"It's not going to work."
The Doctor, in the middle of pulling a lever that looked suspiciously like the end of a pool cue, shook his free hand dismissively. "Of course it is!" he yelled over the screeching whine of the engines, "Come on, old girl, you can do it!"
He felt the TARDIS shake ominously beneath his feet. Over the other side of the room, his new-old Amy grabbed the handrail, her knuckles white, her jaw tense.
"Almost there," he said cheerily, dashing around to the other side of the console and pressing a giant red button.
The Doctor felt a sudden moment of near-panic as a flash of bright-white light enveloped them both. Perhaps this time he had finally done it - perhaps this time the universe, with it's stodgy old laws, had finally gotten tired to bending to suit his whims. Perhaps...
The light disappeared as suddenly as it had arrived. The Doctor looked around carefully and took a deep breath. Everything seemed as it should. The relative causality spectrograph was blinking green-green-green-red, which he assumed was good seeing as that was what it normally did.
Except something was not right. It took him a moment to work out what the problem was. The room was absolutely silent. The normal thrum of the engines that provided a constant background noise was uncannily absent.
"You've blown the inhibitor circuit."
Amy was already down below the floating floor, kneeling beside a mess of wires. He whistled under his breath. She'd moved so quickly, so quietly, he hadn't realised she'd moved at all. His Amy, the Amy he had left safe in London, couldn't have done that. Stupidly, he felt a moment of unease. The same feeling you get when you look at someone you have known for years and suddenly see them as a stranger would.
The scent of melted plastic brought him back to the problem at hand.
"Can't have," he said, taking the stairs down two at a time, "the inhibitor circuit isn't even attached. I just keep it there because generally a TARDIS should have one. People like to see one around, you know. Makes them feel like this is a proper, professional operation."
"Well, the energy supply it wasn't hooked up to has completely fried it," she responded dryly.
He stood still for a moment, looking deep in thought. That usually worked, but Amy was looking up at him with a distinctly unimpressed expression on her face.
"In that case, let's go find a new one."
Amy jumped to her feet and followed him to the door.
"Hang on a second, you don't even know we are somewhere we can..."
"Of course we're somewhere. Everywhere is somewhere. We aren't floating, I'd be able to feel it. Therefore we have landed, therefore we are," he threw the doors open triumphantly, "...somewhere."
Amy bit down her howl of frustration as they looked out at the tangled mass of vines and trees that lay outside the TARDIS doors. She had spent so long sneaking through the corridors of the kindness centre that keeping her emotions in check had become second nature. The knowledge dawned on her anew that she no longer had to be on constant watch, no longer had to be fearful of any unintended noise that may draw the attention of the handbots.
But that didn't make it any less annoying that they were stuck in the middle of nowhere with a machine that could go anywhere in time and space, if only it wasn't broken.
She quickly made an inventory of the supplies she knew they had aboard the ship. The materials for the circuit were specialised. Of course he wouldn't carry a spare - that wasn't how the Doctor did things. And there was absolutely no way of repairing it.
"So, oh wise one, what are we going to do now?"
He was standing there gaping at the jungle in front of him. As soon as she spoke, he shut his mouth and grinned at her.
"Now we get to have an adventure."