Callie's Heroes

PART I - PATHWAYS FORWARD

“Hello, Calliope,” a strange voice said. It sounded male, but at the same time, not quite, as if there was a slight harmonic echo of femininity in it at the same time.

Callie opened her eyes, immediately regretting the action as bright whiteness momentarily blinded her. She groaned, having a vague sense of moving her hand to shield the light and it not seeming to help much. “Hello?” she called back in response.

There was a long pause, as if the voice wasn’t sure what to say. “You have made much progress,” it finally stated.

“Made much progress?” Progress towards what? Groaning again, Callie fought the brightness and opened her eyes, finally seeing a familiar expanse of endless white. Immediately, she realized where she was.

“You! Where the hell have you been!” In front of Callie, the familiar brown and yellow globe floated in mid-air, seeming to tilt quizzically. “It’s been three damn weeks of silence and I was absolutely sure I was imagining you. Well, I suppose I still could be imagining you. Are you real or am I dreaming?”

“Yes, I am real,” said the simple response.

“That sounds exactly like something that something not real would lie to me about,” Callie said skeptically. “So, where have you been?”

“Watching you,” the ball said, flashing an icon of an eyeball. “Learning to speak to you. Working you towards your Silver tier.” There was a shimmer of light, and the floating ball seemed to dissolve into a hazy cloud of sparkling lights, which then coalesced into a vaguely bipedal shape. With a gesture, the people-shaped cloud of lights seemed to summon a pair of brown chairs, which rose from the white nothing of the floor. Both resembled an overstuffed recliner, and Callie had to admit that after a month of fantasy-land furniture, they looked quite comfortable, even if all of this was in her head. “Sit?” the ghostly figure asked as an invitation.

“Uh, sure,” Callie said after a moment of wariness.

She walked over to one of the chairs, waiting to see if the starry cloud of lights followed, and then took a seat when she saw it was moving to the other. The chair was as comfortable as it looked, and Callie’s thoughts immediately drifted back to the big recliner they’d had in the living room back in Chicago, which was perfect for curling up and reading on. She shifted her focus back to the other in the room. “You’re speaking much better than last time, it seems.”

“Words are … strange,” the Symbiote said. “It took effort to learn how to use them. Words are so … slow.”

“If talking is slow, how do you normally communicate?” Callie asked, curiosity in her tone.

There was a stillness in the fake room, as if the form was considering whether to answer, not just what to answer with. Callie quickly felt like she might have asked an improper question.

“Once bonded with a host, I am able to link with others of my kind close to me. No words needed.”

“Link with others? You mean the other Symbiotes, right?” Callie asked.

“Yes, if we are close enough.”

Callie pondered that interesting bit of information. They must have some form of short-range telepathy, or something similar, that allows them to communicate. Like Artemis was able to do with Jesca, or she could do to control her Turrets. “I suppose simply thinking thoughts would indeed be faster,” Callie agreed.

“Very so. There are many here to share knowledge; so we are able to work together to make all the hosts better.”

“What do you mean? By giving us our skills?”

“That is right. But, in addition, I am able to learn of non-Ranger skills and perks, and how to build them, from the others.”

The puzzled expression on Callie’s face showed that explanation was lacking, and she shrugged her shoulders slightly. “Build?”

Casually lifting a hand, the Symbiote waved, causing a small, wispy, blue ball to appear, hanging in midair. Next, a similar wave of its other produced an emoji of a flame, likewise floating. “I will try to explain it simply for you, but it is far more complex,” it said dryly. “Pretend the blue cloud is mana, and flame is the result. How do you make it turn from mana into fire?”

Callie deciphered the question for a moment before answering. “You just cast the spell, I guess. Once you know it, that is.”

“But how?”

Pondering the question even more, Callie still really couldn’t see what the Symbiote was fishing for. If you wanted to cast a spell, you simply focused and the mana was turned into the result. Compared to Earth, that was weird as hell, but that’s how it worked here. Or was it asking a deeper question? Maybe it was about the actual mechanics of converting mana into a spell? She’d never really given it much thought, since it all just sort of worked, but then Callie remembered back to when she had nearly melted her brain with mana loss. Tasi had mentioned pathways in her brain could be burned out if she went too far. Was that how magic worked? You focused your mana along these paths to get the result? “Mana pathways?” she suggested questioningly.

The Symbiote gestured again, the cloud and flame moving apart a little bit and a holographic outline of a brain appearing in the air between them. Then, a needle-thin glowing red line began to form out from the mana cloud, entering the brain picture. It turned, going a short way in another direction before turning again. It bounced over a dozen times throughout the inside of the three-dimensional brain image, before finally leaving and reaching the flame.

“A specific path for mana yields a specific result.” A new line formed from the pool of mana, this one blue, and it likewise ricocheted throughout the brain in completely different directions, before exiting and connecting to the image of a water droplet. “This blue path represents a different skill.”

“Okay, I think I see so far,” Callie said, still a little perplexed but willing to keep going to see where the explanation would lead.

“The paths for skills and perks for your class may form naturally in time,” the Symbiote said, “or as you study new ones.” Then, it gestured towards itself. “I am also able to create new pathways for skills and perks that I also know or discover.” Standing and reaching into the brain image, it moved its finger around, leaving a green pathway behind before it also exited out to the image of a green leaf.

“Wait, so that’s how you were able to give all the recruits our skills and perks that first day? You all were creating these paths for each of us?”

“That is correct, and the more you use those skills and perks, the easier it is for me to reinforce the pathways you already have, increasing their capability.”

“Then, once you are done making all the pathways for a new Tier,” Callie continued with the explanation, actually now enjoying deciphering this puzzle, “that’s when we level up to the next one and get all our new powers, right? When we ask you our level, you must be telling us the percentage completed of your pathmaking or something, and getting sick must be you completing all those connections.”

“A very good deduction. The first Iron paths are very easy to carve, but we need to complete them slowly for a new brain. For Bronze, we make the last part of the connections at the same time, to ease side-effects to a single event, as your brain is no longer new and can endure all the impact.”

That must explain why all their reveals at Iron Tier were doled out slowly over the morning, because their inexperienced brains couldn’t handle them all at once. Then, at Bronze and presumably higher, they received them all at the same time to just get it over with. That actually seemed to make sense to Callie, for some reason.

“Are these pathways only in our brain, like these examples? Or do they go all over our body?”

“The pathways for creation are in your brain,” The Symbiote said, and then hesitantly continued as if trying to find a way to explain. “There is something similar to these pathways throughout your body to focus the result, but I cannot affect them in any way, so it’s not really relevant for this conversation.”

Standing, Callie walked over to the floating brain image, reaching up into it, tracing one of the lines. Puzzling some more for several seconds, Callie asked for a confirmation of her next thought. “A synergized skill, then, must follow the same path, or close to it, right?”

With a wave the lines faded, and a new one formed, bouncing throughout the brain. “This is Multishot.” Then a second line formed, this time branching off the first. “This is Rain of Arrows.”

“Okay,” Callie said, nodding. “I think I’m starting to see how this is working. This explains why changes to my Multishot affect Rain of Arrows. So how does a melded power work?”

“This is where it starts to get much more complicated, and this simple demonstration does not suffice,” the Symbiote explained, the lack of emotion a little awkward and lecturing. “It will serve for now, however.”

Callie shifted forward, double-focusing her attention. This was still rather fascinating to learn, even if dumbed down. “Okay, I’ll try to keep up.”

“To give someone a skill or perk, we can create a new path for a skill or perk we already know, as I have mentioned. We are also able to use a shortcut, by hooking into some elements of other related skills, perks, or racial traits, and sometimes a person’s personality. The benefit of this is that it is not only easier and faster, but also will maintain the same tier ranking of the parent capability. This results in a melded power.”

Callie nodded in partial understanding. “Then, my melded stuff, like Effect Layering for example, must touch more than one skill or perk, right?

“That is correct, or some other fundamental aspect of your being,” the Symbiote replied, actually seeming quite pleased Callie was understanding the representation, despite also showing very little, if any, emotion. To demonstrate, two lines formed, which was explained to represent Tinker and Advanced Archery. Then a third formed hooking into both of the others before exiting as Effect Layering.

“This was very interesting to create,” the Symbiote said, seeming quite pleased with itself.

“Create?”

“This is the first time I have had Tinker available to me, so I was able to design something unique.”

“Whoa!” Callie gasped, her eyes going wide. “So … you can make up new things, too? Just carve any skill or perk into our head that someone might imagine? You’d just need to find the right pathway through our brain to make it work, right?”

“That is right, within some practical limits of magic. When I create, I hope to find a guide or hook of some kind to be part of it. This is why Turret is melded with the others, for example. Without those guides, it would take a great, great deal of creative time to experiment and form the skill from scratch, perhaps many years. Time is better spent right now on base Ranger skills to raise your tier.”

That also made perfect sense, as Callie thought about it. Being able to use something’s existing pathway as a partial guide for something new and unique would obviously drastically reduce the amount of work needed. Then she remembered, “You said you could learn from other Symbiotes, via your telepathy or whatever. Does that mean, say, a Bladeweaver Symbiote could teach you how to carve Ethereal Blast, and then you could give that to me?”

Shaking its head, the Symbiote said, “That skill requires the ability to manipulate Ether, which you can not do, in part because you don’t have the compatible pathways I mentioned throughout your body. Some things cannot be learned, as they are unique to a specific class, as well. But if something was compatible with your magic, and I knew or discovered how to create it, I could do just that.”

“This is how Jesca learned Dash, right?” Callie said. “Her Symbiote asked a Bladeweaver one how to do it, or already knew it in advance. The same thing happened with Pixyl getting Flashstep yesterday?”

“That is right, although their Symbiotes were both able to meld it with an existing aspect or skill to make it easier, and allow it to improve fully to their tier increases. I also shared some instruction about Homing Shot that was used for Pixyl’s Homing Ethereal Blast.”

“And because there are so many Symbiotes here, you are all basically exchanging notes?”

The ghostly form nodded. “This is the first time I have been in the close presence of more than four or five others for so long, and even then they were almost always Rangers. In all my hosts before you, I have never had the opportunity to learn so much so quickly, and get so creative.”

“Hosts before me?” Callie said, and then remembered Vanis mentioning that first night that Symbiotes are reused when a host dies. “How many have there been?”

“You are the seventh.”

That actually caused Callie to stumble backwards a step. “Seven? You’ve been bonded with six others before me? How much of one of their lives do you remember?”

“All of it, just as I will remember all of yours in the centuries to come. Unless I die, that is.”

A huge weight of inadequacy suddenly washed over Callie, and she fell back into the chair as she imagined herself being compared to the six Rangers that came before her. They all had to have been better than her, right?. They at least came from this world and understood how the hell things worked. She was just this hot mess of a girl from another planet, after all, and a Gnome on top of that. “How … how am I doing? Compared to them I mean.” she asked hesitantly.

“It does not matter.”

“It … it does to me. At least tell me if I’m doing bad.”

“How do you think you’re doing?”

“Okay, I guess?” Callie replied, not really noticing the question had been thrown back at her, and not really convinced of her answer, either.

“Then you are doing ‘okay’. We do not judge or rate. We are only passengers, after all, paying our way by helping you receive your powers. We only wish to observe a life as it happens, and collect those memories.”

“Why?”

“How else could we see the world? How else could we meet people and have grand experiences like you do? We are only tiny things after all. Once bonded, we are able to live our lives through the lives of others. But, we also make a choice to not interfere or make ourselves known, so as to not unduly influence our hosts. You were an exception I made, because you were different, and I had to know your intent quickly. Others of my kind are not completely happy that you and I have communicated.”

“That’s it? You do all this because you just want to see the world?”

“Is life nothing more than a series of experiences? Would you not also do the same to have as many as possible? For us, these memories are precious. This is our way.”

“It's …” Callie started to respond, but then she stopped. She’d needed to look at a lot of things lately from strange perspectives, and as she considered the Symbiote’s words she actually started to see theirs. Given a choice between living a life as a tiny little caterpillar in the wild, or hitchhiking a ride with someone else and seeing the world through their eyes, it didn’t really seem like something to even think about. Slowly she leaned back in the chair weighing the implications. “So, with a future host, would you be able to teach them Summon Turret, even if they weren’t a Gnome with Tinker and Carpentry?”

There was a pause as the Symbiote worked to assemble a meaningful response. “Possibly. I would have to find a substitute to those two pathways to meld to, or create a functional alternative to them. But now that I know how to do it, it is likely.”

“Could you teach, say, Jesca’s Symbiote how to do it? Or teach it the Effect Layering perk?”

“It would be difficult, as it wouldn’t have the references I received from the pathways I melded them with, and we don’t have much time before everyone leaves. Perhaps I could devise a subset of them, however …” The Symbiote trailed off as if falling deep into thought. Callie didn’t want to interrupt, and eventually it snapped back to attention. “But, we are not here to talk of me or my purpose,” the people-shaped cloud said, sitting down in the other chair.

“I’m going to level to Silver, aren’t I?” Callie said in response, refocusing. She had assumed that was the case given her close point total and her sudden appearance here. “Is that what you wanted to talk about?”

“You are. I think you will be pleased by what you receive, and more importantly, the upgrades to your current powers. But that is not what I wish to discuss.”

Callie had been about to ask what her new powers were going to be, but the statement that it wasn’t the topic stopped her. “Is something wrong?”

“Not at all. But since we’ve already communicated, it occurred to me that we might as well collaborate on how you wish to grow. In my previous lives, I have had to largely guess as to what might make my host happy. Tell me, as I help you grow to Gold, what kind of Ranger do you wish to become?”

What did that question mean? “I … I don’t actually know,” Callie said. “I didn’t think there were different kinds.”

“Do you wish to perhaps remain in the military? Become a Warden? Does being a Symbiote finder still appeal to you? After you reach Gold, it becomes much more difficult to reach higher tiers, so we have the opportunity to take your future plans into account before we get there.”

“Truly, I don’t know,” Callie said. She’d been wavering on the idea of being a worm hunter a little bit of late, especially now that Pixyl was part of the picture. Even if it didn’t work out with her, and she really wanted it to, Callie found a piece of herself just wanting to settle down in a quiet little somewhere and live happily ever after. But that said, she really had no idea what other choices might be available to her. This was like having to decide when you’re five years old what you want to do when you grow up, and then being stuck with it. Still, she had made a promise to her passenger to become a hunter.

“I just don’t know,” she said again. “I mean, outside of looking for other Symbiotes and wanting to maybe learn Culinar and Enchanting stuff, I haven’t given the future really any thought. I don’t even know what I could do.”

“You could do anything you wish to,” the Symbiote said. Then, as if reading her mind, added, “I will not hold you to your promise to me, if that is your concern. What you did with the Dryad is more than fulfilling it. Many of us will find their memories because of you and her.”

Callie found that an unexpected huge relief. Not because she was opposed to the idea of seeking out Symbiotes professionally, but instead her options post-war were now more open. She really could potentially do anything she wanted, maybe with whomever, too. Then it hit her. ‘Post-war’.

“I suppose the first thing I need to do is get through my Curse. Nothing in my future beyond that really matters if I’m not alive to do it.”

“Then let me ask you this, where do you see your current skills and perks lacking? What other powers do you feel would help you survive what is to come? I, of course, have ideas from my previous lives and the others around us, but I would like to know yours.”

Immediately, Callie’s head was flooded with images of all the other powers her friends had. Ambria’s amazing healing. Lhawni’s Totems and throwing lightning bolts. Everything Pixyl could do. Vanis and his demons. Hell, Tazrok and his shapeshifting, for that matter. There was so much to choose from just in those choices, assuming they were options.

Still, she needed to give it some serious thought, and focus on what would be useful, not just what might be cool. What was she lacking? Sword skills, for one. Sure, she could hold her own in a basic fight, but she didn’t have any special moves like Lena or the Duelists, save the ability to dodge. Healing of some kind, maybe? She couldn’t fight if she was hurt, after all. Hell, she needed more ways not to get hurt in the first place. Flight of some kind would be cool, but also useful, to be able to scout or even shoot from the air, since she was so short. As she considered her power repertoire, Callie started to see more and more holes that could use some plugging.

“Those are all good observations,” the Symbiote said after Callie relayed those thoughts. “I had many of the same ones as well.”

“Those were just things that came immediately to mind. If I think about it more, I’m sure I could come up with other and better ideas, too. Can we talk more about it after I think a bit? In a couple days?”

“If you wish. However, I did have one important question, which was one of the primary reasons I brought you here tonight. Would you prefer to reach Gold before you leave, or would you rather have a wider variety of skills and perks? I could focus on either goal. We will not have time to do both. Keep in mind, the increase at Gold for your base Ranger powers is quite notable, so if you reached that tier, you would have time to train them with the experts.”

Another interesting question. If she focused on reaching Gold, she’d have really powerful capabilities with her current skills and perks, and maybe a few more Ranger skills added. But if Callie pushed that off a bit, she could get more variety and options from the other things. It was a question of sacrificing power for flexibility. Then Callie thought back to all the times she’d needed to get creative about something during the Bogwump and Elemental fights. If she had more capabilities to choose from, that allowed for more ways to ‘Callie up’ a solution of some kind, so that felt like it would be the better choice.

“More powers?” Callie said out loud, a little questioning hesitation in her voice, but then she added a sharp nod of assurance. “Yup, that’s the best idea. With the other Symbiotes here, you have the opportunity to learn what you need to make that happen. Once we leave camp, we can start pushing Gold.”

“Understood,” came the simple return nod of acknowledgement. “Rather than make you wait until Gold, I will complete each new capability as I go. Do note, some of these may be off-class non-melded powers, so they will not be Silver ranked when I complete them, but that will come as you use them and I am able to reinforce the pathways. You will get ill each time one is revealed, however.”

“Worth it, easily,” Callie said without hesitation. “If I’d have to wait for Gold to get them all at once, then what’s the point, right?” She smiled, actually excited to have learned these strange cranial mechanics that went into making magic work, and looking forward to discussing it with Thorn. The Symbiote had said it was only a simplistic explanation, so there was obviously a lot more to it, but what she did learn seemed to somehow make sense.

Then she realized something… “Is … is it okay if I talk to others about how this works? I might be able to use their advice on what skills might be useful. I know Thorn would absolutely geek out about it, too.”

There was a long, heavy pause, as if the Symbiote was considering the question deeply. Finally, it responded, but the response was hesitant. “You may. I have chosen to reveal myself to you, so it is only natural that what you learn would be shared. Just remember that the explanation I gave you is quite rudimentary.”

“Got it. Thanks. And thank you for trusting in me, too.”

“Of course. As it is, that is the only thing I truly needed to speak of tonight,” the Symbiote said, the statement sounding almost like a dismissal. “I will complete your new Silver tier upon your awakening. You will want to be prepared.”

“What? I don’t get a silver medal this time?”

“Do you wish for one?”

“Actually, yeah, I do,” Callie said a little smugly. “It makes it feel like an …” Callies words were suddenly cut off by the distant sounds of somebody screaming in panic. The noise seemed to echo and bounce around the white void. “What is that?”

The form seemed to make an almost quizzical expression, trying to analyze the sounds. “An emergency in the real world!” it said quickly. “You must awaken! I will hold off as long as I am able.”

“What…” was all Callie was able to squeak, before something pulled her from the sea of white.