The Bureau of Gen
To speak any of the past names of the Bureau of Gen within earshot of the Church is to invite inquisition. The organisation known today by this cold, functional appellation is only the most recent mask worn by a lineage stretching back to times long before the Crusades. In its current iteration, the organization is a mere two hundred years old.
Full-scale skirmishes against the Bureau of Gen are rare events, yet records confirm their occurrence has grown more frequent over the last decade of the Crusade. However, finding oneself in a battle against the Bureau almost certainly means one was neither expecting it nor prepared for it.
Origins
Even before the founding of New Antioch and the commencement of the First True Crusade, disparate sects and clandestine organizations across the Old World coalesced, seeking to hone the edge of humanity into a razor against the infernal tides. Many of these groups pre-dated the Church's iron grip by millennia. Many more did not survive the decades of chaos that followed the initial Shattering of Jerusalem.
The Bureau is at is roots, inherited from the intellectual dregs and hardened survivors of heretical groups of yore, primarily the Rosenkreuzer, but also surviving remnants of the Krsnik, the ritualistic Order of the Benandanti, and the esoteric Foliate Church.
The Bureau's modus operandi and heretical beliefs have ensured its status as a most wanted, vilified, and hunted entity throughout history; now more so than ever. The Bureau's principal belief is Nullifidianism: the conviction that divine and infernal powers, while real and measurable, are merely Logotic forces operating on principles yet to be understood, no more worthy of worship than lightning or plague. In the current age, where miracles are a daily, demonstrable reality, Nullifidians are dismissed as denialist maniacs and considered mere kindling for the pyres of the zealous.
Clandestine Operation Eternal
The power of the Bureau resides primarily in its secrecy, a skill it has honed through millennia of evolutionary survival. The Bureau operates on two distinct levels the Nullus Corpus, hidden strongholds acting as small, self-sufficient cities that house laboratories, factories, and the Apparatus, individual operatives embedded within every institution of power across the warring factions. A Bureau spy may serve openly as a Church scribe, Sultanate engineer, or even Heretic officer, their true allegiance unknown even to their families, and sometimes even themselves.
Notable exceptions exist. The Great Iron Wall stands impervious not merely to armies but to faithless infiltration, for whatever arcane properties allow the Sultanate to detect and repel the forces of Hell prove equally effective against those who have excised belief entirely. Likewise, the brand of Hell that marks the Heretic soul presents obstacles born of conflicting purpose. Yet to dismiss such infiltration as impossible is precisely the arrogance the Bureau's insidious methods exploit. Through their surgical refinements and alchemical ministrations, apostasy is no longer required for an agent to serve the Bureau's ends.
On more than one occasion, entire fronts have shifted at the Bureau’s careful orchestration of information. In the chaos, a Bureau extraction team recovers what they truly came for, unnoticed. With deep-rooted spy networks feeding vast intelligence networks, and specialized technologies hooked directly into enemy lines of communication, battles both hallowed and accursed alike have moved to the precise, clinical manipulations of the Bureau. Yet, such acts are performed sparingly, for a spider weaving a web is not impervious to those looking down from above, or below.
Fanaticism is no less rife in the ranks of the Bureau than it is in the Church or the Heretic Legions. To the Bureau, no cost is too high in the pursuit of quantified progress, to understand the very Logotic forces plaguing the minds of men and women, calling into question the nature of reality itself. To keep their minds sharp and their logic pure, many Bureau scientists voluntarily undergo primary lobotomies should they feel their sanity slipping, a procedure the Bureau has perfected. It is, in fact, considered a great honour to receive the senary leucotomy granted upon a promotion to Major General.
Technology
The Bureau's iconoclastic views and parasitic infestation of organizational structures are not the only reasons for their persecution. Perhaps more justified is the perceived, and often quite real, theft of technologies, ranging from high-Church relic prototypes and Sultanate weapon schematics to recovered demonic artifacts. It is perhaps for this reason, the Bureau holds it own intense, logical paranoia regarding their terrifying array of technologies falling into the wrong hands. Innovations are used sparingly, and are always protected by destructive safeguards. All their dedicated intelligence operatives are surgically implanted with a Revelatory Detonator.
Resultantly, the Gen Bureau has ascended into something of a no-man's-land bogeyman. Its presence is generally reported only through word-of-mouth testimony from frontline soldiers, recounting desperate, fragmented glimpses of unseen technology in action, tales of operatives who can seemingly see, hear, and run through solid steel and concrete.
At other times, the Bureau is decidedly less subtle, deploying rampaging laboratory machinations in situations where maximum chaos, or a clean house is required. Such as the documented von Baer Deployment, known colloquially among the surviving regiments of the Church and the Legions as the Trench Grinder.
Among the Bureau's upper echelon, there exists an intrinsic belief that sufficient understanding of the Logotic forces governing both Heaven and Hell will render them inert, or at the very least, allow humanity to surpass them entirely.
Organisation
The Bureau's command authority remains enigmatic to most below those at the very apex of its hierarchy. Through interrogation and defection it is known that the supreme command is vested in nine figures, referred to internally as the Nine Sephirot. Only one of these Sephirot is known in any detail, said to bear the title, or Sphere, of Yesod. It is claimed age has taken most of his faculties, including mobility, speech, and hearing. He exists only within an alchemical sarcophagus that sustains his longevity, his sole method of communication a mechanical apparatus of his own design: a ratcheted drum fed by perforated cipher-cards. How the Bureau's enemies came to learn even this much remains a troubling mystery to the Princes of the Church.
The Bureau's hierarchy is almost certainly compartmentalised and features many decentralized strongholds, inherited from the various clandestine heretical organizations absorbed throughout its history. Given how the Bureau very sparingly shows its hand in the form of mobilization, it is reasonable to suggest that the ruins near Kyllini harbour one of their many beating hearts, given recent troop movements.
More fanciful hearsay among soldiers ranges from the outlandish, such as a sanctuary in the crushing depths of the Mediterranean where even Heretic submarines cannot venture, to accounts of warrens sprawling beneath London's deepest undercrofts, hidden beneath the Crown's very feet. It is even alleged that the Church's recent atmospheric ventures seek to root out Bureau sanctuaries beyond the reach of earthly armies. For those who have witnessed and survived the rare moments the Gen Bureau shows its clandestine hand, none of this seems outlandish.
The Bureau's most frequent and critical military operations into the desolate expanse of no-man's-land are not skirmishes for ground, but primarily calculated, high-risk assignments dedicated to the investigation and retrieval of materials deemed of paramount technological or Logotic interest.