Double Drabble: Bizarre Bazaar

[badly_knitted]

 


Title: Bizarre Bazaar
Author: badly_knitted
Characters: Ianto, Jack.
Rating: G
Written For: Challenge 533: Bargain at tw100.
Spoilers: Nada.
Summary: Shopping on alien planets is a very strange experience.
Disclaimer: I don’t own Torchwood, or the characters.
A/N: Double drabble.




Back on earth, Ianto had been accustomed to being charged set prices for the things he wanted to buy. Everything had its price and if the individual items didn’t have it on them somewhere, there’d be labels on the shelves to inform customers how much they’d be expected to pay.


Nothing here had fixed prices; the place was like the most immense bazaar he’d ever come across, and the stallholders were out to get whatever they could from each individual shopper. There wasn’t even a set currency; money from all over the galaxy was accepted, from metal coins to strips of plastic in various denominations, shining beads to pebbles to trade goods…


One person Ianto saw was buying things using what looked like dried worms as money. Another traded a basket of mushrooms for a bolt of cloth, and still another cut off a lock of his own hair to pay for a flask of pink liquid.


“How are we supposed to buy what we need?” he asked Jack, bemused.


“The same way everyone else does; we bargain for what we want and pay with whatever we’ve got that the stallholder is willing to accept. Everything’s worth something around here.”



The End