Thank you for all your questions! Here's the first round of answers :D
ephemeralemerald27 asks: How did you come up with the name for Kingdom Labs?
I don't know, it kinda just happened. Not until the second draft, though. I needed a name for the lab and ended up with "Kingdom." It doesn't have too much symbolic importance, although you could use it to represent the idea that the lab is a closed system, almost its own world. You also have four classes of people: scientists (nobles), guards (army), surrogate mothers and janitors and other workers (working class), and mutants (slaves). So the comparison between Kingdom Labs and an actual kingdom is there (though I just barely came up with it).
What was the plot of Spock like back with Iri was the main character?
It starts with Iri happy with her life, and then she somehow ends up in the outside world, finds Evan, and stays with his family for a while before being taken back to Kingdom. Evan tries to go find her and gets kidnapped by Kingdom, and they tell him he was a mutant, and then Evan and Iri suffer together until Iri escapes and goes to get outside help to bring Kingdom down. The first draft got all the way through, the second draft got to the suffering together, and the third draft got to Iri staying with the Morales family.
What is Ximena's family like?
Pretty cool, I think. They may or may not be Mormon (either Daniel or Ximena come from a Mormon family, I'm not sure which). Ximena is probably the youngest of her siblings, the only one left who hasn't moved away to college. Her parents are loving and caring, but they also trust her enough that when she says, "I'm going, I'll be back at nine," they take it as a sufficient explanation. I haven't thought much about her parents' role in Ximena's Quest to Save Evan, but it's probably impossible to keep secret for long, considering she's trying to appeal to federal law enforcement. They'd probably be supportive.
What kind of job do you think Gabi might get when she's older?
Oh boy is Gabi gonna go far. She's gonna end up in cutting-edge biological research and/or social work for people with disabilities. Either way, she becomes the foremost expert on kids who have been engineered by Kingdom, and does amazing work to help them be healthy and integrate with society. She and Ximena become a dynamic duo of mutant welfare (Ximena goes into law/politics and fights for their civil rights).
How did Ryann start working at Kingdom Labs?
To answer that question, I'd have to know exactly how Kingdom runs its operations, which I don't. But here's one possibility:
Kingdom has two levels: the aboveground facility, where the legal, ethical biomedical research goes, and the belowground facility, where all the human experimentation happens. Scientists can be recruited aboveground first and then "graduate" to the belowground, or they can be hired directly to the belowground. Either way, when someone works in the belowground facility, they're sworn to secrecy on threat of their job: if they try to leave Kingdom or sell secrets, Kingdom will make sure they never work in research fields again. Most of the employees are either happy with the job or too in love with their field that they'd rather work at Kingdom than not work anywhere science-oriented at all. Ryann's in the first category. She was probably recruited and told about the real work Kingdom was doing, and then she was perfectly happy with both doing biomedical research and being a sort of social worker for the kids.
Another possibility is the one from previous versions, where Ryann is the daughter of the founder of Kingdom, who was a character in his own right. I don't believe he's going to be included in the next draft, though.
