House Enfield

House Enfield would like to be known for one thing—their hereditary ability to telepathically communicate by touch. Unfortunately, in their zeal to preserve this, they've become best known for something else entirely—the inbreeding they've stooped to in the hopes of preserving the purity of their bloodline, and their unique power with it. In exchange, they've lost almost everything else—their seat on the Chamber of Lords, their allies and influence, and every member born "defective," each one pressured out of the faction for that failing.

Internal Structure

Like most houses, rule in House Enfield is hereditary, passed to the eldest child, male or female, of the previous leader.

Despite the house's reputation, its members don't actually like incest, and they attempt to minimize it, breeding members from branches of the family as distant as possible. So far, this has been enough to prevent any of the side effects associated with inbreeding, although after three generations, that window is slowly closing.

Inside the family, it's a private unpleasantness. Not something they like, but something they do out of duty. Now that the other factions know, it's made them a laughingstock—and destroyed much of their influence—but they press on, partially out of stubbornness and partially out of conviction that if they hold on long enough, they can find another means of preserving the family's gift.

That hope has become the driving goal for many members of the faction. Most of its members spend at least some time investigating their power and seeking a way to preserve it, and some members have dedicated their life to this.

Relationships with Others

House Enfield hates just about everyone: every noble faction—the Steel Barons for "stealing" their seat, the others for throwing them out. The commoner factions, which House Enfield has always looked down on, which now have the nerve to consider themselves Enfield's peers. Many of those faction return the sentiment.

Enfield's only allies are the two other commoner houses, Bergmann and Donnelly. (Slattery, in their view, is no longer a proper house.)

History

Family legend says that the founder of their house was granted their gift for saving the life of a faerie lord some five hundred years ago. He founded a house which later moved to the United States in the hopes of profiting from the new territory.

It was one of the founding members of the Peerage, and one of the staunchest opponents of the Trade Union at every turn. In the end, they were the only noble house to oppose the Tripartite Agreement, objecting to treating commoners as equal to nobles, and especially to the promotion of the Coalition of Tradesmen.

Meanwhile, in the mid-1800's, the house learned that some of its members were being born without the family's ability to communicate via touch. The house was appalled and immediately set out to hide this from the other factions while quietly shipping off what they saw to be the 'lesser' members of the house. Since then, House Enfield has discovered that any breeding with people not of Enfield blood results in offspring that don't possess the telepathic ability, which are considered unacceptable to the house as a whole. As such, the house has become inbred in an attempt to preserve the gift. When this was discovered by the other factions, it was used as leverage to remove House Enfield from the Chamber of Lords, where they were replaced by the yet unnamed steel barons. Now relegated to a seat in the Chamber of Commons, House Enfield realizes that the inbreeding will soon become a serious problem, and seeks to solve it and regain their seat in the Chamber of Lords.