The Division

“You think, I'm evil because I'm a Hunter. We're the only ones still on mission. If an agent steps out of line, we're here to clean up the mess.” With the ability to imitate Division agents, these Hunters have increased mobility; their tactics and behaviors being more akin to Agents than any other kind of enemy. Hunters can be clearly identified by their trademark ballistic masks alongside the multiple glowing orange and red (Rogue) Smart Watches they wear as trophies from agents they have executed.

The identity and motives of the Hunters have mostly remained a mystery, seen only showing extreme hostility to Division agents that is nothing short of homicidal in nature; much to the point where they will even use a crash axe to strike and execute them, provided the opportunity to do so.

Rogue First Wave agents are determined to take advantage of a city in chaos, these traitors to the Division are willing to kill their own to take what they want. Highly trained and murderously efficient, they see the pandemic as an opportunity. With the best skills, tech, and training in the city, they're the most dangerous predators on Manhattan's streets. Rogue Division Agents are former Division agents who disavowed the Strategic Homeland Division for one reason or another, and has either lent their services to another faction such as the Last Man Battalion or are working on their own, both cases working against The Division itself.

For an agent, to turn their back on The Division is to commit treason against the United States federal government; yet, it is the freedom and relative autonomy with which agents operate that gives them the potential to turn renegade. Most rogue agents are presumed to have come about following the Joint Task Force's disastrous handling of the Dark Zone. The most prominent and dangerous of these rogue agents is Aaron Keener.During the New York City outbreak the JTF failed to handle and control the quarantined center of Manhattan known as the N.Y.C. Dark Zone. The result was the JTF pulling out of the Dark Zone completely, leaving behind large quantities of valuable equipment, First Wave Agents, and any hope of re-establishing control of the area in the lawless area. The event embittered First Wave Agent Aaron Keener into going rogue as he began to lose faith in the government. Keener then began recruiting other First Wave Agents into going rogue and joining him, persuading the agents about the government's decision to abandon the Dark Zone as a "betrayal". In a recording, Aaron Keener described his chances in recruiting other agents as a "one-in-three" success rate, suggesting that at least one-third of the surviving First Wave defected to Keener's side. Under Aaron Keener's leadership, they later supported the Last Man Battalion

Convinced that not just the city but the entire nation would collapse in the atavistic wake of the pandemic, Bliss was determined that his LMB would survive the smallpox, seize full control of New York, and then use their newly created city-state as a base to usher in a new world order - one where only those with strength of will and character survive.

Cut off from their clients and caught badly unprepared for the outbreak, Bliss reluctantly formed an uneasy alliance with remaining elements of the JTF, offering his manpower in exchange for badly needed supplies to sustain their operations. Despite the occasional fraternizations between both organizations, the situation in New York continued to rapidly spiral out of control. Frustrated with the apparent indecision of JTF leadership and hamstrung heavily by ludicrous restrictions that prevented the LMB from securing the Financial District fully, the LMB's tenacious situation virtually collapsed when the JTF established the Dark Zone and pulled back to their main base of operations in Midtown.

As the LMB fought viciously in the streets for days in a battle for survival, Bliss became convinced that only the LMB had the means and determination to retake and secure New York from the chaos that plagued the city. Upon securing the Financial District, Bliss implemented martial law throughout the district, often press-ganging civilians living in the district to join the ranks of the badly depleted LMB. Recognizing the JTF's reluctance to condone their former allies' intentions, Bliss met up with their JTF liaison in a bid to convince them to assist the LMB. However, as the meeting grew heated, Bliss executed the liaison and permanently severed ties with the crippled-JTF.

Contrasting to other major factions in Manhattan, the LMB employed far more combat specialists with top-grade military gear and weapons, and their defensive positions were more heavily fortified. As much of their equipment was lost or destroyed in the heavy street-fighting in the early days of the pandemic, occasional expeditions were sent into the Dark Zone, with the intent of recovering large quantities of still-functioning equipment left behind by the JTF during their hasty retreat from the quarantine zones.

A private military company originally dispatched to Manhattan to protect certain corporate assets. The LMB were abandoned by their clients once the quarantine hit. Under the leadership of Lt. Col. Charles Bliss, they have placed huge chunks of Manhattan under their version of martial law. The Last Man Battalion (known informally as the LMB) was a private military company Founded and led by Lt. Colonel Charles Bliss, a highly decorated former officer in the United States Army's Special Forces, the LMB comprised almost entirely of former operators from the Army's premier light infantry unit, the 75th Ranger Regiment and the CIA's much feared Special Operations Group, the LMB employs some of the most highly trained and lethal mercenary contractors in the world. Just before the Green Poison outbreak broke out, the company had been contracted to numerous classified black sites across Western Asia and North Africa, often on the behalf of the United States government. But as the situation in New York rapidly deteriorated, panicked Wall Street financial firms immediately hired the LMB to protect their servers and high-value physical assets stored onsite in their Lower Manhattan vaults. Already exhausted from their hazardous overseas duty, the company was unprepared for their new deployment into the viral maelstrom of the deadliest urban catastrophe in modern history

The fanatical faction was initially hindered by CERA's quarantine lines and checkpoints. But nobody knew the bowels of the burrow - the sewers, drainage tunnels, and subway lines - like Joe Ferro and his followers. Armed with flamethrowers, fire axes, firebombs, and firearms, they traversed the city's underground passages, bypassing roadblocks and perimeter barricades with ease. Their philosophy was to burn everything that had contact with the virus.

Their faction spread quickly, driven by Ferro's belief that "the sick are already dead". One file recovered from the Cleaners' headquarters site revealed phone-video footage of a civilian captured and burnt alive by a Cleaner. All Division agents learned to proceed with extra caution in Cleaner-occupied territories, often identified by the presence of the faction's distinctive yellow garbage trucks, burning piles of corpses, and charred streets.

Determined to burn the Green Poison out of Manhattan, these blue-collar workers turned arsonists think they're the only ones willing to make the hard choices. Led by a man named Joe Ferro, they'll burn anything and anyone - living or dead - if they think it might be infected. And they won't stop until Manhattan is "clean". This roaming faction is drawn to areas of high contamination, and they are likely to turn up in any city neighborhood. The zealous pursuit of their goal makes them a dangerous force to be reckoned with. The Cleaners are New York City sanitation workers-garbageman, public facility janitors, park custodians, street cleaners, water treatment plant operators, etc. - whose jobs in better times were devoted to keeping neighborhoods and infrastructure clean. Many commuted to work from outside the city but got trapped in the urban quarantine zones during the early days of the plague. Others were inner-city dwellers who lost loved ones during the outbreak. Responding to what they perceived as the shameful failure of local and federal authorities to protect their health and families, a number of these blue-collar city workers banded together to take matters into their own hands, organized and armed by Manhattan's sanitation supervisor, Joe Ferro. The Cleaners aimed to eradicate the mutant smallpox virus. Their chosen method of killing is donning flamethrowers fueled by napalm. The Cleaners incinerated anything and anyone suspected of carrying the disease. This often included perfectly healthy survivors exposed to the virus.

Since many Rikers Island inmates belonged to local New York gangs, the prison gang's ranks grew quickly as attracted more local followers. The growth led to occasional infighting, but Larae Barrett's iron-fisted leadership helped keep clan rivalries at bay. Known as much for her ruthlessness as her ability to plan, organize, and lead, Barrett proved to be a formidable adversary for Division cells.

Escaped prisoners from Rikers Island, these hardened criminals are led by the dangerous Larae Barrett. They take what they want from the wreckage of Manhattan, determined to live like kings before the virus takes it toll. With no love for the JTF and no mercy for anyone they come across, they rule parts of Manhattan through blood and fear. When the Green Poison outbreak disrupted public services in New York City, a temporary citywide power outage engulfed all five boroughs, including the notorious prison complex on Rikers Island. Taking advantage of the blackout, inmates overpowered the guards and a mass breakout sent dozens of dangerous felons pouring into Queens then over the East River bridges into Manhattan. Ironically, shortly after their arrival, the escapees found themselves essentially imprisoned on another island, this time by the CERA quarantine of the borough.

One of the most intimidating prisoners, Larae Barrett, organized the convicts into a gang she called the Rikers. Trapped in the Manhattan anarchy, this crew of hardened criminals viewed the city as a new Wild West where they could take whatever they wanted, including revenge on the law enforcement elements that put them in jail. Led by Barrett, the Rikers quickly filled the power vacuum left by the JTF withdrawal from the streets, seizing control of entire neighborhoods ruling like urban warlords.

The gang had a primary objective: Kill everyone in a uniform, especially the New York City Police, which had been folded into the Joint Task Force. Video recovered from police vehicle dashcams and other surveillance sources showed Rikers committing terrible atrocities on law enforcement personnel. The gang stripped the corpses of murdered police officers and donned the uniforms themselves, crossing out the police insignias embroidered on them with a white cross of paint.

The Joint Task Force is the thin line of first responders holding back chaos in Manhattan. Comprised of firemen, police officers, city workers and more, the JTF works to protect civilians and the city itself. Outnumbered and outgunned, they work with The Division to try to take back the city. The Joint Task Force (JTF) is a coalition of police officers, firefighters, civil volunteers, National Guardsmen, and other civil and military branches formed in the aftermath of the Dollar Flu outbreak on Black Friday in New York City.

As the civil unrest and chaos escalated in the United States following the Green Poison attack, desertions from the military, law enforcement, first responder, and other government units became common. The shocking street savagery combined with concern for Loved ones motivated many deserters to evacuate out of urban areas. Out of necessity, all remaining security teams (US National Guard, law enforcement, CERA) banded together to form a single command center calling itself the Joint Task Force. Led by Captain Roy Benitez(in NYC), a veteran NYPD narcotics officer and one of the first responders to the 2001 9/11 attacks, as well as other commanders nationwide, the JTF is slowly pushing back the curtain of anarchy in the country. . Their mission is to take back cities block by block, with The Division providing strategic leadership and tactical support.

Ordinary citizens pushed past their limits by the outbreak, these New Yorkers will do anything to survive. They have no leader and recognize no authority except survival of the strongest. Division rubric refers to civilians who've chosen a lawless path to survival as "Rioters." These are typically unorganized looters who roam the city in small packs, preying on the weak to survive. In response to growing scarcity and the declining presence of law enforcement, Rioters simply take what they want from those unable to defend themselves. This threat is exacerbated by the fact that, in the United States, military-grade firearms are so plentiful that Rioters are often heavily armed.

Most Rioters are simply opportunists - ordinary people of all stripes who've been pushed to criminal activity by panic and greed. Instead of signing on to the social compact and working in a cooperative manner for the betterment of all, Rioters victimize others. In such cases, the Division's task is to ensure serious negative consequences for choosing this route.

Rioters have few if any loyalties, and no organization to speak of. However, they do form loose associations with likeminded opportunists when it suits them, or out of necessity. But any alliance is short-lived; the only thing that matters for them is raw survival and the next meal.

The Strategic Homeland Division (SHD) is a decentralized, autonomous entity endowed with executive powers and rules of engagement unfettered by legal constraints. Trained to operate in deadly CBRN (Chemical, Biological, Radiological, Nuclear) environments, The Division is mandated to bring order, stability and justice to communities shattered by catastrophic events. The agency also pledges active support to classified Continuity of Government plans should a widespread national disaster cripple normal governing functions. The Strategic Homeland Division (SHD), referred to as The Division, is a classified unit of highly trained, self-supported tactical agents They are fully autonomous field operatives trained to restore order to communities suffering from catastrophic events, institutional collapse, and societal breakdown. Division agents are embedded in society, leading ordinary lives until they are activated. The Division is not an elite unit in the traditional military sense. They are a civilian agency whose members do not train or deploy like military units. Elite military forces are trained for specific tasks with a completely different mission specification than that of The Division. The Division is made unique by its connection to Directive 51 and its interconnected but autonomous networked organization. It is The Division as a whole that is special, not necessarily each individual agent. Officially, agents of The Division are counted as federal agents, in direct service of the United States federal government.

Their motto is: Extremis Malis Extrema Remedia (Literal translation is "Extreme Evil, Extreme Remedy". More commonly translated as the proverb, "Desperate times call for desperate measures").

Eventually, the situation became worse than the JTF could handle. To start with, a lot of manpower had gotten sick and died, leaving them severely undermanned. Secondly, the LMB and JTF cut ties and began carving out parts of the city for themselves, with the LMB forces taking most of the eastern parts of the city. And making matters worse, prisoners had escaped from Rikers Island, killed the few guards remaining and took police equipment, leaving them in control of the southern part of the city. The sanitation workers who had worked to keep the city free of infection and a lot of whom had lost loved ones by bringing the virus into their homes were abandoned in the northeastern part of the city by the JTF, and began torching everything to eliminate the virus with fire. With all that was occurring, the JTF was forced to abandon the quarantine zone and the Division agents assisting them in keeping order. This created a schism between the government and the First Wave of Division, who abandoned their mission of operating as the government's agents and instead sought to take control of the decaying city from the JTF and anyone else.

After pulling out (and abandoning a lot of valuable equipment in the process), the undermanned and outgunned JTF were at the mercy of the escaped prisoners (calling themselves "Rikers"), the souped up sanitation workers with flamethrowers (the Cleaners) and the LMB (Last Man Battalion). They were eventually pushed back to the port in the southwestern part of the city, while the rest of the city was at the mercy of Rioters and gangs that had taken advantage of the crisis.

Shortly after Black Friday in 2015, people began getting sick with an unknown illness. The symptoms were initially mildly severe so that doctors and hospitals took it for a more serious version of the swine flu. When people began dying around the U.S., they began studying the virus and realized it was smallpox. They distributed the smallpox vaccine and thought things would get better, but they worsened. In New York City, authority to maintain order and solve the crisis was initially given to the local hospitals and the New York Police Department. When it became apparent that order was not being maintained and people were being infected in large numbers due to the disorganization of the NYPD and hospitals, the National Guard, Army and Marine Reserves, and the CDC were called in by New York's governor to assist the containment efforts.

Their solution was simple. Quarantine all known infected individuals in the center of the city to keep them away from healthy citizens, and so they could be easily treated. Eventually, the citizenry and sickness scratching at both the National Guard's and the NYPD's numbers lead to them combining their efforts and operations. From then on, they were known as the Joint Task Force, or JTF. Other public authorities such as crossing guards, firefighters, and paramedics were also included in their numbers. On occasion, the Last Man Battalion, or LMB, a private military company (PMC) hired to protect corporate interests in N.Y.C., would assist JTF efforts to quarantine the sick, though often through brutal methods of punishment. For example, an LMB soldier executed a citizen who defecated in the river.