Joseph and Tessa walked into their room and saw a familiar man laying on Joseph's bed. He wore a white Tee and jeans with slip on leather shoes. His aviator glasses covered his piercing blue eyes and his jacket hung on the bedpost.
"So, how's the place been since I've gone?" He said, sitting up, his long golden hair slightly covering his face. "Still a boring hellhole?"
"You need a cut." Joseph replied.
The man took his hair and put it in a ponytail. "This is the best I've been able to do for that problem. How long have I been gone again?"
"Almost a year now." Tessa said. Causing both of the younger ghouls to start shaking.
"Well, I guess it's that time then." The man took off his aviators and looked at the two teens with his cold eyes. He suddenly opened his arms and screamed, "Come give ol' Foxy a hug! I've missed you both so much!" Both of them tackled him against the bed, hugging him as tightly as they could. They sat there for a few minutes, relishing the reunion.
"Where have you been?" Tessa asked. "What took you so long to come back?"
` Fox sat up with both of them. "That can wait for a bit. First, I have gifts for you guys." He pulled out a bag from under the bed. "Now first, for Tessa. A katana with matching wakizashi. Just don't use them until you finish your training."
She looked at him, stunned at the gift she was receiving, "My own daisho?" She hugged him again. "Oh thank you so much!"
"And it is made with Rc metal. So it can cut through ghouls." He hugged her back. "Now for Joseph. I commissioned you a new tie to match your handkerchief." He said pulling out a black, gray, white, and purple striped necktie. "And a little something extra because it would be unfair for your sister to get two presents and you to only get one." He pulled out a cylinder from the bag and put it into Joseph's hand.
"What is it?" He asked.
"It's a new scope for your mask, self adjusting zoom, digital display, and all the new features you can think of in a cylinder as big as your scope you have now." Fox smiled as Joseph's face began to brighten.
"These are wonderful!" Joseph squeezed Fox tightly. "Thank you thank you thank you! I'm going to go put my new tie on." Joseph started to get up.
"Before you do that, I have two things to say." Fox interjected. "One, you are a bloody mess and you need to clean yourself off. And two, I made a new friend." Fox whistled and they heard a barking sound from under the bed. A small, white, furry face peeked out from between Fox's feet. "This little guy is my new partner. Say hello to Kitsune." Kitsune looked up at mention of his name and made a small yelp in delight.
"He's so cute!" Tessa said, squirming. "Where did you find him?"
"Well, actually, the Ghoul Criminal Investigators Organization gave him to me." He bent down and scratched the fox behind its ear. "This is one of the reasons I've been gone so long. I've been training him."
"Why would the GCIO give you a fox?" Joseph asked, puzzled.
"Well, he's special because he's the only survivor of numerous tests that took place." Fox picked up the animal, revealing the snow white look of its whole body as well as the absence of its tail. "You see how he has no tail? Watch this." He set the fox on his lap and made a few noises to it. Kitsune's eyes went dark and several white bikaku grew out of the place his tail should be.
"What?" Joseph exclaimed in wonder. There was a loud crack as the door was slammed by Tessa leaving.
"I thought she'd be fascinated." Fox looked at the door, surprised.
"We almost had an incident earlier when she found out that they were using 'ghoul rats' for experiments. I didn't think that our DNA could be grafted into other living things like this." Joseph sighed, petting the fox.
"Well I'm keeping him. I've been through a lot with this little guy. Plus, we match!" As Fox said that, he released his own nine white bikaku. Each one with red lightning bolt-like veins on them. Joseph looked at them, amazed and looked back at his face to see a resemblance of a fox's replace it. "Cool huh? It's part of my Mutated koukaku. I don't even need a mask anymore." He laughed, scratching the back of his head with a large white clawed hand.
"How do you have two kagune?" Joseph questioned.
"Well, you know how Kitsune has a bikaku?" Joseph nodded. "Well, almost the same thing happened to me. My parents died and they were both ghouls, but I only inherited my father's bikaku. They implanted my mother's Koukaku into me, giving me claws and more defensive ability. I became the Nine Tails Fox because of the colour of my kagune and the mask that grew once I had a mutated Kagune. But what's really interesting, is that sometimes I can hear my mother saying she loves me." Fox looked like he was going to cry. He took a deep breath and stood up, forcing Kitsune to jump to the floor. "Let's go find your sister and she if she'll accept this little guy for who he is."
"So you really do match with him." Joseph said.
"Yup, we're kindred spirits, he and I." Fox whistled and walked out the door with Kitsune in tow. Joseph followed close behind.
"How could they do something like this? I mean, it's awful. A crime against nature." Tessa said to herself while sitting on the roof of the organization building.
"That's what humans think we are Tessa. A crime against nature, something that shouldn't have existed." Chameleon approached her from behind. "You know Fox and your brother are looking for you right?"
"Yeah, they can go screw themselves. they probably want me to think that it's okay for these poor animals to be turned into ghouls. Well they can forget it!" Tessa pulled up her knees and hid her face.
"You know, they used to experiment on ghouls." Chameleon said after a bit of silence. "You know at least two people who were part of those experiments."
"Who? Who that I know would subject themselves to such things?" She started getting angry.
"We didn't choose to. There was no choice in the matter. It was either let it happen or get thrown on the streets and not be taken care of." He looked at her, annoyance showing on his face.
"Oh, I never knew." Tessa started to say.
"That's because you came just as we were transitioning over to experimentation with animals. Of course you wouldn't know what happened. It was like a great gift was given to us. No more experimentation, we got to relax, to explore, to have fun." He looked out onto the city. "We got to live as ourselves. I don't agree with the use of animals either, but it's better than having you or your brother be subjected to what we had to go through."
"Who is the other person I know then? Who else went through that?" Tessa asked.
"I did Foo Dog!" Fox said happily, walking out of the rooftop door with Kitsune and Joseph following close behind him. "It was so horrible we both forgot our own names, so we stuck with our code names instead. That's one reason why I accepted Kitsune, I know how it feels to be through what he was going through." He knelt down and petted Kitsune, and the fox nuzzled him.
Tessa felt selfish and ashamed. "I'm sorry," she finally said.
"It's okay. Just make sure you get information about something before blurting out what you think is right and wrong." Chameleon put his arm over her shoulder and squeezed her close. "Let's go eat. I haven't in almost a month." They all headed to the mess hall and ate the gathered remains of the criminals the organization had hunted down together.