Invictus

== The Invictus ==
The Conspiracy of Silence
"I've kept your secret, now it's time to discuss the terms."No one is drinking the coffee.
I am making the coffee, because the Managing Director asked me to be here. It suits her for me to be here, but the coffee is only here because it is supposed to be here, because this is an Informal Board Meeting, and you know it is an Informal Board Meeting because you have coffee. It’s good coffee. I was always good at making coffee. 
The coffee sits on the table in front of the boss and the Senior Partners. They don’t look at it. They don’t even touch it. MacIntosh and his PA, Miss Rai, have not touched the coffee either, but they’re toying with it, running fingers around the pristine china rims, going to pick the cups up and never quite managing to get the cups to their mouths.
“You have to realize,” MacIntosh is saying, “that for all intents and purposes, the company seems to have been trading the same way for sixty-seven years. With the same board. Deepa?” 
Miss Rai hands him another sheaf of papers, containing things all of us already know. He could have reached over and picked them up himself, but that’s not the point. The point is power. 
Actually, it’s been more like 68 years, and this is part of a sequence of events we experience every couple of years. This is the part where the Financial Officer discovers that the signatures of the board members are still the same. He finds this suspicious. He finds a reason to explain it, which inevitably tends first towards the mundane, then the ingenious, then the suspicious and criminal. MacIntosh is possessed of no more imagination than his predecessors.
One might think that this was an inexcusable breach of secrecy, but the fact is, it is important that we do this. Because men like MacIntosh are unimaginative, and unimaginative men run this great country of ours, to our benefit. And because, as the boss told me the other day, it is important because we are the only ones who can do this. We have the power. And it is important to demonstrate that we can do things that our more benighted family cannot. We create this conflict to show how easily we dispatch it, how utterly it does not bother us. We do not endanger ourselves. Because we rule. Because the point is power. 
MacIntosh is finishing. He is saying, politely, that my masters are in an awkward position, and that we should close off this field of inquiry before the authorities are alerted. He is threatening us with the law, of course. He has not yet noticed that the last time I offered a refresh, I triggered Miss Rai’s conditioning. She is staring blankly across the table, mouth slightly open, eyes glassy, breathing so shallowly she could be almost as dead as me (oh, Deepa, I have never met a mind so easy to core out as yours, and I have never taken so much enjoyment in doing so, and I so hope I can keep you).
The Managing Director is getting tired of the game now. She says, “Quiet, now,” and MacIntosh stops mid-sentence, eyes wide, suddenly frozen with a realization of something beyond his pathetic imaginative faculties. “Julia?” I shiver as the boss says my name. I take my suit jacket off first, obviously. It was expensive. Slipping between him and his deliciously entranced assistant, I pull his chair back, and sit on his lap. I hadn’t realized how hungry I was. He can’t talk, can’t move. Doesn’t matter if that’s fear or the Managing Director’s power. It’s all power and hunger, really. But the point is power.
===You want to join the Invictus because ===
You always want to be on the winning side. You were powerful when you were alive. You’d rather work with the system. You’re motivated by greed. You don’t see any point in changing things. You are afraid of missing out on the big payday. 
===The big picture ===
The Invictus knows where the bodies are buried. And they know which ones are only sleeping. This is the legend: The beast that sits in the center of a huge empire, the cultured monster wearing a coronet. The old money. The Prince of Darkness.
So very often, at the heart of the vampire web lies the lord and master, the queen, the mistress. The trappings of power — regal, corporate, political, criminal, military — are just trappings. In the end, the structures are the same. Power is the means and the end, the payment for indispensable service. The vampires of the Invictus either have power and know how to keep it or want it and know how to get it. The master of an Invictus house — they often call the ruling structure a “house” — might be the CEO of a holding company, the Godfather of a sprawling crime empire, a mayor, a general, or just a King or Queen; and might maintain a variety of complex hierarchies. But it’s always a hierarchy. 
Most polite and formal of the major covenants, its complex social niceties and sometimes archaic forms of behavior mask blackmail and back-stabbing more vicious than any living human could imagine. Schemes to take down rivals can take literally decades to come to fruition, relying on dizzyingly complex plans, pawns who don’t know they’re pawns, mind control, blood bonds, terrifying financial investments with long-delayed payouts, and sudden acts of horrific violence. Every vampire in the covenant covets the job of the vampire above her; every vampire fears the one beneath. But personal advancement must not come at the cost of the establishment, or its great trust. The Invictus has maintained the traditions of the dead for longer than any vampire covenant now, longer even than its predecessor, the Camarilla itself, survived. The hierarchy must remain intact. A prince cannot be removed if his absence would put the age-old forms in danger; a subordinate cannot be disposed of if no one survives to replace him. The Invictus is the prince, her council, their henchmen, their soldiers. Like the Lancea et Sanctum, the leaders of the Invictus consider all vampires to be under their jurisdiction — unless they set themselves against it, as do the Carthians, in which case they are at best tolerated as dissidents, and at worst proscribed, with all the horror that entails.
Above all, the Invictus are the Conspiracy of Silence. The Invictus have links with the various seats of temporal power, the better to maintain the Masquerade and make the living pull the wool over their own eyes. If their rules are unwritten and often unspoken, they are no less binding. A new vampire might exist for years among the First Estate and still have trouble parsing the covenant’s complex etiquettes. He might take decades to understand fully the extent of the conspiracy’s reach in both the worlds of the living and the dead.
The Invictus’ relationship to the Masquerade is complex. On the one hand, it is the Invictus who keeps it. It is their highest tradition. No one upholds the Masquerade like they do, and, as a result, no one is better placed to be in charge. Of course, the Masquerade helps keep the Invictus on top. The Establishment is frighteningly good at using up-to-date methods of keeping in touch, of hammering down rumors and finding ways to blackmail. On the other hand, Invictus leaders get away with things that their neonates can’t, because they’re more able to contain the consequences.
===Where we came from ===
More than two and a half thousand years ago, the vampires of ancient Rome founded the very first covenant. They called it the Small Debating Chamber, the Camarilla, and it was the first organized government of the dead. It was a thing of dark beauty and terrible legend. It ended more or less at the same time Rome itself ended, in fire and violence, in a cataclysm of horror whose details and causes are lost to history and the screeches of the owls. As the Dark Ages began, the vestiges of the Camarilla became a new, lesser but still glorious, vampire ruling class. It took on the trappings of nobility, and its officials, henchmen, and serfs. They survived. We survived. We are the Camarilla ongoing, bloody and unbowed, unconquered – Invictus.
For most of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, the Invictus and our allies, the Lancea et Sanctum, were the unchallenged rulers of the Kindred in Europe. Occasionally, other covenants — such as the Legion of the Dead, the Gallows Post, or more recently the Ordo Dracul — have arisen or have fallen, but these invariably always become part of the hierarchies we perpetuate. 
It has only been since the 18th century that the Invictus has not ruled alone over the Western dead. Even so, more domains, particularly in Europe, North America, and Australasia, are still ruled by an Invictus majority than any other. If the dead have traditions and etiquettes, they are Invictus etiquettes. If a domain has a hierarchy, it is an Invictus hierarchy. If the society of the dead exists at all, it is because the Conspiracy of Silence preserved it. This is the Invictus version of history; if it is a lie, the truths are lost, because we willed it so. History is written by the victors, and we never admit to losing.
===Our practices ===
Members of our covenant have always understood the value of the adage: You have to change to stay the same. As human power structures have changed, the Invictus has changed with them. We recognize that in the end, the Camarilla’s final fall was its inability to accept the inevitability of Rome’s destruction. You disagree with my version of events? A shame, since my version of history is what is written in the books. 
The Invictus, over the centuries, has been a court of nobles, an absolute monarchy, a dictatorship, a  
corporation, an organized crime family — all are, the First Estate knows, simply ways of preserving hierarchies and keeping our great secret. A man in black, a bullying middle manager, and a mob enforcer might appear to draw their authority from differing sources, but the effect is the same: The silence remains, and those who it shelters know who they owe. Our neonates often end up strong-arming dissidents, hiding evidence of our existence from the living, serving as pawns in the metabyzantine schemes of the elders, and learning piece by piece how to make allies (if not friends) and influence people — one way or the other. 
Every vampire in the Invictus considers himself or herself a ruler with the potential for more, from the lowliest ground-level soldier to the grayest bureaucrat. Better to be a henchman of the Invictus than not in the Invictus at all.
The Invictus maintains the Masquerade, but to do so, we must gain and demonstrate power. From time to time, an Invictus leader might commit indiscretions, but the personal connections she accumulates on the way up are eminently useful in making those indiscretions disappear. A neonate or ancilla might have to be responsible for cleaning up these messes. Power still needs its tools. A young enforcer could be anything from a dead private detective, to a musclebound legbreaker, to the manager of a team of spotter ghouls who watch the unawares vampires of the domain for infractions of local rules.
The Invictus is ancient, but we are modern. We use information technology. We watch the Internet. We use the tools of business and organized crime, changing tools to preserve the status quo, to keep us on top, and above all to keep the secret. Everything depends on our victory. 
===Nicknames ===
The First Estate (formally, within the Invictus and the Lancea et Sanctum); The Old Man (outside of the covenant, especially among the old) or just The Man (among the young); The Conspiracy, sometimes The Conspiracy of Silence (used by allies and enemies alike); The Ownership; The Establishment
===Concepts ===
Old-school Eurotrash, Merc-driving capitalist bloodsucker, intimidatingly silent bodyguard, Man in Black, well-bred dominatrix, boarding-school teacher, privileged frat boy or sorority girl, soulless bureaucrat, Man of Wealth and Taste, military officer, working-class entrepreneur, business-like mobster, jobsworth security guard
===When we are in power ===
The Invictus are the default vampire government in many ways. We made the traditions, and the power structures of the Kindred are those of the First Estate. Although our power might be expressed in many different ways, a hierarchy always exists. In an Invictus-ruled domain, expect the Lancea et Sanctum to be, if not favored, significant, and the Carthians to be held in disdain. The status of the Circle of the Crone and the Ordo Dracul varies, often based on whether we need their occult secrets to keep everyone else in the dark. 
===When we are in trouble ===
When an Invictus house no longer rules, its members do everything they can to be in power again, even if that means betraying their own ideals. If open war is declared against the First Estate, few of us will fight to the death. Many will capitulate and try to become part of new power structures. We play the long game, knowing that the time will come when one of our own will earn authority, and we groom our neonates accordingly. We bide our time, playing at being good members of the new order, the better to end up in charge of it once again. Fear for the Carthian or Acolyte prince whose advisors are Invictus. He may not be prince for very much longer.