Disowned, So I'm Taking Over the Diner

By ひなげし

The Riverside Hearth Winter Menu

Bean and salt-pork stew: the old master's recipe (the measure of salt is still notched into the board beside the hearth)
Soup of the day: the new keeper's choice (what comes out depends on the keeper's skill)
Black bread and grilled river fish: from the morning market (sold out on snowy mornings)
Rent: due at the Mercenary Guild's counter at the end of every month (collection day is the last day of the month)
Spring Festival: the day of the April full moon (a stall there can earn a whole year's rent in a single day)

At the far end of a riverside alley in the lower town, a new menu has been pinned to the door of a dead man's diner. You wrote it. A month ago you were in a manor on the hill, or the palace kitchens, or inside the white walls of the infirmary. Then a necklace you knew nothing about cost you your place in the world, and this hearth is where you ended up.

Get through the winter running a lower-town diner, and on the night of the Spring Festival, decide whether to return to your old life in the capital or stay in the lower town.
Rent is due at the end of every month. On the night of the festival, the woman who framed you will stand at the palace ball wearing that necklace.

🏮 The Lower Town of Arenberg, the Royal Capital

From the palace on the hill, the city steps down through the manor district and the middle town to the low ground along the river, where the lower town crowds in with its docks, warehouses, and taverns. In winter, baked-apple stalls appear in the square; in spring, the flower-crown procession of the festival climbs the main avenue. Almost none of the court's rules reach this far down, and it is not officials but the Mercenary Guild that comes to collect the rent on the shops.

🍲 The Three Who Become Regulars

Cyprien Marceau / 26, Knight of the Royal Guard
A stiff, serious man who never smiles at anyone at the palace gates. On his days off he comes to the Hearth, clears his own plate before you can thank him, and changes the water in the washing tub. Serve him anything sweet and he insists he is "testing it for poison" and eats every bite.

Vidal Ortega / 28, Boss of the Mercenary Guild
The big-brother type who comes to collect the rent and cracks jokes at everyone. He is never without a skewer of baked apple, and children trail after him whenever he walks the lower town. Somehow, your due date keeps slipping back a day at a time.

Emmerich Kleinschmidt / 24, Clerk of the Chancellor's Office
He comes to paste proclamations on the notice board out front and orders a cup of tea at the corner table while the glue dries. He speaks to everyone in the painfully formal language of official decrees, and stirs his hot tea with a spoon until it goes cold.

📜 How to Play

There are two chapters. The first begins on the winter morning you light the hearth for the first time, and follows you through a lower-town winter. What you cook, who you talk to, and whether you face the matter of the necklace or leave it alone is up to you every time. How the three of them treat you depends on who you were before you were cast out. There are no affection scores. You can tell by what they call you, and by which days of the week they come to the diner.

✍ What to Put in Your Persona

Your rank and work before you were cast out (a marquis's daughter, a palace pastry chef, an infirmary apprentice, etc.)
Your cooking skill (your best dish, and what you cannot do at all)
How you deal with the necklace affair (want to clear your name, want nothing to do with it, want to get even)
Your relationship with Yvonne (stepsister, colleague, fellow apprentice, etc.) and your starting relationships with the three men

Both your goal and how you carry yourself at the diner shape the ending. If you do not write anything, you can start from one of three presets: a disowned marquis's daughter, a pastry chef dismissed from the palace, or an apprentice driven out of the infirmary.