IN> Directorate of Special Purposes

[William Keith]

      The executive branch of the PRC's government, naturally, has a 
Ministry of Water Resources, and this Ministry has a Department of 
Planning and Programming.  The mission of this Department is your 
typical paragraph of bureaucratese, listing a collection of goals 
concerning the organization of other Departments in the Ministry, with 
"...and programs of special purposes" slapped in the middle to cover 
anything else it might have to do.  There are directorates in the 
Department applied to each of the listed objectives, including one for 
the "special purposes" objective, generally agreed to be the guys that 
figure out what to do with stuff the Ministry doesn't normally deal 
with, and recommend a strategy to the more usual directorates.  All 
very standard.

      The nonstandard part is the part where this innocuous directorate 
has a staff of feng shui masters and a black-ops budget that rivals the 
military's expenditures on Taiwan intel.

      Serious building projects in Asia frequently consult a feng shui 
practitioner, of course.  Occasionally it involves some architectural 
modifications, but usually it's no more complicated or expensive than 
getting a Catholic priest to come by and sprinkle some holy water on 
the foundation.  It's mainly for the PR; if a good percentage of the 
population thinks your building is sucking in bad luck, you lose 
customer base.  Nationally, of course, this is officially declared to 
be nonsense by the officially atheist PRC.  China's Cultural Revolution 
led to feng shui practice being nearly banned outright, for one extreme 
example.  Certainly China has no formal governing body dedicated to 
pursuing the inane theology of an outmoded geomantic superstition.

      Right.  Also, while we're at it, China does not have a committee 
on alchemy, has no diplomatic contacts with the Celestial Bureaucracy, 
does not have a small special-ops force solely dedicated to penetrating 
the karmic barriers around the Dalai Lama's reincarnation cycle, does 
not have a one-call-a-year hotline to the hovel where Confucius has 
been happily existing for the past several millenia, and certainly does 
not have Christian angels running around its soil.  One of these 
statements is even true.

      The one about the Feng Shui committee is, however, blatantly 
false.  Calling it The People's Secret Subdirectorate for the 
Theoretical Study and Practical Application of Feng Shui to Corporeal 
Territorial Integrity would be more accurate, but would attract too 
much attention, that's all.

      As world governments go, the Middle Kingdom has been around the 
block a few times.  The geomantic studies involved with this ancient 
art have been in continuous development since the earliest histories 
(that is to say, at the time of the earliest histories they had already 
been in development for some while).  After the confusion of the Xinhai 
Revolution and the Warlord Era, the Kuomintang government got a knock 
on the door.  After the Civil War, the Kuomintang functionaries 
involved with the group all just happened to be away from the worst of 
the purges, and after things had settled down a bit a few quiet 
demonstrations of geomantic calculations and some eyewitness accounts 
of supernatural activity convinced the newly installed government that 
there were, in fact, supernatural creatures running around on Earth, 
and some sort of policy had to be formulated to deal with them.

      The Party chose "kick the bums out," and the first form of the 
Directorate of Special Purposes was created.  Its goal was to secure 
China's borders in the metaphysical sense, by disrupting present 
Tethers and preventing the formation of new ones.  If spirits from 
other worlds are going to come to China, they'll damn well come when 
called and not traipse around unsupervised, and they certainly aren't 
going to be sucking away useful qi that the Chinese people can be 
spending on their own personal and national advancement.  Over the past 
fifty years the DSP has steadily accumulated expertise in identifying 
Tethers, including spotting a new Tether, determining its Side and the 
sorts of activities it engages in, and even roughly cataloging a few 
code-named entities that appear to be in charge whenever specific sorts 
of Tethers are created.  When it identifies a Tether, intelligence 
agents seek information on its formatory event and the likely 
activities that sustain its qi flow.  These are then attacked through 
the use of propaganda agents working the region's population, and 
governmental harassment of the site itself.  Important among these 
tactics is rezoning to disrupt the cover activities of the Tether, with 
the geomancers directing land-use recommendations to shunt qi away from 
the Tether and back into the general population.

      The prevention of the formation of Tethers is a topic of high 
interest in the Directorate.  Water projects ("feng shui" translates as 
"the way of wind and water," and basically employs the principles that 
air scatters qi and water collects it) are undertaken with a mind to 
direct qi toward human uses; hydroelectric dams are big-money projects, 
as are aquaculture and maritime programs.  Whether these projects 
actually work is debated intensively in Heaven and Hell, but what is 
known is that Tethers in China tend to come in three flavors: major, 
secret, and a bare few Tethers to the Chinese pantheon that are 
tolerated in exchange for a working relationship.  A poorly-defended 
Tether that becomes known to the authorities will find itself rapidly 
under assault.  It's possible that this is also an effect of Essence 
circulating in the population with fewer outlets, erupting as fewer but 
stronger Tethers.

      The Directorate pursues its policy of exclusion in its staffing 
procedures, as well.  New managers assigned to the bureaucracy are 
inducted in a series of rituals designed to sniff out celestials: days 
of isolation and fasting followed by blood testing to ensure that the 
recruit is hungry, an animal sacrifice to check Disturbance, a series 
of ritual lies and repudiations, a solid strike upon a fellow human, 
etc.  The rituals are changed regularly.  Shedim and Kyriotates are a 
bit more challenging to check out, but random tests catch even a few of 
those.  Saints, Undead, and Soldiers from both Sides are the primary 
infiltrators.  Celestial presence in the managerial staff is almost 
certainly at zero or bare minimum.

      It's a great pity, then, that the Directorate is almost entirely 
under the thumb of Kronos.  Demons are far freer to use the Celestial 
Bureaucracy's Tethers than angels, and the philosophy of the 
Directorate includes "permitted immigration" by means of summoning, to 
which demons respond and not angels.  The geomantic ranks of the 
Directorate thus include quite a few members of the Black Order 
thoroughly steeped in demon-summoning, and the net results of the 
Directorate's activities are projected by Fate demons to serve Hell 
better than Heaven. The occasional disruption of an Infernal Tether is 
a price to be paid for similar disruption to the other Side, especially 
when agents can prioritize Heavenly Tethers for attack over Infernal 
ones.

      Rectifying this situation is a major goal of Destiny's angels in 
China.  It's ironic, given that Destiny would cheerfully leave humanity 
alone exactly as the PRC officially wants, if only Hell would do the 
same.  The front-end projects, especially hydroelectric dams, are often 
dealt with by Lightning, and zoning is a matter for Stone.  An 
Archangel of Water might be more suited to organize efforts on this 
front, though.

William