The Birth of Guyver V
It was a completely normal day. Or, it
would have been if not for the fact that his class had decided
to go on a fieldtrip. It wasn’t that he minded this turn of
events—in fact, he was glad about it, since being in the outside
world was always better than being shut up inside a dark, stuffy
classroom all day.
Ryan, running a hand though his short,
fiery red hair, looked around for the other members of his
class. Ryan Crouger; that was his name. The entire class was out
hiking around one of the high, forbidding cliffs that stood like
lonely sentinels at the far edge of the small city where he
lived. They were a nice place to visit, but he was glad not to
live there.
No doubt about it, though—this
place is a lot more interesting than any of those mind-numbing
"lessons" any day of the week.
Ryan grinned and started walking
again. He always tended to fall behind on outings like this. His
mom often thought that it was because he didn’t want to hurry up
and risk missing any of the sights, but Ryan just thought it was
because he wanted to delay his inevitable return to school.
Either way, variants on the same
situation had been played out every time Ryan had been sent out
on a trip with his classmates. Little did he know just how much
he was about to be delayed. Kicking a pebble, then kicking the
rock that it had landed next to, Ryan made another half-hearted
attempt to find the rest of his class.
He was currently standing on the edge of
a broad, flat, rocky plain. Looking around, he found that there
was nothing really interesting about this particular place and
so felt confident that he didn’t need to pay that much attention
to his surroundings. That would prove to be something of a
mistake.
As he was making his way across the
plain, Ryan didn’t take any notice of the fact that there were
small cracks spider-webbing the surface under his feet, and the
ground dipped slightly under his weight as he walked deeper into
the center of the plain. He was too focused on how much he
didn’t want to go back to school to even notice.
It was only when the ground literally
fell out from under him that Ryan realized that something was
wrong by then it was already too late. With a yelp of extreme
surprise, Ryan fell into the underground cave that he had
inadvertently discovered. Then the ground slammed into him with
brutal force, and Ryan knew nothing more…
The first thing Ryan noticed as he
struggled back to consciousness was the stabbing pain radiating
upward from his left hand. Looking at the afflicted hand, he
found that there was a sharp piece of rock sticking through his
palm. Since his right arm was stuck under a small pile of
rocks—which hurt like a son of a bitch now that he thought about
it—he brought his left hand up to his mouth and clamped his
teeth down on the shard of rock.
Pulling it out, Ryan spat the shard into
a small pile of rocks off to his left. Then he pulled his right
arm out from under the rubble that had been piled on top of it.
"Ahh! Shit!" Ryan shook his arm out,
trying to get it to stop hurting so much.
Deciding that finding help was a pretty
good idea, Ryan got up and started to walk, knowing that he
wouldn’t be able to climb back up and out of the hole. And even
if he could, the sides looked too unstable to risk doing
something like that. Looking for any source of light, he saw
something flash just a few feet in front of him, but it was way
too dim to be anything resembling an exit.
In fact, it looked almost metallic, no
matter how weird that might sound to someone else. The
thing—whatever it was—seemed to be wedged in the rock somehow.
As his eyes became more adjusted to the darkness, he could see
that it wasn’t like anything he had ever seen before. For one
thing, there was a small silver half-sphere placed like a
bull’s-eye in the center of something that Ryan couldn’t quite
make out at the moment.
In fact, if Ryan had been asked to
describe what he was seeing right then, he’d have said that it
looked vaguely like a dartboard. Crouching down in front of the
dartboard-looking thing, he reached out to touch it. The outer
edges were slightly warm and sort of squishy—at least where they
weren’t covered over by smooth metal.
But when he reached the center, where
the flashing thing was, he only had time to register that it was
warm before the entire thing exploded into a mass of writhing
tentacles. The tentacles quickly enveloped him, and he tried in
vain to pull them off. As they covered him completely, he
screamed as he felt them digging into his skin like they were
trying to pull him apart, and the pain was nearly unbearable.
After a few more minutes of that, Ryan
blacked out.
XxXxXxX
The Guyver’s Control Medal flashed
twice, and the newly activated Guyver unit rose to its feet. The
first and last thing that the Guyver’s biocomputer mind could
recall was bonding to its new host, and as it scanned the host’s
brainwaves, it found that its host was unconscious at the
moment. Not possessing the sentience necessary to worry at the
moment, the Guyver scanned the interior of the cavern it was now
standing in.
Finding an exit, the Guyver headed for
it. Scanning the brainwaves of its host again, the Guyver found
that the human—a male—was just starting to regain consciousness.
XxXxXxX
As Ryan slowly came around, he
started to notice that he was walking. That was weird enough,
but after taking a quick look down, Ryan’s definition of "weird"
was quickly revised: his left arm, left leg, and left foot—in
fact the entire left side of his body—was covered in some kind
of insectile gray armor. Looking at the right side, Ryan found
that his entire body
was covered in the stuff.
Bringing his hands up to touch his face,
he found that while he could still feel things with his fingers
and the palms of his hands, the sensations were… distant
somehow. It was like his senses were being amplified, while at
the same time diverted through something that was taking the
edge off of what he was sensing.
It was a weird thing to think, but
that was evidently what was happening. Stepping around a pile of
rocks, Ryan suddenly remembered that there were going to be a
lot of other people looking for him once they noticed that he
was missing. It might have been interesting to see just what
this armor stuff could really
do, but if anyone saw him like
this it was sure to lead to all kinds of unanswerable questions.
And Ryan wasn’t even completely sure
himself how he’d ended up covered from head to toe in the stuff
in the first place. First he tried to peel it off, but all he
managed to do was open one of the chestplates, and when he
checked to see if the other chestplate would open the same way,
he found that it did. Running his right hand—the one that wasn’t
occupied with holding open his left chestplate—over the inside
and coming away with some kind of goo on his fingers, Ryan
rubbed them together. It felt like some kind of mucous.
Okay, now this is getting kinda
gross, Ryan thought, looking
at the mucous he’d collected.
I wonder how you get this stuff off?
As soon as he had that thought, though, the armor peeled off and
disappeared behind him. Turning quickly, he saw the glowing form
of the armor turn transparent and seem to just vanish into the
air a few feet back from where he’d been standing.