Bella was expecting to be slightly late to math class. This is not math class, but it seems like the sort of thing she ought to be later to math class in order to investigate. In she stalks, ready for something to jump out at her, wondering if she ought to pull a stake out of her bag.
"But anyway, I don't live someplace where cloning is customary. And Tony didn't leave his tech lying around and even if he did it came with an aging speedup thing so Sherlock caught up to him. I'm a technical cradle-robber."
"He is chronologically six. It's occasionally weird to think about it, but he's pretty thoroughly eighteen in relevant ways."
"Charming sort of person who wakes up one day and says 'I think I'll clone a first-grader'..."
"I do not. Anyway, if you didn't replace my math class with a time traveling bar, I don't know how it happened, and it could be unfriendly. For instance, if I've been flung forward into the thirtieth century, there may have been a missing Slayer problem for the last millennium, although if you don't have vampires that suggests something else is going on." She looks around at the utterly innocuous furniture. "Interesting wall display," she says of the window with the exploding stars.
"Yes. It may be magic. I suspect everything here of being magic until otherwise demonstrated." Her hand is still hovering near her bag, though her wariness is mostly dropped with respect to Mark.
"I suspect everything here of being beyond our prior experience. 'Magic' is as good a label as any."
Bella drifts near the bar. A napkin appears. She has a stake in her hand in the blink of an eye, and nothing to stab with it.
Another napkin appears.
The first one says, Hello, can I interest you in a beverage? First one is free.
The second napkin says, Please don't be alarmed, I'm not going to attack you. In fact, violence is strictly prohibited in my immediate environs.
"Huh. And why are we here?"
I don't control the door or communicate directly with whoever does. But if you prefer to leave, you will find yourselves in the same times and places you left, respectively.
"So right now back home time is paused - and if I walk out the door, and close it, and open it again, math class?"
Correct.
"And you don't know why us, why our respective 'now's... Do you know whether this is time travel or alternate universes?"
Alternate universes.
Bar is it, thank you. And for reference I am a she.
"Good to know. Aaaaand is all this business magic?"
It is, yes. But not of the sort of world-specific kind you're accustomed to.
"Riiiight."
She receives an Orange Julius. It has a straw. She sips it.