my voice drowns deep underground

[alt_tardis]

If one wants to make a tunnel through water, one has a couple of choices: one can construct a tunnel and leave it to bear up itself, or one can go to quite a lot of work to develop and maintain some sort of active technological solution like blasting all the water out of the tunnel space with a lot of air, or sucking it out with a gravity displacer

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[thatsortofaman]

The Doctor finds the TARDIS in one of the short periods between firestorms on the seventh day. He almost misses it, crisscrossing the park at random, but the portal catches his attention out of the corner of his eye, and he backtracks a few steps, tilting his head to the side. That's... not a Rift.

That's...

The Doctor recognizes the bridge of the TARDIS, after staring for a moment, and then lunges toward the portal and darts inside. He hadn't considered even for a moment that the TARDIS might be affected by the same thing shorting out electronics all around the city. She should be impenetrable, but... that doesn't change the fact that she's dark and silent and dead.

There's nothing he can do at the control panel - it's not like any of the controls would respond - so instead he wanders around it, searching the console room for any spark of light. "Hello?" he calls, voice echoing inside. "Anybody home? Awake? Just a little bit?"

[alt_tardis]

The response comes back curiously out of focus, as though something is projecting from far away in a psychic echo chamber. Nothing in the immediate area of the bridge changes, but there are a few howls from some way down the dark halls.

:: entity{Doctor} ?? ♥ ::

:: TOTAL SYSTEM ERROR ::

[thatsortofaman]

The Doctor lets out a relieved breath at the response. As long as she's still there, alive and conscious, this can be fixed, somehow. He blinks, and glances down in the direction of the howling, but... Possibly some odd echo, some bit of machinery shifting... He has other things to worry about now.

"Yes, hello," he says with a fond smile, reaching out to rest a hand on a support column. "It's me. I did notice that, ah... system error. How long has this been going on?"

This is what he gets for not checking the journals. Apparently.

[alt_tardis]

What floats back is a diffuse sense of time without words or units - the impression it gives is about the amount of time since the plagues started, and it gives very little other than that impression.

:: [SCANNER MALFUNCTION] ?? is-exists{cause{external}} ?? ::

There might be a faint flicker from the deeper recesses of the ship. But maybe not.