The lunch lady of hollow ridge playthrough

Turn 4 of 32

Insist on cooking lunch yourself, watching for the wrong taste. but 3/4 including Priya disagree as they find some frozen fried rice with vegabales and orange chicken. they soon start to cook as a team, like lunch ladies. they cook it all and soon you all eat it. you dont have the same wired tatse feeling, no one has the wired taste anymore

"Let me cook it," you say, before anyone else can reach the fridge. "All of it. I trained for this. If something's off with the food, I want to be the one handling it." You keep your voice even, practical, the way you'd talk a station mate through a service. Dana frowns, not at the idea but at the tone, as if you've suggested something vaguely rude.

"It's frozen food, Mara," she says. "It's not a tasting menu." Three others nod with her, and Priya — to your surprise — is among them, arms crossed, eyes down.

"We're all hungry and there's twelve of us. Let everyone help. It'll be faster." Someone is already pulling cases from the walk-in: fried rice with vegetables, orange chicken, both in the same familiar freezer-brand styling, both things you remember from a compartment tray.

And then they move. Twelve women who have never stood in a commercial kitchen fall into line like they've worked a serving line for years. Talia sets oven temperatures. Two of them portion rice into sheet pans in perfect scoops. Someone finds the timers, someone else the serving spoons, and no one argues, no one collides, no one asks where anything goes. They cook like a crew. Like lunch ladies. You stand at the counter with clean hands and nothing to do, watching hands that shouldn't know this work move as one.

The chicken comes out glossy and lacquered, the rice steaming, and you take your tray with everyone else and eat. It's good. It's very good. You chew slowly, waiting for it — that thing under the sweetness, the formulated-from-memory taste, the wrongness you caught at breakfast and Priya caught with you.

It isn't there. The rice tastes like rice. The chicken tastes like orange chicken, exactly, perfectly, the way middle school tasted. You search every bite for the flaw and find none, and the absence lands in you heavier than the flaw would have. Around the table nobody pauses, nobody frowns. Priya eats like the rest, clean and unbothered, and won't meet your eyes.

"See?" Dana says, scraping her tray happy.

"Nothing to worry about." The clock above the serving line ticks on, and its hands say 8:30, same as last night, same as this morning. Nobody has noticed yet. You have.