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The Iridian Bazaar was fit for its asteroid, or at least for its asteroid's reputation: it was a riot of color in a bleak, hot expanse of nothing, vibrant and alive with noise and heat and tinted shadows where light filtered in through the tents overhead. Hvergelmir had seen many vast, open markets in her travels -- but this one was worth the visit.

She'd come with a fair bit of money to spend, belted in a pouch at her hip -- she always did -- but for now, she was contenting herself with dancing merrily from stall to stall, looking at the sellers' wares, occasionally stopping to sniff at her lunch options here and there. She tried to keep in the shadows cast by the sellers' tents as best she could -- the sun was relentless on her exposed skin, threatening to turn her pink -- but everywhere there was something to see, and it was hard to force herself to do things in any semblance of order.

Hvergelmir had just been on the verge of asking to purchase a beautiful beaded hair comb, spinning it over in her hands with a little confusion, when someone else jostled into her suddenly.

"No, I beg your pardon," she said with that automatic politeness that Sailor Cosmos expected of Cosmos knights as her only real request. "I wasn't watching." She looked up at the other woman and smiled. "Say, I don't suppose you know where I can find the price of this?" Hvergelmir asked, holding up the comb. "I was hoping it might be marked somewhere."

Hvergelmir watched where the cloaked Iridian was pointing. Ah. A barter system, then.

"Hmm. So you're telling me my money's no good, then?" That could pose somewhat of a difficulty. She set the comb she'd been admiring back down forlornly. "Well, that's going to make feeding myself a little difficult, I suppose. It's considered rude to sell a gift near the planet that gave it to you, and everything else I have is in coin."

She jangled the heavy pouch at her waist. "I don't suppose they'd consider rare coins worth trading? I'm sure I still have some gold from way over Altair way, or silver ducats from the Southern Cross."

Hvergelmir studied her Iridian companion with a little more scrutiny. She was offering to be helpful, and that was certainly necessary -- but this wasn't exactly Hvergelmir's first time traveling the Asteroid Belt, as the saying went, and she knew better than to trust helpful people completely blindly.

"And there is, of course, an appraiser's fee, I take it?" she asked with raised eyebrows and a smile.

She wouldn't object to offering a few coins for her helper's trouble, actually -- but she was conscious that there was a chance that some of her coins might take it upon themselves to just wander off on their own, in situations like this, and so happen to wind up in the pockets of a helpful advisor. She had some sense that it would be better to make it clear she wasn't completely without her wits -- at least then, if the Iridian turned out to be cheating her, she'd feel compelled to put a respectable amount of effort in.

Some people took affront at being laughed at. To be fair, Hvergelmir was certainly no exception -- but having spent the past several years traveling the galaxy on one errand or another, one thing she'd gotten used to was the likelihood that she'd get something wrong about a new culture without even thinking about it. In the end, the truth of human society was that there was no one right way, no one defined way, that it developed. People were always a little more different than you expected them to be. Being laughed at for misjudging a cultural point of order was, in the grand scale of things, not really so bad.

And it wasn't even the first time in the last five minutes that it had happened.

What an embarrassing day.

She listened to the presumably-Iridian describe the comb she'd been eyeing with rapt interest. "Can all Iridians spot partial gold content at 10 paces, or is it just you?" she asked. She pulled out a handful of coins from the top of her full coinpurse. "Are any of these worth their weight?" she asked. "And where do you travel to, if I can ask? I do a bit of traveling myself."

Hvergelmir was just in the process of digging through her coinpurse to dig up some more Rhodesian pieces-of-six when the Iridian's description of herself as an exception to the rule caught her attention. She looked up, six copies of the coin flat on her palm.

"Oh!" she said, surprised, when the Iridian pulled back her hood to reveal what was obviously the tiara of a sailor senshi.

With an immediacy that bespoke stringent training, Hvergelmir curled the coins up in her hand and ducked into a well-practiced, formal bow.

"Well met, good soldier," she offered her greeting. "Glad tidings from a knight of Hvergelmir, one of the Wonders of the Cosmos. I'm here on no official business -- only to see the famed Iridian Bazaar with my own eyes."

Hvergelmir, who had certainly visited worlds in her time where she'd been -- to describe it in a word -- unwelcome, wasn't terribly alarmed at the reminder that there were no knights in alliance with Sailor Iris's asteroid. That much she knew -- or there'd have been someone she could've gone to to offer her greetings straightaway, someone who was ultimately part of the same order to which she'd pledged her service. The same great brotherhood. Iris had not deigned to play host to any knights.

"Iris may see it that way," she allowed with a smile. "But if Sailor Cosmos had sent one of us here to make contact -- or if a starseed had passed on and was in need of a chaperone back to the Cauldron, it would've been terribly official on our side. She's a notorious stickler for manners and protocol, that one -- we have that drilled into us in training."

She watched with amused fascination as Sailor Iris rolled the coin back and forth over the tops of her fingers like it was the easiest trick in the book. "As for my clothing . . . " Hvergelmir shrugged. "All starlight falls gently on the knights of the Cosmos -- or so they say. We'll see how I do."

Hvergelmir wondered if she was ever going to get that coin back, or if Sailor Iris planned to keep it. Nothing for it, if she opted for the latter: Hvergelmir could hardly demand a world's sailor senshi remit her a small coin.

"Sailor Iris," Hvergelmir repeated her title back to her, holding out the Rhodesian coins on her palm, with a grin. "Will you show me how making a price with a vendor is done in the Iridian Bazaar?"

Hvergelmir observed the exchange -- or lack thereof -- with interest. It wasn't an uncommon thing to see a world where their original language had fallen away in favor of the common languages of trade, but it was a bit more rare to find one where the old language still had a remaining oral tradition, and hadn't yet faded to old texts and academics.

"I'm dying to know what you said to them," Hvergelmir said quietly, leaning over into Sailor Iris's space so she could lower her voice. " 'You ugly sons of dogs' or something inflammatory like that?"

She parceled out the spare coins she'd dug up, and tucked them back into her coinpurse, then stepped back up to the table where she'd found the comb she liked with only the number Iris had indicated still tucked into her palm. "Excuse me," she said,hoping to catch the vendor's attention. "I'd like to offer you a trade for this comb. Four Rhodesian pieces-of-six, newly minted." She lifted her palm to show her offer. "You can see the craftsmanship -- not a nick or a dent in the filigree, and the details on the portraits are exquisite for coin of this size.

Hvergelmir glanced back at Sailor Iris briefly with eyebrows raised, to see how Iris thought she was doing. Should she have led with a smaller offer and haggled her way up?