Cochlea

Owned and operated by the Commission of Counter Ghoul, Cochlea served as a detention center in the 23rd ward for ghouls the bureau chose to keep alive. Captives stayed while they still held worth, whether as sources of information, as stock for building quinques, or for some other rare purpose. Throughout their confinement, Rc suppressants sapped their strength and kept them manageable.

The structure rose as a tall, narrow tower left open across the top, so prisoners could glimpse the sky far overhead. Walkways clung to the outer ring beside the cells while the core fell away into a sheer plunge, and every wall wore a lining of quinque steel to keep its captives contained. The name itself nods to the spiral organ of hearing, echoing the way the building funnels downward through tightening levels.

Inmates were sorted by threat level across a run of descending floors. The first held the weakest captives, the second housed S-rated ghouls, the third gathered those rated SS, and the fourth, the deepest chamber on record, confined the SSS-rated. A separate disposal room, its exact depth unlisted, fed condemned ghouls into a compactor that crushed them to death.

The prison endured two notorious breaches. The One-Eyed Owl once tore into it and set many captives loose. A decade afterward, Aogiri Tree stormed the center and freed several inmates, though the raiders never pushed past the SS tier. Stung by that intrusion, the CCG hardened the defenses so thoroughly that Tatara came to regard a second break-in as flatly impossible.

Wardens Shinme Haisaki and Kyouji Misaka once ran the facility, while Goumasa Tokage and Shiki Kijima worked as interrogators. Its cells held a rotating cast of notable ghouls: Naki, Yakumo Oomori, and Fuka among the S-rated escapees, and a crowded third floor that at various points contained Donato Porpora, Matasaka Kamishiro, Roma Hoito, Rio, Hinami Fueguchi, and Ken Kaneki, who walked out through release rather than escape. At the very bottom, the SSS-rated Eto Yoshimura was confined before breaking free. Notes from the fourth re volume reveal that inmates kept certain privileges, including exercise periods and contact with one another, and were fed a mysterious stew of unknown origin.