Backstory

Ok this is about Tommy Grimes. He is fearless, reckless even, or certainly was in his pirating days. Why is he fearless? What has he got to lose? What if he has got nothing to lose?
Let's hunt down some backstory:
His mother Mina (?) was a loving woman. Problem was, she tended to spread the love around a bit too much. Her husband Daniel Grimes was a bad choice. Gothicly passionate and inclined to deep glooms and soaring ecstasies, it is probably the passion that attracted her. He was Byronesque as a younger man, but as a father he became more settled and, er, boring. Which was bad news for our butterfly. So she entered into an affair with the bad and dangerous Sir Jasper Despere. Or did she? What if she was used in another way?
So I will need to know about Mina, Daniel and Jasper. I think Jasper's brother is Bishop and a friend of Daniel's. I think they were all pretty wild in their day (even having their own Hell-Fire Club). They dabbled in Black Magic and in Sex. And in cruelty. Which is how they know Mr Bliss.
So this Hellfire Club (“Abaddon”?) pre-dates the Golden Dawn...perhaps gives birth to it. Maybe the Ripper is a member. Sherlock Holmes. Gladstone? Rich and dangerous people. This is where gentlemen get their kicks. A dungeon downstairs and a bordello up. There is an altar and strange costumes.
So they dabble. But what the magic is mostly is ritual disguising sadism and sex. But in there amongst the charlatans is some serious magicking, perhaps. And lots of books.
Tommy Grimes is the ugly duckling and Pinocchio. Possibly Frankenstein's monster chucked in for good measure.
He is ugly, certainly. His face is unsymmetrical, as though put together hurriedly by an impatient craftsman. His jawline leans one side. An ear protrudes (but not the other). One eye set too far away from his nose. The other eye, darker than its errant companion, is more mobile too. The nose, as compensation perhaps, leans the other way like the mast of a listing boat.
Later, a massive unkempt beard hides the worst aspects of his disfigurement. And his sheer size (he is big, as befits a monster), coupled to his fearlessness, makes others careful of how they treat him. Not a swan, perhaps, but a man to be feared and respected.
But as a boy he is an outsider. There is also a mystery about his birth.
What if?
What if his mother has lost a baby, either before, at or shortly after birth? His flighty mother, possibly a bit mad and certainly very spoilt, she cannot cope without the baby she wants. The doctors says her womb is out of whack and so the Abaddon crew set about making a new one? These are charlatans and chancers, mind, and Sir Jasper sees it as an opportunity to get access to Mina's delectable body. His trump card to gain her cooperation is the mysterious Mr Bliss.
If Abaddon has any real magic, then surely it comes from him. Black, bald, and with strange burning eyes shielded by dark glasses (one lens permanently cracked and starred – the left eye?). A tendency to over-dress, a pimp ahead of his time, he fits into the world view of the Victorian “magician”, half-shaman, half savage, nearer to “animal senses”, but at the same time well schooled in the writings of Eliphas Levi, Paracelsus and all the other the alchemists and wonder workers that had contributed to then paranormal canon. He can be utterly convincing putting together his rituals and more to the point, his magic works. Or seems to.
I've just thought of a great scene to describe Tommy's cruel conception! And the plot starts to fall together too.
What if Tommy's dad is forced to take Tommy in? This is after Tommy's mad mum commits suicide after suckling the thing that she has produced?

Parallel Plots?

Okay. Strictly speaking the next step is to begin a breakdown of each character's storyline. However the extended paragraph has many holes in it and it doesn't really solve many of the plotting problems I have.

The first thing is, I would like there to be two distinct, but equally plausible, interpretations. The first is the rational one, where there were no fairies, homunculi, sea monsters or anything else except as part of Tommy's dream-version of reality. And the other of course is that all of those things happened. So really I need two parallel plots.

The other is I would like Tommy to be a homunculus (and this is also a version of Pinocchio, the boy without a soul). And I VERY MUCH like the idea that Mr Bliss shows up as the boy's tutor.

Hmmm. Back to previous step.