What do you mean "no concept...of asking?" During consumption, you must either auto-commit offsets, or manually commit them. If you don't, you'll get the same events over and over again.
Or you can just store your next offset in a DB and tell the consumer to read from that offset - the Kafka offset storage topic is a convenient implementation of the most common usage pattern, but it's not mandatory to use - and again, the broker doesn't do anything with that information when serving you data.