not full or empty, just cracked

Thinking about himself wasn't something Ruti did often.

Truth be told, it bothered him. Healthy, adjusted people should probably have no problem thinking about themselves, right? Ruti already knew he was neither healthy nor adjusted, but he didn't think it was this bad.

His earliest memories were desperately lonely, aimlessly roaming an endless expanse of floating blocks known to most as Skygrid. He was perfectly built to navigate it, so it seemed natural that he belonged there: the blocks were spaced just far enough apart that you'd take fall damage if you mined the one under you, and that it proved difficult to jump from one to the next, so wings and shapeshifting seemed to slot him in his environment well. Something about it seemed off to him, though, something that he couldn't quite place.

Whenever someone asked Ruti about where he came from, he lied. He didn't even really know why he did it. There's nothing bad about spawning into a skygrid world, right? It's just weird. He would always tell some lie like, "oh, I spawned into a creative server I don't quite remember the name of," or avoid the question entirely. By this point, he had just dug himself into a hole that he had just resigned himself to.

Of course, there was also the matter of where he came from; he had to have come from somewhere, right? Players don't just spawn out of nothing like that - okay, well that's a lie, most of them do, actually. Just not, you know, the atypical ones - the ones with powers, or body plans other than the typical one head/two arms/two legs. You know. Ones like Ruti.

Another thing that bothered him was the fact that he had absolutely no idea what species he was. Most people should know their own species, right? Then again, most people are humans, or some sort of anthropomorphic animal, and most people spawn around other members of the same species who can explain that sort of stuff to them. Ruti was just some sort of semi-amorphous blob who spawned completely alone into one of the weirdest types of challenge worlds there was. Hell, he ate diamonds as a snack sometimes: demons and crystal golems were the only species Ruti knew of that were even physically capable of that, and he sure didn't seem like either of those. All he could figure out was that he was some sort of magic-based creature rather than a more typical carbon-based one, and even that would be kind of obvious just by looking at him if you knew anything about the subject.

The worst part is, he didn't know if any of the things he percieved to be 'wrong' about himself were due to his species or not. For example, even permadeaths didn't seem to affect him emotionally as much as they ought to. Was he just part of a species that naturally lived a more transient existence with regard to life and death? Or was he even more fucked in the head than he gave himself credit for? Of course, it wasn't like he was completely emotionless; he'd cried over something incredibly stupid, mundane, and easily fixable more times than he could count.

He also had magical abilities; that much was obvious just from his levitation, not to mention the mild shapeshifting he could do. The problem was that trying to focus his magic into pretty much anything else was more likely than not just going to result in an immense, biome-sized explosion. He didn't even know where to start with that one. Sure, he clearly grew up without anyone else to teach him anything to do with his magic, but even so, it still seemed a little excessive. He was honest-to-god scared of himself; he knew his magic had a habit of sparking up when he got emotional, and he felt that one of these days if he got just a little too upset at someone, he might accidentally end up actually killing them. If he didn't already know it would end badly by virtue of how magic works, he might even try just entirely quitting using magic. 'Course, that was a recipe for disaster; for a person with a normal amount of magical power, that could end up destroying their whole home. Ruti didn't even want to think what would happen if he tried to stop using magic. Might even break the entire server in half, he didn't know.

Of course, Ruti never told anyone about any of this. He wouldn't want to dump all of this on someone and just go "Anyway, so that's what's been going on in my brain for the past couple decades!" Plus, he doubted anyone could even help. He'd just be making some people vaguely more upset than they were before. No point in doing that. Better just to remain the one who can help other people with their problems.