I stared at the blank concrete ceiling, waiting for the inevitable. It has been almost a year since my capture, according to my other self. Day in and day out of nothing but torture. He could not take out my kagune sack, for fear of killing me, but discovered something quite interesting.

"You don't have an appendix." I remember him saying. "Either you had it removed, but I cannot see how it would have been removed without you regrowing it, or you've never had one in the first place." This was after he tried to rip out my kagune. The information was unsettling to me, for some reason. Maybe ghouls weren't humans at all, and we just came into existence one day without warning. Maybe we were not of this world, and part of some ancient group of aliens that happened to pass by.

He came in a few months after almost tearing out my kagune with a huge smile on his face. I took the torture as I had been, with screams of agony and tears of pain. At one point, he stopped and let me lay there, gasping for breath.

"I'm sure you're wondering why I'm so happy today." He began, laughing maniacally. "I've captured more subjects to test. One of them being your friend. What was her name again? Teelee." My mind cleared and I was able to thrash about, despite the fact that my skin was peeled away from my legs and arms. "Yes. Struggle at the fact that your friend is helplessly under my control now. And not only her, but many other ghouls of varying ages are now being thoughtfully dissected by me. They're being changed, contorted, and experimented on to see what makes each one so unique. With your friend Teelee, I am discovering how to manipulate the colour of a kagune. Perhaps we will have a ghoul under our charge that will be able to camouflage itself, like a chameleon."

"The Director will find out what you're doing to us. He'll stop you." I screamed at him.

"Oh, but the reason why I can gather more ghouls to experiment on is because the Director told me I could. I showed him the results of my research on you and he saw it as profitable information." I couldn't believe what he was saying. The Director seemed to care when he picked me up, he seemed to care about weather I was hurt or if I would be safe. Why would he neglect us now, all of us?

My inner evil, which by then I took to calling Hoji, spoke through my mouth to the old man, "We will definitely kill you old man. We will kill you and eat you whole, and then, we will spit out the bones into the sewers and let them rot with the shit that has congealed in your filthy soul."

"Big words coming from a child." He said, giving me another dose of Rc cell repressant. "Do you want to hear what I think about, concerning the origin of ghouls?"

"Sure, why not." Hoji and I said, boredom laced within my voice.

"It is my educated opinion that ghouls are actually humans developed through the age old law of evolution. You see, there are many religions and cultures that used to require a human sacrifice to a more powerful being. Sometimes these cultures would consume humans. Now, you might say, 'what does that have to do with anything?'. Do you know what the appendix was once used for? It is thought that it was used for part of the digestion process. Now, I think that these groups of canibalistic people developed their appendix into what we now know as the predatory organ, kagune. Of course, the appendix is quite small within humans, but strange things can happen to any being, given a few thousand years." He sliced my muscles from my tendons, allowing them to hang from my bones. Pain was no longer a fear of mine, it was a reminder that I was still here, that he hadn't killed me yet.

During the times that I was passed out, I would train with Hoji. We would fight until I woke, and then I would endure the pain until I was returned to Hoji again. Sometimes Hoji and I would talk. Wondering what the others were going through and coming up with Ideas of how to get out. Years started to pass, and the pain started to become less relevant. I was able to hold out longer before passing out. Hoji and I started to become more evenly matched.

On my sixteenth birthday, the doctor walked in, followed by the Director. They were talking to each other, seemingly arguing.

"We need you to put it in him now! We don't have time to wait Mister Bellaire." The director's booming voice echoed through the room.

"I need more time. I can't just take a foreign organ and infuse it into his body." The doctor seemed scared of the Director. "It would ruin him internally!"

"Not if the organ belonged to his mother! Doctor, I implore you to see that we are in dire need." I did not understand what the director was saying. My mother? She couldn't be alive.

"Fine, I'll do it now. But don't expect him to immediately be able to fight him. He needs to get used to it of course." he pressed a button and the table I was on flipped over.

"We will have him go through training as soon as possible for him to use the new kagune." I heard the director open a case and put something on the table next to mine.

"There are two?! Director, even with the fact that they were his mother's, if we give him three of these organs, he would have to eat exclusively ghouls to maintain the cells necessary to use all three!"

"And we will provide him with such, so long as he can clean up this mess, we should do whatever we can!" The director held him by the collar of his shirt. "Now graft them in, or else the next thing he'll eat is sweet revenge." He threw the doctor on the ground and started walking out of the room. "Let your prodigy help you on this one. She may prove useful to you." He opened the door, and an eighteen year old girl walked in.

"Hey dad, what do we have today?" The girl asked, unfazed at the rooms contents.

"We have to surgically insert these two organs into this young ghoul's body." The doctor traced two areas under my shoulder blades with a surgical pen. "Here and here. Since they are classified as Koukaku." The girl started using a scalpel on the marked area on my left. I giggled at the tickling sensation of the blade sliding into my flesh and blood slowly creeping out of the wound.

"Like this?" She asked her father. "I think he likes this. Do ghouls take this much pleasure in pain dad?"

"Usually no. But I've been using this one for so long that he's probably developed a way for his body to cope with the pain." He started using a scalpel on the other marked area.

"It doesn't matter though right dad? Ghouls just care about eating and killing, so we have to teach them not to kill good people by showing them what will happen if they do."

"So you've been listening to me now? Yes, that's exactly it my young Clover." I could hear him whisper numbers under his breath, like he usually does when cutting me open. I close my eyes and go into my mind to talk with Hoji.

"That was quick." He taunted. "Getting soft again?"

"No." I replied calmly. "I just wanted to talk, since this operation seems like it's going to be boring anyway."

"What's your name?" He asked, out of the blue.

"What do you mean?"

"What is your name. I seem to have forgotten it after a while. I want to know if you have too." He looked at me expectantly.

"Hold on a minute." I thought about my name, hoping to find a memory of what I was called. Each memory I pulled up was blurred and garbled. The only one that I could hear was when I first arrived at the facility. "I look like the nine tailed fox."

"That doesn't answer my question stupid."

"I think it does. We learned about the nine tailed fox. It was a demon, or spirit, and in the end its name was Hoji." I explained.

"So what? My name is Hoji, but that doesn't mean you're the nine tailed fox."

"I think it does. You're the result of me being driven out of my comfortable world where I was safe and protected, and Hoji is what it called itself when it was asked to leave it's stone, where it was protected from anything."

"I guess you could say that. Well then, welcome back Fox, to your own tormented mind." Hoji smiled at me, as if I had finished a riddle that had been giving him trouble ever since he had existed in my mind.

I woke up after the surgery to the girl sewing my wounds. She was humming something, like a song that my mother used to sing with me.

"Children start out very little; Not so smart and bones so brittle; But it seem to take no time; To grow up strong sweet love of mine." I sang softly as she hummed. She bent down to my face and looked at me with curious puzzlement.

"How do you know that song?" She asked. I looked at her soft dark face, analyzing it for any form of empathy or remorse.

"My mother used to sing it to me." I replied with as much annoyance as I could muster. "I wonder how a human with no heart would know the same song."

"Don't call me heartless because of what happened to you. Ghouls have no feelings. They only eat and kill." She stood up and continued to sew my flesh together more rapidly.

"And where did you hear something like that, young human? Your devil of a father?"

"My father is working for the good of humans, to protect them from ghouls like you. And I'll have you know, I'm an adult!"

"Eighteen is barely an adult. You're not even making your own judgments yet. You still trust the word of your father blindly. A man who stole a ten year old boy from a haven and tore him open to see what made him tick!"

"My father would never steal a human boy from anywhere. He wouldn't cut open a child ever."

"That boy lost his life and family. He spent time trying to forget his parents' deaths and tried to build a new life here, with other children like him!" I started screaming at the top of my lungs. "He destroyed him. Slaughtered his way of life and experimented on him for six years!"

"Then tell me who this boy is and I'll ask my father if this is true, you stupid monster!"

"That boy is me! This monster that your father made!" I thrashed around while screaming this at the top of my lungs. Trying desperately to escape this torture, this nightmare that I had somehow existed in for so long. I heard the door slam and froze. "Hello?" I asked the dark expanse of the room. Once again, I was alone. Alone to cry so that no one would see the pain I held within me.