The beginning of this misadventure actually began as a creative plan to present a birthday present to a friend. This friend's birthday actually fell around the weekend of the Anime North convention in Toronto, Ontario: with her and several other friends being cosplayers, it only made sense to have the event double up as an impromptu birthday meet up since quite a few of us were already in the area for the convention on a yearly basis. For Anime North 2011, I had a flight of fancy idea in the form of calling up a few friends to organize a slightly bigger group gift of a game system she had been wanting to get for some time but couldn't due to lack of enough disposable income on her end. (Nobody said university was cheap!) When it came to picking a title to go with that system, the answer became much easier than expected as after one lengthy phone call made it clear that after hearing all the positive reviews and watching all the related trailers for the game, she basically flat out said that she'd want to pick up this one particular title as one of the first ones for the current console generation.
That title was Netherrealm Studios' 2011 revival of Mortal Kombat.
After getting the system and game along with a token gag Blu-Ray title with a few weeks to go, for some reason I got the oddball idea that if you're going to have a surprise present, you need to really make the whole presentation work by going above and beyond with the showmanship by having it presented in a way that she'd never see coming: a secret gift presented by the first secret ninja of the MK series, Reptile. There was a catch though, in that despite having inadvertently surrounded myself over the years with a group of cosplayers, I did not know a damn thing about costume work myself. Due to the busy schedule of the other conspirators, I came to the conclusion that there was only one person I knew that was perfect for lending me a hand in finding all the necessary parts to make this work: the birthday girl herself! She was actually more than happy to help, not suspecting anything was off when I came up with the flimsy alibi of wanting to make the suit for some video work...
In hindsight, not even I knew exactly how this was going to all turn out.
Some last minute assembly of both costume and present packaging took place, with the gift box being fashioned to resemble certain question blocks from a series starring a plumber, the day of the presentation came and after at least an hour searching over the whole convention site, the birthday girl was stopped in her tracks as she found herself face to face with a green ninja she wasn't expecting to see along with a present box she had no idea was coming. It wasn't after she finished opening the box and finding what she had assumed was a pair of gag gifts as she neither had a Blu-Ray player nor the system to play the new Mortal Kombat title that she was handed a camera to play a pre-recorded message.
You'll just have to trust me; it was absolutely rich to watch someone who honestly can talk for so long you question if she ever needs to stop to breathe suddenly become completely shocked to the point of silence. It was only then that she finally realized that a group of her friends had been pulling the wool over her eyes for at least a month, with the head planner even getting her to help with certain things of the plan without her ever catching on. Overall, the whole plan was a resounding success, but it did leave two small problems: the first is that from then on, I would have a hell of a hard time finding a way to top that presentation idea. The second is now I had what would be the first of several ninja suits, and no idea what to do with it. Until now.