Guyver!!

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, dark brown hair, looked around for the other members of his class. 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 hell 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!!" 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.

            ____________

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.

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 thing 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.