The TARDIS made a horrible sheering noise, her usual comfortable vworp vworp vworp distorted by the worse than usual flying.
Vwirrrp, vviiirrrk, vrrrrunk.
"What is that?" Kathryn yelled as she and the Doctor performed gymnastics trying to sort out the problem.
"Rock!" the Doctor shouted back at her, using his foot to push a button. "Move the plotter left, then back to the center!"
Kathryn rushed to do what the Doctor ordered. "How are we going through rock? And which plotter?"
"The puce one!" the Doctor told her, mumbling around the normal screwdriver in his mouth. He jammed it into a slot and pulled down. The sheering noise gradually lessened, settling out into the usual calm breathing. TARDIS settled with a solid, unsettling thump and the lights went off.
A soft turquoise glow bathed the console room as the emergency lighting came on. Instantly, Kathryn and the Doctor started looking for the damage.
"Life support still good!" Kathryn called out, taking up one of the floor grates and dropping down inside
"Outer hull is intact and the dimensional difference holding in the yellow zone!"
Kathryn's voice rang out from below. "Plasma cooling system is hot, but within normal limits!"
"The zip drive is accessible!" the Doctor answered. "And our Huon particles are stable!" He leaned over and looked down to where she was. "How's the manipulator?"
Kathryn didn't answer.
"Kathryn?"
"It's broken."
"What?"
The Doctor slid in next to her, looking. "Can't be broken," he said. "Those things don't just break. Require repair yes, and sometimes they fizzle out and need a jump start but they don't…break." He stared at it. "Oh."
"I broke the vortex manipulator."
"Yeah." The Doctor bent down over the fractured shards of what used to make the TARDIS a time ship. "Yeah, you did." The Doctor rubbed his eyes. "And I don't have a spare."
"I'm sorry, I—"
The Doctor waved off her protests. "No, I should have been a little more careful teaching you what to do while flying to prevent this sort of thing. You've already had problems landing, should have put up a safety net to keep you out of tunnels and rooms."
"Still…what did I do, exactly?"
The Doctor sighed. "Any number of things. Pushed down too far on the spatial setting, shifted the co-ordinates midflight, sent us to mining colony and missed the entrance…the list goes on."
He stood up and hoisted himself out, then gave Kathryn a hand up. "Well, no worries. I can still build one, if wherever we are has a few of the parts I need. If not, we'll either wait for a few hundred years, or jerry-rig something to make a skip rather than a jump to somewhere we can get a permanent manipulator."
He nodded down at her. "Since you were flying, and I know my ship a bit better, you get the honor of reconnaissance. Do you still steal my stuff?"
"I make good use of your storage closets, if that's what you're asking."
"Do you have anything we can use to communicate?"
Kathryn reached into her bag and produced what looked like compacts an inch in diameter. The Doctor gave her a look. "You've still got the CeaXhells?"
"They work. Now put it in."
The Doctor accepted one and removed an ear bud from the back of the compact and inserted it into his ear. "Set it to silent, if it's got the mode," the Doctor told Kathryn. "If I need to ring you, you might be somewhere you'd rather not be caught." She nodded and opened the compact, twisting a dial in the lid. Seeing she was set, the Doctor nodded at the door.
"Off you pop."
Kathryn slid outside the door.
She found herself in total darkness. Something dripped, telling her that at least the floor was stone. The air felt odd. Not musty or damp, but odd. There was something in the air, but that wasn't a smell or mist or anything you'd find in air. It was just…odd. Not unpleasant odd; new odd, maybe even exciting odd. But certainly odd.
Kathryn dug in her Gallifreyan messenger bag and pulled out a flashlight and turned it on.
"Aie!"
It took Kathryn a few moments to realize that the multitude of faces around her were stone. Waving the flashlight, she saw that there were hundreds of stone figures.
"Huh. Stone carvers. A tribe of sculptors or something. Interesting."
Looking up and around, Kathryn saw that the entire tunnel was made out of rock, a dark grey with streaks of every color in it.
"Pretty."
Something on the ground caught her eye, under the TARDIS. She looked and grimaced at the bits of statue crushed underneath. "Wicked Witch of the East," she said to herself. "Whoever made those won't be pleased."
Kathryn started picking her way through the stone figures to a turn she saw up ahead. When she made it there, all she saw was more figures, all about as tall as the Doctor.
"Someone has way too much time on their hands," she said aloud, her echo blocked by the carvings. "Or someone has a thing and they collect. Either way, it's not healthy."
Kathryn pulled her CeaXhell out of her pocket and flipped it open. "Renegade to Mother Ship, come in Mother Ship."
"Hello Kathryn," the Doctor's voice said in her ear. "Find anyone yet?"
"No real clue as to when or where we are. I think we're in a tunnel network though, so someone has to be around. Oh, and these people are either over the top religious or have a collecting fetish for depressing sights."
"Why?"
"These tunnels are crammed full of stone angels. They all look like they're crying."
*Constructive criticism welcome, praise happily accepted, flames not wanted*