The Y People

I now have a tentative working title for my YA novel: The Y People. Y for Young, and also Generation Y, and also because they're wondering "Why?". There's also a reference, naturally, to the X-Men. With a small nod to The Tomorrow People, a British sci-fi series of which I watched a few episodes as a child.

There's a problem with it, though. My concept was to set it starting in an orphanage/school - all the kids are orphans and they assemble from three different orphanages/boarding schools, probably Catholic. I was thinking of making the actual country somewhat vague - never mentioning the name of the city, for example - underlining how world cities are increasingly interchangeable and youth culture is increasingly international.

The problem is (at least, it's a problem for my novel idea; I'm sure it's a good thing overall) that in the west, orphanages basically don't exist any more, let alone ones which are also schools. Which leaves me with several choices:

1. Set it in a non-Western country, or in the past (which is also, we're reliably informed, another country). This would involve doing research, and research isn't fun for me in the same way that just making things up is.
2. Just ignore the problem and say that it's an alternate world where there are still orphanages like that. After all, every work of fiction creates an alternate world. But this would make me look ill-informed or lazy (and the latter, while true, isn't generally admired).
3. Change my concept. If I do, though, I'll probably need to incorporate foster parents of some sort, however distant and uninvolved - even boarding school students go home for the summer. This is probably the solution I'll use.

Until I settle this, I'm reluctant to start, even though I have some character concepts:

• John is the narrator. His unusual ability is that nobody ever notices him unless he deliberately draws attention to himself. He uses this ability to cut class and read in the library instead, meaning that he has a wide general knowledge and vocabulary but has skipped significant portions of the usual school curriculum. His abiding issue is that he keeps being overlooked and forgotten about.
• Kevin is John's roommate. His unusual ability is that once he is familiar with a person or object he always knows exactly where he, she or it is relative to his location. This means that he is the only person who is consistently aware that John is in the room. However, in the boarding school context where there are hundreds of familiar people moving round him all the time, he finds the stimulus annoying at times. His issue is that he is more inclined to observe than to act or even interact.
• Marie is from a different location than John and Kevin. Her talent is that when she opens a door she will always find what she needs on the other side. At the start of the story, this is John and Kevin. She is rather too used to having everything she needs and has poor impulse control (although she only finds things she needs, not necessarily things she wants, and she doesn't always know why she needs them).
• Jane is a tinkerer. Any device she spends time around, and particularly any device she builds herself, does whatever it does only more so - a cellphone becomes a telepathic projector, a computer is able to search information that isn't on any website. Her issue is that she doesn't understand people very well and thinks they should work better than they do.

Laying it out like that, the initial impetus is definitely coming from Marie, isn't it? She kicks the whole thing off, and everyone else reacts to her. We'll know they're getting their issues sorted out when they initiate positive courses of action themselves without, or despite, Marie.