Popping his head around the TARDIS door, the Doctor barely had time to absorb the details of the alien vista outside before the heel of his new boots made a satisfyingly noisy crunch on the blackened ground beneath his feet.
The ground was covered with a layer of thick, humid green mist which, from the biting cold, seemed to be generated by temperature changes below ground level. Stooping, the Doctor reached down through the mist and felt the rough, grainy surface beneath his feet. It wasn't gravel. There was no displacement. Whatever the surface was, it had either been artificially laid or…
The Doctor felt a pulse.
It was strong, but slow. And vaguely familiar. Wafting the mist aside with his hand, the time lord pulled out his sonic screwdriver and flipped on its targeting beam. A small cone of blue light exposed a bleached and calcified crust, specked with brown and green patches.
The ground had been grown, like a coral reef, drawing its nutrition from the minerals and rocks below. Mainly iron and copper, the Doctor concluded.
There was the pulse again.
"Fantastic," he muttered, patting the ground. "You've grown a heart and lungs to survive on land. Well done."
Glancing upwards, the Doctor surveyed the landscape. Just above the mist he noticed several coral growths sticking up like mushrooms or cauliflower blooms, stretching off in every direction. Ahead of him, about half a mile away, the land rose in the shape of a medium-sized hill. Overhead, the Doctor observed the sky.
Instead of a sun, there was a dark black spiral. A hole in space, but too close to be a black hole, because the gravity on this world appeared to be normal. Just beyond the horizon the Doctor noticed another body, a rising planet.
He was on a moon.
Turning his attention to the sparsely populated night sky, the Doctor tried to make out a familiar cluster. There were none. If this was Mutter's Spiral, then the planet was beyond the habitable zone which circled the galactic hub like a giant polo mint. They must be about 50,000 light years from the galactic core. The Time Lord broke out into a wide and self-congratulatory grin. He knew where he was.
"The Scything moon Petramegaster Extrameridius in the Constellation of Endomethelsia," he announced. It was reassuring to know that while the ancestral home of Time Lords was gone, that the TARDIS still had somewhere she could call home.
The Doctor's grin faded as three questions popped into his mind. Why had the TARDIS brought him here, what was that big hole in space all about, and did he look good in the new leather jacket and jumper?