REFRESHINGLY UP TO DATE AS OF 7/07/09!

THE CLAIRE AND JACK ENCYCLOPAEDIA, for quick reference.

I will not be, and am not, the first person to say that there's a hell of a lot going on here. I have, in case it isn't remotely clear, a lot of original characters. Thankfully, and this is the nice part for you, they're all related or in the same universe.

So let us begin at the beginning.

I'm currently working on a Wiki for my entire branch of characters, and once that's up, I'll have it here, so until then, well, this will have to do.

AVERY DRISCOLL: This whole thing, and by 'thing' I mean universe, began with Avery Driscoll, the somewhat doe-eyed young boy who plays the violin. He's no longer doe-eyed, nor is he especially young (he was fourteen when I created him and now he is about to be twenty), but he is the first original character that pops up in the archive. He attended Eton College, lives in South Africa, is a musical savant, and has an eccentric personality. He's also gay, and he has two boyfriends, and it is a closed, mutual relationship between all three. No, it didn't start out that way, but it's been that way since (officially) 2005. Here is your example (and no, he doesn't really look like that).
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CLAIRE FITZWILLIAM/DRISCOLL: His mother is the most recognized of my characters, at least as far as how much art I've done for her goes. She's Claire, the infamous Claire who ballet danced her way into my heart. Claire is forty two this year. She danced with the Royal Ballet School as a girl, then went on to be the youngest principal (almost tying with Darcey Bussell), only to retire at age twenty two due to giving birth to Avery. She was married first to John Driscoll, hence Driscoll, but her childhood sweetheart was Jack Camden, a punk from the East End of London. He went to jail, their relationship died, and she has not seen him since. Claire has three children with her first husband; Avery, James(on), and Elizabeth (Bess). She also has three siblings, Louise, Eleanor, and Patrick. Her parents are Ruth and Charlie.
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ISABELLA FITZWILLIAM/RADCLIFFE: Isabella has existed in various forms with the basic prototype since 2005 or 2006. She began as Rose, then was momentarily Isadora, but finally solidified as Isabella in late 2006, while I was writing Claire's diary (see the links for information on that). Isabella was born in 1912 and has the distinct title of being the woman who has lived twice and died once. She brings the supernatural aspect into the Fitzwilliam family when she marries Randolf in 1933 (on Valentine's Day). Originally a girl raised by her mother and her mother's aunt, sans the influence of a father (she never knew him), Isabella was born as Isibél Ó Móráin (her last name was unimportant). She lived on Tory Island, but due to the supernatural nature of her family, was kept in isolation. Her mother (and relatively speaking, her great aunt) was and remains to be anti-human/anything that isn't like her own family. They don't support having children unless it's necessary to keep the family going, and they don't support leaving the island or assimilating into modern culture. Their dialect of Irish, Ulster Irish, is even more primitive than what it is today. Isabella ran away from this at the age of nine, got her wings at puberty, and was kidnapped and sold to a sideshow in 1924. Later that year, she joined a circus, the Brooks Spectacular, and toured England with it for two seasons, leaving at the start of the third, in 1927. She joined vaudeville (or was sent to America for that purpose), and her sexuality blossomed, as did her understanding of the world. She met Randolf in Chicago in 1929, dated him long distance until he proposed in 1932, when she had left the Ziegfeld Follies. They moved to South Africa to marry and raised their first child, Charlie (Claire's father), there before moving back to England at the start of WWII, as Randolf was in the RAF. The couple did live happily ever after with three children (Charles (Charlie), Scott, and Alice), but when Randolf died in 1983, Isabella was unable to live without him and succumbed to a broken heart days later.

But then, due to odd circumstances, she came back in 2007, with the ghost of her husband, and when his ghost left again a year later (again due to odd circumstances), she stayed behind. And hasn't done so well ever since.

But she is absolutely a glamor queen. She flirts to stay fit. She's highly sexual and absolutely sure of herself. But without her Randolf, she doesn't know how to approach a new world. She was dead for a quarter century, after all.
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ALICE FITZWILLIAM(-CAPIO): Alice is Isabella's youngest child and only daughter, making her the spoiled brat. She was a daddy's girl to an unhealthy degree. She went to stage school, learned to dance, and dated a host of boys as a teenager due to being like her mother. She met her future husband in 1961 and began dating him in 1962 after quite a lot of pushing. They stayed together, childless (not by her choice, but because Robert couldn't see himself with children), until an accident gave them Fabian, who was born in 1984. Robert crossed (died, essentially) in 2002. He, being the same creature as Alice, chose to go, but he was 342 at the time, so rather tired of being alive. The circumstances were awful, and Alice was traumatized. However, he returned in 2008 and turned Alice's world upside down. They married in a courthouse without a wedding and Alice give birth to a daughter, Tate, in May 2009.
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RANDOLF FITZWILLIAM: Isabella's husband and Claire's grandfather, Randolf, or Andy, was an Eton College alum with a penchant for music halls and dancing. He was tall, handsome, dirty blond and suave. But his girlfriend left him in 1928 and he toured America to get her out of his head, meeting Isabella in a theatre when she was in vaudeville. He fell in love with her immediately, but they remained friends until their letters started taking the turn from platonic to sexual. As you know from Isabella's paragraphs, they were deeply attached and when he died, she died. But he didn't like that she followed him, as she was so young and so alive, in his eyes, so when he was forced back to earth due to some climatic issues, he told her to stay when he was gone again. So she did. He misses her.
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CECILY Ó MÓRÁIN: Isabella's mother. She is going on 200 years old and is as weathered by the sea as anything else, though always and forever she will look young. A bigot (she hates anything dissimilar to herself in terms of species), she has long, curly brown hair, so many freckles she looks tan, and startling blue eyes (very light). She was spurned by the man who gave her Isabella (a sailor who slept with her and left before she woke). Spurned by her daughter running away (it devastated her--they do not get along). But underneath her shell is a woman who used to be calm and excited and curious. However, her shell is impossible to break.
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LEONID ANTONOV: The young man Claire met while she was dancing as a guest artist with the Kirov Ballet in the late 1980s. He happens to be a member of the vory v zakone (thieves in law). He, like the rest of these characters, with the exception of Randolf, is not human, and this has kept him alive and at the top of his game, even though he was imprisoned in Siberia for two decades for his crimes. Most of his time was spent in solitary confinement. He's covered in tattoos and carries the weight of having been in love with Claire when he met her (she was engaged and recovering from Jack, so he respected her and never told her how he felt).
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FRANCIS RYAN: Isabella's father. She never met him, he doesn't know she exists. He turned 150 this year. Bred from a family of Irish sailors, he is fiercely anti-England and owns a pub in Dublin. He has two daughters and a wife and lives with all three, despite the fact that both daughters have children and husbands. It's a crowded existence. He's a loving man but he slept with a lot of women. And he smokes a lot of cigars.
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THE FITZWILLIAMS: Overall, unless someone married in or was only periphery or simply a sperm donor, these people combine into the Fitzwilliam family. The Fitzwilliams are a wealthy old blue-blooded English family that currently owns a diamond company called, aptly, yhe Fitzwilliam Diamond Company. They have the monopoly on diamonds in this universe, as De Beers was bought out during the Depression. They provide the royal jewels and jewelry and crowns, and their jewelry is one of a kind or sold in such limited quantities that it costs tens of thousands of pounds at minimum. This monopoly, combined with the amount they have saved over the last few centuries, has pushed them into the top three richest families, as their net worth is in the billions. The family has two branches, really, and one is more interesting to the public (diamonds and performing arts) while the other is primarily government-related and serves in Parliament. The branch I concentrate on is only the diamond side, which is no longer in government and gave up its titles (the titles appointed now are awarded to them, not born with them).
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So, the last question is this: What are these people if they aren't human?

I've mentioned angels, but that's an incorrect term. I use it only because it's simpler than saying 'beings with wings that are immortal but are not religious in any way because there is no god in this universe'. But that's what they are in a nutshell: beings that have existed for tens of thousands of years (at least ten thousand, most likely more) that were born from ghosts (essentially) and developed wings for navigation (the wings do not tax the individual, as these beings don't exist on a very normal plane--not that the average 'angel' would know that). They're immortal, perpetually young, and can choose to die if they wish. There's a pocket designed to hold the dead, and all dead people receive wings to navigate the enormity of this pocket upon their death. So 'angels' in this world are, essentially, dead people masking as real people. But it's much more complex than that.
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If you want more, have we got a plethora of links for you!

Specific Prose:
Adage (Claire's aforementioned girlhood diary)
Act II (The novel that takes place after the diary. Leo features here.)
The Wasting Diary (Alice's girlhood diary.)
Dans La Lune (My NaNoWriMo novel for 2008 set in New Orleans 1927/8, when Isabella performs her vaudeville tour there.)
Fiction Journal (For AUs and other canon fics I write.)
Futureverse (canon)
Alternate Universes
"News" (canon)
Junkdust (My NaNoWriMo novel for 2007 was an AU about Claire and Jack.)

Important Universe Links:
THE CLAIRE AND JACK ENCYCLOPAEDIA
Dirty Life, the actual RPG where these characters are from and appear
Dirty History, a secondary RPG where we only write backstory. (You'll see a lot of Isabella and Randolf here, as well as Alice's backstory.)
The Website
DirtyWiki, DL's own Wiki page (this is where you should start if you want to learn more)
The Fitzwilliam Family
Fitzwilliam®
CLAIRE&JACK
Avery's Journal (his third journal, mind you)
Jack's Journal* (his second journal)
Jake's Journal* (his second journal)
Claire's Journal

I hope this helps, but if you have any questions, comment and ask!

*Played by other members of the game, and not created by me!