Xaviers!

Meanwhile, on Earth 1077

Nailah Weaver is sitting in her tiny TA office, on the desk in front of her the handful of relics they managed to save from the temple during a fight she still only barely remembers. Images of bullets punching into her as a mere inconvenience, punches taking out chunks of rock and a blur of motion as she rockets to safety from the crumbling ruins. With only a vague impression of someone else's memories that the alien device left her with, she's only made little headway trying to puzzle out her new powers and the history of the place that gave them to her. A good dozen books are open on th desk as she pours over them, not noticing the fact that she's floating an inch or two above the seat of her chair in the cramped room that more resembles a storage closet for maps and archived artifact than an actual office.

There's the noise of someone walking unsteadily outside, though it's almost drowned out by some heavier footfalls accompanying it. After another brief pause, there's a knock on the door.

Nailah looks up in surprise, falling down into her chair with a faint thud. "Yes?" she asks with a startled voice.

"Miss..." Brief pause as if someone was consulting some sort of notes. "Nailah Weaver? Might I have a few moments of your time?" The accent was British... relatively speaking.

"Uh, sure one second." She frantically cleans up her desk, mostly by putting papers into the books and closing them, almost getting up, stopping to pick up the relics and moving them into a drawer real quick.

"Come in..." She says a bit warily.

The door opens and a distinctly average brunette, dressed in the way you might expect a reporter to dress, smiles at Nailah, "Thank you." She gestures for something behind her to follow as she comes closer, holding out her hand. "I heard about your adventure in Egypt and I just had to meet you."

A faint, barely perceptible distortion in the air followed Natalie inside. The footsteps were a bit harder to conceal in a quiet environment, but most wouldn't notice... unless they looked at the indentations in the carpet.

"How do you know about that?" Her hand that is still on the drawer turns the key on it, locking it with a click. "Who are you? What's going on here?" Already being suspicious she notices something is off, even if she doesn't directly notice Thresh.

"I have a very excellent source. My name is Natalie Denisov, but you can call me Intercept. I represent an organization that looks for extraordinary individuals to assist us with a very difficult problem."

"Are you with the government? Or the Federal States?" she changes her mind, taking note of what she interprets as a faked accent.

"Neither, I'm afraid. The organization I represent really isn't something you would be familiar with," she says, "I understand you found some rather interesting artifacts?"

"I think you'd better leave." she says, concluding that out of the remaining possibilities, it's probably a Nazi ploy. She stands up although her posture is really more 'afraid' rather than 'intimidating'.

Natalie sighs, "I understand your difficulty with the Germans. I assure you that I am not German, though I understand you have no reason to believe me. What can I do to assure you of my good intentions?"

"You could explain what your mysterious 'source' is and why it knows so much about me." And what kind of name is Intercept anyway?

"Would you believe that there are realities beyond this one? My associate and I belong to an organization that monitors those realities and intervenes when someone tries to abuse a reality. We're always looking for people with special abilities and flexible minds to help us with those interventions."

"After the week I've had I'm not sure what I'm supposed to belief anymore." she admits. "All I know is what we discovered mustn't fall into the wrong hands."

"We can help with that too if necessary," Natalie says, moving to close the door. "May I see the artifacts?"

She still doesn't seem sure, but she reaches for the drawer when from outside shouting can be heard. Most of them surprised and panicked, but notably one stands out.

"Heil Hydra!" Before they can really react the man outside fires his rocket launcher at the outside wall of Nailah's office and suddenly everything is swallowed up by the resulting explosion.

When the dust finally settles Nailah is hovering in front of Natalie, eyes closed tightly but having shielded her from the main blast. Her clothes are smoldering and torn, but the rest of her seems fine. Her hair-do is a little out of sorts. The rest of her office hasn't fared as well though. What hasn't been blown out of the giant hole that has replaced the outside wall is either broken or on fire. Or both.

Natalie's cringing with the briefest moment of wondering why she's not punctured by rubble. Then she looks at Nailah and grins, "Thresher, he's all yours."

Seconds before, Thresh's combat systems registered the heat spike outside and he had just enough time to shout "Get down," drop his cloak, and also shield Natalie.

"On it!" he responded before leaping out of the hole and landing in a superhero crouch. He rose and drew his high-tech rifle on the Nazi.

"Boo."

Whatever the man might have expected, it certainly wasn't this. He stares at Tresher and drops his rocket launcher, slack-jawed. His companions who had been hiding in the crowd of onlookers react a little better, pulling out sidearms that look, well, experimental to say the least. They open fire on Thresher with bolts crackling with electricity.

"Aww, those are just adorable," Thresher said as the bolts struck his armor, sending arcs of electricity skittering over the metal. He grunted as one lucky shot disabled one of his many eyes. He immediately opened fire with stun bolts, his advanced targeting systems preventing stray shots from hitting innocent bystanders.

"Now would be the time to get those artifacts out of here, because those certainly sound like the wrong hands outside," Natalie says to Nailah.

The fight elicits some screams from the onlookers, especially the ones standing next to the Nazis when precision blasts take them out one by one.

Meanwhile Nailah carefully opens her eyes and, after seeing Natalie is okay, looks around the devastation that used to be her office. "Oh no... oh no no no." she drops back down to the floor and hurries over to where her desk had been thrown into the wall, books strewn everywhere, most of them smoldering as papers flutter through the air. She starts grabbing them as they float by, gathering them into a rough bunch as wobbles across the rubble. The drawers on her desk are all broken, most of them busted open. She pulls one out, the drawer itself breaking apart as she forces it out of the distorted frame. She pulls a notebook out from underneath broken bits of stone that used to be invaluable artifacts once. Only one of them seems to be mostly intact, courtesy of not being made from stone, but rather a metal ball the size of a fist.

She looks relieved, but it only lasts a moment as she looks around the devastated room once more. "All my work..." A lone page reading 'Research Dissertation' burns up as a deformed typewriter falls down with a crash from where it had been smashed into the wall.

Natalie eyes the orb, but manages to contain herself for the moment. "Come with us. See more places than you even dream existed. There will never be a better time than now and we can keep that orb out of their hands."

"What about the people here? Are they going to be okay?"

"I can't give guarantees like that," Natalie says, looking a little pained, "But if they need our help, we will do our best." She looks towards the hole and yells, "Thresher, time to go!" Then she looks back at Nailah, "I'm going to need your answer now. I'm afraid Thresher and I have already caused more of a splash than we intended to." A device slides down to Natalie's wrist out of her jacket sleeve. The dials on it begin adjusting themselves without any obvious intervention from Natalie.

Nailah looks out the hole in the wall and at the strange automaton that had appeared out of nowhere, then back at the smoldering remains of her work. Clutching the artifact and what remains of her notes to her chest she looks at Natalie. "Okay. How do we get to that other world of yours?"

Thresher stowed his rifle and gave the crowd a jaunty wave goodbye before taking a powerful leap back up to the others.

"We step into the looking glass."

The device on Natalie's wrist beeps twice and then a shimmering liquid barrier appears in the door to Nailah's office. "Right this way," she says, motioning for Thresher and Nailah to precede her.

"I'm not sure what I expected, but it wasn't something this close to an actual lens..." she says, carefully reaching out and putting her hand on and ultimately through the surface of the portal.

"Technically it's home base folding interdimensional space to connect here to there. There's a much longer and technical explanation, but now isn't really the time for me to give that talk," she says, glancing towards the hole in the wall.

Nailah gives the ruined room one last glance before stepping through the portal...

There's a brief pulling sensation and she's dazzled by an array of coruscating lights before she steps out of a large ring-shaped device into a room made mostly of plates of some smooth metal. On the wall is a panel that displays a picture of the globe of her world with the location of her office highlighted and the words: "Inbound team, Earth 1077, Confirmed Identity Signal."

"Wow..." she breathes out, running her hand across the smooth metal. "Where are we? Some kind of U-boat?"

"Not... exactly," Thresher answered, "Well kinda, just much bigger and not underwater. There's technically nothing outside. Or something like nothing, but described with impressive science words."

"That doesn't make a lot of sense. But that's kind of been the case for the last twenty minutes now..."

Natalie comes through the portal and it shuts off behind her, the panel going blank as it does. Then the word "Scanning..." appears on the panel. "Welcome to the Rift, Nailah."

"You're obviously smart, so you'll wrap your mind around it quicker than I did. Hell, I still don't really get it."

"Is there a window?"