Illusion Report

The toy company’s meeting room was easy to find. It was just behind the second large open-plan office, a standard rectangular room.

Mai Mingle peered through the glass door and realized she had come to the right place.

The conference table was strewn with countless faintly yellowed slips of paper and documents. Several large binders lay open. A whiteboard bore the remnants of handwriting, diagrams, and several sets of "???" scrawled in bright red marker. On the opposite wall of the meeting room was a dense collage of employee headshots.

There were four rows of photos, with five in each row. They were like headshots used for acting auditions, each about the size of an A4 sheet of paper.

At least a dozen of the photos had large red X’s drawn over the faces.

As Mai Mingle quietly pushed the door open, she instinctively held her breath—as if not breathing could help her avoid the misfortune the room seemed to promise.

Five chairs corresponded to the three notebooks and two laptops on the table, perhaps indicating that five people had attended the meeting.

’A company with at least twenty office employees, yet only five were left to attend the weekly meeting...’

The handwriting on the whiteboard was rushed, frantic, and unsteady, as if the letters were about to crash into each other and fall apart.

1. The last person to see Miss Jones

(Location, time, what was she doing, what did she say, where could Miss Jones be hiding??

The closing parenthesis was missing. The writer had stopped abruptly, and the last question mark shot diagonally toward the edge of the whiteboard as if trying to fly off into the horizon.

If the same handwriting hadn’t reappeared a short distance away in a smaller font—"Looks like Jones isn’t in the meeting room! Meeting room = safe?"—Mai Mingle would have thought the writer had met with an accident.

’The person probably finished the sentence and then suddenly remembered to check the room... Wait a minute.’

’I should check too, shouldn’t I?’

Mai Mingle quickly scanned her surroundings, then pulled out a chair, bent down, and glanced into the dim, murky space under the conference table.

She let out a sigh of relief.

’I was overthinking it. There was no one under the table, just a child crouching there.’

Mai Mingle had just straightened up when her hair stood on end. She scrambled backward, her back hitting the meeting room door with a THUD. A half-stifled cry tumbled through the silent air and fell to the floor.

Her breathing ragged, she stared at the dark patch of carpet under the table. After a few seconds, she leaned in for another look—it wasn’t a child.

It was just a child-like doll, its limbs twisted into a crouching position. Its molded lips were curved into a stiff, vacant smile.

Mai Mingle didn’t want to touch it, but she didn’t want to share a room with it either. After a few seconds of hesitation, the latter impulse won out. To read the writing on the whiteboard, she would have to turn her back to the conference table. The thought of that doll slowly crawling out from under it was more unsettling than anything. Gritting her teeth, she snatched the doll and tossed it out of the meeting room.

2. How many employees were originally on the third floor of our company, and who were they?

Who are the employees that are still alive and present?

Can they all be found on the HR roster?

Patricia ✓

Osho ✓

Liraimon ✓

Eugene ✓

Jane ✓

Laura ✓

’Six names in total? On second thought, that makes sense.’

’Five people were sitting at the table, and one more was leading the meeting—though "leading a meeting" was less accurate than "directing an emergency operation."’

’Does the checkmark mean all six of them could be found on the employee roster? But why would they need to confirm that?’

’Isn’t their problem that employees are disappearing one by one?’

Mai Mingle soon discovered her initial guess was correct. On the table was a printed sheet of paper: the company’s employee list.

There were twenty names on the list. She gave it a cursory glance and was about to put it down when she suddenly froze.

The six names from the whiteboard were indeed on the employee list, all of them having worked at the company for at least two or three years, and they were also checked off. During their meeting, they must have made a point of confirming that every person present was someone who was supposed to be there.

But Mai Mingle felt there was something wrong with the list.

She stared blankly for a moment, her gaze returning to the whiteboard. Suddenly, with a jolt, she understood.

...The name "Jones" wasn’t on the employee list.

’It’s not like someone removed her name after she disappeared, because the names of the other missing colleagues, aside from the six from the whiteboard, are still on it.’

’So... who is Jones?’

Mai Mingle narrowed her eyes and leaned closer to the whiteboard.

The writing after "3." had been erased, leaving only a faint, ghostly shadow of a line. Perhaps it was just her imagination, but Mai Mingle felt that the words written after the number were the exact same three words: "Who is Jones?"

’...Could it be that the six people at that weekly meeting made the same discovery in this very room as I was making now?’

’Shouldn’t they know better than anyone who their colleagues were?’

She couldn’t figure it out, nor did she know what any of this had to do with her own escape from the third floor. But all Mai Mingle could do was follow the one thread she had grasped.

4. What are the company’s products?

Including historical products

Below "4." was a blank space. Nothing was written, likely because there wasn’t enough room on the whiteboard for this information. The picture albums Mai Mingle saw on the table were product catalogs for the toy company from recent years. In the empty spaces of the catalogs, someone had filled the margins with product names they remembered, written in a nearly frenzied scrawl.

’Strange...’

’This group seemed unsure if everyone present was a colleague, couldn’t remember if a "Jones" was among them, and had no idea where she was. Most of their colleagues seemed to be missing, yet they were trying to confirm what products the company had made?’

Mai Mingle’s mind was so full of "why" that the questions swirling inside her head almost made her dizzy.

She skipped the long-dead laptops on the table and opened the nearest notebook, flipping to the last section with writing.

1. Jane

Around 2:30 PM today, in the breakroom

Jones: "I’m going to hide somewhere on the third floor. You all have to come find me."

Jane: "What are you talking about?"

Jones: "I won’t cheat. I’ll hide right here on the third floor. The stairwell, outside the windows, or in the ventilation ducts—none of those count as the third floor, so they won’t be my hiding spots. You can rule those out."

Jane: "Wait, what do you mean? Do you know why the stairs disappeared? Do you know how to get out? Where did everyone else go?"

Jones: "Don’t you have a weekly meeting this afternoon? You can discuss your battle plan and then come find me together. Or you can look for me one by one. It’s up to you."

Jane: "I told you, I don’t understand what you’re saying!"

(Note: During the conversation, Jane was completely unaware of the issue with Jones’s identity!!)

The sentence in the parentheses had two exclamation points and was heavily underlined three times.

Jones: "Little Carter and the others didn’t find me before. I hope your luck is a little better than theirs. After all, a game of hide-and-seek has a time limit."

Jane: "Wait, you know where Little Carter and the others went? You had them look for you too?"

Jones: "The game has begun."

(Jones left the breakroom. Jane chased after her, but no one was outside the door.)

Mai Mingle frowned.

’It’s a good thing someone wrote down the meeting’s discussion in such detail.’

’So... the toy company employees—or rather, the "toy company employees" created by the Nest—also went through what she was currently experiencing: the third floor had turned into a sealed concrete block with no way out.’

’Among the toy company employees, an unknown "Jones" had appeared. They had to play hide-and-seek with her and find her hiding place on the third floor.’

’What the reward was for finding her was still unknown, but failing to find her clearly resulted in them disappearing one by one—to the point that only six people were left in an office of twenty.’

Mai Mingle turned another page in the notebook.

The content on the next page seemed to jab at her retinas, giving her a sudden jolt that knocked her thoughts briefly out of alignment.

2. There are six participants in the weekly meeting.

We printed out photos of all the employees and posted them on the wall. The missing ones are marked with a red X.

Since no one can remember what Jones looks like, we have to use the process of elimination.

Mai Mingle stared at these words for a moment, then turned her head and gazed at the photos on the wall.

Four rows, five photos per row, for a total of twenty people.

But fifteen of them had been marked with a red X.