Only slightly mollified by the fact that the terrifying floating shadow had spoken English and welcomed him, Harry cautiously prepared to run back down the mountain. But the cloaked figure, edges of his garment fading into smoke as it floated in the cold wind of the strange planet, simply settled to the ground and pulled back its hood. That wasn't much of an improvement on the terror standpoint. Beneath, its head seemed to have had the flesh ripped from it: all red tissue with no ears or nose, but otherwise seeming very human.

Harry stifled a scream as he realized why that seemed familiar, "Are you the Red Skull?"

"I was," the former leader of Hydra nodded, though he seemed a bit miffed at the nickname. "Now I am but a pale shade, called forth and forced to simply oversee a power as great as the one that brought about my demise." After a beat he asked, curious, "But, do they speak of me on Earth?"

"A little," Harry acknowledged. "I know Howard Stark's son. He told me some stories his dad told him."

"Ah, Stark," the shade that had been Johann Schmidt nodded, in memory of his dead opponent. "You are the second to come upon this mountain this day."

"Mistress Morgan," Harry agreed.

"That is not her name," the guardian cautioned.

"It's not, you're right," the woman in question's voice said, having slipped up to see who the Red Skull had left to talk to. "Hello, Harry Potter. Didn't I warn you about sneaking up on me?"

All Harry could think to say in response was, "You clean up nice." All the warts and grime must have been prosthetics, since the woman that stood before him now was no less green, but had perfectly smooth skin marred only by a few deliberate-looking scar lines and framed by vibrant dark hair, fading to red at the ends. Having shed her voluminous robes, she was wearing body-hugging leather with a few significant-looking technological apparati on her belt, and a pack on her back.

The boy was still maybe a year off from puberty and legitimate crushes, but at the very least he suspected this was the kind of woman that Tony would lose his mind trying to invite to his bedroom, if only to fulfill some Captain Kirk fetish about green alien women.

She sighed and extended an arm, causing a long silvery katana to somehow telescope out of the hilt she'd been holding, and pointed the sword at Harry. "I appreciate the compliment, but you really should have stayed home. Now come on."

Harry shot a look at the Red Skull, who just shrugged. "I am here to observe and answer questions only," was the closest thing to an apology Harry would get.

"Why are you doing this?" Harry asked, walking ahead of the imposing not-hag, out onto the sky church, monoliths and long-fallen trees passing by on either side as he walked toward the ledge overlooking an immense fall off of the mountain.

"My father needs that stone," she told him. "Sorry, you seem like a nice kid, but you only had a fifty-fifty shot anyway." As he was trying to puzzle that out, she asked the guardian, "Can I sacrifice him?"

"Is he that which you love?" the Red Skull responded.

"Flark," she said, clearly realizing that wasn't true.

Harry stood beneath the two immense monoliths at the edge, looking off the stone platform where a semicircle cutout overlooked a massive stone ring far enough below that terminal velocity was a given if he fell off—or if he was pushed. "What's he talking about?"

"The stone demands a sacrifice," the guardian explained portentously. "In order to take the stone, you must lose that which you love. A soul… for a soul."

"What about it, Potter?" his former teacher asked. He glanced back and saw frustration written on her face. She'd come all this way, and lacked the means to obtain the stone. "Anyone come with you that you love? What about Dean Thomas or Hermione Granger? You seemed close to them in class."

That made Harry angry. "You'd make me kill my friend? For what? To save my life? You don't have anyone you love? I thought you were nice."

She stepped back a bit under the tirade, but insisted, "You're still young. You don't understand pain yet. The things you'd do to make the pain stop. Love doesn't measure up. I have to return with the stone."

"Why don't you throw yourself off, then? That seems to be all you care about!" Harry shouted, the last year of revelations and manipulations finally too much stress to keep bottled up. "I lost enough for my whole life before I could even walk. Nobody else dies for me."

"Curious," the Red Skull murmured, drifting closer to the confrontation as he noticed orange light seeping in a jagged line from the boy's forehead. "It seems, perhaps, you have already lost enough. Or, more precisely—for you—the debt has already been paid."

Feeling the burning in the scar on his forehead, Harry noticed white light racing up the inside of the giant monoliths, a glowing hole forming in the sky, and then he looked down, orange light shining from within his clenched fist like it had always been there.

Her eyes widened in triumph and she raised the sword again ordering, "Give it to me!"

As Harry met the woman's eyes—Gamora, he somehow knew—it was like he could see into the center of her very being. Good intentions and hope buried in chains and barbed wire. She didn't want to be here any more than he did, but she was bathed in long-cultivated fear of betraying her father. No. Not her father. The man who'd killed her parents, and "adopted" her as if it were a kindness. Hurt her and trained her and used her as just another way to hurt other people. So many visions assailed Harry of the awful things she'd seen her "father" and his army do.

Orange light flashed in Harry's eyes and into hers as he said, "Do you really want it? It will just mean that you have to hurt more people. He isn't worth it. Your parents were the ones that died for you. Just like mine did for me."

Powered by the Soul Stone, Harry's simple words cracked the years of justifications that she had used to wall off her heart, and Gamora fell to her knees and wept.

"Can I… can I put this back?" Harry asked the Red Skull.

"You hold an Infinity Stone in your hand and ask if you can put it back?" the shade asked.

Harry told him, still seeing visions from her soul, "He killed her parents. I think he might have killed her whole planet. Is there anywhere safer to keep this? Will holding onto it protect me from him?" The dead Nazi still speechless at the idea of giving up such power, Harry looked up and realized that the disturbance in the air had never really ceased. Holding the stone aloft he said, "I don't want it anymore. And I don't want him to have it."

The stone flashed in an orange light that escaped into the sky, and then the lights dimmed, the roiling vortex returning to simple clouds.

"I think…" the Red Skull finally managed, "...that the portals may soon be closing."

"Gamora?" Harry reached down and put a hand on the woman's shoulder. "We have to go."

Still baffled, the specter of Johann Schmidt watched the Boy-Who-Lived and the Deadliest Woman in the Galaxy race back down his mountain, wondering for how much longer he would be trapped waiting for someone to take up the burden of the Soul Stone.

They ran down the mountain, snow falling in earnest now, with a sense that the eclipse in the sky might finally end… or might somehow hold its vigil until someone finally claimed the Stone.

Staggering out of the fire in the bonfire room fortunately not burned, they grabbed their brooms and raced for the next portal, flying out into the chess ravine, wary of trolls. Gamora was slight enough that she had almost as easy a time navigating the narrow cave as he did. On the other end of the enclosure, the trolls had given up trying to get past Ron's line of stone golems, most lying prone to either side of the board recuperating from the beating they'd taken. Harry could make out the redhead still having an excellent time ordering his rocky army to victory, but was privately fairly certain his roommate was never in any real danger: that the chess pieces had pinned in the trolls with no human guidance for months.

"I'll leave you here," Gamora told him, floating above the ravine floor. "I think we're on a space lane on this planet. I can call a ship. I'll tell my father…"

"He's not your father," Harry reminded her.

"Right," she nodded. "Well, I'll tell him that Dumbledore outplayed us."

"What if you didn't go back?" he asked her.

"He'd find me," she corrected. "Maybe someday I can leave." She thought about the pain that was coming for her failure, and held out the violin case, which she'd retrieved along with her broom. "Here. I wouldn't be able to keep it. Maybe you can figure out how to play."

"Thanks," he told the alien assassin. "Good luck, Gamora."

"You too, Harry Potter." With that, she flew off, and Harry motioned to Ron to stop playing chess and head for the convergence. The trolls would probably be able to escape once the portals closed and the magic wore down. Maybe they'd even eventually be able to get off the planet.

"You let her go? Or did she let you go?" Ron asked, as they met back up and flew toward the exit.

Harry explained, "I… talked her out of what she was doing. She was basically being forced to do it."

"By You-Know-Who?" Ron asked, reaching for a cultural assumption about what villain could be involved.

"Maybe," Harry agreed, still not totally sure about the identities of all the forces arrayed against him.

Any follow-up questions had to wait until they'd re-entered the swamp and dodged the flock of silvery birds, spotting their friends below, along with Hagrid, McGonagall, and Snape, who seemed like they were trying to figure out how to get into the next portal to come after Harry and Ron.

"Portals may be closing!" Harry warned everyone, as they streaked out of the sky. That was all the encouragement everyone needed to save their questions and hustle through the convergence, past the jungle, and into Garm's room where the giant wolf was once again sleeping peacefully.

"Go ahead," Hagrid ordered. "I'll wake 'im an' get 'im into the forest."

Hermione, Padma, Parvati, and Neville were waiting out in the hallway, and sighed in relief as everyone returned safely and apparently none the worse for wear. Harry had about thirty seconds of frantic, worried hugs before the barrage of questions started from all sides.

"Perhaps," Dumbledore's grandfatherly voice cut through the din as he walked around the corner into the hallway, "Mr. Potter would care to debrief me, while our other world walkers share their own experiences with their friends and professors?"

Snape just rolled his eyes, "No points lost or detentions for such a flagrant violation of rules and safety, Headmaster?"

"Assuming we agree their actions were justified," Dumbledore said with a slight grin, the flickering torchlight in the hall seeming to make his eyes twinkle behind his spectacles.

The chemistry professor just sighed in disgust, "Rather than listen to a bunch of self-congratulatory prattle, I'll be off. Brief me if it's relevant." He got a slight nod of dismissal from the headmaster, then stalked off back toward the dungeons.

"Very well, let's go to the infirmary so Madam Pomfrey can confirm you're all alright. Everyone but Potter," the rector ordered, shepherding the rest of the first-years before her as she left Harry alone with Dumbledore.

"I assume you have no injuries that aren't apparent and require a trip to the infirmary?" he asked Harry.

"No. I think I'm okay, sir. Little exhausted. Though I guess we weren't gone that long?"

The headmaster began walking toward his office, trusting the boy to follow, and suggested, "I, myself, have just arrived, but I suspect not. Though if you went all the way to the end, the physics of the planet might have had a slight effect on the passage of time."

"So it was a black hole?" Harry asked.

"I'm uncertain, myself, though I see you've been paying attention in Professor Sinestra's classes. If it's a permanent eclipse, it likewise could be due to some kind of temporal effect."

Harry held the rest of his questions until they'd climbed through the school to a doorway guarded by a gargoyle, which moved aside as Dumbledore arrived. He led Harry up a short flight of stairs into a tower office, packed so densely with magical trinkets, portraits, and books that the boy didn't even know where to look first. Well, that wasn't quite true, as his eye was drawn by a beautiful red bird the size of an eagle that was on a perch near the desk, turned away from Harry and head bowed in sleep.

"Reese's Crispy Crunchy Bar?" the headmaster offered, taking a seat behind his desk and pushing a bowl of the chocolates toward Harry.

"Thank you sir," Harry accepted, realizing he could definitely do with a snack after that adventure. He tore into the packaging while he waited for the headmaster to ask.

Dumbledore regarded some moving devices on a shelf next to him and said, "The convergence is ending, I see. Do you have it?"

"I did," Harry admitted, not surprised that the old wizard knew more or less what had happened. "I put it back."

The headmaster leaned back, examining Harry while stroking his beard. "Indeed? Very few could have given up such power. I, myself, might not have been able to make the same choice."

"But didn't you have it from Hagrid?" Harry asked. "I thought you put it on… what was it called?"

"Vormir, though I suggest you keep that name secret to reduce the chance it is found again. To answer your other question, the Stone never considered me its master, though it spent quite a few years in my possession, inert and resistant to all magic. It was waiting for someone else. I almost risked allowing it to be stolen from Gringotts, hoping it would not function for one that did not claim it with the proper sacrifice. Was my guess correct that, for you, the price had already been met?"

Harry nodded and asked, "My parents?"

"So I surmise. Your mother was a genius. I believe she worked out how to claim the Soul Stone from across the cosmos with her sacrifice, knowing it would be the only thing powerful enough to protect you."

"From Voldemort," Harry said, the name falling like a lead weight into the room. "Is that why everyone assumes I killed him? So is Gamora's father trying to do what he started?"

"Is that her real name?" He clearly committed it to memory, then said, "I don't know for sure, but I will try to find out. You did not have to destroy her?"

"You're giving me a lot of credit, sir," Harry joked.

"For even a short time, you held an Infinity Stone, Harry. Few can stand against such power, even when wielded by someone as young as you. Again, it takes a special person to give up such power." For a moment, Harry thought Dumbledore's tone was less congratulatory and more accusing. But then he said, "It was probably very wise. There are already enough forces arrayed against you."

"That's what I figured," Harry agreed. "But, no, I… convinced her that she was too good a person to be doing what she was doing. She really only needed a nudge. She said she'd tell her 'father' that you outsmarted her."

"Remarkable," the headmaster breathed. "By 'convinced' I believe you mean you used the Stone to reach her soul?"

"Another reason to give it up, sir. She just needed a nudge, but who knows what else I could do with that power? Seems like the kind of power a bad guy would have, honestly."

"Indeed. It would be tempting to fix those around you that didn't see things your way," Dumbledore admitted, seeming to finally see the flaw in the Soul Stone. "Though I suspect your one use of it was altogether for the good."

"Retired, undefeated, sir," Harry said. Seeing that there wasn't an immediate follow-up, he asked what had been on his mind, "Sir… was the whole thing an obstacle course designed to get me to Vormir? If so, why not just take me there?"

"The journey is as important as the destination, Harry," he explained, not denying that it had largely been created for the boy's benefit. "We do not appreciate things we are merely given the way we do those that we earn. Can you say you would have made the same decision with the Stone should you have just been taken straight to it?"

"I guess not," Harry allowed.

"Well then!" Dumbledore clapped. "It's getting late and I'm sure you have many more questions from your dorm-mates before you can sleep, though hopefully the others have already painted most of the picture. Good evening, Harry."

Dismissed, Harry wandered back to Gryffindor tower, having a lot of time to think about what Dumbledore had really wanted. He was sure that Aunt Pepper would have an opinion… especially once he realized how many of those challenges he could have just strolled through in an invisibility cloak.

The headmaster hadn't been wrong, and Harry was kept up late that night and still had to recount the story many times over the last weeks of school. When he wasn't having to tell the saga of the journey, most of his time was filled with more training and study: Dean had decided they really needed to have a fallback when magic didn't work, and Hermione wanted to know how to make sure magic would always work.

"We should see if we can study with the Masters before school starts," Dean suggested. "Like a magical summer camp. They can probably show us how to do magic without a wand."

"Wouldn't that be like saying we're joining after Hogwarts?" Hermione worried.

Dean shrugged, "I've already fought trolls, dragons, and monster plants. At this rate, whatever stuff the Masters fight won't be that scary."

"Maybe," Hermione said, not totally sure Dean really did understand the difference between battles with fantasy monsters and the kind of eldritch horrors the Masters of the Mystic Arts had to deal with. "Well, we can at least ask them if they'll do a summer camp without having to sign up for their army right away. It would be nice to not be defenseless off Vanaheim."

The leaving feast came faster than they'd expected, where Slytherin won the house cup. Harry wasn't too bothered: the points system didn't really motivate Gryffindor the way it did the other houses. Fred and George had lost every point Percy had earned and more, and they were still very popular, and the officious prefect was still enjoying popular acclaim for his actions on Halloween, not for his academic successes. Harry got a momentary impression, from a flicker of a glance his way before announcing the Slytherin victory, that the headmaster had considered awarding some last minute points, but decided not to.

On the train ride back, Harry was working out his itinerary, "Okay, according to the letter Wong sent, we're registered on a flight that's leaving from London about three hours before we'll be getting to the station."

"Won't that be odd?" Hermione checked.

"The government doesn't know when the train shows up," Harry shrugged. "If they check at all, maybe we just got someone to drive us from Scotland to London and it was faster than the train. Huh. There isn't even really a train on their side. Oh, Wong did say we should try to cover our faces enough to make sure the cameras in London won't do facial recognition on us. So I guess try to buy some big sunglasses and ballcaps at the station?"

"That makes sense," she agreed. "So that gives you, what, five hours or so before you're supposed to be in New York? Oh! There's some stuff we can do in the city in the evening that wasn't open in the winter."

"Can we come?" Padma asked. "We also have a fake flight back home."

"Aw. I have'ta actually fly back'ta Ireland," Seamus complained.

Ron sighed, "And me, Nev, and Lav, aren't going to Midgard at all. It's going to be a boring summer without all of you! Hey! We should see if we can at least coordinate doing our school shopping at the Market on the same day."

"That sounds doable," Harry agreed. "I think we all figured out how to open the Market portal, right?" There were nods all around. "Cool. I'll send Hedwig around to everyone to try to work that out once we get our supply list letters."

The Grangers adapted well enough to their daughter asking if they could entertain four of her friends for several hours on a summer afternoon when they'd just been planning to take her straight home. "We can't fit all those trunks in the car, though," her father insisted.

"All seven of us, either," her mother corrected. "I suppose we could do some things around downtown."

"We can drop the others' trunks at the sanctum," Hermione suggested. "I need to ask Master Rama about summer training anyway."

"I'll just put your trunk in the car, find long term parking, and meet you at the 'club,' shall I?" her father rolled his eyes, acquiescing.

"Meet you there, dear," Helen Granger told him, allowing herself to be swept up in Hermione's wake. It was still enough of a novelty for her formerly-friendless daughter to have so many friends that she was willing to make some concessions.

At the sanctum, Sol Rama said he'd ask the other Masters about training. "Most Hogwarts students wait until their upper years to do that, but I suppose we could work something in."

"We just… found ourselves off of Vanaheim for a bit, and our wands didn't work," Harry admitted, but kept quiet that they would also like to be able to do magic on Earth if they needed to.

"Oh? I bet if you told us that story, it might be an easier sell," Sol offered, privately making a mental note to ask some of the other Hogwarts students they were in contact with what was going on over there. The rumors about troll attacks Wong's cousin had passed on over winter break had already been worrying. "I'll have the apprentices go ahead and send your trunks to your homes, so grab anything you might need. Otherwise, I'll see you back here in a few hours."

With that, Hermione's whirlwind walking tour of Westminster proceeded apace. Even her parents had to admit they'd had a good time. Locals rarely made time to do the fun tourist attractions, except when hosting out-of-towners.

Bidding farewell to their friends for a few weeks, everyone except the Grangers stepped through the sanctum's central doorway and across the planet, the Patils getting off in Kamar-Taj while Dean and Harry continued on to New York. Harry was too exhausted to remember much about finally meeting Master Drumm, other than that he was an impressively-muscled black guy with a smooth head and a quiet confidence. He could see why Dean had already imprinted on the guy as the mentor he aspired to follow.

"Where's your aunt meeting you?" Dean asked.

"Stark offices, probably," Harry considered. "Damn. No phone to figure out how to get there."

"I got you, it's probably the same train as to my house," Dean said, eager to demonstrate his own mastery of travel around New York the way Hermione had shown off in London.

Master Drumm surreptitiously tagged both with a monitoring spell to make sure the two pre-teens didn't immediately become horribly lost in Manhattan.

After another adventure with the subway system, Harry wandered into the Stark Industries offices in Manhattan, signed in at the registration desk, asked the receptionist to call his aunt, and passed out in a comfy visitor's chair. It was still daylight outside, but he had no idea whatsoever what time his internal clock thought it should be.

A power-nap later, Aunt Pepper shook him awake and said, "Did you take the subway here? You could have called me!"

"No phone," Harry reminded her.

"Oh. Right. I have a replacement for you with my bags," she realized. To be fair to her, while she had gotten busy with work, she had no way of knowing exactly when he'd teleport across the planet to New York. "You ready to fly back to LA?"

"As long as I can sleep on the plane," Harry agreed.

"Uh uh," she shook her head, pulling him to his feet. "Three more hours of time change. Best for you to just stay up and go to bed at a reasonable west coast time. Plus, you need to tell me about your year. Where's your trunk?"

"Masters sent it ahead," he explained, groggy and frustrated at being told he couldn't go back to sleep.

"Well, that's something at least," she said, waving goodbye to the receptionist, grabbing her rolling suitcase, and leading the sleepy adolescent down to the motor pool so they could get a driver to take them to the airport.

Harry remembered very little of the trip back to LA, other than that Pepper had basically bribed him with the phone and threatened him with worse punishment if he didn't tell her exactly how he'd really broken his first one. And he thought he'd also told her more about the rest of his adventures than he'd been planning on.

It was another couple of days before he was completely coherent, after all the jet lag sent him into a very small coma as soon as they returned to 5730 Encino Avenue.

Shortly after he was mostly functional again, he rode with Aunt Pepper over to Tony's house in Malibu, and they found the recently-liberated billionaire tinkering in his garage. As they put in their door codes, Harry took in the space through the glass wall that separated the stairs from the expansive workspace. Tony had begun to spread out several workbenches with a lot of tools and unassembled mechanical and electrical components, with various large plastic mats laid out near the row of expensive cars as if he was also practicing some kind of martial art.

"Pepper. And Salt!," Tony greeted them, rolling back in his chair away from a computer desktop after minimizing the drafting application he had open. "Back from Jolly Old!"

"And he's grounded," Pepper explained to her boss, adding a new stack of envelopes and documents to one side of a desk atop a pile that he had barely touched since the last time she'd been there. "The ones on the top need signatures. One of them's about a board meeting coming up."

"Grounded already. What'd you do?" Tony asked, unconcerned about the documents or meeting.

"Broke my phone," Harry shrugged.

Tony shot Pepper a look about being too stern and she said, "Tell him how you broke your phone."

Harry sighed, "Ran off to fight with another kid I don't get along with into the woods at night, left behind the adult that was watching us, and fell down after I nearly got gored by a wild boar."

"Do they still have wild boars in Scotland?" Tony asked.

"Reintroduced back in the 70s. They're apparently quite the nuisance," Pepper explained. They'd looked it up when coming up with the cover story. He couldn't exactly tell people some kind of technology-eating alien had come after him. "Tell him what else."

"Stopped a teacher from robbing the school," Harry said. His aunt gave him a look, so he expanded, "My friends and I didn't wait for the other teachers to go after her, she was the martial arts teacher, and we knew she liked knives." He saw that Tony seemed more impressed than upset, and added, "And I did talk her out of it."

"Sounds like we both had a busy year," Tony gave a self-deprecating smirk.

"Yeah," Harry nodded. "Aunt Pepper says you have a super-battery on your chest?"

Tony pulled down his t-shirt to show the top of the object embedded in his sternum. "Miniature arc reactor powering an electromagnet."

"Neat. But seems like overkill," Harry said.

"It can power other stuff," Tony argued, and that got him thinking. Harry Potts: lightweight, fearless, and athletically coordinated. "Hey, Pep. Want me to oversee Salt's grounding?"

"What are you up to, Tony?" she looked up from sorting the table of documents.

"I've got projects," Tony gestured around. "Could use a lab assistant I can trust to keep his mouth shut about what I'm working on. One with small hands for some of the smaller parts. You've got small hands, Pepper. You could help too, but I know you're busy."

"Yeah, covering for you while you're down here," she said. But she didn't immediately shoot him down.

"How about it?" he asked Harry. "No posting about it on your blog. No telling those friends of yours. You know, Two Names and your girlfriend Winter's Tale."

"She's not my girlfriend. And she's not named after Winter's Tale," Harry argued, Hermione having explained it to him. "Her mom's Greek and named Helen."

"Ah," Tony agreed, making a mental note to look up that reference. He thought he should have gotten some credit for the Shakespeare deep cut. "Noted. So, want to help me with a project this summer."

It definitely sounded more interesting than being confined to 5730 Encino Avenue for over a month, and Tony's entertainment centers were better than his anyway. "Can I, Aunt Pepper?"

Suspicious of the free babysitting, Pepper at least felt better about both of her charges being in one spot for the summer. "Fine. But I'm going to talk to Legal about getting him put on the company insurance at least." She gestured at the mats laid about, knowing that Tony was doing something at least mildly dangerous down here. She just hoped it wasn't more dangerous than the things Dumbledore had put her nephew through at school.

"See, that's why I have a Pepper," Tony nodded. "Get them to make sure we don't get sued for child labor laws, and all of that. Right. I need to get your measurements, Salt. JARVIS, spin up the 3D scanner. You're going to have to strip down to your underwear for the scan." He gave it a beat and said, "You can, too, if you want, Pepper. You know, just in case it's useful to have your scan on record."

"I don't think so. Will that be all, Mr. Stark?" she asked Tony, while giving Harry a look that conveyed "You asked for this" and then headed for the door. "I'll go talk to Legal. Don't do anything dangerous until I tell you it's okay. And sign those documents."

"Yes, ma'am!" Tony said, already scooting back over to the desktop to work on the math for how Harry's weight would affect the flight controls. He'd already nearly killed himself launching himself into the ceiling while testing his rocket boots out. It would be a lot easier to dial in the basics of the propulsion for someone Harry's size before he risked himself again.

Maybe he would also put down a few more crashpads.


Yes, I know the wiki doesn't think Tony starts actually working on the physical components of the Mark II until September, but the montage doesn't really imply six minutes of film are meant to take four months, and compressing it down lets Harry be involved. (It's also weird that it takes over five months between the press conference and the Stark emergency board meeting.) Assume for purposes of this fic that the initial designs and boot test was May and June, the pre-armor tests will take place over the rest of the summer, and the full armor fabrication will take long enough to push the Iron Monger fight back out so it's still in late fall.