BREGMAN: You want to go there? Why, for God’s sake?

DOCTOR: I’m half-stupid. On my mother’s side.

Anyone requiring further information about cross-species translation conventions should consult Preface III of Professor Thripsted's excellent Genetic Politics Beyond the Third Zone. Ask your local library if they can order you a copy. But only if you enjoy wasting people's time.

When the demand for surrender came, some of the politicians sealed themselves into the Parliament buildings, and let the aliens set the corridors alight with them still inside.

Not out of principle. Politicians don't have principles, not even on this side of Mutter's Spiral. They just had nowhere else to go.

Homunculette found Marie’s body in the main corridor, at the junction between the guest room passage and the ziggurat entrance. He didn’t recognise it as a body, to begin with. The first thing he saw was the hatstand, propped up against the wall between the torches. After that, he saw the tiles, patches of off-white flooring torn out of the TARDIS interior and scattered along the corridor. A sofa clogged up the side-passage to Homuculette’s right; he identified it as the shabby red one from Marie’s secondary console room, but only half of it seemed to be there, the other being embedded in the corridor wall. An upturned bookcase lay beyond the sofa, vomiting out shredded pages covered in scrawls of High Gallifreyan. […] [A] filing cabinet squeezed itself out of Marie’s wound and shunted itself across the corridor. The matter left inside her was forcing its way out, piece by piece. Pus from the wound.

The Doctor looked back at Qixotl. Qixotl was breathing heavily, his eyes popping out of his head. ‘I nearly killed you,’ the Doctor said. ‘I’m terribly sorry. It seemed like such a good idea.’

[The Doctor] reached into his jacket pocket. Over the years, people had often commented on his ability to produce exactly the right item from his pockets at exactly the right time. Some had speculated that his pockets were extensions of the TARDIS, others had guessed he was just lucky. But then, they’d never read Yeltstrom’s Karma and Flares: The Importance of Fashion Sense to the Modern Zen Master.

They didn’t appreciate the things a sentient life-form could achieve, if he was totally at one with the lining of his jacket.

The Doctor pulled a sink plunger out of his pocket, thrust it into the mechanism in the wall, and twisted it a little.

After the Doctor had left, Sam had sniffed around the console room for a bit, for the simple reason that she didn’t often get the chance to fondle the controls without having the backs of her hands slapped.

[…]

Sam reached for the lever which, experience had taught her, activated the scanner. The Doctor slapped the back of her hand, and reached for an entirely different lever that did exactly the same job.

The face moved as she watched. The skin broke open before her eyes. Folds unfolded, wrinkles readjusted themselves. Sharp white objects, hard and solid, emerged from the flesh. Smiling. That was all it was doing. Smiling. Oh, God. The face was just a face, a normal face, but everything that made a human being really human had been sucked out of it.