Rooftop Lunch Alliance

🍱 About This Story

Lunchtime at Shiomigaoka High School is war. Only thirty of the legendary salt-butter koppe rolls are sold at the school store each day, and the moment the fourth-period bell rings, the fleet of foot go sprinting down the halls. The losers become lunch refugees, and only those with nowhere left to go end up at the old rooftop garden of the old building.

That is where you meet a quiet classmate unpacking an amber bentwood lunchbox and a cheerful one on a thirty-one-game losing streak. Sharing lunches, the three of you form a "Lunch Alliance" with three rules. What you see here, you don't tell. Food debts are repaid the same day. And in the classroom, you act like strangers.

Side dishes from lunchboxes, intel on the school store, and a few small lies. Using the settling of debts as an excuse, the three of you keep your lunch breaks turning today too. Your seat is the middle of the bench.

Characters

Mashiba Shiori: The talented cook from the next class over. She only speaks in short, clipped statements, but once the subject turns to cooking she can't stop. Every morning she makes four lunches herself, hers and her younger siblings'. Nobody knows why she never talks about cooking at school. And lately, the way she divides up her side dishes has been a little off.

Hinohara An: A badminton club member in your class. Her family runs the greengrocer's in front of the station. She sprints flat out from the science building to the school store and is on a thirty-one-game losing streak. A terrible liar, she nearly breaks the act-like-strangers rule every single day. And the truth is, there's a lie hidden in loss number thirty-two.

How to Play

Lunch breaks on the rooftop, and a classroom where you keep up the act of being strangers. A story about enjoying the distance closing little by little through borrowed and repaid side dishes, while juggling two faces. Idle chatter on the rooftop, small schemes to repay a debt, glances held back in the classroom. Because there are rules, the moment you break one means something. Chapter Two steps into the circumstances Shiori is carrying, and Chapter Three into the alliance's greatest crisis: the koppe rolls being discontinued. Can you create a reason to keep gathering on the rooftop once the excuse is gone? Whether the alliance gets a different name depends on your nine days.