BREACH

Bureau of Reality Exploration, Access, and Containment of Hostiles Control and Homesteading

BREACH is a branch of NATO that has ended up the de facto group responsible for exploring strange new words while keeping them from exploring us. It juggles, with variable skill, scientific, economic, and military duties.

Logo

A stylized crennelated white castle wall on a blue background, which has been partially... breached. Beneath is a banner reading "Henry V, Act III, Scene I ".

Bases

Conestoga

Conestoga Base is located in Nebraska, far from anything ("Not that there's much to worry about losing"). The location is a poorly-kept secret. First, it was formed from a Cold War era military bunker that was known to exist. Second, expanding it required fairly visible transports of construction equipment and hundreds of military engineers and workers, most of whom were from local bases. Third, while above ground construction is minimal and claims to be a minor Department of Agriculture office (despite there being no active farms within 50 miles), the air and ground traffic, including military and corporate transports, is very heavy.

Lastly, while the base does provide for many creature comforts, it cannot provide them all, and while it's a 90 minute drive to the Speckled Zebra Bar and Grill, quite a few of the soldiers and staff make it there (in several senses of the word) and people do have a tendency to talk.

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Structure

NATO oversees BREACH, and assigns a Director (typically, a mid-rank General or Admiral) who reports to ACO. Beneath them are various department heads, with operations roughly divided into Military, Scientific, and Economic branches. The latter departments are typically headed by civilians appointed by the NAC for renewable two-year terms, and both are heavily shaped by political pressure. The various branches subdivide into assorted specialized bureaucracies, and the organization as a whole has developed an impressive level of redundancy and regulatory contradiction for such a young group.

Culture

The original purpose and focus of BREACH was to deal with "incursions" -- intrusions of monsters and menaces into Baseline Earth. It had a small, tight-knit military culture centered around small teams of elite forces who could end up anywhere at any time to deal with walking carnivorous plants, titanosaurs, or Soviet soldiers with lightning guns.

Currently, the culture is clashing between three major factions: Those who want to study the scientific treasures of the multiverse (and amongst them, the divide between social scientists/historians/anthropologists and biologists/chemists/geologists/etc), those who want to profit from the treasures of the multiverse ("So, the Age of Sail Babylonians with the massive fleet need salt, and there's some early-gunpowder lizard-people on Mesozoica who have salt mines but not enough fish. You get me?"), and those who signed up to go to strange exotic realities, meet strange exotic sapients, and shoot them.

Public Agenda

BREACH was formed as a military group to "explore, evaluate, and exterminate" interdimensional hostiles. When the breach stabilizer was developed, and the scientific and economic benefits became more obvious, the mission changed to "explore, evaluate, and expand", though many argue an "exploit" is in there somewhere.

The current acronym, Bureau of Reality Exploration, Access, Control, and Homesteading, identifies the public-facing mission. "Homesteading" is mostly theoretical, but the potential of full-time, long-term settlement cannot be denied.

"The E in BREACH"

It is something between a joke and a serious criticism (depending on who's talking) that "the E in BREACH stands for Exploitation". It's not remotely secret or hidden that a lot of funding for BREACH comes from corporate sponsors, which can claim it as a tax write-off if it's earmarked for artistic, scientific, or cultural research. Dendrologists in every field spend a lot of time writing grant proposals to get money to study, in-depth, artifacts brought back from the web of worlds, or to establish long-term research groups on parallel worlds. Less open is the tacit understanding that these sponsors will gain legal rights for exploiting and developing what's found. As individual governments, trade alliances, and the UN all struggle to establish legal principles for the ownership of resources taken from other worlds, many organizations, commercial and governmental, want to try to get ahead of regulation and make it a fait accompli, forcing whatever laws are eventually agreed upon to wrap themselves around existing practices.

Other than the disastrous Landfill experiment, no large-scale private "breach-to-Baseline" operation has yet started. As far as anyone knows.

Assets

Military assets are to be had in some abundance. A lot of "pure science" is done by civilian contractors, and there's often complex webs of provisioning for the kind of bleeding-edge gear needed, ranging from "promotional consideration" to subtle, unspoken requirements for "information sharing". Almost anything can be had in theory, but, in practice, deal-making, clout, and connections matter a lot in determining what gets expedited through the requisition labyrinth and what wanders there forever.

History

2013

BREACH was formed to deal with "incursions". As such, it was conceived as a small, lean operation with a few dozen strike teams ready to go at a moment's notice and a small staff of eggheads to study the data and maybe 1 or 2 to accompany the combat agents and make excitable squeaky noises. The development of the Breach Stabilizer a year after the organization was officially formed forced a hasty restructuring and an explosively fast expansion.

2014-2023

BREACH sets up exploration centers in remote portions of the US, Canada, and Europe.

Organization Type

Very Powerful

Eff. Patron Cost

20

Rank Cost

4

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Founding Date

August 17, 2013 (Officially)

Type

Governmental, Department

Location

Baseline Earth

Controlled Territories

• Conestoga Base