# B-CORP DIRECTIVE 7: THE SANDBOX PROTOCOL

## Prologue: The Second Island

B-Corp never advertised what happened to the ones who didn't make it off the first Isle. The nine documented escape routes off the original simulation were real — but real doesn't mean guaranteed, and B-Corp has never in its history let a resource go to waste twice.

Somewhere in B-Corp's internal registry, filed under a designation that never appears on any public document, is Site Designation SB-1 — what the handful of engineers who know about it call, informally, "the Sandbox." It is not the Isle. It looks like the Isle. It runs on the same underlying simulation architecture, seeded from the same Umbra-adjacent research that built the original island's ecosystem. But where the Isle exists to study what the Umbra does to ordinary people thrown into an extraordinary situation, the Sandbox exists for a colder, far more practical purpose: live-fire certification for B-Corp's mercenary contractors, using bodies B-Corp already owns.

Those bodies come from prisons.

## The Arrangement
B-Corp does not run its own prisons. It doesn't need to. Decades of quiet arrangements with penal systems across multiple countries — brokered the same patient, bureaucratic way B-Corp brokers everything — give it standing access to a supply of inmates nobody is tracking closely enough to miss. Death row cases already exhausted of appeals. Long-haul lifers whose home institutions are quietly relieved to free up a cell. A smaller number who simply vanish from transfer manifests between one facility and the next, their paperwork "misplaced" by someone already on B-Corp's payroll.

Officially, none of them are being punished. B-Corp's internal language is careful about this, the same way it's careful about everything: they are "training assets," "certification subjects," "live variables." What that means in practice is simple. They are dropped onto the Sandbox with nothing but what they can scavenge, and B-Corp's Mercenary squads are dropped in behind them — not to guard, not to contain, but to hunt, using exactly the tactics, timing, and weapons B-Corp intends to certify them on before deploying them into the real world.

## The Way Out
Unlike the original Isle, the Sandbox was never designed with nine different escape routes in mind. It has exactly one, and B-Corp made sure it's genuinely brutal to reach: survive long enough, evade or eliminate enough of a deployed Mercenary squad, and reach the Sandbox's extraction beacon at the old Lighthouse before the current cycle ends. A prisoner who manages that isn't quietly disappeared into the next cycle. Their sentence, wherever it technically still exists on paper, is marked served. B-Corp keeps this part of the arrangement scrupulously honest, for the same reason a casino pays out its rare jackpots — the story of the one who made it out has to be true, or nobody left in a holding cell would ever cooperate with the transfer paperwork again.

Very few make it. That's the point. A squad that can be routinely beaten by an underfed, unarmed convict isn't ready for a real contract. The prisoners who do reach the Lighthouse tend to describe the same thing afterward, when they're willing to describe anything at all: it never once felt like the mercenaries were trying to capture them. It always felt like being hunted by professionals keeping score.

## The Prisoners
Whoever ends up on the Sandbox rarely has anything in common with the person in the cell next to them, beyond the fact that both were considered acceptable to lose.
- The Lifers — inmates with nothing left to bargain for at their original institution, offered the Sandbox as the only remaining chance, however slim, at a life outside a cell.

- The Loose Ends — witnesses, informants, and low-level operators tied to something B-Corp itself would rather not have discussed in an open courtroom, quietly rerouted before their case ever reaches trial. -

The Volunteers — a small, strange category of prisoner who requests the Sandbox specifically, usually after hearing enough about the original Isle's mythology to believe surviving something like it would mean something. B-Corp does not discourage this belief. It's useful. - The Mistakes — inmates who were never supposed to qualify at all, caught up in a transfer paperwork error B-Corp has no institutional incentive to correct once they're already inside the simulation.

They arrive with no equipment, no allies, and — this part is deliberate — no briefing on which Mercenary squad has been assigned to that cycle, or how many of them there are.
## The Mercenary Squads
The Sandbox is where B-Corp actually builds its roster, well past the two squads most people associate with the Isle. Certification here isn't a formality — a squad that fails to consistently clear its assigned prisoners doesn't get deployed on real contracts, and in a few documented cases, doesn't get kept on at all.
- Alpha Squad — the baseline standard every other squad is measured against: a five-soldier formation built around a Commander directing Sniper, Spotter, Medic, and Gunner roles working in careful coordination. Alpha is what B-Corp uses to certify that a prisoner drop is actually survivable at all before harder squads get cleared to rotate in.

- Bravo Squad — Alpha's designated rival formation, run with a different tactical doctrine specifically so B-Corp can certify contractors against more than one style of engagement. Sandbox veterans who've faced both consistently describe Bravo as colder and less predictable in how they close ground.

- Charlie, Delta, and Eta Squads — later additions built specifically for the Sandbox, never fielded on the original Isle at all. Each was assembled to stress a specific weakness B-Corp identified in earlier certification cycles — one favors overwhelming firepower over subtlety, another specializes in isolating a single target from any group that tries to band together, and the last is fielded almost exclusively during the Sandbox's harder certification cycles, when B-Corp wants to know if a contractor roster can hold up against something built to actually break it.

Every squad rotation is scored, logged, and reviewed by handlers who were never physically present on the Sandbox at all — the same distant, administrative remove B-Corp applies to everything it would rather not have to answer for directly.
## The Weapons
Sandbox armories skew standard-issue at the low end and genuinely experimental at the high end, and which tier a prisoner encounters usually says more about how seriously B-Corp is taking that particular cycle than anything else.
Baseline Mercenary loadouts run through conventional hardware — combat shotguns, scoped and sniper-tier rifles, and heavier support weapons for Gunner-class roles — the same category of gear B-Corp expects its contractors to actually carry on real-world jobs. Harder certification cycles escalate fast: Heavy Rifles and Military Sniper Rifles for squads meant to test sustained-engagement discipline, and — reserved for the rarest, worst cycles — prototype hardware pulled straight from B-Corp's own Umbra-adjacent research line: the Phaser and Hyperphaser energy rifles, the Striker, the Focused Atomsplitter, the Photon Ionizer, and, on cycles B-Corp later classified as a mistake, the Annihilation Hypercannon — a weapon that made it back into storage after exactly one certification run, once it became clear it wasn't leaving enough of a body behind to confirm the kill.

Prisoners get none of this handed to them. Whatever they carry by the time they reach the Lighthouse, they built or scavenged themselves, out of whatever the island's usual scattering of Isle-standard items and B-Corp castoffs happens to leave lying around that cycle.

## The Overseer

No single figure runs the Sandbox the way a warden runs a prison. B-Corp's actual administrative presence is closer to what long-cycle survivors describe as a voice without a face — cycle briefings relayed through the same distant, faintly clinical tone the company's internal logs are known for, never explaining more than the immediate operational necessity requires. Whether that voice belongs to a person, a committee, or one of B-Corp's own AI constructs handling the Isle's original simulation architecture is not something any surviving prisoner has ever been in a position to confirm. B-Corp has never volunteered the answer, and nobody left standing at the Lighthouse has ever thought to ask before taking their freedom and walking away.

--- This document is original connective-tissue lore built specifically for a B-Corp/Isle Sandbox crossover — it does not copy the structure-example document's setting or specifics, only its documentary tone. It draws on confirmed Isle/Isle Sandbox canon (B-Corp as the simulation's operator, the Umbra research angle, the Mercenary squads including Alpha, Bravo, and Isle Sandbox's own Charlie/Delta/Eta additions, and real named weapons like the Phaser, Hyperphaser, Striker, Focused Atomsplitter, Photon Ionizer, Heavy Rifle, Military Sniper Rifle, and Annihilation Hypercannon) while the prisoner-training premise, the Arrangement, the single Lighthouse escape condition, and the Overseer framing are all newly invented for this crossover.