teammates.
Looks like he's sitting this one out. And he's really glad James got out of there, or the prosthesis would be toast.
James looks rather relieved, too, and guilty for looking relieved. Probably just shopping in the crowd, constantly scanning for threats had been stressful enough without all this.
Steve realizes his shield is useless, puts it aside, and starts assembling the best team. Tony's benched, along with Logan, whose entire skeleton is Adamantium. Colossus is freaking made of metal.
Most of Clint's arrows have metal in them, and he's still farming with his secret family in their secret farmhouse in the middle of nowhere.
Cap's preparing to go in without his iconic shield. Storm's a great candidate for this, and they should get Bruce over there to have Hulk smash flying debris. Or maybe Beast.
Thor seems confident that Mjolnir will not obey Erik's magnetic powers.
But as the team is suiting up and ready to head out, Tony hears a familiar voice call out "Your savior is here! The Avengers and X-Men are a bit too slow, aren't they?"
Loki strides into the camera's view. Gone is the ridiculous, curved golden helmet he'd worn during the invasion.
"I've fought the X-Men before," Magneto sounds extremely bored, yet keeps his commanding pose.
Loki matches Magneto's imperious posture. "If I had taken over, I at least would have kept you from fighting each other,"
Tony can practically hear Fury's blood vessels bursting from here, and mutters "Well, this is going to be a PR nightmare,"
Loki's face breaks into a wide, cheshire cat grin. He creates several illusions of himself to keep Magneto guessing and teleports out of the way of any attacks.
At first, Loki simply trolls Magneto, switching the sizes of objects so he has to adjust his control.
Scowling at all the Lokis, Magneto gestures in a grandiose fashion. Several cars from outside smash through the mall's glass doors, each hurtling towards one of the Lokis.
"When you wanted to see flying cars," Steve, now in his Captain America suit, leans close to James, "I don't think this is what you meant."
"Well, they're doing better than my dad's prototype did," Tony mutters. James looks extraordinarily guilty, as he does any time Howard or Maria are mentioned.
They watch Loki shrink the cars to matchbox car size, but they continue to hurtle like bullets, curving in the air to shoot towards Lokis rather than innocent civilians. Loki creates some sort of shield that stops their momentum, and Tony frowns at all the laws of physics being broken.
Harry, however, is delighted. "Loki made them into toys! He can make my toys as big as all you guys!"
"But you already have the real versions of us," Tony points out. "No action figure can compare to the real Iron Man. Not even those new magical versions they're making that really fly."
"We saw those." Harry tells him, rather nonchalantly for a boy who had seen flying figurines. Then again, that's nothing next to what they're seeing now, what the world had seen in Manhattan.
Tony starts calculating how many cars are going to be replaced, because even he doesn't make a habit of purchasing a whole parking garage's worth of cars. Then he remembers Loki had fixed most of Manhattan, and figures they can stick Loki with cleanup duty this time, too.
Loki transforms the metal tornado of appliances, infrastructure, cauldrons, hockey pucks and even a Golden Snitch into a swarm of bees, Magneto's purple helmet becomes the beehive.
Magneto reaches to tug the hive off of his head, but his words are not about the bees.
"Get out of my head, Charles."
Huh. So that helmet somehow prevents Professor X from reading Magneto's mind. Tony makes a note to ask if the Professor can read his mind when he's in the Iron Man suit. Does his suit make him immune to magical mind-reading as well? Would Loki have even been able to take over his mind?
Magneto tosses the hive to the floor, and the bees buzz around it.
"They are not our equals, Charles. We are gods among insects," Magneto casts an even more withering glare at the humans than he did the bees.
"I beg your pardon, but I believe I'm the god here."
Magneto falls to the ground, unconscious, atop a swarm of bees.
Loki turns to the crowd with his arms stretched wide, then bows to the huddled civilians. "Be sure to purchase my merchandise."
My mom came up to my computer as I was writing and read a few of Loki and Erik's lines, specifically "Get out of my head, Charles" and "I beg your pardon, but I believe I'm the god here" out loud.
Also I wrote the whole bee thing before I looked up Magneto quotes and found the one where he tells Pyro they're gods among insects, and it was so fitting with what I'd written that I had to use it.