The Genesis of Characters by Deborah McNemar

A blond woman steps from the shadows, a boned-down sniper rifle in her hands. Her hair is coiled up away from her face and held in place by a pair of silver sticks and those sapphire blue eyes miss nothing. There is something elegant and lethal about her, both strength and a surprising fragility. Athene.

Behind her, the shadows shift, resolving into a broad shouldered man with a ghost of a smile in his dark eyes. Pan. A slender girl, red hair spiking defiantly around her gamine face, steps forward, both protective and apprehensive. Alecto. Beside her, a tall man moves into place with a fighter's grace, his pale hair and quicksilver eyes giving him the looks of an angel. Thanatos. How the shadows ever hid the massive man with the bulging muscles is anyone's guess. He cracks a joke that makes the others shake their heads and roll their eyes. Hercules. There. At the back. I see him now, a younger man stands apart, part real and part shadow, and his smoke colored eyes remain wary. Morpheus.

This was the cast of characters who introduced themselves to me one March morning when I was supposed to be writing a short story for a contest. The story was written, a tale of a female sniper assassinating a political figure in a virtual reality world. It won the contest but left me with a lingering curiosity about what happened next. With nothing else in the works, I sat down and began to write, determined to uncover the whole story, and Pantheon was born.

I never imagined a short story would become four, full length novels. I never imagined I would ever write in the futuristic/science fiction genre. I'm technologically challenged on my best days. I don't understand how a cell phone works but that doesn't stop me from using one. That same acceptance of the technology by the characters goes a long way. It's not the technology that drives the story, after all, it's the people and that I can deal with. Each story covers a different character and each reveals another layer in this war that has become less a bid for power and more a personal vendetta against Pantheon. I'm loving the way this story is unfolding. As different as it is from what I normally write, it's presenting its own challenges and rewards.

Athene was only the first to tell me her story, the tale of a woman with no past, fighting to preserve her present and learning to believe in the possibility of a future. Then came Hercules with his ridiculous sense of humor that, more often than not, left me shaking my head in exasperation. He was a man who had found a woman he wasn't willing to let go of. The battle in Hades escalated the war began in Pantheon.

I knew Thanatos' story was next. But he's so reserved, I argued. How can I tell a story if the character doesn't open up to me? Then I met Elysia. Don't let her small stature fool you. Full of conviction, a passion for life and an overdeveloped safe-the-world gene, she slid through his self-preserving shields leaving him with a choice: walk away from the best thing that's ever happened to him and back into the emotionless distance he's lived in for so long or grab on and see where the ride takes him. It is Elysia's "nose" for trouble that leads him into the heart of the real war being fought, a war that could spell the end of Pantheon Consulting.

Beyond Elysia there is one more story to go. The war has escalated into open attacks and people are dying. Will Pantheon survive the revealing of secrets held for so long? Or will they fall and the world be left to find its way in the dark? There's only one way to find out.