"Ow!"

The exclamation of a certain Time Lord rang about the console room of his beloved ship and was followed by a solid Gallifreyan curse. He'd just gotten a shock off of one circuit or another, trying to tweak the TARDIS to perfection. He wondered if she wasn't taking his tinkering personally. Regardless, the only consolation she offered for his electrocuted fingers was a quiet beep somewhere above his head.

The Doctor unwound himself from the console's various innards and stood at the controls now, searching for the source of the sound. His eyes landed on a small light blinking rhythmically admist the other instrument displays.

"A psychic hail?" he mumbled. "I haven't had one of those in ages. . ." Intrigued, he reached for the toggle switch that would open the unusual frequency to the console room.

Martha was immersed in one corner of the wardrobe room when a violent shudder from the TARDIS sent her tumbling into a pile of stocking caps. The lights temporarily dimmed as the shuddering dissolved, leaving Martha less than comforted as she got to her feet and hurried out of the wardrobe.

"Oi!" she called as she barreled into the console room. "Working on our landing skills, are w-" she fell silent. The room was empty. "Doctor?"

"Turn it off..."

Her stomach flipped unpleasantly when she heard the Doctor's strained voice from the far side of the console. She spotted his trainers then and ran toward him. He was sprawled on the floor, eyes screwed shut, hands over his ears. She knelt down next to him, trying to discover what ailed him.

"Turn it off!" he said again, his tone desperate.

"Turn what off, Doctor?" she asked shakily. "I can't hear anything, what is it?"

He groaned as though in pain, and Martha frantically turned to the console. "What do I need to turn off, Doctor?" There were so many switches and buttons and levers. She was liable to materialize them into a volcano or something equally life ending.

"I don't know what it is you mean!" she said worriedly.

The Doctor rolled onto his side, one hand sliding up to clutch at his head. "Please . . . turn it off . . . "

"Doctor, what is it? What do I turn off?!" Her voice cracked. She was close to tears, knowing the solution was before her but unable to reach it. And then suddenly a little light blinked at her from the console, just above a brass toggle. Martha looked up the height of the rotors, realizing, or hoping at least, that it was the TARDIS showing her the answer.

She flipped the switch.

The TARDIS shuddered more roughly than before, requiring Martha to grip the edge of the console or be flung to the grate. The lights dimmed several notches and stayed there this time, and there was an eerie crackling noise somewhere up in the shadowed recesses of the ceiling. When the room had stabilized, Martha finally bent down to tend to the Doctor.

He had dropped his hands from his head and lay shaking next to the console, exhausted in the wake of whatever affliction had assaulted him. Martha felt her eyes sting again. "There was a signal," he said thickly, dragging his eyes over to meet her own. "A signal, but it was a trap. Like having your brain in a microwave..." He said something else but he was either speaking in another language or simply saying words she had never heard before. It was certainly odd to her ears.

"What? What does that mean?"

He blinked slowly. ". . . Your face is all blurry. . . blurry Martha..."

"Doctor, I don't understand what's happened. What can I do for you?" she asked him. She wasn't sure if he was looking at her anymore or just staring, unfocused.

"Not much." He spoke as though he had to concentrate to pronounce each word. Martha's face fell, feeling a weight from his response that she knew he did not intend.

"Well, not much is better than nothing," she told him quietly. "Tell me how to help you." There was no answer. "Doctor? Doctor!"

Whatever had affected him had quickly thrown him into a catatonic state. Or at least, that's what Martha would have called it had he been human. His eyes would not respond to light and she could not get him to stir or respond to anything even after a good thirty minutes. She'd managed to haul him onto a lounger and found a blanket to put over him. She didn't have enough experience with his cardio functions to know if his pulse, or pulses rather, were normal or not. Whatever drugs she might have chosen to treat what was wrong with him, even if she had them there, could be poison to a Time Lord for all she knew. Without knowing the cause of his stupor, she couldn't really safely medicate him anyway.

And then there was the TARDIS. Martha was pulling the Doctor's sneakers off to try and make him more comfortable when the lights dimmed almost to the point of leaving her blind in the dark. There was a drop in pitch in the ship's ever present hum, like the sound of some massive electrical device powering down. Then it stuttered back upwards again and the lights returned to their previously already-dim state. Martha felt her heartbeat pick up. She could hear that strange crackling noise again, filtering down from a place she could not see. How long until the lights went out completely? What if whatever it was that kept them warm and breathing went out, too?

For another ten minutes, she sat on the floor with her back against the edge of the lounger, massaging her temples and wondering what in the hell she was supposed to do. The Doctor hadn't so much as twitched since she'd moved him. Finally, she got to her feet and returned to the console, circling it and searching for some clue, some hint as to what was going on and how to fix it...

...Or where they were. It hadn't dawned on her to check that, and that, Martha could do. The Doctor had shown her how to operate the display screen at least. Of course, when she activated the viewer, it displayed in a language she had no idea how to read, and the TARDIS wasn't helping her, for whatever reason. Maybe the ship couldn't in it's current state...or maybe since it was a part of the console, the translation gift wouldn't work on it.

It didn't take much translation, however, to worry about the characters highlighted in red flashing large across the screen.

"Damn," Martha swore, and returned to the Doctor's side. She placed her hands on his arms. "Doctor, I really need your help. There's something wrong with the TARDIS. I don't know how to fix it. I don't know how to fix you, you've got to tell me."

He only stared blankly through half-lidded brown eyes, just has he had been for nearly an hour now. Martha sank to the floor again, back against the lounger. She had half a notion to call her mother on her now-modified cell phone, out of reflex. But what would she say? Hey mom, my alien friend needs medical attention but his space ship sorta broke down. Can you send a tow?

Right.

Sighing frustatedly, her eyes rested on the far wall of the console room. She frowned when she realized what she was looking at. There were dark streaks running across the wall and through the roundels. A cold dread numbed her insides when she took a closer look. Dark tendrils of...something were weaving their way across the walls of the console room, branching out from somewhere above her head. They were thin jagged lines, criss-crossing with one another here and there, and they were spreading, like some sort of ivy. She didn't know what it was, but she knew it wasn't good. Especially since the lighting was starting to flicker around the areas where the "ivy" was highly concentrated. Staring at one such spot, she had a strange urge to touch it and slowly reached out her hand. Before her fingertips could brush the strange tendrils, several more suddenly burst forth from that particular spot and advanced along the wall, issuing the mystery crackling noise Martha had heard earlier.

"It's...it's taking over," Martha said tightly. "My God, it's taking over the TARDIS . . . "

But what was it? Was this what the Doctor meant? The signal that was a really a trap? Had tripping the signal somehow let something inside the TARDIS?

She backed away slowly from the thing creeping along the wall, and by all hope, before she could turn away from the sight of it, the Doctor gasped himself awake, jerking upright in the lounger. Martha jerked her head around, startled and relieved, and ran to him.

"Are you all right?" she asked him worriedly. "You scared the hell out of me!"

"What happened?" he asked, looking down at the blanket and his lack of shoes. "How long was I out?"

"About an hour," she told him. "I came in here and found you laid out on the floor. You said something about a signal. That it was a trap." He blinked, apparently remembering what was going on, and threw himself out of the chair. "There's something wrong the TARDIS," she went on, following him to the console.

"It tried to invade the ship through a psychic frequency, she's probably had an overload," he said tersely, flipping a switch here and pulling a lever there. He was frowning severely.

"Doctor, I think it succeeded," Martha said, her voice shaking again. "Look." She pointed to the spot she'd been staring at before, where the foreign lines were snaking all over the wall. The Doctor followed her gaze and visibly flinched when he saw it. He stepped down the console platform, still minus his shoes, and walked closer.

"No. No no no no NO! Get off my ship!!" the Doctor yelled toward the ceiling, breathing hard. Martha stood frozen, feeling helpless and terrified. The Doctor turned and ran to the display monitor, dragging a hand through his hair and cramming his glasses onto his nose. He leant forward so that the glow from the monitor lit his face eerily. Martha watched as his dark eyes scanned the screen, moving rapidly over whatever he saw there.

"What can we do?" Martha spoke when she thought it was safe to. "How do we get this thing out of here?"

"I have to fetch some equipment," he answered finally. "From another room. And I'm gonna need you to stay here." Martha watched him retrieve his shoes and hastily pull them on.

"But I can help you-"

"You're staying here," the Doctor cut her off emphatically. "The ship is unstable, and fighting for control of herself. It could be dangerous. And besides, you will be helping me. I need you at the monitor to give me status reports, and direct me if need be."

"Direct you?"

"You know that the corridors change. There's no telling what it'll be like now." He was digging through a set of shelves, and amidst a cloud of dust, finally found what he was looking for. "A ha! Here." The Doctor tossed her a walkie talkie of sorts. "Hit the big button while you talk. Has it got power?" Martha fiddled with the thing until she finally had it switched on. "Yeah, it works. But Doctor, the screen-"

"I've switched it over to English." Sure enough, he had. The red highlighted characters now read "WARNING," very prominently across the top of the display. "Doctor, please be careful," she told him.

He turned to look at her before stepping out of the room, offering her a grin in the middle of all the disaster. "Don't worry. I'm always careful."

The door shut behind him and Martha turned back to the screen. "Yeah, that's a comfort," she said dryly, full aware of his history of being careful. She shifted her eyes to the tendrils again. "All right, you. You better behave, you hear me?"

All she could do now, was wait.