TRIGGER WARNING: MENTIONS OF BLOOD, GORE, DEATH AND CANNIBALISM DUE TO THE NATURE OF GHOULS

"Ghouls live among us, the same way as normal people in every way – except their craving for human flesh."

Tokyo Ghoul, Volume one

Having grown up in Tokyo, Japan, Shiro grew up with anti-ghoul propaganda, courtesy of the Japanese CCG, being shoved down his throat, to the point that he could probably recite them off the top of his head if asked.

It was now just a fact of life that in every dark corner of the streets of Tokyo, a ghoul laid, resting silently, ready to pounce onto un an unsuspecting pedestrian as they walked past, more interested in their destinations than their surroundings. While he had grown up in one of the more peaceful wards of Tokyo, the fear and violence of the other wards was enough to put the fear of ghouls into human.

It wasn't like he had been raised to like ghouls either. No, he was raised on children bedtime stories of ghouls eating him for misbehaving, young teens boating about how many ghoul attacks they had been in and lived to tell the tale, and the hushed conversations of grownups at parks and parties, scared for their lives as they pondered over the latest ghoul attack.

So boy was he surprised when he moved to America after his grandfather's death to find that ghouls had rights.

Right to marriage, rights to the freedom of speech, the right to shelter, the right to food (though there were lots of heavy scrutiny, rules and regulations when it came to this part of the Ghoul's Rights Act 2047), and the right to live.

It was a really wired concept for him to grasp.

He deals with it, well he learns how to put his worries about ghouls to rest as he knows that ghouls are not a threat to humanity here, as they are fed whatever came in the container that they handed out to the ghoul students at the Garrison. Like in Japan, its hard to identify who is a ghoul and who isn't, but, unlike in Japan, there isn't as much worry about them.

Sure, there's still the discrimination of being a ghoul in a human society, but, if he was reading his pre-mission report correctly, even the bad stigma of ghouls was disappearing.

"I understand that in your culture, Shirogane, ghouls are considered dangerous, but the mission requires the minds of-"

"I don't care if they're ghouls, as long as they can do their jobs." Shiro interrupted Iverson, looking up from the tablet to stare at the eyepatched man. There were rumours within the Garrison that he lost his eye to a rouge ghoul out in the desert while on a scouting mission, but Shiro highly doubted it. He watched as the commander sighed with relief, obviously happy that he didn't need to convince him to stay and fly in a shuttle with two fully grown ghouls for months on end.

This was going to go wrong in so many ways.

He doesn't meet the ghouls, people, they were people, about a week after getting assigned the mission, as, while having originated from Italy, they had moved over to DC to live out the American life. From what Shiro could gather, it was a very long process for a ghoul to immigrant, and often enough it was rejected due to the country they were coming from was already too high with ghoul violence, like Japan and surprisingly enough Cuba, where it was too hard to disprove they had never killed a human before.

Unfortunately, he was only able to meet of the people today, Matthew Holt as Commander Holt, the superior officer in charge of the mission as well as his father, was stuck in a meeting in DC still, something to do with making the politicians happy with the mission brief.

The meeting was set in one of the many classrooms that the Garrison in Arizona had to offer, as the other had all but demanded so, as he didn't want to be 'stuck in a stuffy board room all day' as the email put it, which was fair enough in Shiro's mind, because he was dreading the time when all the mission previews came up, which of course meant being stuck in a stuffy room all day listening to politics, something that the Commander wasn't able to get out of, even this early into the pre-mission planning.

He got to the classroom about 10 minutes early, to anxious about meeting them to stay away any longer. It was a standard size, with a hologram at the front of the class for presentations and videos as well as a whiteboard behind it, something that the engineer students would moan about because of something that uses AR technology as well the hologram that helped the teacher draw in the 3D plain, something that, as a pilot, Shiro could just not understand.

There are the 30 standard desks, each equipped with their own standard chair and the standard amount of graffiti since the Garrison couldn't afford to buy new ones and couldn't be bothered to yell at the students for the drawing, though some of them were pretty good. There was of course, the teacher's desk at the front of the class, holding a computer that looked like it was made in the 2020's and its own chair, this one with a computer chair. Around the room, what could have been millions of formulae that each engineer needed to work out the right numbers for the things they were making and fixing as well as a tablet trolley located at the back of the room, charging up to about 40. Sighing, he sat one of the desks in the front row, and got out his phone, hoping it would calm his nerves.

So, Shiro spent the ten minutes up to the meeting on his phone, trying to complete a level on Candy Crush, one of the most addictive retro games still on the market, with levels still being created for the blasted thing, while he continuously looking back at the time at the top right-hand corner of his device. He then gives up as he's expecting the other person to come at any moment, and waited five minutes, expecting the mysterious ghoul to appear.

When the five turns in ten, he opened his emails, checks that he had gotten the right time, clicks off the email, only to go back on it two minutes later.

When ten turns to twenty, he stood up and checked outside the classroom to see if he was waiting there, only to see two kids walk past in their uniform talking elaboratively about how there was definitely a nacho planet out there in deep space. He blinked, processing on the conversation he just overheard, then went back into the classroom, and started to walk laps around the desk, checking the email for a third time to see if he at least cancelled the meeting.

The twenty turns to half an hour, no emails arrives, not even spam, and neither does Matthew Holt. Huffing with annoyance, Shiro made his way to the door only for it to slid open, with a brown-haired boy standing at the doorway, out of breath and hair a rat's nest, his glasses hanging off the end of his nose and missing an ear completely, making it look like he'd ran into several walls on the way here, and, judging by the way that one hand was held to his nose with small bits of blood dripping through, that event seemed likely to have happened.

"I'M REALLY SORRY I'M LATE I SLEPT IN PLEASE DON'T BE ANGRY OR KILL ME!"

Blinking in surprise, Shiro could only see that the person in from of him was clearly a complete mess, and that everyone, including Matthew Holt, needed protection from this disaster on legs.

This is what Shiro waited 40 minutes to meet?

Well, it's not like Shiro had anything better to do in the meantime.

A.N. Hey, so I have had this idea ever since reading Swordbird98's crossover, Paladins are Friends, Not Food (which is totally amazing so you should go and check it out), but, instead of Lance being the only ghoul, I have made Shiro the only human, but he is still space dad, don't you worry. I might do some more oneshots of this at a later date, depending how well this goes, but I want to finish this first.

Enjoy!