List: Em's Mostly Random Word Generator List #1
Number: 5. Stun
Story of Origin: None
Character(s): Random
Warnings: None.
Use: None.
Scenario: Not much of one, though I’ve been watching a lot of Star Trek: Voyager recently.
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He could feel the gun stun him like an old fairy spell, turn him to stone or ice, ripple through his nerves and membranes up his arm and through his shoulder to the cortex, immobilizing him. It was painful only briefly, as the pulse first traveled, and then the nerves that should have sent him pain signals were stunned and stopped. When it hit his cortex he crumpled, lost control of his body, became a lousy heap of bone and muscle.

The battle continued over him, the sounds distant and images blurred. Being stunned was being trapped inside your own body, helpless. You remained peripherally aware of the things going on around you but you could not focus. It was like being awake for over forty hours, not eating in so many days, being gripped by the lethargy of no energy.

Though he could not feel it, he knew he still breathed. All that was gone was the sensation, the connection between higher brain and body. The body itself continued on, oblivious to the commands missing.

Stun technology had taken years to develop, but it was the preferred method of nonlethal force. It was the best way to take someone down for questioning, or put a stop to what they were doing without hurting them, or skirt charges for murder. True, every so often a person died from stunning for one reason or another, but overall it was a safe, effective technology, in use throughout the galaxy.

His thoughts were coming sluggishly to him, not wholly formulating, and some part of him regretted the inability to think even if that regret was as distant as everything else about his body right now. He usually had his thoughts if nothing else. It was what had gotten him through prison on the Thurisian colony, yearlong solitary confinement, and even if he was no genius he liked to believe himself smarter and more contemplative than others. Being without thoughts was being as good as dead.

He had been in so many firefights before, yet this was the first time he had ever suffered a fully-paralytic stunning. Sometimes a blast would nick his leg or his hand and it would go to sleep and half an hour later he’d have terrible pins and needles, but this was the first time he had been truly disconnected. It was different than he imagined it would be, not at all like the stories they swapped around the campfire. He would probably lie like the rest of them when they swapped battle stories again, if they won the fight.

He was turned to stone and ice.