Answer:
1. Escort / accompany / help / assist / lead.
2. apocalypse / anti-utopia / h*ll / neverland.
The tone would be determined by the kind of people the author is writing for. A story for children is going to have a different tone than a graduate thesis even if they are on the same topic.
Hope that helps.
A research question should answer this " do i know the field and its literature well" <span />
The sentence that has faulty parallel structure is option A
The trip started in Colorado, went through New Mexico, and the the end being California.
Faulty parallelism is a construction in which two or more parts of a sentence are equivalent in meaning but not grammatically similar in form. It does not follow the same grammatical pattern according verb tenses. The correct version would be and ended in Carlifornia
I think you should go with A