It took him a good 30 minutes of staring intensely at his reflection in the side mirror of his truck, but Ludo was 90% sure that he'd figured out the trick to how the ski mask looked so flawless on his head.
And it was actually quite simple now that he 'knew' the answer.
Upon closer inspection, he could still see the faintest grooves of the nano-fabric pressed against his cheek, and it took all his concentration to find it. But with it essentially being a 'smart' fabric, he guessed that it just copied the colour of his skin tone underneath it and adapted itself to it.
This wasn't anything new or revolutionary for Ludo, as some animals on Earth were able to do the same thing with their skin, like chameleons.
But scientists were still far away from replicating that — so he was just shocked that this fabric could for a moment.
Especially when he opened his mouth and checked his nostrils. It seemed even this piece of technology wasn't flawless. His nostrils looked fine, as it just remained its usual jet black colour to imitate them. But whenever he opened his mouth… scrap that, he just couldn't open it at all.
He'd have to act like a mute while wearing this, it seemed.
As for how his hair was showing?
After going through all sorts of considerations — like was it a holographic projection? Was it fake hair? He knew it couldn't be a hologram after he ran his hands through it, and felt the very real sensations of the slightly greasy hair he hadn't washed since the morning of the previous day. As for being fake? Was it even so advanced to replicate the natural oils that had built up? Ludo was sure it wasn't. It probably wouldn't be a Middle Level 1 technology if it could even do either of those.
Ludo realised that it was none of those answers, and once again, was much more simple.
It turned out that each individual strand of hair had passed through minuscule little holes in the fabric, letting his natural, real hair to flow freely and add further to the realism, which must also be how he was able to breathe despite having his nose and mouth covered.
With the entire suit on, his eyes were the only exposed part of his body.
With all these miraculous features that would take Earth scientists decades to figure out for themselves, he actually looked rather stylish.
And most importantly, his head was nigh indistinguishable from how he usually looked. Someone would only be able to notice the nano-fabric armour attached to his skin if they were looking through a magnified glass from close up, or had a good 20 minutes of him standing completely still to observe his skin.
Ludo finished admiring himself in the mirror and turned to look at the object in his hand.
The Gauss pistol.
'I should realistically save all of my bullets until I need them, but how can I know it works if I don't at least try it once?'
He was extremely eager for this part. As a US citizen, it was practically a requirement to have at least shot a gun before, and Ludo wasn't an exception to this rule either.
In his high school days he and his friends would go to the gun range for some fun and shoot a few guns, but that was years upon years ago, and guns relying on gunpowder were very different from Gauss guns.
Unlike Gauss guns shown in fiction, this one was more like a rail gun that fired a singular projectile using magnetic coils to accelerate it to unimaginable speeds in an instant.
Earth could even do this with their current technology, but these rail guns were the size of a whole house and the power requirements to actually use them were immense, making them unconventional to use in combat.
The one that Ludo held in his hand, however, was much more advanced than that.
With the basic knowledge that Ludo had, he surmised that this Gauss pistol likely used superconducting magnets to produce a much more powerful magnetic field, as well as making it significantly more energy efficient to operate.
And judging by how he couldn't see any sort of cooling compartment for a superconducting magnet, he suspected it might even be a room temperature superconductor…
This stuff was the dream of scientists all over the world, and was one of the big hurdles to overcome to achieve commercial fusion.
Yet it was used in a small handheld weapon instead… If they knew, they'd likely want to tear their hair straight out of their heads at the sheer wastage of such technology.
Ludo realised this too, and felt that once he was done with it in the future, he could take it apart and research all of the materials used…
Then maybe, he could significantly lower the costs when he tried buying fusion technology himself!
After all, why buy the technology behind the magnets used in the fusion process if he'd already had it himself?
He already knew that the Galactic Terminal would take that into account.
"Okay, lets set that dead tree as my target…"
Ludo shook off all of his uninvited thoughts and focused entirely on the situation at hand, flicking the on switch of the gun. This was the only drawback of the weapon, as he had to actually turn it on before he'd be able to use it. The magnetic field needed electricity to operate.
A dead tree around 30 cm in diameter, without any leaves or branches left stood out from the lively forest surrounding it, so he decided to use that as target practice.
At present, he stood around 100 metres away from it, so whether he would actually hit it or not was questionable, but…
Whoosh!
He pressed fire.
There was no fanfare like with conventional weapons.
With no explosion of gunpowder, there was no loud bang or kickback from the explosive force.
Instead, only the sound of air being rapidly pierced and pushed aside resulted from him firing the gun.
And with the projectile moving at over 1 km/s, it reached the target in less than 100 milliseconds.
Ludo was left astounded.
Not only did it hit the target on the other side, it completely shattered the area it penetrated, causing the top half of the tree to collapse in on itself.