This post is part of a virtual book tour organized by Goddess Fish Promotions. Nathaniel Koszer will be awarding a $10 Amazon/BN gift card to a randomly drawn winner. Click on the tour banner to see the other stops on the tour.

SERA

Even among the six superpowered LO-ECs, Sera is a shining and terrifying force to be reckoned with. Sera can fly and has the same superhuman strength and durability as her peers. The big difference between her and them is the amount of biological energy her body produces. It is so great that it is visible in the form of glowing light that twists and bends just under her skin. When needed, she can physically and violently force this energy out of her body, creating an explosion of energy several hundred feet wide. Sera can store this energy for a time to make a bigger explosion, but doing so causes her physical pain and can eventually cause damage to her insides.

Sera’s back story is the driving force behind the six LO-ECs finding each other and uniting on an objective, and that objective was vengeance. Sera was six years old when the LO-EC extermination effort began. The military campaign in her hometown was led by three experimental, powerful, ruthless androids named Can, Tank, and Russ. Sera witnessed her parents’ murders at the hands of the androids but was too young to do anything but flee. It was that day that her unrelenting hatred for the androids was born, as was the frustration of knowing there was no way she alone could destroy them.

Sera spent the next twenty years living with a religious community that, due to her powers, considered her to be a messiah. When she grew up, she began helping her followers with the construction and maintenance of a self sustaining, underground, hydronic garden. Some equipment needed for this could only be found in military facilities. Using her powers to her advantage, Sera stole what was needed and while she was never caught, the androids did realize it had to be a LO-EC perpetrating the thefts.

To crack the case, the androids enlisted the help of a top military investigator from Los Angeles, a young man named Naren. What the androids didn’t realize is that Naren was a LO-EC too, with his own set of unique powers. Naren had orchestrated his transfer to New Orleans specifically so he could find more people like him and his twin sister Nadine, who remained behind in LA. As Naren helped Sera avoid detection and capture, they fell in love, and Sera’s thirst for vengeance became their shared goal.

They bided their time until 18 months later, when an opportunity arose for them to unite with more superpowered LO-ECs, including Nadine. Together, they finally ended the androids once and for all. Sera delivered the final blows to Russ, the android that gunned her parents down, and used its self-contained power generator to power her followers’ garden. She then joined the LO-ECs as they hopped from city to city, stoking rebellions wherever they could in the hopes that the world government that hated them would one day be overthrown.

NAREN

There are three LO-ECs that can fly, and Naren is the fastest of them. But besides that, Naren’s powers are fairly straightforward. The others all have something unique about their ability that creates an advantage when fighting, but Naren just has his flight and the strength, speed, and durability that all super-powered LO-ECs have. Naren’s true strength is strategy and planning. He knows military capabilities and strategies well and is usually the person responsible for planning attacks.

Naren and his twin sister were six-year-olds living in Chicago when the LO-EC extermination campaign began. While the details are grainy, what Naren distinctly remembers is that his father had been officer in the military but led a rebellion in Chicago when the world leader, Spidre, ordered soldiers to invade the city. When it became apparent that the rebellion would fail, their father gave Naren and Nadine his military ID and put them on a train to hide out with relatives in another city. Cut to twenty years later, and the twins were living in Los Angeles. Naren had digitally altered his father’s ID to create a fake military persona and joined LA’s military regiment as an investigator. He used his access to military intel to find others like them, while Nadine stayed off the radar and set up an underground net access point to communicate with other rebellious sorts around the world.

When the androids in New Orleans put out a call for assistance in solving a suspicious theft ring, Naren and Nadine realized it might be a fellow LO-EC. Nadine stayed in LA while Naren transferred to New Orleans. In short order, he found out where the LO-EC would strike next and got there before the theft happened. It was then that he met Sera, and their fates became forever intertwined.

Again, please look out for more character bios on Gina Rae Mitchell’s blog, and on Fabulous & Brunette comming up. I hope you enjoyed learning about these characters, and if you did, I hope you go learn more about them by picking up a copy of Kinetics and/or Latency!

After stoking rebellions across the globe, six super-powered LO-ECs dealt a massive blow to the military by disabling their worldwide communication tower. But in doing so, they suffered grave injuries, and Spidre, the world leader, will not let them rest. As he desperately clings to power, there is only one course of action for the LO-ECs: hide and heal, then finally bring the fight to Spidre’s front door.

Breaching Spidre’s force field will require splitting up and launching simultaneous surprise attacks all over the world. And in some of these places, the military is the least of the LO-ECs’ concerns. They’ll also face legions of robots controlled by an eccentric oligarch, guerilla outfits led by their own super-powered LO-ECs, and the ever-present threat of being discovered and bombed into dust by a world leader with nothing left to lose.

If their power is enough to survive all of this, the reward for the LO-ECs is a confrontation with Spidre at his compound, complete with all of the secrets and plans he has amassed for the last twenty years.

Enjoy an Excerpt

“So how do you feel? And I need you to be honest with me,” Symon asked.

“No pain. Honestly. Not from the jaw, not from my arm and not from the ribs,” Nadine replied.

Symon sighed. “Okay, I believe you. You are cleared for takeoff,” he said with a smirk.

As soon as Symon uttered those words, Nadine took to the air and screamed at the top of her lungs. She started doing laps above Heinz field, circling ever higher and farther outward. From the second Nadine had learned to fly, every takeoff had been for a purpose: fighting Spidre’s peacekeeper soldiers, saving Edgar so she could confess her love, escaping an ambush, playing her part in bringing down the Net Tower and crippling the military’s communications. Add to that an additional six weeks of being grounded due to injuries from the net tower assault, and it all made this into a moment of complete ecstasy for her. She hoped to follow this celebratory flight with a celebratory fight, but when she looked south, where the peacekeepers had decided to attack today, she could see them in retreat at the hands of Edgar, Naren, and Victor.

As much as she wanted to get involved, she knew that if they had it under control, then strategically speaking she was more useful waiting at Heinz field in case another attack came from somewhere else. Spidre’s army had tried this strategy many times while she was recovering, and on a few occasions they’d almost succeeded. So she descended back to the field, toward a lonely orange glow at the northeast corner. It was Sera. She was awake but lying down on a mattress with a bunch of pillows propping up her back.

“Glad to see you didn’t forget how to fly!” Sera joked as Nadine landed next to her.

Nadine chuckled. “I spent 26 years trying to get off the ground. You are all lucky I ever came back down.”

About the Author: Nate grew up in Brooklyn NY, but now calls the Bronx home along with his wife and their sons. Nate grew up on all things sci-fi. Partly due to his chronic illness, Nate always had a special place in his heart for the X-Men, and especially the invulnerable Wolverine. This was heavy inspiration for his first novel, Latency a superhero sci-fi story which released March 5, 2024. His second novel, Kinetics, releases today.

This post is part of a virtual book tour organized by Goddess Fish Promotions. Nathaniel Koszer will award a $10 Amazon/BN gift card to a randomly drawn winner. Click on the tour banner to see the other stops on the tour.

One aspect of Latency that seems to stand out to readers is the sheer amount of POV characters. There are six protagonists in total (Sera, Naren, Nadine, Edgar, Victor, and Symon) and three antagonists (Spidre, Captain Byron, and the androids, who are technically three separate entities but mostly operate together) and they all get their turns in the spotlight. It might surprise people to know that I always envisioned having this many characters, and in fact I am grateful to my publisher for letting me keep all of them. I just can’t imagine the story any other way, and the reason for this has very old personal roots.

My desire to be a writer is relatively new, maybe a decade old at most. Before that I was exclusively a science-fiction nerd, and before that I was a science fiction nerd and a daydreamer with a wild imagination. In elementary school, I would often get in trouble for not paying attention in class, it was because I was lost in thought, inventing my own little characters that eventually became the cast of Latency.

Elementary school Nate loved teams of superheroes. I watched the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles animated series religiously, played with X-men action figures, and read Animorphs books. I also loved learning about animals, especially bugs! So it made perfect sense that my first original characters, the ones that zipped around my brain during math class, were mostly themed around insects and arachnids. There were six “good guys” and three “bad guys”, and after two decades of digesting science fiction media whenever I could, those characters, now very different from their origins, can be found in my debut novel.

Here are the characters that elementary school Nate thought of. I encourage readers of Latency to try and figure out which character each of these became.

The “good guys”:

Firefly: Could fly, glowed, and had light based/blinding powers

Scorpion: Very physically powerful, and had stabbing pincers on each arm

Mosquito: Could fly fast, and delivered weaker blows but lots of them very quickly

Mantis: A fighter that dealt out fast, powerful blows

Wasp: Could fly but slowly, and had a forceful stabbing ability

Spider: The older leader of the group. Nimble and agile fighter but no other standout powers

The “bad guys”:

Spidre: Spider’s evil twin. The leader of the bad guys. I have a feeling this one is obvious.

Crony #1: This character and the next had names at some point, but for the life of me I can’t remember them now. They were the two non-bugs, and were comic relief bumbling evildoers (think Bebop and Rocksteady from TMNT) who worked for the big baddie Spidre. Crony number one one was huge and strong but very dumb.

Crony #2: This one was a scary looking robot with lots of gadgets, but got around on wheels and constantly fell/was knocked over.

I hope readers have fun figuring out which character is which as they read through Latency, and I look forward to seeing everyone’s guesses!

Sera is a LO-EC, a human who gained superpowers as an unintended side effect of a biotechnological breakthrough. Her unique abilities allowed her to survive while others like her, including her parents, were exterminated by a world government fearful of their potential.

After decades of hiding, she meets Naren, another superpowered survivor who has infiltrated the ranks of the military. Together, they form a plan to unite with other surviving LO-ECs, claim vengeance against the forces who murdered their families, and ultimately stoke a worldwide rebellion against the government that wanted them dead.

The entirety of 26th century Earth’s armed forces stand in their way: Soldiers equipped with terrifying weaponry, armies with electromagnetic cannons, merciless bloodthirsty androids, and Spidre, the World Leader with unnatural abilities of his own. The world brought Sera and the other LO-ECs pain and loss, and they’re determined to return it in kind.

Enjoy an Excerpt

In the basement of a skyscraper hundreds of stories high, a constant shaking and groaning accompanied the cacophony of breaking glass and falling bricks from the street above. A man and a woman had spent the night here, fearing those sounds meant their building was on the verge of collapse. Finally, the sun rose and the sounds gave way to stillness. The death of the noises gave life to new fears, in that now the man and woman had to take action.

“Are there any sort of supplies on the cycles?” the man asked. He was bleary-eyed, his face was flush, and even the simple task of standing up seemed to be a struggle.

“I doubt it,” the woman replied, her expression as beleaguered as his. “And you’re sure there was nothing in these boxes?” she continued, glancing around the small storage room.

The man shook his head. “Just lots of cleaning supplies. And we can’t risk going back upstairs,” he replied. “I can’t even hear the big one lumbering around, that has to mean they’re searching another building. We need to move now. We’ll worry about supplies after we get out of New Orleans, and after it feels safe.”

The woman nodded and walked over to one smaller pile of boxes. She pulled them away and the room lit up in an orange glow. The boxes had been covering a young girl, no more than six years old, whose skin had trails of orange light swirling across her arms, legs, and face.

“We need to leave, sweetie. We’re going to find our cycles in the garage, Ok?”

The little girl nodded.

“Do you remember that woman? Alison?” she asked the girl. “Do you remember where she and her friends live?”

The little girl nodded slowly, while the man’s face furrowed with skepticism.

“If anything happens to us, you go straight to her. Do you understand?”

“She can’t go to them!” the man exclaimed in an elevated whisper. “They’re a bunch of fanatics!”

“They are, but they will keep her safe!” the woman responded.

About the Author: Nate grew up in Brooklyn NY, but now calls the Bronx home along with his wife and their sons. Nate grew up on all things sci-fi. Partly due to his chronic illness, Nate always had a special place in his heart for the X-Men, and especially the invulnerable Wolverine. This was heavy inspiration for his first novel, Latency a superhero sci-fi story to be released March 5, 2024.

Buy the book at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or Smashwords.