"Ta Daa!" I said. "I like that! That's neat!"
The far end of the room had the same concrete floor and the same tool chests. Parked in the same spot was the same big motorcycle. I eyed it with something between admiration and fear- like you would look at a lion in a zoo who had just looked right at you and roared. It had a license tag on the rear fender now; one with an 'MG' prefix that meant it was a government plate. When I looked closer at the bike, I noticed that a mobile radio had been added next to the control panel between the handlebars. A microphone with a coiled cord clipped onto the side of the radio.
Neeka looked over my shoulder. "They did a good job of installing the radio," she said. "I'm glad they didn't screw up the bike."
"Yeah," I said, halfheartedly. "Me too."
"Well, what do you think of it?" Bambi asked.
I threw my arms around her and hugged her. "It's wonderful!" I said. "It's way more than I expected. You did a great job! Thank you so much!"
"Just one more thing, then," she said, leading me back to the cabinet. She opened the right-hand cabinet doors and left them standing wide open. When she stepped back, I couldn't see a thing. I put my hand into the cabinet and my fingers ran into the fabric of the suit draped over a hanger. In the dim light in the cabinet, it had been invisible.
I took the hanger out and held it up to show Neeka.
"That's it?" she asked. "It looks like a piece of gray gauze."
I handed her the suit and picked up the high-top, crepe soled shoes and the fanny pack from the bottom of the cabinet.
"It looks fantastic!" I said. "I can't wait to try it on."
I don't think I'd ever gotten undressed that fast before. I took the suit from Neeka and sat down on the office chair. I flipped the suit around to get to the zipper and pulled it down to the crotch. When I saw how long the zipper was, I smiled. Mr. Morton had added a thoughtful touch to the design — the zipper went all the way through the crotch. I would able to unzip it far enough to be able to pee without having to take the suit off. That would be handy if I got stuck on some kind of prolonged stakeout. Then I had a second thought that actually made more sense given what I knew about Mr. Morton's second business — the zipper would go down far enough to allow me to fuck with the suit on.
I pulled the bottom of the suit on like a pair of panty hose. Standing, I put my hands through the rolled up arms and shrugged it on over my shoulders. I had to reach between my legs all the way to my butt to grab the zipper and pull it up. Fortunately, or more likely by design, the zipper didn't bite anywhere as I pulled it up to my throat.
The suit fit me like a second skin. Already light to start, with its weight spread all over my body, it felt like I was wearing nothing at all. The weave was fine enough to appear opaque, but open enough to fool my skin into feeling bare.
I looked around for a mirror, and was unhappy that there didn't seem to be one when Bambi opened the door of the other cabinet wide. There was a large mirror mounted on the inside of the door.
I stared at myself in the suit for at least a minute. It fit perfectly. It clung to every curve, every line of my body. It was incredible. I tried bending and moving in the suit and it moved with me in every direction.
"Wow!" Neeka said. "That is soooo kewl. But why the yucky color?"
"Wait," Bambi said. "You'll see in a minute."
I sat back down and pulled on the shoes and pulled the Velcro closures tight. The shoes fit as perfectly as the suit. Bambi handed me the gloves from the top shelf and I pulled them on. The palms and insides of the fingers were reinforced with several layers of material and had a tacky rubber-like coating on them. They would be great for grabbing things. The thin elastic fabric masked the overlap of the gloves with the rest of the suit. It looked seamless from the high turtleneck to the toes, like I had been dipped in it.
I reached back behind my neck and unrolled the cowl, pulling it up and over my head. When I pulled it all the way forward, it hung down over my face like a monk's robe. At first I wondered if this was an oversight, but then I realized that it would be a way to hide my face — the only part of my body that would be exposed when I was wearing the suit.
To answer Neeka's question, I walked over to an open spot of the wall and stepped close to it.
"Watch this!" I said. I put my back flat against the wall and turned my head so the hood hid my face.
The effect was everything I could have wanted. Neeka gasped and said, "Holy moly! You almost disappeared into the wall! If I wasn't looking right at you, I'd never know you were there!"
Bambi explained the special optical properties of the fabric and how lucky we were to have it. "And that's why it looks gray," she concluded, "it's really colorless. The gray is just the average of all the light around it. When it's touching something, like a wall, it transmits the color to the other side like a TV picture tube."
"So that's why it covers so much of you. It's a camouflage suit." Neeka said.
"That," I said, "and it's also cut-proof and bullet-resistant."
"You mean bullet-proof?"
"No, just resistant. If I get shot, the suit won't tear, but I still catch the impact and it will stretch enough so I will be seriously hurt. Just hopefully not dead."
"That's still amazing for a leotard," Neeka said. "Let me run get my outfit so we can see how they look together. Be right back."
Neeka left by the back door. Before it swung shut on its hydraulic arm, I saw her take off running. She was just as excited about this as I was.
When I picked up the fanny pack, I noticed that it had already been packed. I put it on the desk to see what equipment I had in it. The catch was the regular type, but the belt was extra wide, so it would be comfortable to wear and not fly around. I unzipped it and looked inside. I pulled out a coil of thin cord attached to a folding grappling hook. A tag sewn to the end of the cord declared it to be fifty feet long and have a tested breaking strength of 1000 kg, or one metric ton.
There was a small metal flashlight with a belt-clip and a hexagonal lens-guard, so it wouldn't roll if I set it down. When I pushed the button on the end-cap to turn it on, the incredibly bright light momentarily blinded me. I snapped it off immediately, but it took several seconds to be able to see again.
"Sorry," I said, seeing Bambi rubbing her eyes as well. "I'll have to be careful with that."
"The ad said it could also be used as a weapon," she said, blinking. "I thought they meant you could hit people with it. I didn't try to turn it on. It uses some special batteries that only last for an hour, so I got lots of spares. There is another set in there."
I pulled the spares out of an inside compartment. They were short and fat and said 'Lithium, 3 volt Photo' on the side.
There was a flat pouch that contained a supply of the throwing stars. It had a slit in the back and could have been worn on the fanny pack belt. I decided to leave it in the pack until I had practiced enough with the stars to be comfortable with using them.
A folding multi-tool was the next item. It was so compact and well designed that it looked like it had been cut from a single block of metal. When I opened it up it bristled like a porcupine with all kinds of tools, knife blades and saw blades. There was even a nail file, a tweezers, and for some reason I couldn't fathom — a toothpick.
"You had fun doing this, didn't you?" I asked Bambi.
"I did, indeed," she grinned. "The more catalogs I looked at, the more things I found that I thought you might need. The list of things I thought seriously about but didn't get is considerably longer than the list of things I finally decided on. If you think of anything that isn't here, let me know. Chances are, I saw it in a catalog somewhere."