NERV Headquarters

NERV Headquarters (NERV本部, NERV Honbu), commonly shortened to NERV HQ, anchors all of NERV's worldwide operations from inside the subterranean GeoFront cavern below Tokyo-3. Construction was largely finished by 2003, and the base is administered through the Command Center and the S.C. Magi System, which governs the facility along with the entire city above.

Tokyo-3 itself was engineered as an extension of the base, a fortress city studded with Evangelion elevators, power sockets, and weapon caches that houses the workforce and shields NERV from the Angels. Gendo Ikari asserts that every resource humanity can offer is being funneled into the facility. Project E and the Adam Revival Project began here, the Evangelions were researched and largely assembled on site, and every active unit and pilot launches from the base. Its visible face is a black pyramid jutting into the GeoFront, paired with an inverted counterpart that stores the base's water; near the apex sits the Commander's office, decorated with a Tree of Life diagram and an image of atomic trails from a bubble chamber. Eighteen reinforced windows built into the Tokyo-3 superstructure bathe the cavern in natural light, and trains such as the C-22 Special Express run straight into the complex.

Floors carry letter-and-number designations, with the "B" shaft holding the command facilities and larger numbers lying deeper underground; Misato's map places the Command Center at level B-20 inside Central Dogma, a primary subsection apparently arranged as a large hexagon. Central Dogma hosts most of NERV's vital installations: the Sigma Unit containing the Pribnow Box, the test chamber for the Evangelion Simulation Bodies, which the Angel Ireul infiltrates through a freshly installed protein wall in Episode 13 before hacking toward the Magi; the Artificial Evolution Laboratory, where Rei Ayanami is said to have been born; a graveyard holding the failed prototype Evas; and the Dummy Plug Plant in the central area, which grows Rei copies for spare parts and dummy plug cores. The Evangelions themselves rest in at least seven pens, from which movable platforms raise them into catapults bound for the surface, a layout glimpsed in Episode 19 when Unit-01 smashed Zeruel through the walls between pens and catapults.

Far below lies Terminal Dogma, the base's heavily restricted deepest level, 2008 meters beneath the GeoFront floor and roughly three kilometers under the Earth's surface, reached by a spiraling elevator down the central shaft. Only Gendo Ikari, Kozo Fuyutsuki, and Ritsuko Akagi hold clearance to enter. The descent passes the honeycombed interior of the Black Moon, whose desolate spaces served Gehirn and later NERV as dumping grounds, and ends at a vast salt lake beneath a pink, glittering canopy. Beyond it stands Heaven's Door, opening onto the chamber where Lilith hangs restrained on a red cross, surrounded by heptagons marked with radiation symbols. Her endless bleeding of LCL has pooled into a sea deep enough for a UN frigate to patrol and to reach an Evangelion's waist, and the LCL Production Plant operates within these depths.

The base is staffed by NERV's full complement under Commander Gendo Ikari: the bridge crew of the Command Center, the Technical Division that maintains the Evangelions, and the security forces guarding both the GeoFront and the headquarters structure itself. A backup command center sits several levels beneath the primary one.

Terminal Dogma's secrets belong exclusively to the three highest-cleared officers, Gendo, Fuyutsuki, and Ritsuko, who alone may descend to the chamber of Lilith. Everything else, from the launch catapults to the city above, runs on the judgment of the Magi.