The Origin of Superheroes by Sarah Raplee

My husband, Chuck, is much better at finding things than most people. For example, a few years ago we were attending a religious study class in a friend’s home. One woman had to leave early. A few minutes after she left, she came back saying she’d misplaced her car keys.

Without looking up from his workbook, Chuck said, “They’re on the floor under the bed where we put our coats.”

Sure enough, when she got down on her hands and knees and peered under the bed, there was her key ring. When asked how he knew where the keys were, my husband shrugged. He just knew.

Dowsers are paid to locate underground water and mineral deposits. I know of a psychic who works with police who has located missing persons using map dowsing with a pendulum.

These were the inspirations for my hero’s psychic power in BLINDSIGHT, Book 1 of my Psychic Agents series. He is a Master Dowser. He uses his Talent (aka superpower) to find anyone or anything, anywhere. Except…when the villain has a minion with a Level 10 superpower that blocks other Talents hiding his objective.

A young man who has a legendary superpower and works for the FBI would be confident, right? Maybe even a little arrogant?

Who is the heroine that can take him down a notch?

A woman he sees as extremely vulnerable because she is blind, when in fact she is gutsy, resourceful and dangerous. Enter the heroine, a blind wedding singer with a Level 10 Talent she doesn’t understand and can’t control. Every man she’s ever kissed has passed out. When she decides to practice on the hero at the drug lord’s wedding, all hell breaks loose—after which she rescues the hero from a torture chamber.

See how things evolved?

I realized I needed to do a lot of world building, so I took a class and took the time to do so. This is vital to planning a superhero series. You can’t just pull characters and powers out of thin air. There has to be an underlying logic that supports the ‘laws of nature’ in your story world.

For example, in my story world super-characters are born with a latent Talent that begins to manifest in childhood. Talents can be anywhere on a continuum from very weak to very strong. Sometimes they seem to cluster in families, but they are not “passed down” according to the known laws of genetics. No lightning strikes or falling in a vat of chemicals here! In the beginning of the series, scientists have not yet discovered why more and more Talented people are being born—but I, as the author, must know from the get-go in order to make the series work.

I’m working on character development for SIGHT UNSEEN, Book 2 in the Psychic Agents series. I set up the potential romance at the end of Book 1. 

The heroine is a survivor with amnesia and no Talent, who gave birth to a Talented child. The baby's father is a mystery. 

The hero is the FBI Psychic Agent who delivered her baby during the final battle in BLINDSIGHT. He is known as the Forgettable Man. Unless he works hard to suppress his unique Talent and someone spends a lot of time with him, their memories of him quickly fade. After a sound sleep, they are gone. His Talent even clouds surveillance technology.

Hence the title, SIGHT UNSEEN.

Do you enjoy reading about people with superpowers?  ~Sarah Raplee