Zoe 'Royal' Payne, SSX veteran, musician, BMX champion, and internationally known figure of fan-worship, was almost completely wasted. Somehow, mostly through blind luck, she had just completed a long, involved run down from Peak III of BIG Mountain, and she had managed to do so without wiping out once. Naturally, there were more than her fair share of close calls, including having to dodge several trees that had actively tried to kill her on the Intimidator.

'Powder' Pete Johnson, the Osprey's pilot, and the only person capable of being stupid or insane enough to buzz the gondolas without fear of repercussion, was also nice enough to pick Zoe up from the bottom of the Metro City Breakdown, and, as an added bonus, the helipad on top of the hotel where all the SSX members were staying was empty. A final bonus was that the roof elevator was waiting for her, and Zoe took advantage of the free movement to her floor.

When she finally arrived at her floor, Zoe didn't so much walk towards her room as stagger, and the dull clatter of her board being dragged behind her tipped off everyone on the floor on just how tired she was. Thankfully, nobody tried to poke their heads out of their own rooms to say anything to her. The last person who had done so had ended up with a black eye and the bragging rights of being 'touched by Zoe'.

It took her a few minutes to reach her room, and, while fumbling through the pockets of her ripped-up jeans, she started shivering uncontrollably. The shivering was so strong that when she finally did get her cardkey out of her back pocket, Zoe dropped the credit-card sized object. It took three tries for her to properly swipe the card through the reader, though she simply suffered in silence.

Finally unlocking and opening her door, she stumbled into her room, dropping her 'Medusa' board against the closet door on the way to the open 'living' room in her suite. Zoe kicked off her sneakers on the way, watching her hands tremble vigorously. She didn't even try to make it to the bed in the next room, instead flopping onto the couch like a felled tree.

Sighing deeply, she let the shivers take over, racking her body for another several minutes before they finally stopped. Finally, exhausted and virtually incapable of effective movement, Zoe sat up on the couch, looking at her hands as they continued to tremble. "What's happening to me?"

Almost on cue, the spoken question triggered a bout of coughing, doubling Zoe over as a spine of pain stabbed through her chest like a knife through a piece of steak. The coughing fit was thankfully short, ending less than a minute later. Looking like she would much rather be taking a knife to someone else, Zoe grabbed her M-comm, and accessed the expensive machine's cellphone functions.

Moving slowly, as if everything she did pained her, Zoe punched in a frequently-used number and waited for it to go through. Finally, the line clicked, and she started talking. "Doc? It's me. Do you have the test results back? Yes? All right. I'll head in as soon as I can to take a look at them. Thanks for everything, doc."

Zoe disconnected the line, then fell back onto the couch, grimacing in pain. However, instead of giving in to the urge to fall asleep, which was insisting that she go and hibernate in the large bed less than forty feet away, she slowly got up and walked in the opposite direction, to the bathroom. Once inside the small room, Zoe washed her face, removing her warpaint before she removed her all-white contact lenses.

Unadorned with makeup, Zoe looked at her face in the mirror, unsurprised to see that she was looking steadily worse. Her skin had a faint yellowish tinge to it, and her eyes, normally a clear shade a blue were murky and bloodshot, with dark smudges underneath.

Grimacing to herself, Zoe frowned at the ghastly apparition in the mirror, then shook her head slightly. The next thing she knew, she was sitting on the floor, looking in the toilet bowl at a dark reddish-grey mass of vomit. Flushing the disgusting mass away, Zoe slowly and carefully tried to get to her bed so she could sleep. She managed to get halfway out of the bathroom door before collapsing into unconsciousness.