The following weeks blurred together for Cale as he poked at his interface with every waking moment. It was so frustrating to him since he could literally do nothing but make the boxes wiggle a little as he tried to rearrange them. On top of this frustrating interface, he also had not been able to make any progress on his soul. Something that he felt very strange about since he wasn’t fully sure the original him had a soul. If his old self had a soul, maybe they both went to the same afterlife? Now that would be a tale to tell his original self. Cale found himself lost in a fake conversation between himself in the afterlife, which is probably why he hadn’t realized that people were slowly filing into the house.

  He was finally snapped out of his daydreaming by a loud POP! He looked around and saw that his parents' house was filled with people he did not recognize and one aunt he did. He gave her the stink eye which only made her smile at him. As he looked around, he noticed that there were gifts in the corner of the room and food on the table. Around the room there were balloons hanging above the doors and on the floor, sparkly paper streamers were hanging from the ceiling. The popping must have been a balloon, he pondered, but wh…yy…? Then it dawned on him. It was HIS FIRST BIRTHDAY! These people must be friends and family of his parents.

  As he looked around, his baby eyes were drawn to the sparkly streamers and the little pile of presents in the corner. His mother had placed him in a chair so that their family could look at him without holding him or passing him around. He wasn’t sure why his mother didn’t like him being held by others, but he wasn’t going to question it right now since it was an obvious godsend. However, he was still focused on the presents in the corner, they were calling to him like a siren to a desperate sailor. It’s all he could think about. After all, were they not HIS presents? And who could get upset at a baby for wanting to open all of them as soon as possible?

  Cale started trying to fiddle with his chair to see if he could get himself out of it when he accidentally made eye contact with his mother and he realized his plan had been found out. She had seen way too many of his antics over the last few months to not recognize the look of determination and mischief in his eyes.

  “Gather around everyone!” she called out. Getting everyone’s attention and causing the conversations to stop. Ever since the interface had been installed, he had been able to understand his mother fairly well, perhaps there were features to this interface that he was unaware of.

  “Today we celebrate Xavier’s first birthday, and I wanted to thank you all for coming. As is tradition, we don’t allow others to see the child until the gods have granted their interface access to the system. Though typically an interface for a child is registered within the first few months after birth, the gods decided to wait longer in recognizing the interface granted to our little Xavier. As many of you have guessed, Xavier has finally registered an interface with the system, and we decided to make his first birthday a big one in celebration of such an important moment in one's life. Now gather around as we wish him a happy birthday and enjoy the food before you!”

  The people started to clap and get closer to him as they started to sing a birthday song from this world, which he didn’t recognize, and for some reason involved a lot of clapping. Additionally, a few of the guests were standing a bit close and could not seem to keep their spit in their mouths. After what felt like an eternity of off tune singing and mismatched clapping, the song ended with his mother stating: “With one year under your belt, baby Xavier, we welcome you into the Del’Orion family!!”

  As everyone clapped and yelled in celebration, he noticed the blinking icon of the interface in the corner of his eye, and it was glowing a dark blue. This was the first time he had seen it glow this color since it had been installed, and it immediately drew the attention of his baby brain. He had no choice; how could he NOT press the button? It was literally asking him to open his interface. With the patience of a baby, and without giving it a second thought, he mentally pressed the blinking icon. The screen popped up before him with a little celebratory firework and a lot of text.

  #For formally being accepted into the Del’Orion family your name has been updated to Xavier Del’Orion.

  Hmm another hidden feature I see. It’s mildly inconvenient not understanding how any of this works.

  #Error: Your first birthday has been recognized. This does not match the previous age listed on record. Updating record.

  #Warning: Unable to subtract age, recalculating age based off conscience, soul age, and recorded birthdays.

  #Congratulations! In celebration of your 13th birthday your interface has unlocked the `Teenager` Config! This version of the interface will let you slowly unlock different features as you learn, use, and adapt your interface into it and your adult form.

  #Importing settings from pre-teen interface.

  #Warning: No pre-teen interface found. Would you like to download the default config?

  ## Yes ## No

  Cale stopped for a second to think about this. He was now apparently 13 in the eyes of the interface. He really hoped that nobody else had noticed, and by nobody he meant his mother. When he had gotten the notification he had ignored everything else and focused on his interface. But right before he pushed the button, he could feel hot breath on his cheek, and he vaguely recalled someone calling his name while his focus was elsewhere. He stopped looking at his interface and noticed that the sound in the room, which was full of conversation moments ago, was now silent, and the mood no longer felt full of joy.

  “Xavier. Are you ok?” He heard her say as if from far away. Her eyes looked worried and there was a small quiver in her voice.

  He wanted to be concerned about her, he really did. But when she said his name. Xavier, he realized that this was the path to having his name changed in the interface. A SAFER decision would have been to not answer the interface and wait until after the party. After all he could have just minimized it and played along. But he was a baby damn it! And babies didn’t think too hard about this kind of thing. They see a button; they PUSH the button. With a newfound rush of excitement Cale smiled to his mother and mentally pushed #Yes.

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  Cale immediately felt something happening with his soul. He felt his soul starting to pulse in rapid succession, then, without warning, it felt like someone had slapped him directly in the brain. He screamed as pain hit him and he could feel something happening to not only his brain, but his soul. He tried to push through it, but it was unrelenting and the combination of pain happening in two different places was too much for his baby body. To the shock of everyone watching, Cale slumped over in his chair, passed out and was barely breathing.

  Cale wasn’t sure what was going on. The world around him seemed foggy, distant and muted. Like a dream in slow motion where nothing makes sense, but everything fits in its place. He found that he could move but it wasn’t fast, and his movements felt restricted. He slowly wandered around this world of strange shapes when he noticed that there was a spot brighter than the rest. He lightly chuckled to himself as he thought don’t go into the light, but there were many lights around him, this one was just the brightest. The closer he got to the light the easier his movements became and the less foggy the world seemed. When he finally reached the light, he found that it was surrounded by other, smaller lights. One of them was pulsing rapidly and reminded him of his mother’s heartbeat.

  That’s when it hit him! My party! I just turned one, no, I turned 13… The memory of the event slowly came back to him as he realized the bright light in the middle of the smaller lights was him! He moved closer to take a look and though he couldn’t see his physical form, he could recognize his soul. He tried to touch it but found that he phased right through. That’s not a good sign, he thought. Since he was unable to interact with his soul, he decided to inspect it as best he could, maybe he could learn something about it. He had a lot of questions about how the interface worked, and his previous attempts had not amounted to much which had perplexed him.

  As he got closer to his soul, he saw what he assumed was the soul seed hanging out on the edges slowly orbiting around his soul. He remembered the interface mentioning it but didn’t know how it related to him or the interface. It didn’t look like much, and it didn’t look like it was hurting him at all, so he moved on to the only other anomaly he could see with his soul, the dark spot. Now that he was able to get a good look at it, he saw it was not a dark spot at all. It was something that looked a bit like a tendril coming out of the top. It felt like a little stub; however, he could tell there was a lot more to it than that. He got even closer, his curiosity bringing him in, the stub that stuck out of his soul was covered in strange designs. He followed these designs around the nub but wasn’t able to see anything that he could recognize so he followed them down to the base where it connected to his soul. The lines slowly faded, and they looked like they went deeper into his soul than he could see.

  Since he wasn’t able to see anything else here, he went to the very top of the tendril, where the designs started. As he moved himself over the very tip of the tendril, he felt something warm coming out of it and it felt like it passed right out of his soul, through whatever version of consciousness this was, and out into the void. He moved farther along the top of the tendril and when he got to the halfway point, he felt the same energy that was coming out of his soul, only it was going in. Maybe this was how he could fix whatever had happened to him, he tried to let the warm feeling take him into his soul but alas, it didn’t seem to matter. He looked away from his soul, back to where he saw the smaller lights and saw that they had not moved at all.

  Is time stopped for me? He thought. Or maybe the interface realized I wasn’t the right soul and kicked me out, or maybe my baby brain couldn’t handle the teen interface? Cale thought about this since there wasn’t anything else going on. He thought about exploring his surroundings but had this instinctual feeling that moving away from his soul at this moment was a very bad idea.

  Out of boredom he decided to check out the tendril again, but right before he got to it, he felt his soul pulse. He saw a line of energy stream out of his tendril, this time it was fully visible to him, not just a warm feeling. He watched the stream blink rapidly into the void, and in return the void sent back its own stream of energy. This sure looks a lot like some sort of communication device, he thought as he watched it go back and forth. It reminded him of when he would give tours of the company datacenter to investors and the lights on the network equipment would be blinking rapidly back and forth. However, he wasn’t about to assume that was the case here, for all he knew this was something his body did all the time and was natural to this world. If he ever got out of this weird in-between place, he would investigate that tendril a whole lot more.

  Finally, after what felt like an eternity, the energy coming into his soul stopped, his soul sent out one last burst and then it went quiet. A few seconds later he felt his soul pulse again. Once, twice, three times it pulsed. As he inspected his soul, he felt himself become heavier, like a weight was pressing him into his own soul. The weight was on the verge of causing pain when he realized he could feel his fingers. Feeling! He screamed to himself. Yes! Maybe I will survive this! Soon he could feel his toes, his butt, and even his nose. He tried to open his eyes, but they stayed firmly shut.

  Slowly, over what felt like a few hours. His body came back into feeling; the strange part was that he could now FEEL his soul as well. It had a weight it didn’t have before. He focused on his soul again to try and find what was causing this feeling. As he focused on his soul, he found that the surface wasn't smooth as it had been; instead of it being a solid color, there were swirls moving around and underneath it. It reminded him a lot of those pictures of Jupiter with the cool swirls showing the violent atmosphere of the planet. He thought that he should be more concerned about this new development, but for some reason this new version seemed right and the previous swirl-less version of his soul seemed incorrect. Regardless, he could do nothing about it now. He moved his consciousness back to his eyes only to find the blinking icon of the interface was waiting for him. He felt his adrenaline pulse as he opened the message. He really hoped it had good news.

  #Starting configuration change.

  #Importing settings from baby config.

  #Notice: Due to parental rights, your parents will be notified of your upgrade.

  #Notice: Privacy settings enabled.

  Uh privacy settings? What kind of things could my parents see about me? He didn’t get time to think about it as the notifications kept coming.

  #Loading Teen config from remote data repository.

  Data repository. I wonder if that is like a data center or a remote server. I bet I could find a lot of answers there if I was able to get in.

  #Warning: Teen interface was unable to load safely. Parameters of soul are non-standard. Adding standard config could damage the soul in the long term.

  Well, that is not a good sign.

  #Notice: Checking alternate backup locations for interface configs that match soul type.

  #Notice: No matching configs in repository. Timeout limit reached.

  #Notice: Unlocking manual config options. Since a config cannot be found for the soul, the soul will keep the current config as the primary interface. To modify your config, open the interface and enter a five-pointed star pattern in the top left corner.

  ###Notice: Due to age, the lock on pure matter conversion put on the soul has been unlocked.

  ### Notice: Conscience will now be re-integrated with the soul. Brace yourself.

  Sound, sight, and smell exploded into Cale’s world; he was back!

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