Harry had most of the next week free before his back-to-back summer camps started. In addition to his regular full-tilt attempt to catch back up on all the media he'd missed over the year, he sat down and built a pair of magic glasses. It wasn't that exciting. But he finally had enough runes knowledge to put some minor effects on his eyewear, and access to Tony's micro-engravers to get them small enough to fit on his frames.
Reinforcement runes would make them much harder to break. A couple of runes on the earpieces would prevent them being dislodged from his head if he didn't want them to come off. He worked in a tinting scheme that would beat out the best transitions lenses for speed of going from clear to sunglasses. And then there was the newly-important one: making his eyes always look normal, even if they suddenly turned orange.
He really needed to talk to someone about that issue.
Then on the 10th, he was following his instructions to bring a week of clothes and portal over to where he'd met Ying Nan in the bamboo forest during the third task. Harry, like any nearly-15-year-old, had been trying to be cool about his sudden freedom to travel. He obviously knew better than to use his sling ring in public. But in private… he'd gotten a little too comfortable opening portals for his friends to come over and watch TV. And when he felt like popping over to the Encino house to get some private time. He'd even made one to reach into the kitchen for snacks a couple of times.
Basically, he was getting a lot of practice at making portals and that's what he'd insist to anyone from Kamar-Taj that acted like he wasn't taking it seriously enough.
He'd left late enough in the evening, New York time, to get to China around sunrise, much as he had during the task. If anything, the glade was even more beautiful at the height of summer than it had been in mid-spring. But that was barely a taste of what he was about to see. The enigmatic martial artist met him there, made him swear so many oaths about keeping secret the place she was about to show him, and then led him through a waterfall and into a parallel world.
Harry couldn't tell anyone specifics about the Asian fantasy kingdom that he visited, but his D&D games were going to have some rich cultural foundations for a while.
It felt like longer than a week, and it was hard to tell whether it was because the place had a different flow of time or just that everything was so interesting. Harry spent most of his time in the promised intense martial arts training with Ying Nan, but he also got to spend some time on spear and archery fighting, armor manufacture, and Ta Lo storytelling (he was glad they spoke Chinese, which his implant translated). And he got to meet an honest-to-Odin protector dragon. It was a lot better than his last dragon encounter on Muspelheim.
By the end of the week, he didn't seem to have worn out his welcome, though he hadn't quite done well enough that the locals felt like loading him down with gifts. They seemed to think that the shed dragonscales that they used in most of their weapons and armors might be too risky to release into Earth, and he hadn't pressed the issue. He was taking away an immense amount of unique knowledge, after all, and he'd just have to content himself at being better at martial arts but not having an awesome set of armor or weapons.
"You have to tell me all about it!" Hermione insisted, when he met back up with his friends at Kamar-Taj, his first week of summer camp blending immediately into a second.
"Can't. Classified," he shrugged. Relenting a little, he explained, "I can teach you the martial arts I learned? It's like the soft style. My teacher could basically do air bending. I may never get good enough to do that, but just learning how to flow out of the way of attacks was huge."
The girls were interested in a special fighting style that didn't rely on muscle mass, and Dean was keen to learn any martial art in principle. For their part, the Masters were thrilled that Harry was so ready to spend camp teaching his friends: they'd honestly run out of obvious subjects for the precocious teens. They were still too young to make deals with Principalities, and were scraping up on the edge of what even very-trained apprentices could do with their personal magic. There was a lot more theory to learn, of course, but other than getting the rest of them to Harry's level with astral projection, there wasn't too much practical to teach them until they turned 18.
So the Ancient One was thrilled to help Harry learn to be a better teacher. It was an excellent way to improve one's personal skills, anyway. If it took some of the expectations off of the Masters, so much the better.
During one of those one-on-one sessions, Harry finally got a chance to explain the situation with his eyes turning orange. "What do you think is happening?" the Ancient One challenged him, from where they were having a very comfortable morning discussion on the ramparts of Kamar-Taj.
Harry had obviously had a couple of weeks to really think about it, so didn't take long to start explaining, "I don't know if it started when I actually touched the Soul Stone, or maybe all the way back when my mom saved me with it as a baby. There have been a few times I could just, like, understand people, you know?" He paused for a minute, and revealed, "Also, I had a bunch of weird dreams that were probably me seeing what was going on with Loki and the aliens all year."
"And they turn your eyes orange?"
"According to Peter. He's the first one that told me. It makes my scar itch, too," he shrugged.
"I will not pretend I have all the answers in this instance, like some others might…" she began.
"Like Dumbledore?"
She smirked, not denying the old man's tendency to act omniscient. Instead, she continued, "The Time Stone has failed to give me innate powers, despite how long I've spent with it. And it is the only one of the Stones I'm familiar with: the others are rumor, being moved about the universe, and hidden again as quickly as they are discovered. But I get glimpses. A little over two decades ago, I felt a surge of energy I did not feel again until the events of two months ago, and I believe someone on Earth gained powers."
"An air force pilot!" Harry agreed, putting together the redacted information about Carol Danvers he'd read in the Avengers Initiative tablet. "I think she was flying a ship that used the Tesseract as a power source, and it blew up. She can fly, shoot energy beams, and blow up kree spaceships."
The Ancient One mentally filed that piece of intelligence away in case it was ever relevant, and continued, "The other Stones have less verifiable histories, but the legends of many worlds speak of those that gained powers from them. Their favor seems arbitrary, even whimsical. An enhanced sight seems far less powerful than being able to destroy spaceships, but it could be very valuable as a method of gaining knowledge, if you learned to control it."
"So you don't think it's dangerous?"
"Every single thing we've taught you over the last four years could be dangerous. But, no, I think this is just another power you must master, not some kind of liability, for all that it may seem dangerous that you can't predict when it will work." She considered for another moment and then suggested, "Orange eyes are a rare enough color that you might question anyone else you find with them to see if it might be related."
That conversation was on the 20th of July, and that evening, late on a Friday evening in Kathmandu, his phone started to ring. It was weird for any teen's phone to ring: he pretty exclusively texted with his friends, and, anyway, nearly all his same-aged friends with phones were in the building. Dean shared the same Kamar-Taj bedroom. "Your ringtone is 70s rock?" his best friend asked, groggily.
"Jailbreak, by AC/DC. Tony must have set it. I don't think anybody's called me since I got this phone, so I didn't think about it," Harry explained. He was still using the phone Tony had sent him during the events in New York, since it was newer and better than the one he'd originally left on Vanaheim. He'd struggled out of the spartan-but-comfortable bed and checked the caller ID. "It's Nat."
"Oooh, Natasha," Dean chuckled from bed.
"It's not like that. Anymore," Harry argued, then accepted the call. "Hey." Maybe he put a little more smoothness into that syllable than he would have for his other friends. Or any of the other Avengers.
"Harry!" Natasha's voice sounded over the line. "Are you in a secure location? Pepper said you're at summer camp?"
"Basically," he agreed, "since it's just me and Dean."
"Can you come help with some Avengers stuff? Should only take a few hours. Hopefully."
"Uh, it's kind of late here," he said, asking Dean, "You think I can leave for a few hours to do Avengers stuff?"
"I'll tell anyone that asks," Dean agreed, sleepily.
"Yeah. Meet you at the Tower?" he checked.
"Actually, can you get to Chicago, or do we need to send a jet?"
"Maybe," he considered, having at least been there on a layover a couple of times. "Is Tony there? Want me to grab him when I get my armor?"
"He probably is, but don't grab him. This is more covert. I'll explain when you get here. I'll send you the coordinates," she signed off.
"Hopefully back before anyone's up," Harry informed Dean, who made a noncommittal noise like he'd already gotten most of the way back to sleep. Hoping he wasn't going to get in trouble, the Boy-Who-Lived spun open a portal to his room at the Tower and stepped through.
Ten minutes later (putting on armor correctly was surprisingly complicated, and it was harder to rush when missiles weren't blowing up buildings right down the street), Arcane was stepping out of another portal on one of the runways at O'Hare. He shrugged and put his finger in front of his masked lips to the guy driving the baggage truck that had swerved off course as he stepped out, then climbed onto his broom and took off into the sky.
Presumably just the rumor he was in town wouldn't blow the "more covert" thing Natasha had mentioned.
It only took him about fifteen minutes to cross the distance from the airport to the location she'd given him. He could have made it there faster, but he was trying to be fully concealed and leave his cloak mostly covering him as he flew toward Lake Michigan. As he came in for a landing, he dodged skyscrapers and touched down on the Rookery building, where he could see he was not far west of a large, lakefront park. "I'm on the roof," he texted Nat, as he stowed his broom and went looking for a way down into the building.
"That was fast. Up in a minute," she replied.
When she met him, she was wearing a brunette wig and a fairly conservative skirt suit. She would never exactly blend, but if he hadn't been looking for her, he didn't think he'd have been like, "That's Natasha!" Presumably it was enough of a change that people that had just seen footage of her at the Battle of New York wouldn't make the connection. "Cloak up and follow me," she suggested.
They took the elevator back down and entered a room on the west edge of the building, where Clint and Steve were also set up, seemingly doing a stakeout of the large bank building across the street. As he let his cloak retract when the door closed behind him, Clint wearily asked, "Magic?"
"Magic," the wizard agreed. Seeing they were alone in the room, he peeled the mask off and asked, "What's going on?"
Clint was dressed as some kind of utility worker in coveralls, and blended as well as Harry had assumed he would into any blue collar job. Steve was wearing an oversized pair of jeans and t-shirt that didn't do much to hide how physically fit he was. He had a large artist's portfolio that bulged from hiding his shield but at least disguised the contours of it. "Bank robbery," the Captain said, all business, despite his relaxed attire. "They have a Chitauri rifle from New York. They've hit a dozen banks already. And SHIELD's analysts predict this one is next. Somehow."
"Escalation," Natasha explained. "For the first couple of weeks after New York, they were strictly smash and grab. SHIELD probably should have rolled them up pretty quickly, but all our field officers were busy."
"And nobody asked us," Clint rolled his eyes.
"They made it down to Florida and then turned around and started back north instead of leaving the country. They've been hitting bigger and bigger banks up through the midwest. Not just money. They've started looting safe deposit boxes, and the connection is banks for former Roxxon Oil executives. Their CEO keeps a box here, and we put out chatter that he's moving his private holdings across the country tonight."
"So we think they're going to rob this one and we need to stop them. Got it," Harry summed up.
"Hopefully in a low-key way," Steve cautioned. "They've been doing a lot of property damage with that thing to keep any guards from trying to respond. Maybe we can talk them down. But number one priority is keeping them from hurting civilians."
Harry offered, "I think I've worked out how to hit an object with a tracking spell, so if I can get the rifle or their car with that, we can let them think they got away and follow them. I don't think I can just break the gun." Whatever alien metals the Chitauri weapons were made of had resisted Harry's attempts to use transfiguration on them during the Battle of New York.
"Sounds good," Steve nodded and laid out a plan, "Romanoff and I will be inside. Barton's on overwatch. You go invisible and keep where you need to, whether that's to look for an opening behind them or mark their vehicle if it's safer to let them run."
Within twenty minutes, they were following through. Black Widow was inserted behind the tellers as if she was a manager. Captain America was over on the other side of the floor pretending to wait for a meeting with a broker. There wasn't a convenient utility pole in the dense business heart of Chicago, but Hawkeye had arranged a scaffold to be set up on the building across the street and was pretending to patch some brick on the facade. And Arcane was loitering invisibly just inside the bank lobby near the door but out of the way of foot traffic.
Then the waiting began.
It was an hour and a half of sitting quietly propped in a corner, invisible, and getting sleepier and sleepier before something happened. Hawkeye, who had the worst of it having to be outside in the afternoon heat the whole time, explained over the comms, "This looks like a probable. White Sprinter van pulling up illegally. Yeah, here they come. Same black and pink ski masks. And you can't miss the gun."
Moments later, the promised bank robbers came piling in through the brass revolving door, barely managing to make it through with the oversized pulse rifle. The man in the lead wielded the gun, and the woman in the pink mask behind him started yelling, "This is a robbery! Nobody move and nobody gets hurt!" The man fired a shot that was meant to blow up an unoccupied table in the middle of the lobby, and seemed very surprised to have the blast evaporate off of the famous shield of Captain America, who'd dived in the way.
Before Arcane could decide whether to jump in, Hawkeye added, "There's still a driver in the van. Better tag it before I take a shot at the tire, just in case."
"On it," he confirmed, quietly, slipping out the non-revolving door closest to him and spotting the large white van parked over the curb and halfway onto the sidewalk, facing the wrong way on the street. The windows were slightly tinted, but as his cloak fell away so he could do the complex gestures to brand the vehicle with a glyph of his personal energy that he could track, he caught a glimpse of the face of the driver, and the oversized "turban" he was wearing. "The driver's Doctor Bighead!" he warned.
Unfortunately, the gamma-enhanced genius, Stearns, saw him as well, looked annoyed but not surprised, and floored the van back into traffic, somehow avoiding an accident with the cars already on the road. Hawkeye's arrow hit the back passenger-side tire, but somehow just bounced off. "That's new," he said, never having seen such a robust wheel. "Assume the vehicle is armored."
"He likes to build stuff," Arcane confirmed.
"Keep up with him," we've got it handled in here, the Captain ordered. While scrappy enough that they might have given a SHIELD field officer like Sitwell some difficulty, the modern-day Bonnie and Clyde weren't remotely a match for Captain America and Black Widow, even with an energy cannon. "Send us a location when he stops."
"I can do you one better," the team's mage explained, pulling his broom out of his armor pocket and waving to the pedestrians and drivers that had realized what they were seeing. "When you're done, meet up where Cap was sitting. I'll portal you in. But I'm going to try to stop him before he can get into a hideout. Who knows what kind of traps he'll have."
"Be careful," the team's combat leader cautioned.
Rather than what Arcane expected, and making for some parking garage where he could ditch the van and enter a lair, Stearns seemed to be heading east at maximum speed for the busy Friday afternoon streets, honking and weaving between cars, getting nearly up to interstate speeds over a couple blocks down State Street, before pulling a real Grand Theft Auto and weaving between cars going the wrong way up Madison. He'd certainly made improvements to the van.
Clearing the buildings to get a view of the vehicle as it wove through cars blaring their horns across Michigan Avenue, he warned the team, "He's going into the park. I can see that shiny sculpture thing on my left."
"The Bean," Hawkeye said, just as the Captain said, "The Cloud Gate."
"He's ramping up into the tourist area around it. Patio? Pavilion? Whatever. I'm going in before he runs somebody over." As he raced his broom down toward the plaza, dozens of people were, indeed, running out of the way of the inexplicable van bearing down the pedestrian walkway, smashing handrails as it drove up the stairs, and wheeling left as if Stearns thought the Cloud Gate was an actual portal that would get him out of there.
The van pulled a bootlegger's turn just in front of the large, mirrored sculpture and faced the descending sorcerer, revving the engine a couple of times. Arcane landed and quickly stowed the broom, falling into a casting stance about thirty yards from the vehicle. Even if he couldn't manifest any magical constructs that could stop the souped-up van, he was hoping he could trick Stearns into crashing into the trees or stone guardrails behind him.
But instead, the megalomaniacal nerd's voice issued from a loudspeaker, insisting, "I guess you were really sandbagging in the library, huh?" It was a solid implication that he'd used his intellect to work out Arcane's secret identity. At least he wasn't shouting it into the crowd. "But this time, I'm prepared." Suddenly, the van began to break apart and reshape, the cab lifting into the center of what quickly became a 20-foot-tall humanoid battlemech.
"You built a transformer?" Arcane asked, aghast, not even sure he was loud enough to be heard across the plaza.
"I built a transformer!" Stearns agreed, with manic glee.
"Did this turn into a fight instead of a covert operation?" Iron Man's voice butted into the comms. "I can be out there in twenty minutes."
"Get on your balcony and you can be here as soon as we need you," Arcane suggested back, boggling at the giant robot.
"Oh, right, we're thinking with portals now," the billionaire agreed. "I'll be in position."
Unfortunately, finding a safe moment to open a portal was turning out to be a challenge. Clearly, the plasma cannon the bank robbers had been using wasn't the only one Stearns had come across, his genius had been enough to get them working where nobody else seemed to be able to, and he'd incorporated two of them into his transforming power armor. "It turns out you don't need a miniature arc reactor with some of the alien batteries," he was explaining, as if teaching a class, as he blew up the plaza stone at Arcane's frantically dodging feet.
"Guys, bringing you in hot," he said into the comms, expecting it would be easier to get the nearer Avengers. The mech suit didn't seem to be able to move fast and he was able to break line of sight behind a tree long enough to get under his cloak, reposition, and find a spot he could hopefully start opening a portal without immediately being blasted.
"That's some good invisibility!" Stearns complimented, ceasing his blasts. "Scanners are getting nothing. Is 'magic' something anyone can learn, or is it a genetic mutation? Anyway, I appreciate you picking up the clues. I thought I'd have to drag those kids around half the country before SHIELD figured out the pattern, and then I thought I'd have to put down between two and five agents before they sent the Avengers in. Oh, is that a portal? The cake really is a lie!"
Arcane barely got the magical doorway to close in front of a plasma blast that would have gone into the bank lobby, and narrowly avoided splinching Hawkeye's foot as he dove through last. Fortunately all three teammates were going fast enough to be out of the explosion radius as it instead hit a tree some distance back, sending burning splinters everywhere. "That's a big robot," the Captain noted. "I'll get its attention, Widow, flank and look for weak spots, Hawkeye, I hope you brought explosive arrows."
"Never leave home without them," the archer agreed, moving to find a safe vantage.
"So do you want to know my plan?" the villain asked, sending a stray blast that the Captain deflected while trundling the suit forward. "You make a lot of people nervous. People that will pay to see you taken down. And then pay the guy who invented the weapons that could do it."
"This is all your audition as a weapons dealer?" the super soldier demanded, moving into range to test the robot's armor while staying inside the gun's minimum effective range.
"For a start. Also, did you know Chicago has a bunch of organized criminals that want some of the glory?"
With that call to tag in, several of the "tourists" that had sheltered in place rather than running popped up with balaclava masks on and a wide range of Earth-made firearms. Captain America was immediately back on the defensive since they seemed to know the van was bulletproof but the hero wasn't.
Arcane hadn't been idle, having once again moved even further out to have enough time to open a portal to the Tower balcony. Iron Man rocketed through the moment it looked stable, narrowly missing the Bean as he misjudged his angle and because his sensors were confused by the reflective sculpture. He certainly started drawing fire from the gang members, taking some pressure off the others.
"Okay. I really would have planned for instant adds if I'd known you could make portals. It's new. It's unfair. But I respect the hustle," Stearns continued to monologue as he began to focus on Iron Man in a power armor fight.
Across the plaza from Arcane, Black Widow was a dervish, using a balletic series of moves to foul aim and functionally dodge bullets by moving in a way even several gunmen couldn't cover. She was still in her bank outfit, but had ditched the wig and managed to pick up her "Widow's Sting" bracers, several of her thrown taser nodes, and was scooping up handguns as she took their wielders down.
Hawkeye hadn't found any useful high ground, so was moving and firing, impaling the gun arm of anyone he saw getting close to a clear shot on himself or the others. In a moment of freedom from targeting, he managed to land an arrow into the mech's right knee, triggering a fizzing thermite payload to begin melting through the components.
Captain America's tactical awareness remained unmatched, his shield bouncing between opponents and yet back in his hand to deflect bullets as soon as someone was taking a shot at him.
"Regular guns I can mess with," Arcane said, mostly for dramatic effect. He dropped out of invisibility behind a quartet of gangsters with honest-to-Odin uzis that were giving the others a hard time and made a sweeping set of gestures. Sirius had shown him the trick of what he'd done against the dark elves the previous year: rather than just subtly fouling the gun barrels, they audibly clanked as all empty space within imploded.
Iron Man was having a surprisingly hard time with Stearns, since the super-genius had been able to study his attack style from video recordings. The armor on the mech was optimized to deflect repulsors and micro-missiles. "Oh, come on," the villain complained, "you're almost through the gang already? I gave them a much higher chance of shooting at least one of you." He did not yet sound like he was actually worried about losing.
Seeing that the others were about to finish off the gang, Arcane tried something. He still wasn't able to do much with wildly-different portal directions, with his attempts tending to orient both the opening and closing portals in the same way. But he could, for example, make a portal facing the ground several feet above his head and on the ground right behind the robot's left leg.
Iron Man and Hawkeye saw the magical hole open and shot with missiles and explosive arrows to drive the villain back just enough. Meanwhile, Arcane was sprinting out from under his own portal as a robot leg fell through, hanging awkwardly in thin air once Stearns caught himself on the plaza pavestones. Before he could figure out how to pull free, the portal irised closed, alien-alloyed armor plating no match for splinching. The severed leg clanked to the ground and the mech was suddenly having a hard time protecting its back from attacks seeking gaps in the armor.
"Fish biscuits!" Stearns cursed, the robot's PA system still operational. "Next time, I'll plan for portals."
"Assuming there's going to be a next time?" Iron Man dismissed, with his own suit-amplified voice.
"For sure. Get 'em, Bean!"
The Cloud Gate sculpture began to emit a disturbing hum, and the reflections of sunlight off its mirrored surface started to flicker as if the entire skin was vibrating. "What did you do?" Iron Man demanded, landing so he could use his cutting lasers to try to pry Stearns out of the mostly-immobilized robot.
"Someone set us up the bomb!" the genius cackled, wondering, "Is your armor shielded against gamma radiation? What about your friends? I'm pretty sure it'll just make me stronger. Not sure what it will do to regular people, but it should be neat."
"You're actually insane!" Arcane realized, moving over to try to get a look at the device. The sculpture was something like 20 yards across at its longest side. Had he turned the whole thing into an emitter or was there a bomb just hidden inside? "You could kill thousands of people!" And that was assuming any energy it released got blocked by the high rises around the park. If it kept going, it could be far more.
"Insanity would be allowing SHIELD to maintain its super-powered enforcement wing!" Stearns countered, still seemingly safe in a metal womb within the van as Iron Man tried to dig him out. "You're all just agents of an increasingly-fascistic government! I need to stop this before every nation in the world has its own set of jackbooted thugs with laser beams!"
"Stark, can you move it?" Black Widow asked, over their comms. She was still restraining the downed gangbangers while looking in horror at the device.
JARVIS supplied, "The Cloud Gate sculpture weighs an approximate one-hundred tons. It is far outside the Mark Six's lifting capacity."
"And I can't even cut it open, without risking my lasers reflecting who knows where," Iron Man groaned. "Give me a minute. Maybe he has a shutdown inside the armor."
JARVIS countered, "Based on the frequency, I estimate you have thirty seconds."
"I'm going to try something," Arcane said, having rushed around the Bean and gotten a good idea of its dimensions. It was huge, yes, but it was stationary and nobody was shooting at him anymore. He was going to have to try a couple of new tricks, but Wong had at least shown him the theory…
Spinning his right hand above his head in ever-larger circles, a fiery portal began to open directly above the mirrored sculpture, making it look like it was covered in falling sparks reflected in the curved surface. Grimacing under his mask with the effort and basically whipping his arm around like he was doing an impression of a helicopter, he coaxed the portal larger and larger still. He thought he'd reached his limit at not quite good enough, but another intensification of the vibrations within the improvised nuke gave him the energy to rip the sky open to just big enough.
Basically falling over with the gesture, he dropped his hands and forced the portal 20 yards straight down, engulfing the entire sculpture in a way that made it look like it was being erased by a cheap 2D video effect. By the time the immense, sparking ring hit the pavers, it appeared to be a magical swimming pool, showing dark, churning waters beneath.
With a negating gesture, the portal closed like a camera shutter, leaving nothing but an empty plaza and the sheared-off anchor points for the sculpture. One lone powerboater on Lake Michigan over a mile to the east had a hell of a day, watching the Bean appear out of a wheel of fire over the lake and then suddenly drop into the water. He was safely away as the bomb finally went off several seconds later, nothing but a sullen green light making it out of the depths to which the heavy sculpture quickly sank (well, sullen light and, perhaps, some soon-to-be-mutated fish).
"Got him," Iron Man announced, tearing open the mech's cockpit and dragging Stearns out into the air.
With a look as sullen as the waterlogged gamma light, Stearns declared, "Magic is bullshit."