"Having fun, Howard?" Steve asked as he brought the girls into the lab. He pulled out chairs for both of them, keeping one eye on them and one eye on Howard. Keeping an eye on Howard was always a priority.

Alissa blinked. Howard. He looked kind of familiar. Kind of.

"Fun?" Howard promptly replied. "This isn't fun, Steve, this is Science."

Taylor blinked as well. Something about this Howard person was irritatingly familiar.

Alissa snorted quietly and muttered, "The only difference between screwing around and Science is writing shit down." Which she knew from college.

Steve blinked at that. Okay, so she had sass.

Howard blinked as well.

"Yes, yes, that's exactly it," he said, grinning. "You, I like you, we're keeping you, Steve, we're keeping this one."

Steve snorted. "First we have to figure out where they came from," he said. "Then we'll see." Because he was rather used to Howard's oddities by now. "Where's Bucky? You seen him?"

Alissa smirked a bit but didn't comment for now.

"Shooting range," Howard replied, flapping a hand. "Like always."

Steve nodded. "Thanks, I'll grab him later. These two don't know how they got down here." He figured that might be enough to grab Howard's attention, if the clothes didn't (eventually) do it.

"What?" Howard glanced over. "How do they not know how they got down here? And--" He paused, now really looking at them. "What on earth are they wearing?"

And Howard was caught. Steve hid his little smile. "Not sure," he said. "That's why I brought them to you, Howard, you're supposed to be a genius, you can figure it out."

Howard blinked.

"Wait, no," he said, "that's not fair, Steve, you can't just do that to me, there's next to nothing for me to go off of, I need more information than that."

"We woke up in a store room," Alissa said, looking at him. "We were at home before that. I didn't even think we lived near an Army base."

"We don't," Taylor agreed. She bit her lip some and glanced around.

"What happened before that?" Howard asked, jotting a few things down on a pad of paper. "Where were you then?"

"Work," Alissa said with a shrug. "Picked up groceries on my way home from work."

Steve frowned a little at that, because, no, they were Americans, they couldn't have jobs here outside the base.

"I was coming home from classes," Taylor said, nodding. "They let out early for once."

Howard blinked. None of that sounded even remotely right. It was so not right that he didn't immediately have words for it.

Taylor noticed the odd stares.

"What?" she asked.

"There are no schools around here, and Americans don't have jobs outside the base," Steve said, glancing at Howard. "Are you sure that's the last thing you remember?"

"Yes." Alissa frowned at them both.

Steve frowned, puzzled. There was just nothing making sense here.

Taylor nodded as well, and Howard frowned, muttering to himself. None of this made and sense at all. The glowing blue cube made more sense at the moment.

Steve shook his head a bit. Nope, way outside his range of duty.

"Any ideas? At all?" he asked Howard.

Howard shook his head.

"I've gotta admit, Rodgers, you have me stumped," he said. "I didn't think it was possible. I'll keep thinking about it. In the meantime, take them somewhere else, I need to work with some reactive things."

Steve huffed. "Fine. Let me know as soon as you have any ideas, alright?" He gave Howard a bit of a Look, because the man was notoriously hard to pin down.

"Yeah, sure, fine," Howard said, turning back to his notes on the Cube. He needed something else to focus on while he let the current problem stewed.

Steve shook his head and headed up to the shooting range with the girls. If he had to babysit, he was making Bucky suffer with him.

"Buck?" he called, glancing around.

There was a beat of silence.

"Steve?" Bucky called back. "Thought you were still out."

"Not anymore." Steve glanced back at the girls. "Need your help with something."

Bucky. Alissa knew that name. Bucky. Steve Rogers' best friend, the one who fell. She turned to look at Taylor, her eyes huge. Bucky was dead, Bucky fell, there was no way Steve could be talking to Bucky now.

Bucky raised an eyebrow but disassembled his rifle and packed it up. Then he went to see what his friend needed.

"What's up, Stevie?"

Taylor blinked and her eyes widened. That wasn't possible. It couldn't be. She knew history as well as every other American. She knew Bucky Barnes had been killed in action in World War Two.

"I have to keep an eye on these two." Steve grinned. "We have no idea where they came from, they just showed up in a storage room and people started freaking. So I rescued them, brought them to Howard who doesn't know anything more than I do and shooed us all out to go back to Science, and now you get to help me."

Alissa looked at the two of them, her eyes wide as saucers, because there was just no way. No way at all.

Then a part of her brain registered the fact that the uniforms she'd seen people wearing looked exactly like the ones in the exhibit. And she almost lost it, but didn't quite, only because she bit her lower lip hard.