Skyl and the other two took the Bifrost back to Earth. When the gatekeeper Heimdall asked where they wanted to go, Skyl said New York, but the city was still veiled by that Law, and Heimdall couldn't see through it. So Skyl smoothly switched destinations and asked for Los Angeles instead. It worked out nicely. He could check in on Tony and Lady Moonshadow while he was at it.
The Bifrost came down with a thunderous blast right on Stark's beachfront mansion. It was five in the morning, and Tony had been sleeping hard enough to rattle the walls. The sudden thunder and shaking floor made him bolt upright, convinced he was under attack.
He tapped the arc reactor in his chest with two fingers. Amber magical energy surged out and wrapped across his body, weaving itself into a suit of armor with a crystalline sheen, unmistakably modeled after the Iron Man armor.
A moment later, JARVIS pulled up the security feed. Two people were standing outside the main hall doors, and at the front, Skyl smiled and waved at the camera.
The magazine-beauty beside Tony rolled over in bed and mumbled sleepily, "What is it, Tony?"
"Call me Stark. And it's nothing. Go back to sleep."
A short while later, Tony—now changed into pajamas—was in the living room making coffee. Skyl and Gali sat on the massive sofa while the floor-to-ceiling windows along one wall rose open, letting in the sound of the surf. An orchid diffuser filled the air with a dark, lush fragrance. The living room lights were soft, blending neatly with the first pale hint of dawn.
After spending several days in the stately palaces of Asgard, coming back to a modern mansion gave Skyl the strange sensation that he'd just skipped across centuries.
Tony came over with coffee in hand and immediately took a long drink himself before saying anything else, clearly trying to revive his brain.
"Skyl, buddy, you scared the hell out of me. Next time, send a text. How've you been? And you brought a cute lady with you this time. Hi, Anthony Stark. Call me Tony. Also, that snake on your arm looks pretty awesome. It doesn't bite, does it?"
"Sorry for disturbing your rest, Mr. Stark. This is Gali, Galactus's daughter. The one on her arm is Jormungand—Gali's daughter."
Tony's expression turned deeply complicated, like he had about five hundred sarcastic comments lined up and no idea which one to fire first.
"Skyl, just call me Tony. Sometimes your politeness and that British accent are too much for me. Then again, right, Hogwarts." Stark shrugged, then pulled Skyl aside with a thoroughly awkward look on his face. "That snake came out of the girl? How old are you two, exactly?"
"You can't possibly think Jormungand is my child with Gali."
"Isn't it? I was about to give you a crash course in sex ed. At your age, you look exactly like the kind of kid who could get into trouble."
Skyl looked helpless. "Strictly speaking, Jormungand was the tapeworm in Gali's stomach. And besides, if a spellcaster can't control the urge to reproduce, he has no business climbing the ladder of truth. Shouldn't you be the one showing some restraint? Weren't you supposed to be turning over a new leaf?"
Tony laughed awkwardly and declined to elaborate.
Skyl had already noticed the arc reactor in Tony's chest. The cold-fusion blue glow had turned amber, which meant Tony had turned the reactor into a magical focus. What ran inside it now was no longer radiative energy, but magical power drawn from the Vishanti.
"So you actually finished the magic armor. Congratulations. You've officially become a magical-boy hero. Or maybe a Kamen Rider."
Tony gave him a proud grin and transformed on the spot.
Amber magic armor flowed over his whole body. Tony rose into the air, and then a layer of burning amber flared across the suit. Dense golden runes spread over it like flourishing thorned vines, dazzling and magnificent.
Give that thing a pair of wings and he could've passed for some kind of gospel angel. People would probably drop to their knees outside a church.
Skyl sucked in a sharp breath—the kind every guy in the room would make without even thinking. No matter the era, a transformation sequence like that would never stop being cool.
The faceplate of the helmet snapped open, revealing Stark's smug smile. "Well? This is the Mark III prototype. Tempted?"
Back in Kamar-Taj, Tony had already mentioned the idea. He'd noticed that these mages fought by getting in close and throwing hands. Sure, the magic effects looked flashy as hell, but most of them only served to support melee combat. Tony's reaction had basically been: gentlemen, it's the twenty-first century. Why are you still fighting like this?
So he came up with the idea of turning Iron Man armor into a magical artifact—something that could attack, defend, and move with incredible speed. The kind of thing every mage would want on the road, or in a fight.
Even with Tony's intelligence, creating such a complicated and precise magical artifact was beyond the ability of any one man. Even with divine inspiration, he probably would have needed three to five years of slow experimentation. After all, this was completely uncharted territory.
Skyl smiled. "Lady Moonshadow helped you a lot, didn't she?"
The arrogance vanished from Tony's face at once. He put on a stubborn expression and said, "Not that much. She just refined the blueprints, handled the calculations, adjusted the rune lattice... none of that matters. The idea matters, okay? Great ideas build great companies. The guy who comes up with the idea deserves permanent credit."
From the faint frustration on Tony's face, Skyl could easily imagine how the last month and a half had gone for him.
When Lady Moonshadow first showed up, the first thing she told Tony to do was build a spaceship.
"Pardon me," Tony had asked, "but why does Skyl want a spaceship?"
"For space travel," Lady Moonshadow had replied. "To roam the galaxy, of course."
Tony had nearly broken on the spot. That was like asking a caveman to build an aircraft carrier. The technological demands of space travel were insanely high. Humanity wasn't there yet.
Then Lady Moonshadow had asked him, "Can you build it?"
"I can build some of it," Tony had answered, holding his fingers a tiny distance apart. "I can make the shell. I can build a fusion reactor for power. I can provide the computer systems and the ship's operating software. But I can't do the most important part."
"The engine."
Humanity had imagined all kinds of ways to travel the cosmos, but the current mainstream model still relied on reaction rockets—engines that expel mass for thrust. A rocket was mostly fuel to begin with.
If you really wanted interstellar travel, chemical fuel wasn't going to get you far. A fusion reactor solved most of the obvious problems, but even if you pushed a ship close to lightspeed, reaching the nearest star system beyond the Solar System would still take four or five years. If the goal was actual travel, then you needed faster-than-light technology.
Lady Moonshadow had said that part was easy.
Tony had asked how, exactly, any of that was easy.
She answered by proving it. She casually pulled out more than ten different sets of design schematics for spatial-jump devices: curvature drives that generated warp bubbles, stargates that opened wormholes, higher-dimensional jump systems, hyperspace gliders—every single one of them capable of faster-than-light travel.
Tony had been so stunned he'd blurted out, "Who the hell are you?"
Lady Moonshadow had only smiled and patted him on the head.
That tiny gesture had nearly fried Tony's CPU from overthinking it. He couldn't figure out why the dark-skinned elf woman had patted his head. After getting nowhere with it, JARVIS had offered a suggestion: maybe it was one of those old Hollywood fantasy-mentor moves, a cryptic hint telling him to come back in the middle of the night for a private lesson.
So Tony had done exactly that.
He hadn't even made it through the door.
The next day, Lady Moonshadow told him the truth: she'd just thought the empty look on his face made him resemble a big dog, and she hadn't been able to resist giving him a couple of pats.
Utter humiliation.
Tony didn't tell Skyl that part, but he had come to a very clear realization: his life really was too shallow and too short by comparison. Everyone around him was either some ancient monster who'd lived for thousands of years, a cosmic-level god, or an otherworldly mage like Skyl.
Once the ship was finished, he planned to head out into the galaxy with Skyl and finally see what the wider universe looked like.
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