"This was an Oxfam before," said John, dumbly.
"And now it's this!" said the Doctor. "Every regeneration, it comes with its own eccentricities."
They stared up at the sign that read WALES FOR WHALES, with its dragon and sea creature cheerfully entwined.
"It doesn't seem like something anyone would support," said John as they walked through the door.
"Well, they should," said the Doctor guiltily, "even nice people go round killing whales these days."
Despite John's disbelief, the shop was doing well for itself. A number of people were milling around inside, buying odd ornaments that had regenerated from odder ones. It could be hard to find the men's clothes in a shop like this – especially if you were panicking about the end of the world – but the Doctor dragged him over to a rack of checked shirts and worn trousers. They looked terrible, but there wasn't time to worry: he grabbed things of about the right size and dashed to the open cubicle to change.
"We'll pay for those right away," said the Doctor to the man on the till as she slammed down the coins John had given her. "And we won't need a bag."
"Good for you," smiled the man. "Save the planet!"
"I'll try," said the Doctor, her attention already elsewhere. The two cubicles at one end of the shop were good at preserving modesty, with long curtains that almost fell to the floor. But she could see pink stumps that weren't feet poking out of the bottom of one, and knew that the thing inside was no longer a human.
"In a changing room," she said. "Fitting."
She swished open the curtain to reveal a Bendolene, which had completely entangled itself in hooks and clothes. "I don't understand," said its voice from under a green woolen hat.
"Hey," said an awkward man behind the Doctor. "I'm not being rude. But you shouldn't look into a changing room when it's clear that there's someone inside."
"You shouldn't," said the Doctor, gesturing into the cubicle. "But the person in there is a hairdryer!"
"I don't care if it's the Queen of Norway," said the man as he thrust the curtain closed, "it still deserves a little privacy. It could've been naked," he muttered, "you must've realised that."
The Doctor sighed. In the aftermath of a regeneration bomb the people it hit would notice the huge differences, their old selves screaming at them to look at the world once again. She'd hoped that little enough time had passed that the hairdryer people would seem weird, so it'd be easier to show people how much danger they could really be in. Things had been worse than she'd thought, clearly— but at least that would give her the chance to test her device.
"John!" said the Doctor through the cubicle door. "There's a Bendolene here; I'm going to need a sock!"
John threw one over the top of the cubicle without responding.
"Because I can see if the stick works," she continued, "by"—
"You do alien things; I trust they'll work. You don't need to tell me about them all."
The Doctor huffed, and explained everything to herself instead. A sock would never be enough for a Bendolene to remember being human. But it might make a human remember how a Bendolene should never be.
She rubbed the sock up and down the stick, generating static electricity. Before long she felt a small zap at her finger, and knew the device was fully operational. She held the stick high, and opened the Bendolene's curtain once again. The awkward man spun round to shout at her once more, but as he did so she snapped the stick hard against her knee—
The shop fell silent, and its faces all fell too. The man in front of the Doctor shifted uncomfortably, looking like a bystander at the scene of an awful accident.
"Something's wrong, isn't it?" he said in a quiet voice. "Everyone knows it, and nobody's saying. It's in the air, maybe. Something's gone very, very wrong."
"It's alright," said the Doctor. "You don't have to be scared by the hairdryer."
The man gave her an odd look. "What hairdryer?" he said.
All around the shop people were looking blankly into the distance, like the most terrifying thing in the world had actually been there all along.
"It's mad, isn't it? All these alien invasions, and we walk around pretending that they never even happened at all!"
"My neighbour's a squid! He's been one for ages and nobody knows what to say!"
"They've made him the President! Why would you want someone like that to ever become the President?"
"I don't understand," said the Bendolene. "I don't understand. I don't understand."
"Can't someone do something?" said the terrified man to the Doctor. "Can't someone stop it?"
The Doctor looked into his eyes, trying not to reflect terror back.
"This isn't"— she took a deep breath. "It's not what I was trying to stop," she said. "I wanted you to let go of an illusion, see what you'd learned not to see. And it's worked, come to that. It's worked just a little bit too well."
"I don't understand," said the Bendolene from under its hat.
"At least that hairdryer person doesn't seem bothered," said the man. "Though you never can tell when it's them! Seems a bit stuck, the poor thing."
The Bendolene's blades started to turn and whizz, as the man freed it from the clothes it was trapped inside.
The Doctor finally snapped like her stick, and let out an anguished scream. She grabbed the Bendolene by its middle and ran across the whole of the shop, shoving it out the door before anyone could say a word.
"Put on those clothes yet, John?" the Doctor cried. "Thinking we might have to get on the way."
"I don't have my socks on!" called a voice from the cubicle.
"John," said the Doctor tersely, "if all the Earth turns up in the afterlife and I have to tell them it's because you were busy putting socks on"—
"Okay," said John as he emerged out in a crumpled way. "You're pretty exasperating sometimes; do people ever say?"
"Possibly. We can discuss it as we go. Walk and talk, only faster." She frowned. "Ramble and gambol? We'll workshop it. We need to run, is what I'm saying. We don't have a lot of time anymore. Things are… well. They're a lot worse than I thought."
She looked over at the nearest shopper, who showed no sign of anguish or fear as she inspected a horrible vase. Everything seemed normal for just a moment, although the whole world was about to end. But then that bit was normal too, in a life like hers.
As they both started to run in the direction of the Bendolene, she caught herself wishing she could lose all her memories, too.