Venlu Island

In 2274, Venlu Corporation moved into Guadalupe Island and established the world’s first corporately run island prison. The island is divided into two very different parts.

The prison is an imposing fortress on the island’s southeast side. Solid ceramacrete walls rise up from the shore’s already steep and rocky cliffs, like a megalith perfectly carved by some giant laser. Searchlights, cameras, and sentry guns dot the walls at regular intervals. The only windows mark the locations of administration offices and security officer quarters. The shore is arid, barren, and constantly assaulted by the relentless Pacific Ocean. The dark volcanic sand bakes in the sun to extreme temperatures. The only trees in the southern half of the island have been planted in the prison’s minimum security yards.

The north half of the island is devoted to employees of the Venlu Corporation and their families. Here, wonderfully modern housing is protected from the elements by dense vegetation in a setting that is oddly utopian given what sits on the other side of the island. Small parks and beaches dot the community. A medical facility, a school, and even a small research institute lie at the centre of the community, which is home to 20,000 men, women and children. The vast majority of Venlu’s employees are human, Lesser Grigori, and Lesser Nephilim, although the corporation does employ several AI and even a few Remnants.

Dozens of city-states have arranged incarceration contracts with Venlu. The island’s prison is already home to nearly 500,000 inmates, with room doe more than twice that according to Venlu. Unlike many other privately-run prison facilities, Venlu offers its customers several levels of incarceration as well as numerous education programmes.

Inmates generally arrive by boat to the island’s south receiving station, a heavily-guarded platform which stretches out into the rough sea. Helicopters and other vertical take-off and landing aircraft are also common on the island.

So far Venlu Island has a nearly perfect record. Although there have been numerous attempts, no one has successfully escaped. Several inmates made it t the ocean, but were never found, and the California coast is an impossible 241 km (149.7 mi) swim (4.5.2).