The lunch lady of hollow ridge playthrough

Turn 3 of 32

Check the boxes for an ingredient list or dates before anything is cooked. all the dates are good. however, someone steps up to show everyone how to cook them. its like randomly that they learned how to. soon the sticks are done and you all start to eat, its the most food you all had since yesterday lunch.after, you all tour the place to find an way out which you dont. now its lunch time

You turn a case box over before anyone can open the oven. The ingredient panel lists exactly what you'd expect — bread, eggs, oil, syrup flavoring — and the dates stamped along the seam are all good, printed clean and recent, no freezer burn, no frost inside the bags. Everything about the box says this food is fine. Everything about the box saying so, here, bothers you more than a bad date would have.

Then Talia — the one who works at a dentist's office, who has never once touched a stove in your hearing — steps forward and says, "Four-fifty. Spread them out, single layer, flip halfway. About ten minutes."

She says it the way you'd recite your own address. She preheats the oven without checking whether it has a preheat setting, slides two sheet pans together from a rack that holds exactly two sheet pans, and works with the flat confidence of someone who has done this ten thousand times. Nobody questions it. That's the part that keeps you quiet while the kitchen fills with warm sugar-smell: not that she knows, but that all of you feel you knew too, somewhere under the skin, the moment the boxes came out.

The sticks come out golden, the shells crackling, the centers soft as the ones from middle school, and twelve women eat standing up over the steel counters like it's Thanksgiving. It's the first real food since yesterday's lunch, and it's better than it has any right to be. You take two bites before you catch the taste. Something underneath the sweetness, faint and wrong, like the syrup flavoring was formulated from a memory of syrup rather than syrup itself. You look up. Priya has stopped chewing too. She meets your eyes and says nothing.

Afterward Dana declares a full sweep of the building, and you walk the whole length of it together — offices with dead computers, a processing floor stripped of machines, a loading dock with the shutter welded shut from outside, doors that open onto cinder block or nothing. The loading door stands open, but the road beyond it runs down and down until the trees take it, and no one wants to try it on foot by afternoon. By the time you're back in the kitchen, the light through the high windows has gone long and orange, and your stomach starts up again, loud and certain, right on schedule. It is lunch time, and the kitchen is waiting.