Question about the NERV ruins near Village 3

[nerv bae]

Registered to ask a dumb question: In 3.0+1.0, Shinji leaves Kenken's home and wanders to these ruins outside the village:



Looks kind of like a big Eva cage, like we're used to seeing inside the Geofront, although I thought all that infrastructure is currently up in Gendo's insane sky pyramid. Rei Q comes looking for Shinji at Kenken's and Asuka tells her he's at the 2nd Branch ruins:



Reichu's translation gives the same information as the above Amazon Prime screenshot.

But I thought the village was in Japan near Tokyo-3, while NERV's 2nd Branch was in North America. What am I missing?

[Archer]

I assumed the Neo NERV HQ was a new structure consisting of some (but not all) of the old Geofront. After all it doesn't look like all of NERV HQ was just plucked out of the ground.

[nerv bae]

Sure, that makes sense. We also know that NERV had other nearby facilities at Matsushiro, although I'm not sure that's within wandering distance of the village. The wiki calls Matsushiro a secondary facility, but states it's not a full "branch base" of Nerv. So why call the ruins "2nd Branch" in the script? 2.22 establishes 2nd Branch in the USA pretty clearly:

[Archer]

Perhaps we can just rationalize it as the "second branch" of NERV Japan, and the "second branch" mentioned in 2.0 is the "second branch" of NERV USA (which would make sense why they're the ones bringing stuff over, since the "first branch" got vaporized).

[nerv bae]

Oh, interesting idea -- first and second USA branches and first and second Japan branches. I can live with that for an explanation!

[Cookie H Wilson]

Never understood neo nerv pyramid
I felt and will always feel lost since first view

[Jinroh]

Never understood neo nerv pyramid

Same, and I have no idea how it can contain facilities to produce various models of eva units and house thousands of Mark.07.

[Giji Shinka]

the inverted pyramid is incredibly massive, it just looks small in comparison to everything else we see in the movie.
In size it's probably the same or bigger than the whole old NERV HQ we saw in previous movies, but it's clear that over the years the HQ was converted to mass produce Eva units to fight off opposing forces.