Other Appearances: "Gargs & Dolls" by Dylan P. Blacquiere.
Creator: Dylan P. Blacquiere
Bras d'Or is a secret department of the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service (CSIS) dedicated to the acquisition and study of magical and paranormal artifacts and beings. It's officially known as the Magical/Paranormal Investigations Bureau, but is almost universally known by it's code name, Bras d'Or, which is French for "the arm of gold". It was named after the Bras d'Or Lakes on Cape Breton Island, where the society's founder lived.
Bras d'Or was created in the wake of World War II, officially incorporated in 1946. After the defeat of the Nazis in World War II, Canadian Army officer General Thomas Dearing of Glace Bay, Nova Scotia, found a book of spells in a German bunker in Berlin, which had been one of the bases for the Nazi's obsession with the occult. He brought the book back to Canada, and subseqent research convinced Prime Minister William Lyon MacKenzie King that Canada would benefit from limited research of such things. Thomas Dearing was offered the command of a new investigations bureau devoted to the study of such relics, which he named Bras d'Or, after the lakes in Cape Breton. He based the new department in the small town of Ste-Agnes-de-Dundee, Quebec. While Bras d'Or was at first merely a limited study of such arcane relics, an operation in northern Newfoundland changed that. A Bras d'Or researcher found a leftover relic of the long-since vanished Beothuk peoples that was found to have actual magical properties which made sea life plentiful by calling them to the area of the spellcaster. This discovery led to a dramatic increase in Bras d'Or's budget, and the organization became much more important. It was incorporated into the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service, and continued its research in secret.
Director Thomas Dearing was the head of Bras d'Or from 1946 until 1976. He was followed by Director William Robertson of Edmonton, Alberta, who discovered literature on the mysterious Phaedra Stone. This artifact supposedly gave a person the ability to cross over to different realities, a prospect which Robertson found infinitely appealing. The Phaedra Stone had been lost for millenia, though, and there seemed to be no hope of finding it until Robertson was approached by a mysterious man with a silver face (who would later be called Iceface as a derogatory nickname). He supposedly knew a great deal about the Phaedra Stone, and informed Robertson that it was located in a dimensional nexus known as "Nowhere". But the only gate to Nowhere was with an artifact called the MacKenzie Pendant, which had disappeared in New York City in 1924 during a jewel heist by Mace Malone and Dominic Dracon. "Project Phaedra" was set up, which had three goals: obtain the Phoenix Gate, return to 1924 and obtain the MacKenzie Pendant, and enter Nowhere and obtain the Phaedra Stone. Robertson was killed in a car crash before Project Phaedra was ever begun, leaving the project up to his successor, a young man by the name of Jean-Francois LaFontaine. Director LaFontaine was extremely interested in Project: Phaedra, and dedicated his life to its successful completion. The Phoenix Gate remained the elusive key, however, and the actual project would not begin until the Phoenix Gate was rediscovered on Prince Edward Island in 1998.
Bras d'Or's interest was not solely in Phaedra, however; in 1954, Director Dearing heard several folk legends of mysterious creatures known as gargoyles in several centers around Canada. Dearing's only success in finding these creatures was in 1960, when Bras d'Or operatives in St. John's, Newfoundland, collected the smashed fragments of seven gargoyles in an abandoned church. LaFontaine's direction would bring a breakthrough...in 1994, operatives in British Columbia successfully captured a live gargoyle, and brought him to Quebec for study. This piqued interest in gargoyle research as well, most notably in the area of gargoyle cloning. However, the only available samples were the stone fragments of the Newfoundland specimens, since a lab accident destroyed all samples of live gargoyle tissue. Gargoyle research stalled for a while, until late 1996, when an operative in New York City's Xanatos Enterprises, Inc. (who had been placed to monitor magical activity in the Eyrie Building due to some rather tempting rumours of the goings-on in that place) reported that a clan of gargoyles had moved into the castle. (This was, of course, the Manhattan Clan, later joined by four new gargoyles from Avalon and Newfoundland) LaFontaine ordered discrete monitoring of the clan.
In 1997, frustrated with the stall in gargoyle genetics research, and the repeated failure of all cloning attempts, LaFontaine enlisted the help of Anton Sevarius, the only man known to have successfully cloned gargoyles. Sevarius and Dr. Charlotte Raybur, a Bras d'Or operative sent to New York to assist Sevarius in discovering an alternative method of cloning, orchestrated the kidnapping of five cloned gargoyles, but a mistake was made, leading to the capture of three cloned gargoyles - Malibu, Brentwood and Delilah - and of two normal specimens - Whitbourne and Bonavista. The research paid off, as Sevarius and Raybur discovered a way to increase the effectiveness of the cloning process. However, the situation was complicated by the death of Brentwood, the deafening of Malibu, and the escape of the test subjects. Regardless of this, the project was successful, as Bras d'Or now had the means to clone a gargoyle, and a blood sample from the two Newfoundlanders to use instead of the stone scrapings from the Newfoundland rock fragments.
Bras d'Or spent most of the next year petitioning for funding increases from the Canadian government, obtaining them in secret and through extortion. However, their attention was not solely focused on worldly concerns, evidenced by the enaction of Project: Phaedra upon the discovery of the Phoenix Gate in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island in early 1998. Iceface was sent to Charlottetown to acquire it, only to find that David Xanatos had gone to the Island and acquired it first. Iceface went to New York, infiltrated the Eyrie Building, and used the Phoenix Gate to return to September 6, 1924, inadvertently taking Broadway, Angela, Bonavista and Kennedy Woodworth with him. Once there, Iceface enlisted the help of Dominic Dracon and Mace Malone to obtain the MacKenzie Pendant, a project which ended up fufilling the past of both Dominic and Mace. It also led, however, to Iceface being incapacitated and the gargoyles returning to the present with the MacKenzie Pendant, leaving Iceface stranded in the past. Iceface spent the next seventy-four years alone, returning to Ste-Agnes-de-Dundee in exactly the same condition he had left it. LaFontaine, angry over the failure of Phaedra's first phase, decided to try to retrieve the pendant from the Eyrie Building when conditions allowed it, deciding to delay the retrieval until the year 2000 when the pendant's properties would make it easier to do so.
Bras d'Or continues to try and acquire all things magical in order to study them, and will doubtless return to further its own motives.