Molly J. Bragg has a new FF superhero book out: Scatter.
When Deputy US Marshal Danielle ‘Danny’ Martin was told she’d gotten a promotion, she expected to be leading her own fugitive retrieval team. Instead, she got transferred to Pontian Florida of all places, and assigned to a Superhero support detail for Focus, a seemingly immortal superhero who is also one of the most famous lesbian icons on the planet.
Bad enough she’s got to spend every day working with a woman she’s had a crush on since she was five years old, but when she arrives at her new post, things start getting weird. It turns out that Focus asked for her by name, and it quickly becomes apparent that Focus wants to be more than just coworkers, or even friends.
After Focus has a violent reaction to Danny getting hurt in the line of duty, she starts looking into why the Superhero might be so fixated on her. She begins to suspect that seeing the future might be one of Focus’ powers, but when a mission leaves her stranded thirty years in the past, right at the start of Focus’s superhero career, everything becomes clear, except why the Focus in the past can barely seem to tolerate her presence.
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Excerpt
“MOM, FOR THE HUNDREDTH time, no. I can’t tell you anything about my new assignment,” Danny said, trying her best not to roll her eyes as she was driving along one of the most accident-plagued stretches of highway in the state of Florida.
“If you won’t tell me, then how do I know you’re not beating confessions out of innocent people in some CIA black site?”
“First, because I’m a Deputy US Marshal.”
“Don’t remind me. I can barely stand the shame. My daughter, wearing a badge. I have no idea where I went wrong.”
“Second, because however ashamed you are of me, I am still your daughter,” she said. “I put on the badge because I want to help people.”
“You can’t help people from inside a corrupt system, Danny. You have to tear it down and start over.”
“Maybe, Mom, but until you find the matches to burn it down, I can do my best. That means that sometimes, I have to keep secrets.”
“Even from your mother?”
“Especially from my mother. Do you know how embarrassing it would be if I were doing Witness Protection and my crazy ACLU lawyer mother kicked in the door with a court order demanding the release of the witness?”
“So you’re doing Witness Protection!”
“I never said that. I just suggested a scenario in which you could humiliate me. You know, like when you sued my high school.”
“They were discriminating against you.”
“I remember, Mom, and I’m hanging up now. I’m almost at work.”
“Okay. I love you. Be safe.”
“I love you too. Try not to sue my boss.”
“You’d have to give me his name first.”
“Bye,” Danny said, hitting the ‘end call’ button before her mom could reply. She loved her mom,
she really did, but Deputy US Marshals and pot-smoking hippie civil rights lawyers went together like gasoline and matches. It didn’t help that she knew her mom would have preferred her to have been a bit more like her sisters, but Danny had always wanted to be a cop.
She was a good one, too. Or she liked to think so. Her superiors certainly seemed to think so. She’d spent the first four years of her career on a fugitive retrieval team, and now she’d been promoted to ‘Metahuman Emergency Response Team Support,’ or what most people called ‘Superhero Duty.’ And not just for any Superhero group, either. She’d been assigned to Focus. A Tier Three asset.
Honestly, she was a little nervous about that. Focus wasn’t your run-of-the-mill Superhero. Tier Three Assets were the heroes who got the call for situations that threatened the entire planet. Heroes like the Olympus Six, Ice Dragon, The Gentleman, Clockwork, and Quickstep. They were the most powerful metahumans on the roster, and Focus was one of the most powerful of the Tier Three Heroes in the US. Maybe one of the most powerful in the world. She was the sixth-longest serving Superhero out there, with an active period just a hair shy of thirty-two years. She was also extremely gay. Danny had had a crush on her since she was five years old. She’d had a poster of Focus kissing her former sidekick Scatter on the wall of her bedroom from the time she’d come out to her parents at thirteen up until she graduated from college. She also had a bad habit of turning into a babbling idiot around pretty girls.
Author Bio
Molly is a 45-year-old trans woman with a degree in Astro-physics and a love of storytelling. She loves science fiction, superheroes, and giant robots. Her hobbies include collecting transformers, watching way too many crafting videos on YouTube, and complaining bitterly about the way a certain comic book company treats her favorite superhero.