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. 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. ---- The ruling covenant, the Invictus sits like a lord atop the pyramid of power in Paradi City. It's a precarious perch, more than they like to acknowledge, but it's theirs for the time being. Seldom shared among outsiders, to avoid damaging the presentation of a unified front, the First Estate doesn't particularly relish Van Dorn's rule. They're happy to have the power but Tobias was a relative newcomer to the city when he launched his bid for the throne. He toppled the former Prince and took his place but that hasn't sat well with the Inner Circle. They can't publicly condemn him, but in the closed doors of the covenants meetings, Tobias isn't the highest ranked member in the room. Paradi City is enormous and the Invictus is heavily invested in it. From the boardroom to the back-alley gang lord, wherever there's a niche for power to be had, you'll find the covenant and its servants exploiting it. All of this too maintain the most important law of the dead; the Masquerade. The Invictus in Paradi City take the Tradition of Masquerade extremely seriously. The Masquerade isn't about ensuring mortals never learn of the undead. Clearly, vampires have been a topic of fiction for centuries, and there'll always be mortals who fall through the cracks. The trick is to have those cracks be so deep that no light can ever shine inside them to reveal the whole hive. An individual witness here and there is easy to silence with bribes or blackmail. It doesn't take much to set someone up and destroy their reputation. Anyone going public about the existence of the undead is apt to find themselves mocked, jeered, and ignored. The Invictus finds itself in bed with the Ordo Dracul and the Circle of the Crone, in lesser degree, with its ties to the Second Estate strained because of it. The Carthians are always quick to capitalize on any mis-step the First Estate makes and more, younger vampires grumble under the traditionalist feudal structure enforced by the High Prince. In some districts of Paradi, it's a matchbook waiting to be lit. The Knights of the First Order are constantly busy and few of them survive more than a handful of decades. A state of cold war exists between the First and the Rebels, with acts of violence all too ready to tip the whole thing on its side.