Kaneki's eyebrow twitched in annoyance as he followed Blake to the cafeteria.
"By your reaction, I'm guessing that you're not someone who's used to being in the limelight very often"
his amber-eyed guide stated dryly, probably referring to all of the people staring at him as he walked down the hallway.
"It's not the attention that's bugging me the most"
he replied before letting out an annoyed sigh.
That wasn't a complete lie.
It was true that he wasn't one to actively seek out attention from others, but he was more than confident in his ability to perform while being the center of attention. So, it wasn't the stares from his future peers that bothered him so much.
No, what really bothered him was the fact that they were all gossiping about him so openly.
For the past few months, his reputation as a dangerous ghoul garnered him a lot of attention from ghouls and doves alike. That reputation also forced them to respect him, because if they didn't, they would face the very real possibility of him ripping out their spines with nothing but his teeth.
Now, however, people were talking about him like he wasn't even in the same room and the worst part being, that he wasn't even allowed to stop them because of his agreement with Ozpin. The one that specifically told him to not do too much harm to any of the other students here without good reason.
It was an annoying little detail that the headmaster practically forced on him, but it was a reasonable one at the very least, so he resigned himself to it for the time being.
"Hang in there, we're almost at the cafeteria"
Blake assured him with a small, amused smile gracing her lips.
"There, people will be so wrapped up with themselves that they most likely won't even notice you."
The artificial half ghoul cracked his finger and gave a curt nod in response, silently adding, For their sakes, let's hope that you're right.
When the two entered the cafeteria, Kaneki was immediately struck by the sheer size and grandeur of the place. It was far beyond anything he's ever seen before, but then again, the only other cafeterias he's ever seen were the ones he saw back when he was still in school, so it could be easily attributed to the fact he's only ever seen three in his entire life.
"Yeah, that was about my reaction to seeing it too"
the bow-wearing teen next to him stated. "I would say you get used to it, but you never really do"
He glanced over at her and found the dark-haired teen shaking her head.
"Heck, I still haven't."
"Noted"
he replied with yet another curt nod of his head.
"Come on, we should go get in line before they run out of food"
the bow-bearing bookworm said to him while gesturing for him to follow with her hand.
"You go ahead, I'm not that hungry"
the artificial half ghoul stated while subconsciously scratching his chin with his left hand.
"I'll just go and see if I can find the others."
He half-expected to receive some form of resistance from her, but was surprised to see Blake simply shrug her shoulders and reply with
"Alright, they usually sit somewhere near the back corner of the cafeteria with another team."
She pointed off towards the direction she was referring to.
"They really shouldn't be too hard for you to spot, but come back here if you can't find them."
"Got it"
he said to her, nodding once in affirmation before they went on their separate ways. Blake getting in line for lunch and Kaneki following the directions she gave him.
Much to his surprise, the other three members of team RWBY were relatively easy to pick out of the crowds of people, just like Blake had told him.
The three were sitting opposite to another group of people, presumably another team of hunters in training. He started to walk over to them, but was stopped dead in his tracks when something hit him dead center of the chest. Doing so with enough force and weight, that it actually managed to knock him back a foot or two.
His instincts were just about to have him jump back and enter a combat stance, but they grinder to a halt when a loud, feminine-sounding squeak reached his ears. A sound that probably meant that he simply bumped into someone by accident.
Dammit, I should've been paying more attention, Kaneki berated himself, mentally slapping a hand to his forehead as he checked to see who exactly he bumped into.
There, sitting on the ground before him was a girl wearing the standard uniform for the female students of Beacon, an empty tray that presumably once held food lying in her lap.
At first glance, she looked almost completely normal-looking. Her hair was the common hair color of brown and so were her eyes.
There was almost nothing about her that made her really stand out of the crowd. Well, other than the fact she looked more attractive than the average face in his opinion, but the one thing that made her stand out the most, was the fact she had a pair of rabbit ears adorning the top of her head.
There were literal rabbit ears sticking out from her head and from what he could tell, she wasn't wearing some sort of headband, which meant that this girl seriously had rabbit ears.
Is she one of those faunus that Ozpin told me about yesterday night? the artificially-made half ghoul asked himself, thinking back to the conversation he and the headmaster had the night before. Yeah, he said that faunus are most easily distinguished from their human counterparts by the fact they either had the ears or tails of animals. So it's probably safe to say that she must be one of them.
According to Ozpin, the faunus were a race that grew alongside the humans. They were by all means physically superior to the human race, but were always outnumbered by the humans, so they were always considered to be the lesser being. Meaning that discrimination against the faunus ran rampant with the general populace for quite a long time.
Apparently, there was even a time where the human race tried to force all faunus to live in a single area called Menagerie, which understandably angered a lot of the faunus. Soon enough, a full out war between the two races over the topic of faunus rights broke out, which the more populated of the two sides ultimately lost.
With the victory, the faunus forced the human government to stop the shipping of all of the faunus to Menagerie and win a form of equal rights, which was probably one of the only good things to come out of the war in Ozpin's opinion.
The war also caused the faunus to gain a predominantly negative reputation with the human race and vice versa, causing a lot more tension to grow between the two groups.
At the time, the headmaster described the situation as 'volatile at best', which then lead him to telling Kaneki about the faunus-rights activist group called: the White Fang.
At first, it strove for peace and equality between the two races, but then, something inside the organization changed and now, they wanted the destruction of the entirety of the human race.
When Ozpin first told him about the faunus, Kaneki immediately started drawing parallels between the faunus and the ghouls of his world.
From the blatant discrimination directed towards them to the interspecies fighting against the human race. It seemed so similar.
Hell, the only real difference between the two races' situations he could find, was the fact that the humans from his world actually had justification to be afraid of ghouls. Since the only thing that ghouls could eat without literally poisoning themselves were human beings and other ghouls, it only made sense that they would clash with one another for pure survival, which only made the metaphorical line between black and white clear for the two races involved.
Here, however, the line between right and wrong was much more blurred. Both sides had a way to justify their actions, no matter how terrible, and there was even a select group of people who firmly rested in the gray area between them.
In his eyes, the faunus situation here in Remnant was much more complicated than the situation with the ghouls from Earth. He, being the literal manifestation of a gray line in the latter, could only take solace in the fact that coexistence here actually seemed possible.
Getting back to the situation at hand, the artificially made half ghoul knelt down and reached his hand out to the girl so he could help her up. Only for her to flinch at the sight of his approaching hand. He blinked at the reaction in confusion.
Did I do something wrong? Kaneki asked himself mentally.
"Um, are you okay?"
he asked the girl, using a tone that emphasized the confusion and guilt he felt.
"I'm sorry for bumping into you and all"
he offered her an apology coupled with a sheepish smile,
"I guess I should have been paying more attention to where I was going."
The chocolate-haired faunus opened her eyes and tentatively shifted her gaze onto him, staring at the hand he was offering her with uncertainty in her eyes. The display reminded him of an animal who was wondering if the hand offering it food was safe or not, which probably wasn't the most appropriate analogy to use in this situation, but the shoe fit so he went along with it.
After a few moments of staring at his hand, she eventually took grasp of it were extremely soft hands and he pulled her back up to her feet.
"T-thank you"
she told him the moment she was back up on two feet, her tone apologetic and soft as she bashfully rubbed her elbow.
He smiled reassuringly at her discomfort and replied with
"Don't mention it."
That exchange was immediately followed up by a several second-long stint of silence between the two, and unlike the one with Blake, the one he was currently experiencing was incredibly awkward.
"Your shirt..."
she spoke up suddenly, prompting the snowy-haired ghoul to blink and look down at himself, and what he found made him let out a tired sigh.
It turned out that the empty tray that she was holding, actually wasn't empty when they collided and the bump had caused a good amount of her food to spill onto the fabric of his shirt. Thankfully, it wouldn't stain because of its dark color, but that wasn't even close to being his main concern at the moment.
No, his main concern wasn't what his clothes looked like, it was what they smelt like that concerned him the most and to put it bluntly, they smelt like shit. This time, however, he didn't actually mean that they smelt like human excrement, but they smelt just as bad. In all actuality, his clothes smelt like meat that had been left to rot in the sun for several days and that smell, was accompanied with the faint aroma of a vomit-soaked sponge.
Kaneki highly doubted that the food here actually smelt as bad as it did to the other students around him. It only smelt that way to him because he was a ghoul; and everything that wasn't either coffee, water, or human meat smelt and tasted disgusting to ghouls, which was probably a good thing considering human food was literally poison to ghouls if a ghoul were to ingest human food and let it digest, one of two things would happen to them: either they would regurgitate the food back up like the poison it was or keep it inside and have their reflexes, strength, and speed hindered immensely.
"Don't worry about it"
the snowy-haired half ghoul replied, flashing the girl an understanding smile as he wiped the food of his shirt with his hand, trying his best to ignore the disgusting smell and texture of the food as he did so.
"It's just a shirt and I can always get it washed later, so no harm, no foul."
This caused yet another bout of awkward silence to grow in between the two, but it was eventually broken when the chocolate-haired faunus grabbed him by the wrist suddenly and tugging on it lightly as she said
"Follow me."
The snowy-haired half ghoul blinked at the meek-looking girl holding onto his wrist before tentatively nodding, prompting her to start dragging him towards the exit of the cafeteria with a surprisingly tight grip on aforementioned appendage.
A single thought ran through his mind as he got dragged out of the cafeteria, What the hell am I getting myself into?