Welcome to Gaia! ::

You somehow found the service entrance to the back of the hospital. It looks extremely broken and run down, and there are no lights within the interior.

Are you sure you want to venture further?

At the very end of the service entrance, past a long winding set of stairs and a room that was impossible to find without a flashlight was a doorway.

The inside was just as ominous as outside, covered in fog and writhing vines. They vines seemed to move as they came in contact with the living, reaching towards any moving source.

At the very end of the room was an elevator.

It only had one button going down.

There was a rough buzzing noise as the elevator opened. It was relatively clean on the inside, and surprisingly still well-lit, with just the elevator lights flickering occasionally.

The elevator would close whenever prompted, by again, two sets of buttons on the inside. One to close the door, the other to go down. It wasn't a very fancy elevator, there was no glass paneling, each side was simply barricaded by steel walls. There would be no indication how long the trip down was, it just seemed like an infinite claustrophobic abyss of waiting.

At the bottom, for those who had braved the elevator, the doors would buzz again and slowly churn open.

There was a perfectly lit hallway in outside the elevator, highly reminiscent of a hi-tech laboratory that was also entirely abandoned. The floors and ceiling were clean, without a trace of fog, blood, or vines, and there were no bodies in sight either. There was however, in the reception right in front of the elevator, a computer, still running a screensaver. Papers were strewn everywhere: whomever had been here prior had left in a hurry. There was still an old coffee mug from who knows how long ago with now molding liquid in it.

The screen lit up.

At first it just sank to a blank screen again, and then a series of letters, characters, began to scroll down the length of the screen, similar to old operating systems booting. The white text scrolled and scrolled and then stopped at the very bottom.

The text bar blinked a few times, otherwise stationary, and then several words began to play along the bottom, typing themselves out.

Hello Fantasia. We have been waiting all this time. Are you ready?

The screen turned black again and then static.

And then a black and white, poorly recorded video began to play. It displayed some unknown lady in front of a computer camera. "Um, testing, day one, testing. Begin recording." She cleared her throat. "We've isolated a sample of the original virus to see if it can replicate. It doesn't just replicate, it grows sentient." They looked behind them and the screen cut off.

The video began to play again. "Day seven. It can speak now. Simple words. It takes on appearances of people, whatever it touches. We gave it a new name. The strain. We-" The video stopped.

There was a long pause of static and then the video started again, however, this time it was excessively choppy. There was only vague flashing black and white images instead of a clear display of the person. "Day twelve. -- A severe miscalculatio-- witn-- shou-- know--. Too--" It cut off.

The screen turned dark and the words began to play.

Now, do you know?

Before Fantasia could respond, videos began to play again, but this time it wasn't just of one person. It was of various images, flashing too fast for comfort. The undying tearing out from people's bodies, victims clawing out their own flesh, people cutting each other open, people eating each other, humans vomiting blood, eyes bleeding, succumbing to the infection as their skin peeled and beneath were thousands of vines thorns maggots wormsfleshbonesskincorpseseyesteeth-

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The videos stopped just as the text stopped. All the lights and the computer electricity turned off and there was a loud thud that echoed from the hallways behind.

Silence.

And then the lights flickered on. She was going to be okay. One by one, the machines whirred to life, with the exception of the computer. A few more moments passed, and then the elevator dinged, and opened again, waiting for Fantasia.

There was a loud churning and the elevator flickered, nearly dropping power again before slowly, dubiously rising. The lights stopped flickering and the ascension was painfully slow. It was just her in the elevator.

Was it moving at all?

Fantasia's terrified face reflected against the pristine metallic surface of the elevator-

- and so did something else behind her.

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Dazs clutched his flashlight as though it was a lifeline. He and Giuseppe had ventured outside, hoping to find some kind of thinning of fog. Of course, he'd kept an eye on his brother, worried that he might hie off into the fog on a whim. Dazs had also collected pieces of some kind of map and he only hoped it led to supplies.

"Come on," he whispered. His flashlight illuminated a door, briefly. A service door. Without a second thought, he entered. Dazs did not realize that, by entering, he'd left Giuseppe outside, in the dark, with no way to get in...



Map Pieces: [x] [x] [x] [x] [x]

Infection: 0/100
HP: 38/50