holli

I don't think this is quite right, but it almost gets at the tone I'm aiming for. Note how I don't let anyone talk long enough for the voices to sound wrong:

The meteor, when they found it, looked more or less as Harriet had expected it to look: a great lump of pitted metal, wreathed in smoke. But-- no, that wasn't right; it had crashed days ago. "Ought there still be smoke?" she asked, and the Doctor looked approving.

"Not if it were a meteor," he said. "But it's trying to look like one-- or like we think one should look."

"Perception filter?" asked Amelia. Rory and the Doctor nodded their agreement.

"Must be," said her husband, while the Doctor waved that curious metal wand about. It made a high, whining noise, and the meteor flickered like broken film. Where it had been, in the crater, now lay a craft, not at all like a plane, half-crushed and still smoking about what must have been the engines.

The Doctor and the Ponds did not hesitate, but ran towards the thing, clambering heedlessly over the fallen trees and stones its crash had strewn about. Harriet took Peter's hand, and the two of them paused for a long moment, before they followed.

They came to the dead pilot first, still strapped into its chair. Harriet had seen a statue, once, of a hippo-headed Egyptian goddess, in an exhibit at the National Museum. If this creature looked like anything on Earth, it looked like that. Peter touched its face, the arm that emerged unmangled from the wreckage, the hand with its three stubby fingers. "Cold," he said, "if that means anything at all; if it is anything like us, it has been dead since the crash."

"Back here!" called Amelia Pond, from deeper within the ship. "It's still alive!"

Harriet and Peter scrambled over a spill of wires, and helped each other across gaps in the grating. Harriet found herself acutely aware that the clothes one wore to a dinner-party were not at all the thing for exploring downed spacecraft. Peter, too, seemed to be thinking of this, as he freed his coat from a jagged bit of metal with a distinct rip. "Bunter may forgive the damage, this once," he said. "If ever circumstances were extenuatin'--"

Harriet laughed at that, just a little. But they had reached the back of the ship, and the second creature was still alive.