---
title: "SEELE"
type: "organization"
nation: "nichirin"
ooc: true
infobox: (15 rows)
---
**SEELE** (ゼレ, Aldrige: *Zere*, *ZEH-reh*; Alemannian: *Seele*, *ZAY-luh*) is a clandestine intelligence and paramilitary organization of [[nichirin]], headquartered in Shiratsuki Ward, [[shinkeisei]]. Although it splintered from the Shogunate's former intelligence service and continues to operate under a wartime instrument that has never been rescinded, it stands outside the constitutional order of the state, answers to no ministry, and regards itself as a body that Nichirin neither owns nor can dissolve. The organization is governed by a Directorate of three, whose seats are known as the Pillars. Its work abroad is organized in four theaters, covering [[valtheria]], [[evria]], the Five Indies and the Sahara Sea, each under a theater lead who operates with considerable independence.
SEELE's doctrine treats the Nichirian state as a temporary arrangement and the organization as the part of Nichirin intended to continue after that arrangement has ended. From this follows the rule that governs its membership. The organization does not recruit from the general population. It takes only those who have no record with the state and no other course open to them, and it does not accept anyone who could still serve the state in an ordinary capacity. Membership is permanent.
The existence of SEELE is known only to the Shogun, his Senior Shogunal Advisors, and a small circle of ministers, and to no one outside government.
## Etymology
SEELE is directly adopted from the Alemannian noun *Seele*, meaning "soul". It only appears in documents in [Rumaic script](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_script), and the [katakana](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katakana) form, ゼレ (Zere), seldom appears outside of the organization’s emblem. The word denotes that which is eternal, uncreated and indestructible, and it expresses the organization's self-conception as the part of Nichirin that will outlast the Nichirian state, an inheritance assembled in advance of an end the state itself has not agreed is coming.
A Nichirian name, in the organization's account, would have implied that SEELE is owned by the Nichirian state, a proposition the organization rejects. The three attributes of its gloss correspond to three tenets of its doctrine: eternal, in that nothing is held to be finished but only stopped, the record of an ending being treated as a document separate from the person or thing it describes; uncreated, in that what a government creates by instrument it may dissolve by instrument, so that an institution the state did not make cannot be unmade by it, a principle the doctrine states as "to be counted is to be able to die"; and indestructible, in that whatever is salvaged from the state's accounting is kept and not returned.
The organization's internal geography takes its names from the [Kabbalistic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kabbalah) [Tree of Life](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_of_life_(Kabbalah)), whose three columns give the three directorial offices their titles of Severity, Equilibrium and Mercy, held from the Left, Center and Right Pillars. Field designations derive instead from Kaiseido scripture, from the single passage of the [kuniyuzuri](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuni-yuzuri) (国譲り, "the transfer of the land"), in which a realm passes from the god holding it to another power.
## History
### Nichirian Intelligence Agency
Hideaki Katsuragi was born around 1862 into a family attached to the Imperial Court, and was a child in Shinkeisei during the Bakuraku War of 1868, when the Court's attempt to reclaim power from the Shogun was crushed, Emperor Kasuga was captured and publicly executed, and the offices, insignia and stipends of the Court were abolished by decree over the following months, his family’s position with them. Takahashi, his colleague of thirty years, later dated to these years the conviction that governed Katsuragi’s creations, being that a state is an arrangement for deciding what counts, that such arrangements end, and that what an arrangement recognises dies with it.
He entered intelligence work through the army and spent the 1880s and 1890s attached to the Nichirian legation in Beining, running the Agency's networks inside the Xing Empire. He was appointed Spymaster of the Nichirian Intelligence Agency, the Shogunate’s lawful intelligence service, around 1900, in his late thirties, after a period of service the Agency's own records describe as distinguished.
### The Shanggang Affair
In 1906, the Xing court exposed the Agency's principal network in the Empire. Nineteen agents were arrested in Shanggang and its provincial cities, their confessions were published, and the Empire protested the operation as a breach of the Treaty of Kōrihama, the non-aggression treaty the two states had signed in 1889 to close the frontier after the Manshu campaigns. The Shogunate disavowed the network to preserve the treaty. The disavowal required the government to confirm the agents' names, which it did, and sixteen of them were executed by the Xing. Relations between the two states, already strained over Manshu, did not recover before [[great-war|the Great War]].
Katsuragi remained as the Spymaster. By Takahashi's account, he drew from the affair the conclusion that a service the state recognised could be closed by the state, agent by agent, whenever a treaty or a budget required it, and that the only personnel a government could never be made to surrender were those it had never accounted for.
Within a few years of the incident, Katsuragi opened a private facility at a decommissioned sanatorium in rural Kochōrin, the poorest prefecture in Nichirin, later designated Site ‘Kelipah’. Its subjects were children taken off the streets of Kochōrin's impoverished sub-prefectural towns, none of whom appeared in any register, and its purpose was to condition them from early childhood into operatives whose loyalty and function would not depend on the state. The Bakufu was not told of its existence at any point. The regime failed, as most of the children died during the program, though a small number escaped. Katsuragi did not visit the facility, and wrote the intake protocol for it, in his own hand, only in 1924, when the first generation was ending.
### Instrument 6174 and the Yagara
The Xing retreat that followed the Battle of [[mizuhara]] had left rear-echelon units behind without extraction orders, and at the Second Battle of Tanretsu on 2 September 1916, Nichirian forces captured one such unit whole. The men were executed, while the women were forced into sexual slavery. On 9 August 1917, Shogun Masanori Miyamoto signed Wartime Instrument 6174, authorising a prisoner-exploitation unit under the Spymaster's command, funded outside the estimates and reporting to no ministry, on the sole condition that it be governed by a directorate of three. It consisted of Katsuragi himself, Doctor Yui Shinazugawa, a senior researcher in the Agency's technical division, and Takahashi, a retired Marshal-General of the Bulwark and a trusted advisor to Masanori.
By the autumn of 1917, the Xing Empire was collapsing, and in October, operatives of the new unit identified among the Hezhouan women in Nichirian captivity a pool of bilingual candidates for insertion into it. Katsuragi filed a request and received them inside eleven days. Nineteen women entered the unit, with consent recorded, under the designation *Yagara* (夜鴉, "the Night Ravens"). The cohort was sent into the Empire in the last months of the war; all but [[liang-weixi]] were killed or defected. She was the only operative still working when Shanggang fell on 3 November 1918, and continued alone for six months before learning that she was the last.
On 1 March 1922, [[uzume]] was designated Head of Field Operations under the codename *Uzume*. On 11 November, [[kosumi-inari]], a former trafficker and contract assassin based in Toteham, Dunmaris, was recruited under the codename *Yachimata*, dividing the field into a Valtherian and an Evrian theatre. The same year, the Directorate's three seats were internally formalised as the Pillars, Left, Center and Right, with Katsuragi on the Left, Shinazugawa in the Center and Takahashi on the Right; the columns' titles of Severity, Equilibrium and Mercy were attached to them only in 1927, with the rest of the figure.
Arjun Majumdar, a chartering superintendent for a Kinshū shipping line at Tsubayo, and Emeka Okafor, a condemned sergeant of sappers in the Arvernois colonial infantry of the Côte d'Saumon, were later recruited in 1924 and 1926 respectively under the codenames *Futsunushi* and *Takemikazuchi*, expanding SEELE operations to theatres in the Five Indies and the Sahara Sea. The four theatres have been unchanged since.
The Nichirian Intelligence Agency was never abolished. As the prisoner-exploitation unit grew, Katsuragi moved the Agency's officers, funds and stations into it, and the lawful service was hollowed from the inside until nothing of it remained on the books but its name. It was struck from the estimates in the 1924 budget, and the Spymaster's command was dissolved on 31 March of that year, though Katsuragi kept his title.
### Discovery of Site ‘Malkuth’
In the summer of 1927, a Shogunate geological survey of [[hyperborea]] with Marshal-Admiral [[suiren-makinami]], Chief Liaison Officer [[akane-shikinami-hoffmann|Akane Shikinami Hoffmann]] and Chief Historian [[kanade-tachibana]] in attendance followed maps in the Tachibana family’s keeping to a cave system in the foothills of the Northern Wall. Beneath the ice, they uncovered a temple complex of the pre-Shogunate imperial cult built in the eighth century. Its main hall held the remains of thousands of Tohantan people, beheaded and laid in concentric circles about a central altar, the dead of the cult's suppression of a population that had refused assimilation. A follow-up archaeological expedition in August opened a chamber beneath the altar and found eleven stone platforms arranged as the Kabbalistic Tree of Life, each bearing the body of a pre-Shogunate emperor in full regalia, preserved by the cold. The Shogun sealed the findings; the emperors' remains were relocated to the Imperial Archive in Shinkeisei, and the Tohantan dead were reburied in Tohanto.
SEELE inferred that the priesthood had faced the problem Katsuragi had set himself. They served a dynasty with an end date, under gods of doorways, harvests and river crossings that offered nothing for surviving the death of a state. Katsuragi took the chamber as a prototype of his own thesis, worked out a thousand years before him, and within a week of the inscription survey, had mapped the figure onto the organization. The Directorate's three seats received the titles of the Tree's three columns, and the installations their names from its positions, with the temple itself designated Malkuth. To consolidate SEELE’s control of the site, Shinazugawa’s Scientific Division had the government construct a forward operating base designated Keter on the coastal plain below the Wall. The base was a Shogunate installation on paper and in its funding, but was manned entirely by SEELE scientists.
### The Fall of Katsuragi
The Elysian embassy in Shinkeisei was targeted by a car bomb in November 1928, gravely injuring Colonel [[george-elwood]]. The Shogun ordered Katsuragi to make it impossible for a foreign operative to move undetected on Nichirian soil. The Kagemusha was deployed to northern ports and principal rail termini, signals intelligence was expanded, and Forward Operating Base Keter was garrisoned by two hundred operatives under a High Commandant codenamed Shuten.
On 27 December 1928, Shuten was exposed as General Mayu Kitta, who had been recorded as dead by Katsuragi in November 1926 after attempted suicide, revived in SEELE's custody under an identity-termination protocol, and redeployed under a cover identity without the Shogun's knowledge. The exposure produced a deep distrust between the Bakufu and the Directorate, and the Shogun placed every operation, deployment and requisition under his own review. When Senior Shogunal Advisor Hideki Otonashi was shot dead on 1 January 1930 by a round meant for Makinami, the January directive rescinded those restrictions and restored full operational authority to the Directorate, which Katsuragi thereafter treated as authorisation for every action he took.
At the time, the Kagemusha was a state unit lent to the Directorate under the Shogun's mandates and answerable through the army's own channels. Between 1927 and 1929, Katsuragi requested a security force under SEELE's own authority, outside the estimates and military procedure, four times, and was refused each time; after Kitta's exposure, the refusal rested on the political cost of enlarging the organization's mandate at all. On the morning of 6 February 1930, SEELE’s compound in Shiratsuki Ward, Shinkeisei was assaulted by the yakuza organization of Kiyonari Tsujimura while Makinami and Shikinami-Hoffmann were inside for a scheduled debriefing. Eight people were killed, most of them non-essential staff, among them Minister [[kishibe-toda]]. The weapons carried by the attackers were military-specification arms from a decommissioned stockpile in Manshu, which Katsuragi had supplied to Tsujimura through a cutout in late December 1929. On the evening before the assault, he had withdrawn from the compound the staff whose loss would have compromised the intelligence apparatus.
By Katsuragi’s own later account, a successful assault on the organization's headquarters would force the Shogun to grant SEELE the armed branch under its own authority that he had been refused. He acknowledged this arrangement to his daughter, Kyouko Katsuragi, on 10 February. She reported it to [[kenzo-kamiya|Kenzo Kamiya]], the Minister of Justice, the following day, and he was arrested at the Palace on 14 February. At trial, he relied on the November and January mandates, but Kamiya established that the weapons had been transferred three weeks before the January directive granting Katsuragi full operational authority was issued. On 28 February, the court convicted him of illegal procurement, facilitation of an armed assault on a state institution, gross negligence, and treason under Article 47 of the Criminal Code.
Katsuragi was sent to Shiranui-tō Penitentiary on 1 March 1930. In October 1930, he was assigned to a penal squad of eight prisoners sent to scout a logistics route through the cave system beneath the Northern Wall for a research station in Inner Hyperborea. The squad included Tsujimura, who had been arrested by Uzume; Sae Kujō, the markswoman who had killed Otonashi on Tsujimura's orders; and Mako Murakumo, one of the first-generation children who had survived and escaped the sanatorium. It descended on 7 October, and five of its members died below ground. Katsuragi, Kujō and Murakumo reached the exit on 11 October.
At Keter, Katsuragi withheld squad scribe Kippei Hanagata’s notebook, the only record of the route, and offered it to the state in exchange for his release abroad. Tachibana, who held older maps of the same passages, established that the route could be reconstructed without it, and Shinazugawa shot him. Her stated ground was his own doctrine. He had built the organization to operate without him and had told the other directors so, and a founder who put the organization's assets to the state as the price of his own person had made himself the one thing the design did not permit, a single point on which the whole depended. A convicted traitor in the state's custody was also a channel through which a court could reach the Directorate, and the organization does not leave such channels open. No successor was seated on the Left Pillar.
### Interregnum
From Shiranui-tō, Katsuragi wrote by dead drop to Uzume alone. However, this did not reach the other theatre leads. In Arlbern, Yachimata had placed Noah Baruch of the Shivonite Democratic Federation under her protection. On 14 July 1930, she traveled to Prauvenberg to offer the same arrangement to Shlomi Meyer of the Shivonite Socialist Union, both in exile from the Shivonite dictator Mendel Shneerson. By then, Takemikazuchi, unreachable from Shinkeisei since Katsuragi's arrest and under contract to Shneerson's regime, had wired the Union's headquarters with explosives. The two recognised each other inside the building. Yachimata gave ground; as a result, Takemikazuchi brought the building down with eleven civilians inside and kidnapped Meyer to [[shivon]]. Five days later, Yachimata freed him from his cell in [[eretz]], having located it on a wordless indication from Takemikazuchi.
Uzume continued the sequence after Katsuragi’s death, issuing instructions in his filing system to the organization's agents abroad. For the next three years after Katsuragi's death, the two remaining directors agreed on nothing substantial, and the organization's activity was whatever its field operatives did on their own judgement.
### Changing of the Guard
In October 1932, Takahashi revived Katsuragi's conditioning program at Kelipah with an intake of fourteen children, authorized under the Right Pillar's seal and requisitioned on the Scientific Division's letterhead. Shinazugawa detected the resumption in her own division's paperwork and, on 9 January 1933, dispatched a retrieval team to Kelipah consisting of Kujō and Murakumo, both recruited into the organization after surviving the penal squad, and Agent Masaru Konaka. They arrived to find the site under Kagemusha guard, the children transferred six days earlier to an undisclosed location, and the intake records of both generations intact. Kyouko Katsuragi, conducting an investigation of her own from the surrounding woodland, fatally shot Konaka with a round intended for the garrison and was detained by the organization on account of what she had seen.
On 7 February 1933, Shinazugawa informed Takahashi that she intended to bring the program before the Shogun, and was shot by Yachimata on his order. Kujō, Murakumo and Kyouko escaped the compound with Kitta's assistance. On 10 February, the Kakugi examined Takahashi and released him, having identified no statute that reached him; the same night, Rin Shiragiku, a biologist who had worked under Shinazugawa in Hyperborea, assumed the Center Pillar, while Ayaka Kyougoku, a scrutinized figure after her controversial successes in the Liberation of Shivon, assumed the Left Pillar after resigning her naval commission. Kujō and Murakumo resumed their posts on 13 February, outwardly as before, and with a distrust of the Directorate that has not lifted.
Kyouko Katsuragi was arrested for Konaka's death on the 15th, after the Directorate delivered his body to a public mortuary. Kitta was arrested the following day at Kelipah, where a Kagemusha detail had shot a police sergeant during a clearance of the site. In March 1934, the Ministry of Interior Affairs amended the civil register to record Kitta as living, and Kyouko Katsuragi's defence called him as the only witness who could corroborate her account of Kelipah and be sworn. He gave it, and when the prosecution put his own 1928 deposition to him, taken as history from a man the Archive listed as dead, he affirmed on oath his execution of seven prisoners of war at Mizuhara in 1915, accepting the referral to Justice that followed as the price of being a witness at all. The charge against her was withdrawn once the Interior established that Konaka had never been registered as a person.
As of July 1934, the whereabouts of the second-generation children remain unknown, and the organization once again operates under a full Directorate of three.
## Structure
SEELE is directed by three directors, each occupying a seat known as a Pillar and each holding a portfolio in which their decision is final. Matters affecting the organization as a whole require the agreement of all three.
Ayaka Kyougoku holds the Left Pillar, Severity. She directs the organization's special operatives, oversees the collection and assessment of intelligence from the theaters and from within Nichirin, and conducts the Directorate's exchanges with the government.
Rin Shiragiku holds the Center Pillar, Equilibrium, and directs the Scientific Division, whose research is conducted at the organization's installations in Hyperborea.
Gendo Takahashi, the longest serving of the three, holds the Right Pillar, Mercy, and commands the Kagemusha, listed on the Ground Corps' establishment as a special operations division, paid for and equipped by the Ministry of Defense.
Directors are appointed by the Directorate itself and answer to no organ of the state. An unoccupied seat is termed dark, and since the organization records a director's death only by its own notice, orders and requisitions bearing a deceased director's signature continue to be honored until one is issued.
The Directorate sits at Shiratsuki Ward, Shinkeisei, in a compound enclosed by a granite wall and entered by one gate under a sentry. The building above ground is given over to offices, a reception and a switchboard; the Directorate meets two floors below, in Central Dogma, a chamber built inside a disused cistern. Its three pillars correspond to the three seats and are lit only while a seat is filled. Beyond Shinkeisei, the organization maintains installations throughout Nichirin and its territories.
Operations abroad are divided among four theaters of equal standing, each under a theater lead who acts on their own authority and reports to the Directorate afterwards, under a standing rule that every operation be notified within seventy-two hours. Uzume heads Valtheria; Yachimata heads Evria; Futsunushi heads the Five Indies; and Takemikazuchi heads the Sahara Sea. Field agents resident in each theater and in Nichirin number several hundred, and none appears by name in any state record. They receive their instructions through a system of dead drops administered by their theater leads, while the theater leads themselves, special operatives, and the Directorate communicate through an encrypted relay of the Bakufu Communications Service.
SEELE has no place in the Shogunate's constitution. It continues to operate under Wartime Instrument 6174, and its dealings with the government pass through the Chief Liaison Officer. The Shogun directs it by mandate, which the Directorate may receive or decline. No statute of the Criminal Code reaches an act committed under the instrument. Knowledge of the organization is confined to the Shogun, his Senior Shogunal Advisors, and a small circle of ministers.
