Geographic Research and Assessment for Imperial Lands (GRAIL)

“Forget what you've seen in films. Military intelligence is not all about dry martinis and sports cars. Protecting the British Isles requires more than just knowing people—it requires an intimate understanding of the very forces that shape this earth. The rough seas that ravage fleets. The lightning storms that can halt an aircraft carrier. A battle can be won, an invasion squashed, without firing a single weapon, so long as nature wills it. Every new ecosystem, every climate can have a profound effect on national security. And all that research also tells us what we need to give back, to keep everything ticking along as it should. Put simply, England's 'green and pleasant' lands would not be so without our research and guidance.”

GRAIL commissioner Sir Hartley Wentworth's speech upon accepting his CBE, August 2002.

GRAIL is a small but well-funded division of the British Secret Intelligence Service (also known as SIS, or, more familiarly, MI6) dedicated to environmental research and ecological surveillance.

To thoroughly research the environmental forces that shape the world, with the ultimate aim of protecting the British Isles and its overseas territories.

GRAIL was established in 1982 during the Argentine invasion of the Falkland Islands, after much internal lobbying from the more environmentally conscious wing of the Secret Intelligence Services. It was set up without much public fanfare and was granted a fleet of military helicopters and a sizeable supply of highly-advanced ecological monitoring equipment—all for the express purposes of conducting environmental research. Many of the helicopters sent by Britain during the Falklands War were in fact there for the purposes of GRAIL reconnaissance, gathering ecological data that could be utilised in times of conflict about the remote islands of the South Atlantic and the surrounding regions.

Since then, GRAIL has expanded. Military bases in former British colonies have been reinstituted as international research stations. Acclaimed researchers from across the Commonwealth have been contracted to carry out top-secret research in globally distributed state-of-the-art laboratories. Despite other wartime MI6 divisions being somewhat deprioritised by the British government over the years, funding has never seemed to be a problem for GRAIL—perhaps they're simply so inconspicuous that no government ever looks too closely at how much money they're really being allocated.

GRAIL is a member of the NATO trifecta that has been sent to investigate APERIS alongside ANCOM and the Bundesgeheimnissesamt. With similar areas of responsibility, GRAIL and ANCOM have come into contact before, culminating in the politically embarrassing South Georgian Islands incident in 1986—shots were exchanged between both sides but no casualties reported—since then the two have cooperated infrequently during joint American-British ventures in the Antarctic ocean.

GRAIL is also known for its contracts with SPRHD, although many populist British politicians are on record criticising this, insisting that Britain's reliance on a third party archive to manage sensitive data is politically very troubling. As a division of the UK's MI6, GRAIL considers units from the Sino-Russian JCP—Unit 871 and the 13th Independent Special Investigations Battalion—as national rivals to be treated with caution.

While it's true that GRAIL shares many of its aims with environmentalist organisations such as Sceau d'Or, its official stance on these groups is that they tend to be ad hoc, disorganised and insufficiently funded, and thus rarely finds cause to co-operate with them in an official capacity. Meanwhile, co-operation with the far more radical Terra Indomita would be outright impossible, since the group is currently recognised as a terrorist organisation by the British government.

Alongside the high-ranking supervisors—who have typically worked their way up through the military or the SIS—and the security detail—who also tend to be ex-military—GRAIL recruits a wide array of researchers encompassing many disciplines, such as meteorology, botany, zoology, chemistry, and geology. Many of these researchers will only have temporary contracts with GRAIL, but those who show excellence in their field may be offered a permanent role within the division.

GRAIL agents, especially those with overseas placements, are typically assigned codenames of figures from British mythology and folklore, such as 'Merlin', 'Spriggan', 'Kelpie', or 'Rhiannon'.