1) They say it’s your birthday

  My first moment of awareness was seeing a fingertip pulling away from where it had been poking at me.

  The finger belonged to a man of an uncertain age wearing disheveled, old, mismatched clothing. Not dirty, just sort of thrown on with no attempt to have anything match, and all of it torn here and there in spots which didn’t make anything unwearable, just ill kept.

  The man was the only thing I noticed because everything else around me sort of faded away other the man. Like he was the only thing in the world that was real.

  The man seemed to be looking off at a distance as he slowly shook his head from side to side with a look of defiance on his face, and then crossed his arms as he began to speak in a grumpy exhausted sounding voice.

  I could plainly hear each word he spoke, but they also seemed to appear as burning letters in the air before… my eyes? At least until they dulled and faded away.

  [Well? You demanded that I deal with this, so I have. Living Cores, all one of them, are now my chosen sponsored race and immune to going Demon. With their birth gift to be Instinctive Knowledge. Which largely means they can understand, and speak the common tongue of whatever land they are created in, along with everything else that comes with that.]

  He seemed to listen to some reply before grinning. [Sentience is a prerequisite for being a chosen race, so they get that for free, not as my gift. You know I don’t care enough about anything to even try to overstep my position by giving it a double dip.]

  I can speak? “Who are you? ...who am I?”

  My voice was deep but with a breathless sound to it. Like it was echoing outwards from a deep hole.

  I kind of liked it.

  The man gave me a long look before rolling his eyes. [I’m the God of Indifference, and have I never bothered with a name, so that I may not be called. As for you, well…]

  He kicked at something on the floor. [You can have his. Nictob. He certainly won’t be using it anymore.]

  Then the man was gone, and I became aware that I was in a room…

  Which was easy enough to do since I could see in all directions at once, including the hazy reddish spot on the stone floor beneath me. Apparently, whatever a Living Core is, it must be translucent, and red colored.

  The knowledge the Nameless God had... wait, wouldn't that, ‘The Nameless God’, be his name?

  Anyways, thanks to his gift I could judge that the room I was in varied between ten feet two inches to eight feet three inches wide, and it was separated into three sections by a set of mismatched supporting arches near either end of the twenty foot nine inch long room.

  One side of the room, going longways, was covered from the floor to up near the ceiling in wooden cabinets, hutches, and various shelving units. The other side of the room, longways, was filled up with a series of tables, both flat and angled.

  Some of the tables had chairs and shorter cabinets stacked on the back of them, along with barrels, jars, and other containers tucked away underneath or on top of the work surfaces.

  And everything, even most of the chairs, was all filled or covered to overflowing with stacks of papers, scrolls, books and an assortment of various mundane or possibly exotic items. Even the ceiling had various glass globes, stuffed animals, baskets and nets hanging from it.

  The floor at least was uncluttered, although the stone floor around me was covered in chalk circles and writing in several different colors, all scribbled around the recently kicked dead body of a completely bald, out of shape looking middle aged man partially covered in an assortment of rounded, semi transparent, various colored, lightly glowing, stones.

  Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  He was also lying in a pool of fresh looking blood both underneath and around him.

  “I guess you must be, or had been, Nictob.”

  The next voice to sound out in the room was a little shrill. It was high pitched and it sounded like it was coming from a distance, as if the speaker had to yell a bit for me to hear them clearly.

  “Holy Shit! He really did it. You’re...You’re a person now? A Core? You can talk? Do you get a class now, or do you have to wait until you hit your Awakening Day? How old does a rock made from the Chaos adsorbed by a Beast have to be to reach maturity?”

  Whoever was talking to me was up on top of the nearest table, and was far enough back from its edge that I couldn’t see them at all. And they seemed to have no intention to stop talking long enough to let me say anything in return.

  So it looked like I would have to interrupt them…

  “No.” I said, very firmly. The other’s flow of words trailed off. “No, I can’t speak.”

  There was a pause before a tiny little purple skinned right hand with long dark green fingernails on each finger stretched out just far enough to reach over the end of the table in order to begin pointing at me while wagging their extended index finger.

  “Now you listen here you little shit. I know you just got created, but I had had a really shitty week. I’ve been kidnapped. Sold off to a crazy cellar dwelling warlock, who planned to drain me alive like I was a Core carved out of a Greater Beast by the way. And right now… I’m stuck in a cold iron birdcage in an underground lair with a dead body and I’m talking to an aberration of the natural order!

  The hand pulled back a bit and then nearly went limp as it was draped over the edge of the table. It’s mostly still unseen owner sighed.

  “So maybe spare me the sass.”

  We both took a moment before I began to speak, “I think as a newborn I’m supposed to be very needy… crying all the time. A need for a diaper might even be involved at some point, but is there anything I can do to help?”

  The hand pulled back and there was a rattling sound nearly drowned out by shrill laughter broken up with some scattered words such as, “Diaper.” and questions like, “What would you even poop? Pebbles? Glitter?”

  Near the end, I was wished a “Happy Birthday!” before the voice broke out in giggling again.

  “So, if I may ask? What am I?”

  The hand reappeared, palm up and wiggling side to side. “Seriously? You don’t know?”

  I sighed. It felt right and seemed to vent out a little of my dissatisfaction. How useful.

  “You were here when I was born, I don’t have much to go on here… You have at least one hand, which I seem to be lacking, or much of anything else. I can see my surroundings all around me except for an area in the middle, so I must be the whatever I am inside of that area, but I can’t see myself.”

  A concerning thought occurred to me. “I’m not just an eyeball lying on the floor am I?”

  I mean, that would be fairly inconvenient, what with the lack of an eyelid, but as far as I knew the only other living being in the room was a hand with a bit of arm attached. People consisting of disembodied body parts might even be the norm, with old and going cold Nictob lying there face down with two arms, and two legs as the possible exception.

  For all I know he might not even have a face pressed up against the floor underneath that bald head of his.

  He does have at least one ear, but I’m not sure about the other one. If he had a pair of those, the other would be on the side of his head facing away from me.

  The silence was broken up by some more giggling. “No silly, you’re not an eyeball. At least not a big squishy one. You’re a Core, a big orangy red one which by the size and color must have come from a greater beast with a Fire affinity.”

  The hand slowly began tapping at the edge of the table. “Right, you don’t seem to know all that much even with your Instinctual Knowledge birthright thingy, whatever all that does, so let me explain a little.”

  “As always, you can blame everything on the Gods…”