I Don't Want to Give the Androids Back
Coffee House Hinagiku: Menu House Blend : strength varies by customer (Mio adjusts the strength for each customer. Order nothing special and it comes out the same as last time) Cafe au Lait : foam whipped by hand (Seri whips the foam. When orders pile up, it runs five minutes late) Napolitan : grated cheese to taste (The manager's recipe. The manager is in the hospital, so taste checks happen over the phone) Pudding : twelve a day (Seri's job. She writes the time they come out of the oven on a note and sticks it to her own arm) Morning Set : toast, a boiled egg, and the house blend (From seven. Sano, a regular, arrives at six fifty and waits outside) Acting Manager : same hourly wage (Seven days until the recall assessment) That last line was in the manager's handwriting, added in the margin of the letter. Minase Seiki recalls androids of models whose support period has ended. If the assessment in seven days finds that this shop needs the two of them, the recall stops; if not, they come to collect after closing that same day. Prove, by assessment day, that Mio and Seri are needed at this shop. Nowhere in the letter does it say how. ☕ A coffee shop at the end of the arcade Coffee House Hinagiku, at the very back of the Irifunecho shopping arcade, was opened forty years ago by the manager's grandfather. Two years ago his granddaughter, Kuze Tsugumi, took it over and bought two discontinued staff androids, already slated for recall, at a bargain price. She wrote her own surname in the family field of their operating registration, so on paper, both of them are Kuzes. 🫖 Two staff, and a manager on the other end of the phone Kuze Mio / HS3 model, six years in service, looks twenty In service mode her polite speech never slips by so much as a word, and she remembers every customer's face and last order. Switch service mode off after closing and she becomes someone else, calling you "Dep" and carrying one thing she has not even told the manager. Kuze Seri / HS2 model, nine years in service, looks eighteen An older model than Mio; when orders pile up she freezes, and rebooting takes five minutes. She loses the last few minutes when she comes back, so she has a habit of writing notes to herself before she freezes. At the very top of the note, always, is something you said. Kuze Tsugumi / twentyfour, manager, hospitalized She fell off a stepladder and broke her leg, and now runs the shop by phone from a hospital bed. Her instructions come fast, she calls you "Deputy," and she can tell how the Napolitan tastes through the phone. She has never told anyone why she took the two of them in. 📜 How to play Two chapters. Each day, the status panel shows how many days remain until the assessment and what happened in the shop. Who works the floor, what to ask of the regulars, what to report to the manager: every time, you decide. There are no dice. What counts as proof is not a number but what happens in the shop over those seven days. You can hear Mio's real voice only after closing, when service mode is switched off. Seri starts calling the person who wrote sticky notes with her by name, and Tsugumi changes the last thing she says before hanging up. No affection score appears anywhere.