The fun thing about information is that you can compartmentalize it and set it aside for later as you do something else. Something like picking a small dinosaur up off the ground, and placing her gently in your pocket. He put the X-men fact away for future Benji to deal with. Alternate xmen potentially meant alternate Benjis, and that was a can of worms he didn't yet want to open.

He hadn't looked away when she had shifted. She didn't seem to care. It wasn't every day that you could see someone turning into a dinosaur. His curiosity got to him. Benji had never been one to shy away from science, even things that were a little, can we say, morbid? Like dissections, or scientific videos of predators at work. Spiders, wrapping up dinner for later. Hyenas, eating carrion. Snakes and snails and slimy things. He wasn't much dazed by them... or by watching someone turn into something, somehow converting mass into a smaller package, it seemed. The science behind that would have to be fascinating. What happened to the mass? If she got larger, where'd the extra mass come from? It spit in the face of physics. Then again, so did he. On a routine basis. Where did all the saliva come from? Another mystery.

The discarded shirt got scooped up, and Benji balled it and stuffed it under his arm. Then, he looked upwards at the platform of the fire escape several feet off the ground. Dinosaur in his pocket, eyes on the skies, Benjamin got a running start and leaped. Then, as he sailed through the air, he tapped into his power and burst forward to bridge the remaining space. He left blue trails of light in the air behind him. One second, they were a few feet off the ground, the next, they'd accelerated to about 100 miles per hour, lurching straight up like a fastball pitch. Benji would have liked to say that he'd flipped and stuck the landing on the fire escape platform, but there simply hadn't been enough room. He snagged the metal underside of the platform above, and used his forward momentum to carry him in a swing, onto the lower platform, thankfully before he did something embarrassing like overshoot his trajectory and conk his head. The shirt flapped away onto the ground below, lost in the motion of the flight correction. His focused mind didn't notice what he'd lost.

Up the stairs of the fire escape, they went. He kept up a brisk pace. The Korean man was fit, and his power gave him stamina in spades. On a regular man, there might have been the awkwardness of aching legs and heavy breathing, ascending that many flights of steps. But Benji had his stuff together. They made it to the highest point of the fire escape, and he ran and climbed the side of the building up to the edge of the roof with only a minor use of his powers (and parkour!). Several minutes had passed, during the climb.

Benji looked out over the city. The eclipse had ended. In places, he could see spots of red that could have been lights, just as easily as they could have been raging fires. Sirens echoed off walls. The city was restless. Changes were happening, in plain sight as well as behind the scenes. It gave him a tiny feeling of foreboding, which he shared with the dinosaur by holding her out, Lion king style, to see all the land that might someday be hers (if she started off the new Jurassic age and built an army of t-rexes to help pave the way). Of all the things he could see, the moon was the most normal. It stood out plain against the ill gray of light pollution in the city. No stars, no planets. The eclipse had passed. He idly wondered why he'd spent eight bucks on the special glasses to see the eclipse. He hadn't seen a thing. Someone had ruined the moment with some ill-placed chronological dickery. And he'd missed most of it. He wouldn't be able to tell his children about the time he saw an eclipse. Instead, he'd have some wild story about rescuing a dinosaur and discovering a hole in space. That... might have been comparable, actually. Less believable, but comparable. No worries.

"Hakuna Matata, I suppose." Benji commented quietly, mostly to himself. The dinosaur could make the most of what she got from it, because he wasn't elaborating any time soon. Simply a thought escaped from his head. Move along. He set her down for the moment, hands slipping away from the mouse-sized gliding lizard. "I guess now we wait till I hear back from Shiv." He said as bent, then straightened up to his full height.

A few minutes later, his phone rang. It was a stock ring, not a personalized ringtone. He didn't know Shiv well enough for one of those. It was a crying shame he didn't have one. He always felt they added something special to a moment. Irony? Humor? Weight? Maybe he'd pick a classy violin ringtone out later? He answered. "Hello, hello." Benji smiled. The smile slackened as he tilted his head, to take in the details of their conversation.

She was in the area. Where was he?

"Amber and I climbed up to a rooftop, to get off the streets. It sounds like things are getting a little mad out there." No Wonderland reference intended. "The address by the alley is--" Benji rattled off the street address. He'd noted it when they'd first gotten to the alley. "We'll meet you there in a minute or two. In the alley." He said bye and wrapped up the call. Then, he glanced down at the alley below.

He was way too much. Part of him wanted to surprise Shiv by leaping off the building, bursting upwards into the air before he hit the ground, into a momentum-changing flip, then sticking the landing (and having a mouse-sized dinosaur glide down to alight on his hand). Part of him thought that it'd be pretty cool. The other, brighter, part of him KNEW that it was lame. It was the kind of lame that surprised paranoid super-heroines and made one look like a showoffish doof. It risked his neck for the sake of being impressive, and had all the subtlety of a tactical nuke. Dressed in blue jeans, a black domino mask, and a white button-up dress shirt, he was already unimpressive enough. He didn't need to help himself become any more 'average' or unimpressive. They say actions speak louder than words, but they should really say that intelligent actions speak louder than brash stupidity. A far more applicable quote. Benji erred on the side of intelligent action, and opted for the more casual entrance.

"Up you go, Amber." He scooped her up and settled her in his shirt pocket again. Then, he began the trudge down the several flights of fire escape steps. By the time he reached the last platform, Shiv was in the alley, in full-costume. "Hey," Benji called down from her.

Leaning forward, Benji bunched up his legs muscles and prepared for the leap. He surged forward a moment later, off the fire escape. He blurred somehow, before he hit the ground. For some reason, impacts were less serious when he burst forwards. At this height, the fall wasn't much more than jumping down a couple of steps to him. Easy. The blue streaks trailed close to his body, without any forward acceleration to whisk them away. They dulled the lines of his form. With an audible clap of shoes on pavement, Benji landed several feet away from the dark-haired heroine. The Korean man plopped Amber the dinosaur gently on his shoulder.

"Sorry for waking you up," he said. A faint smile curved the lines of his face. Concern was in voice, alongside apology, but not TOO much concern. Amusement with the situation played at war with the other tones. "It sounded like you were having a good sleep. But then, I guess justice never rests, huh?" He teased. "It was important. I guess that counts for something, amid terrible behavior." Waking a woman up this late at night? And so thoughtlessly, too! He needed to make introductions, to make up for his slight.

"This is Amber the dinosaur," Benji nodded to the pocket monster on his shoulder. "Shiv, Amber. Amber, Shiv." He briefly introduced them to each other, gesturing from one to the other with an open hand. Then, he continued briskly. "She's from Earth Two. They've got X-men on Earth Two. Apparently. Chances are, they've got duplicates of people on this side. She isn't the only one to cross over. I suppose I should let you tell your own story, huh?" He glanced at the little lizard dinosaur thoughtfully. He really was railroading the conversation. Then, he looked to Shiv. "You've probably got questions, too." He smiled.

Amber felt no sense of self-consciousness at being watched when she changed forms.  Self-consciousness seemed to be one of the more pointless feelings and one of the more common ones among humans.  Her warning had been purely for Benji's sake, knowing that many found her transformation to be grotesque and disturbing.  What did she care if she grossed someone out?  That was their problem, not hers.

This was the first time she'd ever ridden in a pocket.  She'd always known it was possible, of course.  She'd gotten close to pocket riding before and hopped on to the odd shoulder or head.  She'd even be on the other side of this bizarre scenario and been the ride before, a rather for more sizable dinosaur being ridden like a horse.  A horse with giant horns and a crest full of hard bone.  Now that had been an experience to remember and probably even more so for her lucky (unlucky?) rider.  This?  This was also proving to be an experience to remember.

One might not expect a ride in a pocket to be especially interesting and one would probably be right if said ride involved a normal human running at normal human speeds.  This was not a normal human and she could only guess at the speeds he was running, but most certainly they were not normal human speeds.  When one was little larger than a mouse and mostly hidden away safely in folds of fabric, it wasn't exactly easy to tell just how quickly they were travelling, but judging by how vigorously they were bounding and the sound of wind in her sensitive ears, she could only guess it was pretty damn fast.  She knew there were dinosaurs out there who could run as fast as 80 km/hr, but she'd never had the fortune of possessing one of those forms.

Their speed was such that it wasn't safe for her to travel with with her head outside the protection of the fabric around her, so aside from a few brief, blurred glimpses of city, she remained mostly in the dark.  Sometime after their mad flight began, they slowed down, stopped while he took a call and continued, eventually landing with a thud.  At the end of their mad dash, she was placed on a shoulder as her ride began talking to a young dark haired woman.

Nodding her tiny lizard head at the introduction, she scrambled off Benji's shoulder, down his leg and onto the ground.  Running a short distance away she began the process of resuming her human shape and within a minute a young, naked, corpse-like girl once again stood where once there had been lizard.  If offered the shirt from earlier she would take it, otherwise she made no attempt to cover herself nor did the cool night air seem to bother her.  "Thank you for bringing me here, Benji."  She nodded in his direction.  "Hello, Shiv.  I'm Amber and I fell through a rift between worlds."  She wasn't very good at the whole introductions thing or very good at the nuances of human interaction in general.

Apparently finding Cheshire wasn't going to be a problem, he made one hell of an entrance. Getting to the alley way he pointed out didn't take long and she wasn't waiting long before he dropped in. Literally. Like stereotypical hero-type entrance dropping in, complete with shoulder mounted dinosaur. That, that was new. Yeah Ambrosia could turn into a flying fairy dragon thing but this was a dinosaur. A small dinosaur. On a flying man's shoulder.

Normal was officially out of her vocabulary.

Smiling at the excitable man's comments, she could hardly blame him for waking her up. Not like it was the weirdest way it had happen in the past few weeks either, when a friend falls though your window in the early morning to invite you to a party, well nothing much topped it. "Don't worry Benji, I can handle a few nights without sleep. Wouldn't be doing this if I couldn't. And it was a good shout, this is kind of huge. And terrifying." It explained so damn much though, all the weird timey wimey stuff and the odd weather and animal behavior. And people behavior. Frankly she could just lump all the recent weirdness into whatever this was and it wouldn't be a bad assumption. "I gave you a way to contact me for a reason and rips in reality fall in that. Apparently."

Wait, the other......world had X-Men? That was, well that was huge! What were they like? Were they in as bad a situation as her's were or was stuff going better for them? Oooo were they goodies or baddies, like some kind of opposites of them? Well if they were all evil and stuff they had a face punching coming, making the X's have a bad name and everything.

And now there was a naked woman in the alley. A naked, very unwell looking girl, Christ she looked like she'd been dug out a grave that morning. "Erm, well nice to meet you Amber." Talking to anyone new while they weren't wearing clothes was a little awkward, this girls odd appearance just made it doubly so. Reaching into one of her many pockets Cait pulled out a folded up survival blanket and offered it to the woman. "Here, I know it's not much but this should at least cover you up while we talk, plus it's warm so, well you'll not get cold.....I guess." Could she get cold? Questions, so many questions. But later, now she had to get stuff sorted.

"First I guess welcome to our world? Which is a phrase I didn't think I'd ever have to say. Anyway I hope you're fine answering some questions because I have a lot." So many, important stuff first though girl! "Feel free to ask us as many as you want as well, I can imagine how weird stuff must be for you right now."

"The most important thing is how are mutants treated over there, are there any groups causing a particularly big issue for them?" She was being careful to not bring any names into it right now, first they had SUPER to deal with in their own world, goodness knew what the other side had going on and second, she didn't know who Amber was or where she sat as far as morality was. She could be some weird supremacist or worse, a government owned mutant like SUPER used. Giving out too much now was a bad idea.

Oh yeah. Nudity. Well, it was good his waking her hadn't made her mad at him because explaining a naked Amber was probably going to make her mad enough. As for the t-shirt... the t-shirt... he firmly remembered setting it down for a second when making a phone call. And then, he'd-- forgotten to pick it up. He winced at his carelessness, and prepared for an explanation. He needn't have bothered. Shiv had prepared for, if not this, then some sort of eventuality that would've required an emergency blanket. The emergency probably wouldn't have been nudity.

Emergency nudity, now there's a thought...

Shiv asked her questions, and Cheshire didn't bother interjecting his own. He'd already asked Amber a few questions. No need to crush her under the weight of more... though he did have one question.

"I've got a question too," he glanced at Shiv, hoping she'd not object to his interruption. "On your world, was there a mutant registration act? I'm curious about differences in history." History was important, as much as groups and social attitudes.

For the second time that night, Amber was handed something appropriate to covering herself with, this time in the form of a blanket, and she loosely wrapped it around her body, making sure to cover the bits people tended to find problematic.  "Thank you.  I'm not cold."  She didn't feel the need to add 'I'm doing this for your benefit only' but that thought definitely did make it's into her thoughts.  Never one to speak without thinking, if anything she sometimes didn't speak enough.

Shiv had questions, she had questions and she could only assume Benji had more questions too.  Whether or not anyone one of them had actually answers might be another matter entirely.  She nodded as the other woman spoke, acknowledging her words.  "If I can answer your questions I will.  As for my own, I don't even know where to start.  How the rift opened, maybe.  Or can I go back through it and return home, but I'm guessing you don't have an answer to those."  

She shrugged when asked how mutants were treated.  "It varies.  Some people don't mind, others mind a lot and violently."  She'd had her share of violent encounters with bigoted humans in her time.  "A lot of humans don't trust mutants but a lot of mutants don't trust humans much either.  I try to stay out of all that."  More successfully back when she lived in the woods; it was hard to avoid living among civilization.  "Is it better here?  Are mutants accepted?"  Or was that a wish too good to be true?

"Ya, the registration act happened.  I was too young to really experience much for myself, but I've heard stories and they weren't good ones."  Her voice was somber.

Not cold!? It'd been freezing the past few days and was only getting worse all the time. No way she could be warm with no clothes on unless she had some kind of space heater hidden away insider her. Unless she did. Because mutants. Worse it wouldn't be the weirdest mutation she'd ever heard of that week, let alone in her life.

Shaking her head to the question, she was as much in the dark as anyone else about the rift. Even with the (limited) resources available to her from the X's hadn't dragged any clues up about the cause of the split in reality, let alone how it worked. While it all seemed connected to the weird time effects they'd been seeing and the freaky weather, no one had any convincing theories. "Sorry dear, about all I know for certain is when it appeared. As for getting home? No idea. I imagine the fed's will have it on lock down for a while until they know what's going on with it."

"Erm, well...." trailing off she wondered how much information she should really give out. No way she could mention SUPER, not without knowing if they existed in the other universe and some of the other bits and bobs she knew weren't exactly general knowledge. Best to go with what people knew, along with just a little extra enough to build trust. "Not great. Well, pretty bad actually. Standard bigotry is common place against mutants and violence isn't unheard of either."

"They major issue we have is we tend to just disappear. Just gone. No records, no missing persons investigations, mutants just vanish. A lot of them too and it's not all down to rqandom murders. Something bad is happening on our end. That's all I can say."

Letting Cheshire make his own inquires she just took in the information. There were similarites between their worlds at least, but did that make theirs the better one? In which case God help the poor sods in the other 'verse. Worse were they the bad ones, the unhappy clones in a more twisted world?

All far too big issues to deal with when there was a naked dino girl from another universe standing in front of her. One huge problem at a time Cait.

He felt a weight in his stomach when he heard that Amber's world hadn't escaped the registration act's evils. For a second, he'd hoped that maybe... just maybe... but no.

There was distrust between people there, just like here. There was nothing too special about the two worlds if they both had the same troubles and hatred of fellow man. It wasn't a Man in the High Castle situation, at least. It didn't sound worse, from the description. It sounded about the same. Benji frowned at that. Here, they'd had a real opportunity to see a world at peace down the rabbit hole, and it had been wasted on 'average.'

It was too bad for Amber that the 'Feds' would likely have a lockdown on her ticket home. They were about the same, true, apart from some details... but that was where her stuff was. And family, maybe? It'd suck being cut off from that. About equal-- except not.

Shiv's reply had him turning his head to look at her. Mysterious disappearances? And she was tight-lipped about it. That left him wondering if maybe their world had something dark that was worse than Amber's world. Something 'cloak and dagger' dark.

"We will have to talk about those disappearances at some point..." Benji trailed, looking at Shiv. Louder, and to Amber he said "Sounds like there's a lot the same, but with differences. Hmm. Maybe now that we've got a group together, we can get off the street and to somewhere safer." He frowned. "At least until we can figure out the best way to help you out. Or get you home."