Welcome to Gaia! ::

"Not a chance buddy." Kayla grinned, glad that he was still able to crack jokes. "I was captain of the cross-country AND hockey teams in high school. No way will you beat me. When you're better, we'll race." she said with a smile.

She let him rest for a few minutes while she scanned the doors. They were in a small circular chamber that had eleven doors along the walls. One door led back the way they had come, and every door after that was labeled with two numbers. 1-20, 21-41, ect. All the way up to 181-200. The last one was the door they wanted.

"When you're ready, this is the door." She set to open it, knowing he would immediately rise to join her.

Kayla opened the door, expecting Acids, however, there were none to be seen. Instead, the floor was coated with fluids and the skin of dead acids. There was no way to walk across it and her Converse cloth shoes, while great for running, were definitely not going to hold up to the mess without being destroyed, along with the soles of her feet.

"Well s**t..."

"Thanks. 193 remember." She reminds him, while fumbling for the right key so that he didn't have to stand on the acidic fluids for too long. God knew he was already in enough pain. He stopped in front of the room, still holding her, and she quickly unlocked the door. The door slid open and they entered the room and the floor was relatively clear of acid remains. Enough at least for her to be able to walk. He put her down and Kayla raced to clear a chair for him. As he sat, she shut the door and looked for some sort of power source.

"You doing okay?" She asked while looking over a rusty old generator.

She kick-started the generator, not knowing how much gas was left and the lab lit up.

"Well at least I have samples to analyze now." She took his shoes and started to scrap the remains off the bottom of them. She then rinsed them off with some water that she kept on a flask at her hip and handed them back. "They held up pretty well, but you lost the sole in a few places."

She put the samples onto some slides and slid them under the microscope.

"Holy s**t!" She jumped back in shock at what she saw. The slide was crawling with life, swarming with mutation. It was quite a sight, unlike anything she had ever seen before.

((I Gotta go eat dinner. I'll be back in half an hour.))

"Well..." She was rather hesitant to tell him, but she knew he deserved to know. "I mean, I'm going to have to run some tests, but it looks like it's mutating at a consistent rate. And, I don't even know how long this sample was out there. From the smell of it, I would guess only a week. And if it is mutating, then this is even worse than I could have thought."

"It is really bad." She replied disappointedly. "Think about the common cold. It's a mutating virus. We can innoculate varius strands of it, but we can not cure it. We can affect the actual virus because it constantly mutates into a different virus. But that's all." She started to rummage around the lab, looking for anything linked to the original research. "The best I can hope for is to analyze your strand, and hopefully do something about that, but only if I can find the original research and experiment notes."

"Oh boy...this doesn't sound good. Where is it?" She braced herself mentally for the answer.

Kayla put her head down, on the table, fury coursing through her veins. No way was this monster who had unleashed the virus that killed mankind going to help them.

"Well he may have the research, but he can't have all of it. So I'm gonna look around, take some samples of your blood and analyze it, run some tests, and then well see how where we are. If we need to go back, we can...but I don't want to. I really don't trust this guy."