"What are you working on?" Tony asked while walking past where Harry had set up in a corner of the garage, browsing pictures of the Seraphim Tactical Satellite.
"Summer chemistry homework," Harry told him. "Hermione bugged me about getting started on it. Have to talk about the properties of gold and titanium." Well, technically, the assignment had been to talk about the chemical composition of their wand cores. Snape had probably thought Harry would have some materials unknown on Earth, so have a harder time doing the homework. "Thought I'd do some extra credit on alloys. Supposed to be really good at heat transfer."
"Smart," Tony agreed, leaning over his shoulder while drinking one of the weird green smoothies he'd been gradually ramping up on over the last month. "That's cool looking," he said, gesturing to the cover of one of Harry's notebooks.
"Dean drew and colored it for me," Harry agreed. It was a picture of the Hogwarts Helm of Sorting in the red and gold of Gryffindor. "It's a helmet we found in the D&D game."
"Careful with magic helmets. Suddenly you're Lawful Evil and have to pay taxes," Tony quipped. The design didn't really look like his Mark II helmet, but he liked the color scheme a lot. "Alright. Test 37 is up. You ready?"
"Am I actually flying today?" Harry asked enthusiastically, putting his stuff down and hurrying to get his shoes off.
"Hovering," Tony corrected. "If we're lucky."
"Huh, yeah, I guess it would be hard to carry enough fuel for a flight," Harry said, looking at the jury-rigged boots and gloves that were laid out on a work table that Tony had been soldering all afternoon. "Does this just use magnets? Is there a grid in the floor?"
"Oh, no, it'll fly eventually. Just not today," Tony disagreed. He pointed at the propulsion surfaces on the boots and explained, "Ion-actuated plasma jets. They make their own propulsion medium out of the air. Still working on how to make it work in space, but we used these on some of the Stark missiles."
"How much power does that use?" Harry asked, starting to strap on the various apparati.
"A lot," Tony agreed, helping him into the prototype. "But if you've got, say, an arc reactor in your chest…"
"Tony… I don't have an arc reactor in my chest."
"And that's part of why you're just hovering," Tony cinched up the last fastener. "The boots have enough capacitors to test it out. Hopefully for a minute or so. The full system will have to run on one of these, though," he tapped the fist-sized blue reactor on his chest with a metallic thunk, the blue glow hard to miss since he'd recently taken to cutting a hole for it in the middle of his shirts to show it off. "Okay! All strapped in. JARVIS, test 37, configuration 2.0."
He helped Harry stagger in the heavy boots over to the mats in the middle of the room and then got U, his slightly-smarter AI robot arm, arranged to wield a fire extinguisher. He held the video camera himself. Dum-E, the less-competent robot, sulked in a corner, not trusted with any important tools if it wasn't absolutely necessary.
"Ready?" Tony asked. Harry nodded, so he ordered, "Alright, nice and easy. Seriously, we're just going to start off with one percent thrust capacity. In three, two, one…"
And with a rush of electrically-actuated air, Harry began to lift off of the floor. He resisted the urge to flail his legs as his balance started to tip, instead bringing the repulsors in his palms to bear to keep vertical. It ultimately wasn't that different from hovering on a broom, which also lifted on a single axis rather than as a platform. The hover charms on a broom weren't split into four independently mobile pieces, of course, and that took some getting used to.
"Status?" Tony asked after Harry got a few inches off the floor and didn't immediately fall on his face or get flung into a wall.
"This is neat," Harry said. "I'm ready to go higher."
"Kid's ready to go higher," Tony said to himself, or maybe to JARVIS. "Let's bring it up to two percent."
The propulsion doubled, which more than doubled Harry's height given that the first bit of thrust was already cancelling his weight. Now about five feet off the ground and quickly stabilized, he asked, "Should I try to move around?"
"Give it a shot," Tony agreed, stepping back with the camera to give Harry more room. "Stay away from the cars."
"Right," Harry nodded, then concentrated on how he'd need to tilt his palms and feet to change direction rather than basically just treading water. He had a false start and almost tipped on his back as the intuitive direction wasn't the right one. "Woah! That wasn't what I wanted. Maybe some gyroscopes on this?"
"Good idea. JARVIS, note it. You still good?"
"Got it," Harry said, hands thrust back to right himself and then trying gentler motions to move around. "Less is more."
"JARVIS, you tracking his kinematics for analysis?" Tony asked.
"Of course, sir," the AI's voice said from the ceiling-mounted speakers.
Finally feeling out the motions, Harry started deliberately drifting in a circle around the mat, and then leaned over toward Tony's sports cars, grinning as Tony's eyes widened and then pulling himself back well clear of melting off any paint.
"You little," Tony griped, good-naturedly, thrilled at the aerial control Harry had. "Alright, back to the mat and we'll ease off the power at half a percent per second starting… now."
The drop to the mat was a little faster than either had expected, but Harry managed to catch himself with only a slight stumble. "That was fun!"
"It looked fun," Tony agreed. "Oh, yeah. We can fly."
They tried a bunch of tweaks and improvements over the next few days, and by the morning of Harry's birthday on July 31st, the boots and gloves had been joined by additional exoskeletal scaffolding. It was needed to carry the extra capacitors, the gyroscope on the small of his back, and to better record his movements for JARVIS to analyze.
Tony's sleep schedule was incredibly weird, and Harry's body had basically given up on time making sense after getting back from Vanaheim, so they were pushing toward sunrise after having been up through the night. Pepper had pretty much resigned herself to just sleeping in the guest room at the mansion while they both played in the basement.
"Alright," Tony looked at the latest data. "I think we're going to try giving you manual control of the thrust power."
"Happy birthday to me!" Harry grinned.
"It's your birthday?" Tony asked. "Well, as much as I'd like to let you keep the suit, it's still secret. And all your friends at school would be jealous. Plus, you'd just outgrow it." JARVIS had already had to rescan Harry three times over the last month, since he was growing fast enough that the suit pieces that needed to fit precisely would begin causing errors as his height changed even subtly.
"Can't really use electronics at school anyway," Harry shrugged, though privately thinking having one of these in his trunk would have helped outside of Vanaheim.
"What's up with that?" Tony asked. "I know you said they're strict about screens, but no electronics?"
"The place is built like an old castle," Harry explained, then added, "Thick stone walls, basically no accessible outlets. Can't get a signal, and recharging things is inconvenient. And they'd rather die than run network cables along the walls." It wasn't technically a lie, just leaving out the real reason for no power.
"Stone age," Tony sighed. "You sure you wouldn't prefer a different school?"
"Education's good. And I like most of the people."
Tony shrugged and went back to tapping on the computer, "Fair enough. Alright, Test 81, Configuration 2.3. I'm unlocking manual control of propulsion in the boots and gloves, just like we practiced. U, be ready with that fire extinguisher. And, go."
Other than having his own control over the jets rather than JARVIS controlling it, Harry lifted off as usual. But once he started moving around, he was finally able to get a feel for how changing the force on the fly helped him compensate. Within a minute of starting the test, he was swooping around the garage, and even managed to do a vertical loop even within the relatively low confines of the twenty-foot ceiling.
"Alright, Maverick, wheel it in. JARVIS, you're getting the telemetry for this, right?" Tony asked, knowing he'd need a lot of machine assistance to fly as well as the athletic kid.
"Yes, sir. I am already breaking those maneuvers into discrete macros and reversing the kinematics onto your skeletal model," the AI answered.
"Wait, so you're going to move like me?" Harry asked, then risked doing a fancy dance he'd seen in a video game before touching down. He was thrilled that he managed to hold basically stable while pulling it off. "Did you get that, JARVIS?"
"Yes, Mr. Potts," the long-suffering AI acknowledged. "Though the kinematic model is having some difficulty targeting it to Mr. Stark's pelvic range of motion."
"Hey! My pelvic range of motion is just fine!" Tony argued, amused. "I can call up lots of women who'd be happy to testify."
"Oh! Calls!" Harry realized, effortlessly landing and walking toward the laptop he'd been using for games and homework while Tony worked on his own projects that week. "My friends wanted to do a video call, and it's early enough here that they all might be up."
"India, New York, and London, right?" Tony asked, absently, while poring over the new telemetry data from the latest test. "Getting a real jump on the kind of international business meetings I have to figure out."
"I guess I should get out of this so they don't see it on the video," Harry said, annoyed about the time it took to remove the suit.
Tony ordered, "JARVIS, see if you can dynamically mask out any proprietary tech in the shot. Give him a nice Stark Industries t-shirt as an overlay."
"Yes, sir. We have a new design that Ms. Potts approved just last month."
The desk chair groaned a bit more than Harry was used to, since he was wearing upwards of forty pounds of gear, and he messaged his friends and booted up the video chat.
"Happy birthday, Harry!" Hermione was the first to say as she got on. "Where are you?"
"Tony's garage, working on a secret project," Harry answered, amused at the semi-cartoonish t-shirt being superimposed over his body on his own video feed. "He says hi, by the way."
"No I don't," Tony yelled from across the room.
"Hi, Mr. Stark!" Hermione yelled back anyway.
"Can–an–n you–ou–u hear–ar–r us–s?" Padma asked, sharing a video screen with her sister.
"Lag echo's pretty bad," Harry admitted.
"I can help with that," JARVIS said.
"Who was that?" Parvati asked, the echo suddenly almost unnoticeable.
"Tony's assistant, JARVIS," Harry told them. "He's always around."
Dean caught that last bit as he appeared on the call and chuckled, since Harry had told him about JARVIS, even though he wasn't generally making a big deal about Tony Stark having a functioning natural-language AI running his systems. "Happy birthday, man."
"Yes, happy birthday," Padma and Parvati added.
"So I talked to Mr. Rama about summer tuto–," Hermione began, but then her video froze. And so did the other two feeds.
JARVIS said, "We seem to be experiencing communication difficulties."
And then the lights went out.
"That shouldn't be possible," Tony stared at the black screen of his monitor. While the sunrise was imminent as a vague glow in the skylights and in the blue outside of the windows, the garage was pretty much lit by only the (relatively numerous) power indicator LEDs for various tools and devices that functioned entirely on battery power, including Tony's own chest. "My power can't go out. I have redundancies."
Suddenly, toward the ramp out of the garage, the leftmost window exploded inward, throwing glass across Tony's Audi, quickly followed by a male figure that was only visible as a shadow against the lightening sky, vaulting over the edge of the window, jumping off of the roof of the car, and charging into the room.
Tony had just enough time to stand from his computer and square up against the charging intruder before he was effortlessly kicked onto his back (fortunately onto one of the crash pads), the figure drawing a long, straight knife that was as black as the rest of his outfit, and saying, "Passajamanal onolar elithidhenne äth?"
"Hey!" Harry yelled, before Tony could be stabbed to death in the dark. While the playboy had lived nearly four decades with little need to ever get in a fistfight, Harry had recently had nearly a year of martial arts training from the Deadliest Woman in the Galaxy. And he was in a strength-augmenting suit.
Tony's attacker grunted in surprise and pain as Harry essentially punted him in the ribs, kicking him across the room where he narrowly avoided slamming into the Tesla Roadster.
With a growl, the figure rolled back to his feet and switched to a knife-fighting stance that was close to one that Harry had been taught in March. With the gauntlets on, he thought he could potentially block knife strikes, and crouched into Gamora's suggested guard position for a larger opponent with a weapon, placing himself between Tony and the assailant.
The assassin tried two feints, only for Harry to move each time to counter him. Behind Harry, Tony had scrambled to his feet and was moving to grab a wrench or something, when the lights began to flicker. "Finally, the backups," Tony said. With a frustrated grunt, the assassin made one more feint and then ran back toward the smashed window, leaping off the car and out, swinging left to avoid tumbling down the cliffside.
"Nope!" Harry yelled, his Gryffindor instincts treating a fleeing opponent like a dog seeing a squirrel. He ran a couple of steps and ignited the jets, barely managing to fly out the window without banging into anything.
Tony sighed in understanding. "Right. That's why the kid was grounded."
Outside, as Harry gained height, he spotted the cloaked figure running along the edge of Tony's "yard," scrambling up the patchy scrub of the steep cliff edge that dropped to the surf beneath the garage, his hood falling away from his head. Streaking after the attacker, in the rising sun he was surprised to make out angular facial features, including a pointed ear. The apparent-elf's eyes widened at seeing the boy flying after him with rockets at the end of each of his limbs. He shouted up, "Harry Potter djonjel nola Hogwarts."
Then he jumped off the cliff.
Harry would have dived after him, at least to confirm whether the elf had dashed himself on the rocks or somehow survived, but the flight rig began to beep its warning that the capacitors were almost out of power. He barely managed to fly back into the window and miss the Audi before the jets stopped firing and he rolled to a stop on the crash pad that Tony had recently vacated.
"He got away. This definitely needs an arc reactor for long term power," Harry told Tony, who was staring down at him in baffled amusement. After a moment he added, "Also, a servo release for when power is disconnected. I can't get up."
Tony organized his thoughts while helping Harry up and out of the rig, the hazard lights in the room finally giving way to normal lighting as JARVIS announced, "Backup power online. Should I call a technician to inspect the main power and communications junction? At 0605 and twenty seconds, an event occurred which disabled all electrical service, ten seconds after communications were interrupted."
"And jammed the failover routing," Tony added, annoyed. "No, this was targeted. Was that guy speaking Arabic?"
"I don't… think so," Harry said, pretty sure that elves spoke their own ancient language that was closer to old Norse languages than to anything else. But he couldn't explain to Tony why he knew that.
"Yeah, me either. But maybe he was trying to sound like he was?" The possibilities were myriad as Tony thought out loud. "I have a lot of enemies. Could just be someone mad about the stock dropping. Wanted me to think it was a foreign assassin so I'd get back in the weapons game if the hit failed. Thanks, by the way."
"Don't mention it," Harry said, then gasped in relief as he was finally able to step fully free of the inert flight rig.
"Yeah. Let's… not mention it?" Tony suggested. "I mean, I'll beef up security. And it might not be safe for you to be here… Where did you learn to fight like that? Oh, right, the thieving martial arts teacher."
Harry nodded, "If we tell Aunt Pepper, I'm going to be grounded until school starts." As much as he realized he should, he really wanted to go to sorcery camp and school shopping with his friends, and just-turned-twelve-year-olds make bad decisions.
"Yeah. She might ground me too," Tony agreed. While she'd been surprisingly cool about him using her nephew as a test pilot, he didn't think she'd react well to Harry getting in the middle of an assassination attempt. "I'll look into this quietly. We won't worry her until we know more. Probably by the time you're safely at school and can just get angry letters."
Harry gestured at the broken window, "And when she sees that?"
"Repulsor misfire. Everyone's fine. All safety protocols followed."
"Wait, these can blow out a window?" Harry gasped. "If I'd have known that, I could have just shot the guy."
"Alright, Dirty Harry, maybe it's good we're taking a break from testing," Tony scoffed. "And I'm definitely not getting you a handgun for your birthday."
"Wait. Was that an option?" Harry asked. A gun would actually work on Vanaheim and be useful for if he went through another portal off of it.
"Yeah. That's naptime for you," Tony said. "I'll have JARVIS send over some more security guys for the grounds. I'll tell them somebody messed with the power box. Then once Pepper's up you can both head back to… wherever it is you two live."
"Encino," Harry told him, collecting his stuff and heading out of the garage.
"Really, Encino?" Tony boggled. "Encino."
Shortly after Harry and Pepper got back to said house in Encino, a Fry's employee hand-delivered a package for Harry containing a ludicrously nice gaming laptop. The label said, "Happy Birthday, Maverick," on it.
"Wow," Aunt Pepper said. "You impressed him enough that he didn't have me order the present."
"Got some good test data last night," Harry said, though privately he realized it was a present for saving Tony's life. He wished he just didn't feel so bad that he wasn't telling anyone that Tony had probably been in danger because of something having to do with Harry.
He could at least share it with Hermione, after she'd been sworn to not tell Tony or Aunt Pepper. "I don't know much about elves, but we can research when we get back to school," she told him after hearing the story. "Why would they try to kill Mr. Stark? Do you remember exactly what the elf said?"
"Lots of big words," Harry told her. "I just understood 'Harry Potter' and 'Hogwarts.' And maybe something that sounded like 'No' was in there."
"Hmph," Hermione sighed, eventually suggesting, "Well if he wanted to keep you from going back to Hogwarts, making you a murder suspect would certainly keep you from leaving LA."
"He did go a long way to make sure it wouldn't get recorded," Harry agreed. "I wonder if he was expecting us to go to bed before dawn. Kill Tony in his sleep? Then he panicked when we were still up."
"I guess just keep your eyes open. I was trying to tell you that we're on for the camp at Kamar-Taj two weeks before school starts. I can't imagine an elf can get to you once you're there."
With two weeks to kill and a murderous elf to watch out for, Harry was a little surprised to find that even on a cutting-edge gaming rig, there was just something missing after all the real-life adventures he'd been having. He spent more time on Plants vs. Zombies and Braid than he did on anything that would really test the limits of the laptop, because shooters and fighting games no longer did it for him. Life in Gryffindor had turned him into an adrenaline junkie.
Finally, the time came and Master Wong stepped through to pick Harry up. Pepper, who happened to be around that afternoon, was extremely gracious in thanking him for all the personal help he'd given Harry over the last year, then sent them on their way.
The week that followed was less of a summer camp than the twelve-year-olds had really expected. Wanting to give them the full experience, they were basically treated like new apprentices: pre-dawn exercise, hours learning martial arts forms, extended meditation, and the rest of the curriculum. But by the end of the week, each of them had at least managed to project energy without a wand, and had a whole training routine down to try to extend that to the other spells they'd learned that used their personal energy. Harry felt like he was on the very edge of figuring out how to manifest an energy whip without a wand, and that would be a huge help if they got pulled off of Vanaheim again.
"Remember," Wong cautioned them on the last day, "we expect you to use good judgement if you're on Earth. Only use this in an emergency, of if you're sure no one who doesn't know about magic is watching. Think about ways to conceal your magic. And if you're on camera, it might actually be better that you die rather than use a spell."
"Master Wong," Kaecilius broke in, with his accent that Harry had eventually learned was Danish, "you don't need to scare the children. We have the Runes of Kof-Kol for a reason."
"I hate that spell," Wong argued. "Better to take things seriously than need a memory spell of that magnitude."
"Is that what you used on Stane?" Harry asked, remembering that Wong had adjusted Obie's memory about him and his oddities.
Wong just huffed in acknowledgement, and Kaecilius smiled in triumph. "Certainly, keep your powers a secret. But no one of you should die just to keep that secret. We get so few Hogwarts-trained students as it is."
"How many do you get?" Hermione asked, still not certain she wanted to sign up.
Wong counted up, "Maybe half the kids from Earth stay on Vanaheim after graduating. We get most of the ones that come back. Up to five, some years."
"Which leaves us with under a hundred, across all the sanctums," Kaecilius provided the total, "since so few of the Masters make it to retirement age."
"Now you're scaring the children," Wong chastised.
"The girl has concerns about whether this life is too dangerous," he shrugged. "I have similar concerns, some days."
"So's Hogwarts," Dean shrugged.
"I'd been meaning to ask about that," Wong said. "Cho said something about trolls and a teacher going missing?"
"And she doesn't even know about the dragon," Parvati gushed. She had, of course, spread that fact all the way around Gryffindor about twelve hours after Seamus had found out from Ron, exactly as predicted.
With Parvati spilling the secret adventures of Hogwarts, the other four had little else to do but occasionally provide clarifications.
"I am forced to agree with Mr. Thomas," Kaecilius ultimately stated. "Hogwarts seems quite dangerous."
"I'll brief the other Masters," Wong nodded. "Perhaps the Ancient One can convince the headmaster to warn us of these problems. But, for now, it's time to get all of you back."
"Remember, Goblin Market next Wednesday," Hermione cautioned.
"We're sending a search party for a stabby elf if you aren't there," Dean added.
"I'll see you all then," Harry confirmed.
After they were all through the portals, Kaecilius turned to Wong and asked blandly, "Stabby elf?"
Shiväisith translations (I did my best with limited available vocabulary):
Passajamanal onolar elithidhenne äth? "Are you prepared for your sacrifice?"
Harry Potter djonjel nola Hogwarts. "Harry Potter going not to Hogwarts."