Kaylee was having a great time. Shopping! What fun! Granted, she wished she could be shopping for pretty dresses and frills like that. Inara managed to talk Mal into letting the two of them go off earlier and get a few special things for her, and Inara showed Kaylee how to make the little money Mal allowed go a lot further than first Kaylee feared. Lip gloss, perfumes, various unmentionables and other creature comforts which a lady should not have to do without in space. Kaylee had.

Then she and the boys rummaged through a couple shipyards and junk piles and even one or two bonafide part stores, picking up not only the stuff Kaylee knew they couldn't do without, but also a few things that would make the engine room a better place to live in, including improved diagnostic equiptment so Serenity could talk to her better. Kaylee also learned a few things by climbing around inside an older model Firefly with Book. She learned more about how Serenity is supposed to look compared to how she looks now, after all the rigging and creative fixes she'd had to give her over the years. And she learned about redundancies. That some of the things she'd had to pull out of Serenity over the years had been the first line of defense against breakdowns. She'd pulled them out but she never had to replace them. So in more ways than one they'd been flying on a wing and a prayer compared to the ship's original schematics. However there wasn't enough money to splurge on that right now. It was food for thought though. Maybe if she talked real nice to the mysterious gentleman, she could sweeten the deal a bit for all concerned. She hoped he had the soul of a grease monkey.

It had been a long but productive day of shopping on Beatrice. Now the crew was back on board Serenity and heading for New Prospero. Downstairs the rest of the gang were using some cleaning supplies Mal had purchased, and were giving the ship a good once over with mops and sponges and the like. Jayne said all they was doin' was movin' the dirt around, but they we