"Doctor, I think something went horribly wrong this time!" Rory yelled across the open space of the Tardis. The doctor was only visible from the waist down; the rest of him was sticking out of the Tardis door, trying to gage where they were now. "I'm inclined to agree with you," the Doctor yelled back.
Despite the Doctor's voice being calm and controlled, this statement did very little to reassure Rory. It might actually have made things a little bit worse. After all the Doctor was a man who, when confronted with life threatening situations, seemed to only be exited by the unknown and dangerous. So, if that man was agreeing with Rory that something was horribly wrong, something must be horribly, horribly. wrong
Rory walked over to the Tardis' open door, and leaned out his head as well. "So where are we?" he asked. What he saw was the kind of white houses that wouldn't look amiss in London, but Rory had travelled to enough alien worlds to know, they quite often looked like Earth, (though most of the time they looked more like Wales than England).
"Earth," the Doctor said. "But not the right one."
"There is more than one Earth?" Rory asked perplexed. "And how do you know this isn't 'our' Earth?" He looked down at the Doctor, and wasn't surprised to see the 1200-year old alien sticking out his tongue. "Let me guess," Rory said, "it doesn't taste right?"
"Not even almost!" The Doctor pushed through the door, causing Rory to lose his balance and having to hang on to the door to stop himself from falling on his nose.
"What's going on here?" His wife's voice called out from behind Rory's back. When Amy saw the look on her husband's face as he turned to look at her, she said, "Let me guess, no Rio? Again." Rory shook his head.
Amy let out an aggravated sigh, dropped the flowery beach bag on the floor, and marched to the open door. As she disappeared outside, after the Doctor, Rory followed her. Next time he was just going to take a plane to Rio.
"Doctor, this looks a lot like London," Amy said, as she caught up with the Doctor.
"It is London," the Doctor replied.
"But you said this isn't Earth," Rory said when he finally caught up to Amy and the Doctor.
"I said it wasn't your Earth," the Doctor corrected.
"How can it be Earth but not our Earth?" Amy asked.
"Oh!" Rory stopped as he realised what the Doctor was saying. "Parallel worlds." Rory nodded to himself as he started moving again.
"Parallel universes actually," the Doctor corrected. He suddenly stopped walking, causing Rory to almost crash into him. "Although that would include parallel worlds, I suppose. Sorry about that," he said to Rory.
Rory and Amy exchanged one of the looks they exchanged a lot when travelling with the Doctor.
Without warning, the Doctor turned around on the balls of his feet and started walking back to the Tardis.
"Doctor?" Amy asked. She wasn't moving, and Rory - standing between her and the Doctor - wasn't sure of whose lead to follow. "Doctor, where are you going?"
Without stopping or even turning around, the Doctor said, "Going back to the Tardis and staying in there until I find a way to get us out of here."
"Going back to the Tardis? We're in a parallel universe and you just want to 'stay in the hotel?'" The Doctor slowed down just the little bit. "Lets do what we always do," Amy continued, "explore." She turned her attention to Rory. "We could go look ourselves up, see if you managed to get me in this universe as well. I'm not sure you did."
"What we always do," the Doctor interrupted - and only now did Amy notice he'd stopped walking and turned back to face them. "What we always do is get into trouble."
"Yeah, that's kind of what you do," Rory said, not sure why suddenly the Doctor thought that was a bad thing.
"True," the Doctor said and he couldn't help but smile, "but this time it's not a good idea."
"Why not?" Amy asked.
"Parallel universes, very dangerous. Best to just," the Doctor looked around him and seemed distracted as he finished, "to stay in the hotel." He almost seemed unaware of his own voice as he added that last part.
"Doctor, what's wrong?" Rory asked. A question he felt he'd been forced to ask a few times too many for one lifetime already.
The Doctor briefly looked at Rory before suddenly sprinting to the Tardis. Amy and Rory looked at each other, and then both ran after the Doctor.
The Doctor pushed against the door of the Tardis, trying to open it, but it wouldn't budge. The Doctor mumbled something under his breath, making Rory more anxious than he would be willing to admit to. The Doctor wrapped his fingers around the door handle and then, attentively, almost as if he hoped it wouldn't work, he pulled the door open.
The door blocked the view of the Tardis' interior from Rory and Amy but they could both see the Doctor's eyes grow wide as he stared into the blue box. "This is very, very bad," he said.
"What? What is very bad?" Rory asked nervously.
The Doctor didn't say anything; he just stood there, staring into the blue box.
"Doctor, what is it?" Amy demanded. She rushed forward to see what the Doctor was seeing. When she saw it, she gasped. Rory started to ask her what was happening, but then decided to go look for himself. He walked over to his two travel companions and stood behind them. Standing on his toes, he could look over their shoulders, into the blue box. There was no orange and green interior. There was no vortex manipulator. There hardly was any room at all. The inside of this blue box was still familiar, but not as familiar as the Tardis was to Rory. This interior was something he had only seen in old TV-shows, the inside of a blue box. That was all it was now. A blue police box.