Fizzle, snap –
Electricity surges through a defenseless spinal column, racking it with searing pain. Crackles of violet light scramble his pained senses, sending a wave of emotional and physical distress.
And then Kotetsu T. Kaburagi knows.
Something has gone horribly wrong - inside him, and the suit.
The Cerebro suit—what he relies on to let him continue with his super hero lifestyle, is a robotic suit remotely controlled by hook ups to his mind and body in Mr. Saito's laboratory. Right now, it bucks and rages at mental commands for it to continue running away from the lasers and gunfire.
Synthetic nerve terminals mix up impulses. Sensors go haywire. Parts confuse themselves.
The clarity of the battle against the newest villain and minions melds to black, fading out of focus, as the Wild Tiger-painted limbs of the Cerebro sputter, lock up, and power down.
"Oh, crap," Kotetsu says, unable to move any further. Sparks pop off the electrical joints, and even though it wasn't his real body in the fray, Kotetsu feels every electrical shock frying his nerves.
The Cerebro suit: the top-notch of all robotic, medical, and genetic advancements, founded with the research of Barnaby's parents. It inputs the "pilot" in through a sort of simulated reality; the Cerebro acts as a surrogate body, the pilot acts as a surrogate mind, and together they combine to create the illusion of a functioning human being doing whatever other functional human beings do.
In Kotetsu's case, it's to help him remain a functional super hero after his powers left him completely three years ago.
And right now, the suit is failing to be functional in any manner.
In the middle of a massive gun fight, Kotetsu is in a statue-still mid-running pose, unable to run, unable to fight back.
As a lonely target among the other fleeing heroes, the bullets start ringing in. At first, bullets ping the Cerebro armored body and crumple like empty soda cans at impact. But as the gun fire is concentrated, the armor weakens, and Kotetsu feels each white-hot bullet as though they were piercing his own flesh.
"Tiger!" Barnaby Brooks Jr. is the only one of the fleeing heroes who notices Kotetsu is in lock-down. He rushes to him.
"I can't move…" Kotetsu breathes heavily from the pain. "Can ya… get me outta here?"
Before Bunny can reply with words, the gun men concentrate their fire on him. He instead replies with a massive tackle-and-carry maneuver, lifting the Cerebro suit to the safety of a building's smoldering skeleton left over from an earlier bombing.
The battlefield quiets. The gun men must be deciding their next move as Bunny and Tiger find their bearings in the transitory safety in the remains of collateral damage (not caused by Tiger for once).
"Bunny…" Kotetsu's body is still stuck in the mid-running pose, his back mostly flat on the iron-rich soil. His head and shoulders are free to move, and they're seizing as the electricity shorts.
"The suit…-ffffailing…-can't…"
More sparks sputter off him, and then smoke erupts from several cracks in the armor.
Bunny's expression is hidden by his helmet. His grip tightens around the Cerebro's hand. "I can't leave you here."
"You –ffff-…no choice…"
Kotetsu has more to say, more to feel, but the suit won't let him. The emergency retrieval system kicks in, ejecting him from the trance needed to operate such machinery.
He comes to in Saito's lab, gagging for air, as though held underwater for too long. Sweat pours off him, his heart rate exceeds the specified limit for Cerebro operation, and Kotetsu suddenly feels fear for the first time in a long time – a primal fear resonating in the amygdala, unable to cope with the physical shock of his body suddenly torn from reality as it knew it.
His eyes snap wide-open, blood shot, strained from the head set and mental demands. Kotetsu's consciousness recedes from the Cerebro, returning to his own physical, aging body, reminding him that he isn't a robot, that he is a retired NEXT who might as well be human.
Short of breath, he becomes all too aware of the tubes and cords wedged under his skin, feeding nano-machine supplements into his blood stream and reading nerve endings.
The tubes and cords, normally uncomfortable at first and then unnoticeable once the deep sensory transition into the artificial Cerebro conscious is made, aggravates his disoriented state by causing more pain, creating more danger.
Still suffering from a partial trance from the Cerebro, Kotetsu is not all together there in his head. He hastily rips and tears the cords, nodes, and tubes from the veins in his arms, legs, neck, and forehead. He's still gasping and gulping for air, either hallucinating that's he's suffocating from the malfunction of the suit or physically in all actuality. Panicking, as if driven mad, he shoves away the overhanging visor of the head set and bolts from the pilot terminal, but before he can take a fourth step, he falls to his knees.
Kotetsu's senses are overloaded – he struggles for control of his physiological responses, and although determined to return to normal, he is out of luck.
His breathing is stabilizing, but his stomach is protesting angrily with sharp nausea to the nano-machine pill he ingested prior to the deep sensory transition to help ease the process.
Barely holding himself up, Kotetsu is helpless when the vomit hurls up and spreads around his palms and fingers.
Weakness conquers will power, and the once great Wild Tiger passes out after collapsing in a pool of his own bloody vomit.
;I own nothing but the words and situations I control.
First time writing for Tiger and Bunny.
TO BE CONTINUED