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.

BasilGrey asks: How did Ximena learn to play saxophone, if that's her instrument?

I asked my saxophone-playing friend how one learns a saxophone, and she replied, "With much pain." So there you go.

Ximena's been trained in music for about ten years. She started with piano lessons, so her musical knowledge is derived from a keyboardist way of looking at things. I dunno when she took up the saxophone, maybe in middle school or at the beginning of high school. She plays piano, mallet instruments like marimba and xylophone, and saxophone (at least). She'll probably learn the harp at some point too. She also has a nice but untrained singing voice and may or may not have recently jumped on the ukulele trend and started learning guitar chords. Music isn't Ximena's main passion, but it's definitely up there, and she enjoys making music alone and with other people.

Are the Kingdom kids just assigned names, or does someone there name them? Why did Kingdom name them what they did?

The answer to this question has changed from draft to draft, and right now I don't know what it is. In the past, the mutants eventually picked up on the idea that the scientists had names (or that their names didn't have numbers), and once the scientists explain to them about names, they pick one for themselves (usually with the help of the scientists). They're not exactly "real" names: Iri, which is short of Iridescent, refers to the iridescent sheen of her wings; Tosigo is Spanish for "venom" and refers to his ability to poison people; Rosario is a Spanish name meaning "of the rose garden," which refers to the pinkish tint of her jellyfish parts. So they all have direct meaning to a physical trait of the person, rather than just being an identifier. In past drafts they had experiment labels, and they probably still do, because it makes sense (though their names might now be more intentionally given by Kingdom). Iri used to be J457; Evan, Q16; Tosigo, N239; and Rosario, P4. I'll probably change my labelling system, and therefore the labels, so nothing is set in stone right now. But the mutants most likely had a hand in coming up with their own names.

How did Evan and Ximena meet?

Ooh, good question. They probably met in classes together, maybe in middle school but probably in freshman year, but they didn't get to know each other until fall marching band season of sophomore year, when Ximena moved from the pit (*cough* I mean, front ensemble) to the woodwinds section. Now that Evan and Ximena are both marching on the field (Evan plays snare drum), their paths cross enough that Evan sees her talking to her friends and then suddenly falls in love with her as if he tripped and fall into a fox trap. He tries flirting with her, and asking her out, and trying to get to know her, and he's charming enough that even though she knows it won't last, she finds herself falling for him too. Logically, she's worried it won't end well, but emotionally, she just can't get him out of her head. (Evan, for his part, sees no difference between being in love with someone and wanting to be in a relationship with someone, so he just goes for it.)

To be fair, it doesn't end well. Just not the way Ximena predicted.

How did you come up with the idea for Spock, and how did you get the idea to where it is now?

Um.

*awkward coughing*

Well.

We all know that "humble" is not in the Top Ten Adjectives to Describe Wings. So I'm just gonna state it outright.

Spock started out as, "Screw you, James Patterson: Maximum Ride is terrible and I, a thirteen-year-old girl, can do better."

Well, I couldn't do better, but I am getting there. At this point, "being better than James Patterson" isn't even a goal. You know how you're better than James Patterson? You care more about a story than enabling lazy people to read a million bite-sized books. You also don't consider "Author with Most Books Sold at Wal-Mart" to be an accomplishment.

Savage burns on James Patterson aside (I've got more but we'll move on), creating art to try to out-perform another artist is a dumb and very toxic motivation. Don't do it. If anything, aspire to be as good as an artist you love, not better than an artist you hate. Because not only is it that build-yourself-up-by-tearing-others-down thing that doesn't work anyway, it also limits your growth to just being better than someone else instead of being the best you can be.

So, yeah, that wasn't a very good start. But Spock isn't like that anymore. Some original decisions I made were just to be different from Maximum Ride (like taking the time to point out that being "2% bird" with giant wings on your back is stupid), but now, I look at things from the lens of, "How would they be if this happened in our world?" and not, "How should this be different from X, Y, and Z franchise." At least, I try to.

Well, those are the so-not-humble-even-at-all beginnings of Spock. So how did the idea get where it is now?

Fermentation.

I've stuck it in the back of my head and mostly ignored it.

And then, when I do think about it, when my brain is suddenly like, "Wow, homework, okay, how about instead we obsess over how your jellyfish hybrid character breathes," I come up with sudden and amazing ideas like, "How about she only breathes water and has to communicate through sign language?"

That's been the drill for the past two years or so. This past month has been by far the most thinking I've done about Spock since January of 2016. Before that, I was writing drafts, but changes came in a similar fashion: absently thinking about it, and then suddenly, "what about this?" and then boom, that's canon. And I think it's because I've let my unconscious mind do all the heavy lifting so that it can shower my conscious mind with ideas when I need them.

Here's a timeline of the Spock Process:

Get idea based on other idea. Write first draft (67,000 words) with no outline. Feel proud of yourself. Realize you have no plot. Start over with a second draft, still with no outline. Get obsessed with EDM music and spend more time crying over a song that fits your angsty son than planning the story. Start writing scenes out of order because you're bored and you wanna get to the good stuff (the feelz). Realize you now have three or more disconnected timelines that you can't be bothered to connect with boring stuff. Give up 48,000 words in. Start a third draft. Write 20,000 words. Give up for some reason (I can't remember). Get obsessed with Gravity Falls and start focusing more on that. Start an outline for a fourth draft. Finish outline. Feel exhausted but also proud over your very first outline. Write first chapter of fourth draft. Decide to write Gravity Rises and put the entire project on hold for a year. Package neatly and store carefully in a recess of your mind. Let your unconscious mind work on it. Suddenly feel a wave of obsession once again and think obsessively about it for a month. Decide you want to tell all your followers who've followed you since you took the other four drafts down about it.

And here we are.

Has the cast of characters changed a lot, other than Iri not being the main character anymore?

Absolutely. Most of the change has simply been me developing and understanding the characters more, especially in Evan, Gabi, and Ximena. Other changes have been more drastic, like Iri and Rosario getting a personality overhaul. Also, Gabi and Ximena didn't exist in the first draft and Raquelita was alive during the story for the first three drafts. The first draft also had two more mutant characters that were scrapped.

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To be continued :)