The New Pantheon series is a Young Adult modern fantasy about five teenagers who stumble onto gain immortality and magical powers when they eat the food of the gods. In each book, the teens explore the cosmology, gain new powers, and encounter new dangers that test them to the limits of their growing abilities.
In Awakenings, the teens start high school, and begin to notice strange things about their homeroom teacher, Mr. Paul Oxinos. Then each of them accidentally consumes the food (or drink) of the gods, which gifts them with both immortality, and their mentors teach them to channel powers from the magical realms surrounding Earth.
But a giant crashes their training session, and the teens learn the giants are plotting an invasion of Earth. And when their mentors fall, the teens must find a way to protect our world.
Now in their sophomore year of high school, the teens continue to expand their abilities. But a discovery of a tiny gateway reveals that faeries have begun to infiltrate the Earth, and have begun to mess with their friends.
When a nosy teacher blunders into the faeries' antics, the teens have to rescue her while keeping their abilities hidden. But more importantly, they have to discover why the faeries have come to Earth in the first place.
The junior year begins with the introduction of two new students - who also have the gift of immortality! After a tense introduction, they welcome the newcomers, but then learn the new students are fleeing from an organization of anarchist immortals aiming to overthrow civilization.
And if those foes didn't present enough challenges, a horrid chimera arrives on Earth. While he claims to be visiting out of curiosity, the chimera makes no secret of his hunger for more power. Bwtween these two dangerous antagonists, can the New Pantheon prevail?
While I will not reveal any details about the plot of the next two books (since I'm still outlining them), I can tell you a few details.
Like movies, books frequently have deleted scenes, whether because the story needs to go another way, or a scene ran too long, or any number of other reasons. Here, you get to read some early drafts of scenes that I either trimmed or omitted from the final books.
These excerpts are not canonical, so do not consider them as part of the final story. And they're also not edited, meaning the prose might be rough. But like a movie creator, I'm making them available so you could see what might have been.
In Conundrums, Tiff's stepfather turns out to be a lowlife (read the book for details). In this scene, I wanted to show the confrontation and discovery that he'd been fired from his job at a bank for misconduct, and was having an affair. I cut the scene because it created too much drama and ran a little long; I replaced it with a scene where Tiff's mother tells her about the affair on the way home from the bank.
Also in Conundrums, Tiff and MacKenzie have a scene where they're searching for faeries on the rooftops in their avian forms. In the original, I had the faeries spot a mugging victim, and Tiff pounces on them while they're puzzled about the injured human. But I dropped the mugging victim from the scene because it started pushing the story in a different direction. It also ran too long; Tiff is already dealing with trauma, and she didn't need more.
The New Pantheon has a growing set of pages on TVTropes HERE. Check it out!