Rose Tyler
"Your not dining with us?" she exclaimed, bitterly crestfallen.
"Would that I could, but no." Znya said apologetically, "I've got a nice mountain of paperwork waiting up in my chambers, and I daren't leave it any later in the day. I'll never get to bed if I don't start it soon. It's terribly rude of me, I realize, but my position doesn't allow for niceties."
She clapped her hands, and young Cartwright emerged from the shadowy corner of the dining hall, his favourite lurking spot. "Yes, my lady?" he said eagerly, his gormless face twisted into a smile.
"Yes, feed my guests." she said. "Have chef prepare whatever meals they wish, and don't skip on the wine."
"Immediately!" Cartwright ambled over to Rose and took her clumsily by the elbow, leading her into a seat at the table. Jack shuffled in beside her, and Znya made her apologies once more before taking her leave of them.
"Well, my lady?" Cartwright beamed, "what'll it be?"
Rose could get behind a nice juicy chicken, but she didn't much trust a chicken cooked in 1500. Znya might have a fridge, yes, but it would still be cooked in a Tudor kitchen, and potentially buzzing with bacteria. Probably having no meat was the safest option.
"D'you have any more of those plums from last night?"
"Mountains of them!" Cartwright practically shouted in her face, so determined he was to suck up to her, "and to drink?"
"Oh..." she shrugged. "Go on then, a little wine."
Jack ordered just the same, and Rose pounced on him the moment Cartwright was out of earshot.
"D'you buy that?" she demanded. "Paperwork?"
Jack shrugged. "Ain't no reason to think she's lying, other than..."
"Other than the distinct gut feeling that she's lying?"
"Yeah." Jack nodded. "What say me and you go for a little look around after dinner?"
"Damn straight."
Later
"We came that way!" Rose exclaimed, as Jack suggested they take the leftmost path at the four way fork in the corridors.
"Rubbish!" he shot back, nodding at the corridor beside that one, "we came that way!"
Rose felt like crying just then, and wondered how she and Jack could have gotten so hopelessly lost in the castle's unruly labyrinth of identical corridors and pathways. The floor was simple unswept stone, the walls grey brickwork, with precisely nothing to distinguish one way from the next. Each door they went through led to four more, which spawned others in turn, and Rose was sure that retracing their steps had brought them somewhere entirely different to where they'd started...
"So do we have to start screaming, or what?" Jack asked sullenly. "How do we explain why we're here?"
"We'll give it a few minutes," Rose replied, "then yeah, we'll scream."
The decision bore it's rotten fruit when eventually - after several swear words, cloned corridors and faceless doors - they stumbled upon something new. A staircase, hidden behind a unique, jet black door!
Looking back on these times, Rose would always recall her joy at finding those stairs, for her happiness just then was so starkly contradicted by what came shortly thereafter. Had Rose known, or had the slightest inkling, of what she'd find atop that staircase, she'd have surely turned on her heel and run, run faster than the wind, sprinted away as fast as her feet would carry her, with Jack tearing along beside her, his long blue coat flapping behind him.
How she came to wish they'd done exactly that, as opposed to the course of action they did take that night.
They went up the stairs...