AN: Hey everybody, sorry about the delay but life happens. To make it up to you here's a double post! Enjoy! -Galaleo
October 2012, Harry's Workshop
The day after the 'Sokovia Raid' the team had gathered and spent the weekend relaxing at the resort. Inevitably they went back to work, Nat and Clint were called in for recon missions, Steve was summoned to Washington, Bruce was back in California working with Betty on the serums that Fury sent them, and Tony was in his lab.
With everyone else doing their own thing Harry found himself in his workshop looking over his notes on what to work on next. No major missions are on the radar, so he thought he should start looking into metal supplies. His vast use of silver to create vibranium is costing an arm and a leg and his personal stores were taking a major hit. That led him to something he and Tony had discussed a while back. Space travel. Using space travel to collect or mine silver deposits from the asteroid belt.
Gathering together the materials needed Harry started the process of crafting a ship. First he designed the outside, a solid vibranium construct that looked like an oblong oval. Next he picked what runes, enchantments, and utilities he would need. Last but not least he would need a way to interface or pilot it without magic.
Considering Tony made a magic battery when he was trying to make magic powered electronics, he wasn't worried if there wasn't magic in space. So he started theory crafting the enchantments that would power and move his spaceship. He started with the enchantments that allowed him to fly and made a small one man sized ship. Conclusion: it was too slow. Sure it could fly faster than your average plane, but to break the atmosphere would require much more acceleration, not to mention the flight time to get to the asteroid belt. So he discarded that and moved on to a new design. This time he added a type of thruster to the back that used large versions of Tony's magical repulsors. Testing held promise when he had to stop accelerating or he would bypass Mach 20. Next was the ability to survive in space. This presented more problems due to magic never having dealt with radiation in space. He spent a few days testing different things until he groaned and smacked himself in the head.
"Magic proofing had the answer all along." He broke down Tony's rune work and filtered out radiation and not magic. He then enchanted a set of coveralls to be his space suit. From there he moved on to the ship itself. Repurposing the single man ship, he created what would be used for his first foray into space. He took the vibranium and melded it into a large oval, approximately 10 meters long, 6 meters at the widest point, and 3 meters at its highest point, he then added a ramp to the back that he could mold back into one solid piece later. Two circular thrusters sat on either side of the ramp.
With the ship's exterior completed he started his rune work and his enchantments. First he added a levitation inscription, with that he wouldn't need landing gear. Secondly, he worked on the flight capabilities, ensuring that they wouldn't fail as he added more and more to the craft. Soon he was laying down wards and enchantments, to make it a veritable fortress.
It only took 2 days for him to finally have the outside off his hand he stood back and looked at the floating silver construct. It was now adorned with etching designs marking out the door panel and adding some lines to the body of the craft. It was enchanted near indestructible, inscribed with so many protections it might survive a direct nuke including the radiation, and had stabilizers and artificial gravity.
"It isn't pretty, but it'll work." Harry then stepped away and called Tony. "Hey come over to the workshop."
"Yeah sure give me a minute." Tony said before hanging up. Harry quirked an eyebrow at Tony's short response before shrugging and walking out of the large dueling room he repurposed as a spaceship. He barely had time to grab a drink before he saw Tony walking out of the Frame. He looked like hell.
"What happened to you?" Harry asked as Tony stumbled over to the small kitchenette in his workshop. Tony didn't reply, instead he grabbed a large cup of coffee from his stasis pot and took several sips before he finally looked up.
"Well I was asleep when you called." Harry looked down at his phone and groaned when he saw the time was barely 4 am.
"My bad. I didn't look at the time. You could have just told me you'll come over later." Harry said as he waved his hand making two seats for them to sit in. Tony shuffled over and groaned as he relaxed into the chair while Harry took the other.
"I would have, but I could hear something in your voice that I hadn't heard since we finished those flying belts. I figured you made something really impressive to not notice the time." Tony explained as he kept drinking his coffee. Harry smirked in response and waited for Tony to finally wake up. "Alright I got my coffee, show me what you got." Tony said as he jumped out of his chair and rubbed his hands together. Harry stood, vanished the chairs and led Tony into his dueling room.
"Behold! The first magical space ship!" Harry said, waving his arm and presenting the floating oval. Tony paused as he entered the room and just stared at it. "Impressive right?" Tony didn't reply, he was already off, inspecting the runes, searching Harry's notes and going over the designs. Harry was still impressed every time he saw Tony's genius. He had seen Tony absorb information in rapid paces, make innovations in fields he's barely studied, and diagnose problems with little to no effort. Sure he could be an ass and sometimes he would overlook really obvious things, but he was still a genius. Harry would wonder what Hermione would do with the information he has available to him.
30 minutes later Tony was standing next to Harry staring at the ship. "Based on everything you've noted down and the enchantments, this should work. Do you know the max speed?" Tony asked.
"No. I flew the ship in the atmosphere and hit Mach 20 before stopping and slowing down. The ship didn't even shake and what was before I made this larger one, that has way more enchantments." Harry explained.
"That should be everything you need then. It only has to exit the atmosphere." Tony said with a nod as he pulled out his phone and started making notes, but Harry was confused.
"What do you mean it only has to exit the atmosphere? I need to travel to the asteroid belt for my plans." Harry said. Tony looked up suddenly and gave him a weird look.
"You planned to fly there?" Tony asked. Harry nodded slowly as if Tony was stupid for asking. "Why not make a portal once you're in space?" Tony watched as Harry's face went from incredulous to baffled to despair. Harry collapsed backwards into a chair that appeared and just put his face into his hands. "You didn't think of that did you?" Harry shook his head without looking up. Tony sighed and patted his back, he knew the feeling well.
After that everything moved fairly quickly. Tony and Harry started designing the interior. Harry expanded to space inside the ship making enough room for storage, a bridge, and quarters. Tony had an idea to add a long range telescope to use as a means of making portals, and Harry had to create a magical focus that connected to the nose of the craft, so he could open his portals in front of the ship.
Soon enough Tony and Harry were standing on the bridge, both in white coveralls. The bridge was a large room at the front of the ship. The exterior wall was rounded and led to the back wall of the bridge. Two doors were placed on the ends of the back wall, they opened to walkways that went around the exterior wall, to the rear exit of the ship. The inside of the walkways were the entrances of the crew's quarters, storage, and 'engine room'. The exterior wall was enchanted see through and showed the field outside Harry's house. Bars were placed alongside the exterior wall to ensure it looked more like a window than open space. The bridge had several stations that floated above the exterior wall, one was the captain's chair where all the controls to fly the ship were located. A pilot's station that also had a control station, a scanner slash telescopic station that used a set of scrying charms to view the space around them, and several chairs for people who joined them in travel.
"Ready to be the first private citizens in space?" Tony asked. Harry smirked and sat in the captain's chair. A control panel rose out of the floor and situated itself in front of him. Tony sat in the next chair and strapped himself in. Harry took control of the ship and pointed to the sky, slowly they moved upwards.
"Approaching the edge of the stratosphere." Harry said as the ship's 'window' showed the sky turning darker and darker. With no fanfare whatsoever Harry and Tony found themselves looking at space, the sun off to the side already being filtered to protect their eyes. Slowly Harry stopped the ship and turned it, showing the Earth in all its glory. "Wow."
Tony didn't say anything and just stared at the sight before him. The Earth sparkled from the refracted light. They stood there staring for several minutes basking in the knowledge that they are now part of a very small group of humans. Shaking himself free Harry turned the ship away for the sun. He checked the levels of magic being fed into the ship and noticed there was a slight loss of energy being brought in. Nodding he stood up and moved to a separate workstation on the side, it had a large display that was currently a blank screen. He turned it on revealing it to be an image of what's in front of them. Moving the image it was soon zooming across space before stopping. He soon found himself looking at a large collection of rocks in space. Moving back to the captain's chair he focused and placed his hands on a focus rod attached to the side. Within seconds a large portal formed in front of the ship showing the same image of floating rocks. Slowly he flew through and the portal closed behind him. Harry and Tony were now sitting in the asteroid belt on their solar system.
"It worked." Harry said with some awe as the large asteroids slowly drifted along.
"So how are you going to mine them?" Tony asked. Harry just pulled out of a device. He handed it to Tony.
"That is going to point out any silver deposits and the portal focus will be used to make portals into the vacuum sealed storage bays." Harry explained. Soon they were flying through the belt and Tony pointed out what to grab and Harry used his portals to leave the large rocks in storage. By the time storage was getting full they had pulled several house sized asteroids. Soon they were once again sitting just outside Earth's atmosphere. "Want to see how fast this can go?"
"Of course I do." Tony said as he retook his seat. Harry aimed the ship at the moon and started accelerating. Over the next few minutes they watched as the Moon started getting larger and larger. Cursing Harry started to slow the ship until they were sitting a few miles above the surface of the moon.
"Well I don't know the exact speed, but that was about 15 minutes." Harry said as he looked over the rocky surface.
"That's around 15 thousand miles a minute, or 250 miles a second." Tony calculated. "Could you go any faster?" Harry nodded.
"When I realized how quick we were coming up on the moon I had to decelerate. I was still accelerating at that point. On another note, I don't have a speedometer." Harry said as he brought the ship down to land. Tony stood when the ship stopped moving and followed Harry to the exit ramp. "Let me go first and check the suits before you follow." Harry then sealed off the room near the exit ramp and made several very small holes allowing the room to decompress. Not feeling any different he lowered the ramp and walked down a bit. When nothing happened he walked back up and allowed Tony to join him. Soon they both stepped off the ramp and looked at the moon's surface. Tony was bouncing around and laughing, though Harry couldn't hear him. "Remember the comm earrings require intent Tony." Harry then moved off to the side and waved his hand trying to conjure a chair. It didn't work but he felt the effort. Frowning he transfigured the ground into a chair and felt much less strain. Feeling stupid once again he realized that there wasn't anything in the vacuum of space to use as a base for conjuration.
"So magic works in space?" Tony asked as he bounced over, still looking all around like a kid in a candy store. Harry sat there thinking about it.
"Well Magic is made of three types of energy; life, chaos, and quantum. I did notice magic is much harder in space. The ship was reading a lower level of ambient magic, but not low enough to stop running. So I can only assume that life energies are present, but muted." Harry finished, his eyes drifting up and seeing the sun shining in all its glory. "Maybe the sun is giving off enough life energy to power magic, meaning that other systems could be different."
"That is something we'll have to test when we start moving further from our solar system. First we need to make a ship that doesn't require you or your portals." Tony said as he finally stopped moving around. "I doubt you'll want to be on every expedition we go on."
"Definitely." After that they both quieted and Harry made another chair for Tony. Together they just looked out at the cosmos. Stars were so much brighter being unfiltered by the atmosphere. The sun was being partially blocked by Harry's enchantments, but everything else was pure. They sat and watched the Earth in all its glory before they both got up and got back on the ship. Harry didn't take the 'long' way home and just used his portals to once again appear back outside the atmosphere. 10 minutes later Harry was standing in his backyard removing the space suit.
"Well it worked. Now you have a way of relishing your stock of silver. Which means it's time for the new Stark Phones to be released." Tony said as he flattened out his rumbled t-shirt.
"Nah, I already had the supply you need for several million phones stockpiled. I would like Jarvis to fabricate the batteries though. Considering they don't use any runes or active enchantments, he could get the whole thing done with just the new alloy." Harry said. Tony nodded as they both moved to his workshop. They were excited that the new batteries, using very small amounts of vibranium, would allow the phones to basically run for weeks without needing a charge.
In the workshop they finalized their designs and Harry sent Tony on his way with a bag holding all the stock he would need for months. After that Harry finished up making everything about Magic Innovations that needed to be released, public. Tony also worked with Pepper to facilitate his company's knowledge on MI, so that they could answer any question on the new phones that might come up. With that done Harry moved off to get dinner ready for the twins who should be home in just a few hours.