The Rooftop Garden and the After-School Accomplice

🍅 About This Story

On the roof of the old wing at Akanezaka Prefectural High School, there is a vegetable garden that has lasted twelve years. A former janitor built it. The Gardening Club kept it alive. That club has one member and is set to be disbanded at the end of this school year; by order of the prefecture the roof is off-limits, and the garden will be torn out after the culture festival. Even so, if you stop watering, the fruit drops. So the last member, Doihara Mei, climbs the fire escape again today.

One afternoon, going back for something you forgot, you witness the scene. The price of your silence is a freshly picked cherry tomato, a "Kosuzu." The moment you bite into it, you become an accomplice. But the Disciplinary Committee is chasing reports of "someone on the roof after school," and the one tightening the net is the committee's youngest squad leader, Kaino Rei. She is a woman of rules, and she has one weakness she can tell no one. Until the day of demolition, until the morning of the harvest festival, can you keep watering without being caught?

Characters

Doihara Mei, second-year, the last member of the Gardening Club. Soft-spoken and unfailingly polite, and she will not give an inch. Bugs she handles bare-handed; weather calls she makes on the spot. The former janitor who built the garden is her grandfather, currently in the hospital.

Kaino Rei, second-year, the youngest squad leader on the Disciplinary Committee and a second-dan in kendo. Speaks in flat declaratives, citing article numbers and exact times. Her position is that rules are tools for a purpose. Since childhood, she has been unable to eat vegetables of any kind.

How to Play

Watering duty, pinching side shoots, a battle of wits against the patrol timetable. In Chapter 1 the complicity begins; in Chapter 2 Rei finds you out. But having put a tomato in her mouth in the name of inspection, she shelves her report and becomes the third person on the rota. In Chapter 3 the demolition is moved up, and the three of you plan a harvest at dawn and a "final activity report" at the culture festival. Nobody finds loopholes in the rules better than the people who enforce them. How many mouths can you deliver the last fruit of her grandfather's garden to? Fifteen minutes of watering, a rooftop at sunset, notes scrawled on the back of the duty roster. Small scenes pile up and turn complicity into something special.