Kaneki didn't know what he expected when he first saw that sliver of red through his half-open eyes, but he certainly didn't expect to see the young face of a teenage girl staring down at him with a curious pair of gray eyes.
Eyes that shared the same color as his own, but still somehow managed to seem brighter in comparison. So much so, that he actually found that it'd probably be much more accurate to call the shade of her eyes a shade of silver rather than gray.
She blinked at him with those lively, metallic-colored eyes and he blinked back with his own dull, lifeless ones.
"Hi there," she said to him, finally breaking the silence that had grown between them.
Her tone was rather awkward sounding as she raised one of her hands in greeting. An act that vaguely reminded the young man turned half ghoul of a younger version of himself.
"Um… hi," that was the only thing he could manage to say back as he was still completely dumbfounded by what was going on, which ended up causing another impromptu staring contest to go on between them.
The two remained like this for several seconds before the girl once more broke the silence that had grown between them,
"You know there are more comfortable places to sleep than on the ground, right?"
The artificial ghoul's eyes widened when he heard those words, instantly becoming aware of his current surroundings. External sounds and smells rushing into the forefront of his mind like they were the water from a destroyed dam.
Everything around him was, for lack of a better word, different.
The cold concrete ground that he was laying on just before he had blacked out was gone, replaced by what felt like a carpet of soft grass. The air that was once filled with the putrid stench of human excrement and freshly-slain corpses was now offset by fresh, clean air. The almost torturous silence that surrounded his fight with Arima had been filled by the pleasant sounds of birds chirping somewhere off in the distance.
Truly, this was the last place the young half-ghoul expected to find himself when he pried his weary eyes open.
Everything around him felt so serene, so peaceful. Definitely a departure from the tense atmosphere that seemed to follow him around everywhere.
It was a pleasant change to say the least.
Not wanting to take this new found calm for granted, the artificial ghoul took a moment to bask in the serenity around him like a warm blanket on a cold night. Two seconds passing him by before he decided to do something. Already knowing that he wasn't going to be able to scan his current surroundings for any dangers while he was on his back, he forced himself up into a sitting position to do just that and to his surprise, the act took little to no effort to perform whatsoever. Surprising, considering he remembered taking several rather large blows to the midsection in his previous fight.
As he sat himself up, Kaneki noted that he was still wearing the battle suit Tsukiyama had designed for him wear during combat situations, but there was something about his current attire that caught him by surprise.
Not by the fact that he was still wearing it, he distinctly remembered putting it on before heading over to help fight the doves attacking Anteiku, but by how clean it was. It was completely devoid of any blood, which he had spilt plenty of during his attempt to save Kaya, Enji, and the manager from their aforementioned attackers.
"So you're alright after all,"
the girl standing before him stated in what had to be the happiest tone he had heard someone other than Hinami use in months.
Doing a little self-congratulatory fist pump as she continued
"Looks like Yang is buying me those cookies after all."
As he listened to her speak, his eyes began the task of scanning the area around him and was almost immediately caught off-guard by the sheer amount of greenery that was surrounding him.
There were rows upon rows of trees and bushes all around him. So many, in fact, that the only thing he could see off in the distance were just more and more trees.
A forest?'
he asked himself with narrowed eyes.
How the hell did I manage to get all the way out to a forest in the shape I was in?
The snowy-haired half ghoul subconsciously began to rack his brain, looking for anything that could explain how he ended in a place like this.
I can't smell any gas in the air, which means that I have to be pretty deep into the forest, Kaneki mused to himself after having taken in a series of quick sniffs in through his nostrils. How could I have…?
He stopped that train of thought when he realized that he was doing it again. There was no possible way he could know the answers to the questions he was asking himself and yet, he kept on asking himself those kinds of questions like they would suddenly pop into his head .
Obviously, he needed to find someone who could answer the questions he had. Thankfully, there was someone in his general vicinity that fit that description.
Kaneki scanned the black-haired girl standing in front of him from head to toe, taking note of the long red cape that was draped on her shoulders, which he assumed to be the sliver of red he saw when he first opened his eyes.
He then took the time to note how his earlier assumption of her age being somewhere in between a child and a full-grown adult seemed to be spot on.
If he had to guess her actual age though, Kaneki would have to guess that she was somewhere between the age of fifteen and sixteen. Maybe a year younger if she had gone puberty earlier than most females.
Black hair with red tips. Silver eyes. Pale as snow. Admittedly cute. That was everything that made up the basics of rather unique-looking girl before him.
One may ask him what about her appearance made her unique?
Well, her choice of clothing was a black blouse that had red corset-like lacing on her stomach area; a skirt of the same color that's red trimmings only reached her mid-thigh; and black stockings that went all the way down her legs to a pair of red and black boots. Truth be told, she kind of reminded him of the time he had went to Akihabara with Hide. He had seen a lot of girls dressing in a similar way during his time there.
'I think it was called gothic lolita-style dress,'
he mused to himself offhandedly.
So she was pretty unique-looking in his eyes, but then again, he must have looked pretty unique to her too considering that he was still wearing a skin-tight, black battle suit with only a high-collared shirt and a pair of baggy shorts of the same color to conceal his more private areas.
"Um… is there something on my face or something?"
the girl asked him suddenly, forcing him out of his thoughts with a rapid series of blinks.
The artificially-made half ghoul let out a sheepish chuckle at the girl's discomfort, finding the irony in the situation to be quite amusing. He had always been the one to become unnerved by things like getting stared at for too long, so he never expected to be able to do the same to someone else without trying.
"S-sorry, I didn't mean to stare,"
he replied, his tone as sheepish as his prior chuckle as he began to scratch the back of his head.
The girl's expression immediately brightened as she waved off his worries with a chuckle similar to his,
"It's alright, I guess you're still a little disoriented. I know I'd be if I woke up in the middle of the Emerald Forest with someone I didn't know standing over me."
The Emerald Forest?'
he repeated the name to himself mentally, gray eyes narrowing slightly at the mention of the foreign name.
Kaneki wasn't - and had never been - the most well-versed at geography, but he knew enough to know that there wasn't a forest by that name anywhere near Tokyo. A detail that told him that someone physically picked him up and removed him from those sewers. There was simply no way he could've gotten here on his own fruition, even if he had found someone to give him the energy he needed to start regenerating, as he would never have been able to make it out of such a densely populated area without drawing attention of some kind.
That, of course, meant either one of two things happened to the snowy-haired ghoul after he blacked out: either someone retrieved his body from the sewer, fed him with enough human meat for him to recover completely and dragged him all the way out to this forest for some reason
or he was dead and the girl in front of him was some sort of grim reaper, assigned with taking him to some form of higher existence.
Both explanations seemed rather implausible to him.
The first, because that explanation sounded convoluted as all hell, and that wasn't even adding in the fact he still probably would've died from his injuries long before the person responsible managed to get him out of those sewers.
The second had a lot of flaws to it too, many of them rather obvious ones, but the most prevalent one to him being the fact the girl that was supposed to be his reaper certainly didn't act like one.
She acted just like how a normal fifteen year old girl who had just found someone lying unconscious in the middle of a forest would, and that was it. He also didn't see why it was necessary to have someone guide the souls of the dead somewhere, especially when they could've been forced to go from the beginning, but that was beyond the point .
Still though, he might have not the biggest believer in things like the afterlife, but he was pretty sure it would have a much more efficient system of handling things likes this. Considering the amount of people that died in the world every single day, he would've thought that was a given,
So after looking at both of those options, and how improbable they were, Kaneki finally decided upon a course of action: he was going to ask the girl if she could guide him out of this forest and see what happened from there.
But before he could even begin putting his plan into motion, he was cut off by a voice that erupted from the treeline surrounding the two of them,
"Hey lil' sis, what were you trying to say earlier? We didn't quite catch it."
The moment immediately after those words were spoken, someone emerged from the bushes and drew both pairs of the two teens' gray eyes immediately. When Kaneki's eyes fell upon the newcomer over, he decided to use the same approach he used to describe the red-clad girl in front of him to describe the newcomer. Short and sweet, which ironically enough, weren't words he would use to describe her.
Long, wavy blonde hair that reached all the way down to her lower back. Pale, but not overly so. Maybe two years older than the girl in red. Slight resemblance to the latter in terms of facial structure?
Those were the things about the girl that really stuck out to him on first sight. Other than her apparel of course, which compared to the girl with the long red cape draped on her shoulders, was relatively normal despite how… revealing they were. Tan vest with a gold piping over a low-crop yellow shirt, brown belt with an attached tan skirt over a pair of black shorts, and upper-calf high brown boots with heels.
As Kaneki registered the details of her general appearance in his head, he took note of how she called the red-clad girl her little sister.
Step-sisters maybe?'
the artificial asked himself mentally, Or maybe a familial-like relationship, like the one me and Hinami have?
Before he could question the topic any further, another figure emerged from the same treeline and drew him out of his thoughts . Just like what he did with the other two girls, the artificially-made half ghoul ran his eyes over the newcomer and took note of anything that stuck out to him.
Also female. Also pale. Also pretty. Also seemed two years older than the girl in red. Hell, the only thing that he could say about her that wasn't essentially rehashing what he said about the other two was that she had long, straight white hair tied up into a side-ponytail. And just like the two girls who came before her, her choice of clothing made her stand out quite a bit.
Light blue bolero jacket with a red inside, a thigh-length dress of the same color that turned white near her bust, and a pair of blue boots that too turned white as they went up.
"Maybe we would've heard her if you had left that boarbatusk alone like I told you to,"
the white and blue clad girl retorted, arms crossed and expression locked into a scowl to further emphasize her disapproval.
Boarbatusk?
Kaneki repeated mentally as he stared at the two newcomers.
"Oh come on, how was I supposed to know that tiny little thing's mother was so close by?"
the yellow-haired girl countered in a fashion that made it seem like she was waiting for the other girl to say that, kind of like a child who did something bad and was waiting for their parents to say something about it.
"You have got to be kidding me!"
the white-haired girl slapped herself in the forehead in frustration.
"You and I both know that wildly charging at an enemy like that without properly surveying the area is a stupid idea!"
A pale hand held directly out in front of his face drew his attention off the two bickering girls. Following it to its owner, Kaneki discovered that it belonged to the girl with red cape who had found him.
"Don't worry about those two, they can get really into it sometimes,"
she said to him in an apologetic tone.
Small sheepish smile crossing her lips as she continued, "My name's Ruby by the way, Ruby Rose.
Ruby Rose… Hm, that doesn't sound like a Japanese name... the artificial ghoul thought as he stared at the hand offered to him.
A foreigner maybe, or maybe I'm the foreigner here?
Pushing the question to the back of his mind, he took the hand offered to him and allowed the red-clad girl, apparently named Ruby, to pull him up to his feet. Doing so with little to no trouble, from the looks of it. Then again, it wasn't like he weighed too much to begin with. Actually, the last time he checked he had only weighed 58 kg, which would probably classify him as slightly underweight for people his age.
"Kaneki," the artificial ghoul told her once he was back on his own two feet again.
"Ken Kaneki, but most people tend to just call me by my last name."
"Nice to meet you Kaneki,"
Ruby replied with a cheerful smile, nodding her head once in a way that he couldn't describe as anything other than cute. Mainly because it reminded him a lot of Hinami.
"So if you don't mind me asking, why were you lying out in the middle of the forest?"
He flashed her an awkward smile, subconsciously scratching his left cheek and averting his eyes as he answered the girl's question,
"Truth be told, I really have no clue how I got out here. I just kind of woke up here."
It wasn't much of an answer, but it wasn't a lie. He just wasn't telling her everything.
"Well that's certainly worrying,"
said another unfamiliar voice from directly behind him.
Instincts immediately flaring up at the sound of voice, he turned towards the direction the voice came from on a dime and immediately entered a fighting stance, ready to fight back anything that might have wanted to kill him.
The moment his eyes fell upon the owner of the voice, he immediately relaxed as the owner of the voice was just another teenage girl that had been sitting on a rock reading a book behind him.
How he hadn't noticed her presence earlier was completely beyond him, but he already had way too many questions on his mind at the moment and he didn't want to add onto the pile, so he decided to not question it any further.
For the sake of originality, Kaneki decided to describe the girl in his head with a slightly different approach. Like the other three girls surrounding him, she had rather pale skin. Her black hair was long and wavy, and her eyes were a deep amber. The entirety of her clothing consisted of a black-buttoned-up vest with coattails, a sleeveless white undershirt, a pair of white shorts, and a pair of black stockings that started up at her hips and ended at a pair of ankle-high black heels.
The snowy-haired half ghoul also took note of the large, black bow that adorned her head.
Cute,'he thought referring to the bow, blinking owlishly at the aforementioned article of clothing as he added, almost makes her look like a cat.
"You dropped something by the way,"
the black-haired girl told him, not even bothering to look up from her book as she spoke.
Glancing down at his feet, the white-haired ghoul's eyes widened at the sight of something that definitely shouldn't have been there. It was his mask... The mask he clearly remembered ripping off during his fight with Amon.
"How the hell…?"
Kaneki muttered under his breath before he knelt down to retrieve the previously discarded item.
He stared at the oh so familiar piece of leather with a toothy grin for a few seconds, feeling its familiar surface as if to make sure it was really there, before being finally broken out of his stupor by the sound of Ruby asking him,
"Is there something wrong?"
The artificial ghoul glanced up at the red-clad girl from over his shoulder, taking a moment to collect his thoughts before shaking his head and replying,
"No, it's nothing."
He stuffed the mask into his shirt and stood from his kneeling position.
"Just reminded me of something I'd rather forget,"
Kaneki added solemnly as he placed his right thumb over his index finger and pressed down on it, causing a loud crack to split through the air like it was a hot knife through butter. He then looked up and glanced over at the girls surrounding him, asking,
"So, do any of you know how to get out of this forest?" .