Illusion Report

When she touched her face, it still felt normal: skin, nose, eyebrows... everything was there.

But when Mai Mingle opened her eyes and looked in the mirror, the young face that had returned to her life after more than sixty years was nowhere to be found.

In the mirror, she still had a human body. From the neck down, she was still the same old Mai Mingle.

...Only her head and face were gone, replaced by a wooden door the size of a human head.

’Is this a toy, or a decoration?’

The doorframe formed a pointed arch. Where her eyes should have been was now brass filigree. Her ears were gone, replaced by two black, decorative doorposts. Taking up two-thirds of her face was a pair of double doors inlaid with ivory, complete with two thumb-sized doorknobs.

As if sleepwalking, Mai Mingle raised a hand to the mirror. Following the reflection, she found the round handle on her face that hadn’t been there before.

There was clearly nothing but air between her fingers, yet in the mirror, her thumb and forefinger were gently pinching the round handle.

Then, almost as a matter of course, she pulled, and one of the doors in the reflection swung open.

...Mai Mingle had opened a door on her face.

’What kind of sense does that even make?’

As the thought flashed through her mind, the small door she had pulled open revealed a mirror.

Both doors on her face could be opened. Once they were, two-thirds of her face became a mirror.

Mirror facing mirror, they created a long corridor of reflections, an infinite series of identical slices. Countless Mai Mingles, each with countless wooden-door mirrors for a head, stared back into the bathroom mirror.

’...My face has become a wooden door toy with mirrors inside. What does this mean?’

Mai Mingle studied it for a few moments before she found she really couldn’t bear to look at the mirror any longer.

Her head wasn’t in the mirror, only countless wooden doors, and the reflection of a reflection of a reflection in a mirror. A few more glances and she would be sucked into a disorienting, weightless sensation. It felt as if she was losing control of her own body; she nearly stumbled and hit the sink.

’I should get out of here first... Since I need to go downstairs, finding the staircase has to be the right move.’

Mai Mingle fought back a dizzy spell and closed the "doors on her face" again. She walked out of the bathroom and took a deep breath. As she exhaled, the image that appeared in her mind was of a mirror fogging over with white vapor.

The feeling of having a toy-like, wooden double door sitting on her neck was too bizarre. Searching for the stairs was actually a good way to distract herself.

Mai Mingle spent two or three minutes walking a full circuit of the floor. After she finished, she stood stunned for a moment.

’...It can’t be, right?’

Mai Mingle started walking again, making a second and then a third lap, each one slower and more meticulous than the last.

By the time she began her fourth search, Mai Mingle was conducting a true carpet search. She found a utility knife in an office, used it to cut up and tear out the entire carpet in the workspace, and choked on the billowing dust and debris. Covering a mouth that didn’t exist in her reflection, she felt her way across every inch of the bare floor underneath.

There was nothing.

The entire floor seemed to be sealed off by concrete and bricks: no elevator, no stairs, no secret doors, not a single passage leading downstairs.

The door she thought led to the fire escape opened to reveal nothing but a solid wall.

’...What about the windows? Can I get out through a window?’

Mai Mingle, ignoring the filth and dust covering her, lunged toward the end of the hallway where she’d first entered. She couldn’t suppress her panic, and her pace quickened, stirring up a breeze around her. The wind hit the window at the end of the hall, causing the rooftop outside to flutter slightly.

Huh?

She stopped dead, hardly daring to believe her eyes.

Mai Mingle reached out and picked at a corner of the "window."

The window, along with the sky and rooftops outside, turned out to be a photograph printed on a sheet of paper. Because it was made to the size of a real window, it looked completely authentic from a distance.

But the adhesive was starting to fail, and the breeze had lifted a corner, revealing a thick, white wall behind it, without so much as a crack.

When she returned to the office and pulled open the blinds, clinging to a sliver of hope, she found more photos taped behind them. Some showed the parking lot downstairs, others the road beyond the perimeter wall.

With the blinds closed, looking through the slats, it was impossible to imagine that the view outside was entirely fake.

’The air ducts... Are there air ducts?’

Two minutes later, standing on a desk, having just removed a vent cover, Mai Mingle stared at another solid block of concrete. She felt she really shouldn’t be surprised or disappointed anymore.

If Mai Mingle had gained anything from her search, it was only one thing: the numbers on the room doors started with a 3, running from 301 to 303, encompassing two open-plan offices and one private office. In other words, she had to be on the third floor.

The third floor.

If every floor was a sealed block of concrete, even if she could smash her way down with a hammer, it would take far longer than an hour to break through to the first floor. And even if she could break through reinforced concrete, where would she find a hammer in a toy company’s office?

There were plenty of toy samples, though.

Several plush dolls, puzzles, assembly-required dolls, remote-control cars, and other miscellaneous toy samples were crowded onto a long table against the wall. They stared at Mai Mingle with their plastic eyes, as if silently waiting to see if the faint dread in her heart would blossom into full-blown claustrophobia.

’I’m sealed inside a block of concrete... Worst-case scenario, if I can’t get out, the air should be enough to last me an hour.’

’But even when the hour is up and the Kai Family comes to the rescue, how would they even get in?’

’Wait, since this is an interview stage chosen by the Kai Family, it can’t be a no-win situation...’

’Could it be that the wooden door and mirrors have some significance for getting downstairs?’

’Is my appearance some kind of clue? Is that why Chebri emphasized it so much?’

But Mai Mingle really didn’t want to go back to the bathroom to look in the mirror.

Standing before the mirror, the slightest tilt of her head would cause the infinitely receding layers of reflections to spin like a kaleidoscope. Each Mai Mingle was smaller than the last, each wooden door hid another. The deeper she looked, the more her eyeballs seemed to swell, as if they would fall from her skull and roll all the way down the deep corridor of countless wooden doors in the mirror.

Mai Mingle was afraid that when she turned away from the mirror, her real self would have already fallen into its unreachable depths, and only "a Mai Mingle" would walk out of the bathroom.

Of course, this fear was irrational and unfounded—after all, there were no clues to suggest she was in any danger of falling into the mirror.

Huh?

’Since the phone can take pictures, it should be able to take a picture of me, right?’

’If I just turn the phone around, point the back camera at myself, and find the shutter button on the screen with my finger, I can take a picture of my face, can’t I?’

She seemed to recall seeing tourists on the street taking pictures of themselves; they probably used this method.

Even at a time like this, Mai Mingle felt a pang of inappropriate pride: Hai Luwei had never taught her this, but she had figured it out on her own.

With the phone turned around, finding the shutter button on the screen wasn’t easy. Mai Mingle tried two or three times before she finally heard a CLICK. She quickly turned the phone back around—in the photo, a carved wooden door faced the camera, the double doors shut tight, no mirror visible.

’...I forgot to open the doors.’

Mai Mingle’s fingers hovered in the air above her cheeks; the fine hairs on her skin could feel the faint warmth from her fingertips.

She couldn’t feel the doorknobs. Relying on her memory of their location, she made a haphazard "opening" motion on her face and tried taking another picture. After several repeated attempts, she finally managed to capture a clear photo with the doors open, revealing the mirrors.

Although a photo of a wooden-door mirror sitting on her neck was still unsettling, it was much better than looking directly into the mirror. The weightless sensation of falling was completely gone when she looked at the picture.

Mai Mingle zoomed in on the photo, carefully examining the wooden door and mirrors on her neck.

Naturally, she didn’t overlook the reflection in the mirrors either—the back of the phone, the camera lens, and the arm holding the phone were all reflected. But aside from the things she had already seen and expected to be there, she couldn’t find any clues.

’...What now?’

In a daze, Mai Mingle walked back into the open-plan office and, with a THUMP, collapsed into an office chair.

Only after sitting down did she feel it: the muscles in her exhausted body were as heavy as cement, and the wound on her foot throbbed with a burning pain.

’I’ll just rest for a few minutes. The tougher the situation, the more important it is to stay in good shape. Rushing around like a headless chicken just leads to mistakes, right?’

Mai Mingle found an excuse to keep sitting for a while, her gaze wandering aimlessly around the office.

She had ruined the carpet, which now lay in cut, upturned, and stacked pieces. But other than that, everything looked like a normally-used office—or perhaps, a little *too* normal.

So normal it was as if the employees had suddenly vanished mid-workday.

Next to the computer in front of her sat a cup with an unfinished coffee that had dried into a muddy crust. When Mai Mingle accidentally nudged the mouse, the computer screen lit up, prompting her for a password she didn’t know.

’...There are computers in the Nest? They must have been generated along with the building, right?’

Even though she had decided to rest, she found herself standing up without realizing it.

Jackets and bags were still draped over some of the office chairs. In one drawer, she found half a pack of cookies. A photo of a child sat on one desk—a child who, Mai Mingle thought to herself, was... ’well, if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.’

The real discovery came when Mai Mingle was passing the printer. A sudden impulse made her bend down.

She reached in and picked up a stack of paper that had clearly been left untouched since it was printed.

Meeting Minutes for the First Week of February 2025 (For weekly meeting use)

This Week’s Meeting Topic: Where exactly is Miss Jones hiding?

(Also: How much time do we have left to find Miss Jones? If we can’t find her, who will be next? etc. Thirty minutes reserved for open discussion.)