A/N: As promised, the Doctor and Quinn are back! I got several chapters written during my little break so I'm now ready to start posting each week again. Hopefully I can stay ahead this time. Thanks for all your support during the break; it's nice - and a little ego stroking - to know I was missed.

Quinn couldn't really blame anybody but herself, she thought. If there was one thing she should have known by now, it was that accuracy was called for when making a request of the Doctor. "Shopping" wasn't clear enough, you had to be specific. "Retail," was a word you should definitely use, as well as "mall" and "store", and it would never hurt to specify a century in there somewhere as well. If you didn't do these things, you had nobody but yourself to blame when you found yourself in a bazaar built in the treetops of a jungle trying to pick up a few things.

Not that it hadn't turned out to be a fruitful trip. The local currency was based on trading of shells and semiprecious gems, and the Doctor had unique specimens they'd never seen before. That had gotten her quite a bit of store credit, or whatever store credit was called when you were interacting with a primitive, barter-based economy. She'd got some nice things, even, but none that she really needed. The whole point of the trip was to get a heavy winter jacket that would actually fit her, and pick up some new maternity clothes, but the concept of stretchy waistlines was about a thousand years away for this society and there wasn't much demand for heavy winter clothes when you lived in a tropical environment. But, she thought, opening one of her bags and looking over its contents, at least they made some beautiful things.

She'd bought a few odds and ends - a scarf here, a bottle of perfume there - and was about to head back to the TARDIS when a young man waved her over to his booth. Curious, she wandered over to see what he was peddling. There was very little merchandise on the shelves of the small kiosk he was set up in - just a few various odds and ends that didn't seem to be in any way related. One thing looked like a pair of binoculars, another was a silver serving tray, there were a few dishes and serving spoons, and what appeared to be a chess set made out of iron or bronze. Maybe this was the local equivalent of a swap meet?

"Something for the lovely lady?" the man asked with a thick accent, and reaching into his pocket he pulled out a pendant on a chain, presenting it for her. It was a small pendant, about the size of a half dollar. The center had a multi-faceted topaz gem that caught the light beautifully, and that was set into a tight coiling of very fine gold wires that circled around the outside of the gem - the final effect almost looked like a yellow daisy the way the coils surrounded the gem. It was beautiful, the kind of beautiful that simply guarantees that the item is outside your price range.

She smiled. "It's lovely but I couldn't possibly afford it," she said.

The man smiled. "You are sure?" he asked. "I see you are not from around here by your hair." That made sense. Every other person she'd seen - male and female - had short cropped hair, probably because of the heat. "Maybe you don't know the currency, no? Show to me your ka-ta."

She rolled her eyes and smiled. "Okay," she said lightly, pulling out the slip the cashiers had all been writing on today, showing the balance of her account. She showed it to the man, and she expected him to laugh in her face, say she was right, she didn't have enough at all, and tell her to get lost. But he didn't do any of those things. Instead he took the slip, put it in his pocket, and put the necklace into an ornately carved wooden box.

"For the lovely lady," he said, "that will do, very good." And he held the box out for her to take.

"What? No!" she said. "I couldn't take this, it'd be robbery!"

"Oh no, miss, it is perfect. Trust in me, the compensation is... perfect."

She bit her bottom lip, thinking. "Really?" she asked. "I mean, really actually, really?"

"Please," he said, "Consider it is, to me, a personal favor. Please take it."

She smiled, reaching out to take the box gingerly from his hand. "Okay," she said, smiling. "I will. Thank you."

"Thank you," he said. "Thank you more than you know."

She walked away, continuing on towards the TARDIS and smiling. This almost made up for the fact that she hadn't been able to actually accomplish her goals for the day.

Almost.

She was starting to realize that traveling with the Doctor was all about going with the flow, which she didn't mind as much as she thought she might have, to be fair. She had always been used to being completely in charge of any situation she entered into, and the master of her own destiny, so this was definitely a change of pace for her. And while it turned out that it was a pretty enjoyable way to live and at another point in her life she might have let herself get completely lost in it, the Doctor didn't always seem to understand the difference between wanting to go someplace and needing to. If she needed to pick up more of her vitamins, get new clothes, get a check-up, or anything else, she practically had to force him to do it.

She was sure it wasn't malicious - she'd seen the way he took care of people and she was no exception; he'd go to the ends of the universe to protect her, it seemed. But he was clearly not used to living on any sort of schedule or keeping track of specific "to-do"s and making sure they got done on time. When you had all of time itself at your disposal, to manipulate to your whims, she supposed that worked just fine, but her own personal timeline marched on, no matter what, and she was getting closer and closer to her due date with each passing second. That never changed, whether they went to the far-flung past or the distant future, and sometimes she didn't think the Doctor understood that.

He hadn't even come with her, either, and that had kind of sucked initially, but now she was greatful for the time to herself, for not having to run around at a breakneck pace all the time. It was nice to have a little more of a leisurely afternoon, she thought. Still, she wondered what the Doctor was doing that was so important he'd turn down a chance to see the beautifully strange bazaar she'd just spent the afternoon in - the kind of thing that seemed like it was definitely his cup of tea. Oh well, it couldn't be helped. He'd probably been to so many of these things that it seemed boring to him. For that matter, he was a guy. Guys hated shopping, and Quinn was pretty sure that was a universal truth no matter what planet they came from. Well, except Kurt, but that was a different story.

She unlocked the door to the TARDIS and stepped inside, setting her bags down on the floor next to the hat rack. The Doctor was nowhere to be seen, and with a sigh she started the search through the back corridors of the ship. About ten minutes later, she found him in The Fifth Study. That was what he called it - The Fifth Study. When she asked what happened to the first four studies, he simply replied that he'd lost them, but not to worry, they'd turn up somewhere, sometime. She'd said she wasn't worried about his lost studies in the slightest, and he'd actually looked hurt that she said it. Since then she'd avoided the topic.

"There you are," she said, and he'd given a little start when she spoke. Clearly he'd been engrossed in whatever he was doing, and she could see why. Above his head, a hologram turned slowly. She had no idea what she was looking at. Over on one side was a list, or the equivalent of one - she couldn't read the Gallifreyan script. It was always unsettling to look at it, either here or on the scanner in the console room, and not know what it said. She didn't realize how much she'd gotten used to the automatic translation the TARDIS did for her until, suddenly, it wasn't doing it any longer. The much larger part of the display was a series of nodes, hollow transparent spheres of varying sizes and colors all floating up in the air. A line connected each of the spheres to each other, sometimes running right through the center of one and, at other times, barely touching the edges of another one.

He turned to her and smiled one of his biggest grins. "Quinn!" he said. "How was shopping?"

"Mixed results," she said. "I got a couple nice things... just not the kinds of things I needed."

"Oh? Why not?"

"Doctor. This is a bazaar, in a treehouse, in a jungle." She approached him underneath the spinning hologram and took him by the shoulders, making him look her in the eye. "Listen to me, very carefully," she said slowly, not wanting him to miss a single word. "I am pregnant. I need maternity clothes. I need polyester and elastic and synthetic fibers and stretchy material. Find me a place that has all these things and you won't be trapped in a blue box with a very angry, hormonal teenager."

He blew his bangs out of his eyes with a puff and said, "Oh, alright. It's always the way with you lot, you know. I try to expand your horizons but it's always all, 'I want something familiar, I want something sanitary, I don't want to eat that thing even if it is deep fried it just crawled out of a green ocean,' I dunno. Sometimes I wonder why I bother."

It was evident that he was teasing her from his tone, not legitimately disappointed in her, so she gave him crap right back. "Deep fried green ocean critters? It has been a long morning. Lunch sounds good."

He smiled. "No seafood for you, remember? Doctor's orders." He turned and strode out the door. "Come on, we'll go get something."

She didn't follow him. She was looking up at the hologram now. "What's this?" she called, and he poked his head back through the door.

"Oh, that," he said, looking at the hologram. "Just charting out a course, finding the next cool place to be."

"Is that it? Is that where we're going?"

"Oh, maybe someday," he said. "C'mon."

She left the study, giving the hologram one last glance as she did so. "Are those planets?" she asked, following him.

"Yep," he said. "Sure are. Lovely little solar system out in the southern spiral arm. You'll love it."

"Ooh," she said. "I can't wait."

"Not just yet," he said. "Sometime soon, sure, but not just yet. I've got something else in mind."

"What's that?"

"A deli. I'm starved. It's definitely lunchtime."

The TARDIS dematerialized, fading out of existence in the alcove where it had been nestled. The young man who had sold Quinn the necklace watched it go. "Perfect," he said, although there was nobody about. "Now we can discuss payment."