Illusion Report

The entries in Eugene’s notebook were mostly written in shorthand.

Even though he had sped up his writing, the subsequent sections grew increasingly rushed and sloppy. Sometimes, he would dash off a word so quickly it became a single curved line, making it quite difficult for Mai Mingle to decipher.

*

Things got a little chaotic after that, but I’ll try to record them in order.

While we were examining the twenty unfamiliar toys, someone—I don’t know who—said, "Twenty employees, twenty toys."

That sentence has been weighing on my mind, and I think the others feel the same way. At the very least, Jane has definitely connected the two...

Everyone was inspecting the toys one by one, while secretly sizing each other up, trying to compare the people to the toys.

But we wasted at least ten-odd minutes for nothing. We couldn’t see any connection between the twenty unfamiliar toys and ourselves.

Jane said the little girl on the cover of a coloring book seemed to look a bit like her.

The skin tone and eye color were indeed the same...

But Liraimon argued that it didn’t prove anything. It was just a poorly drawn cartoon girl, and Jane has brown eyes, which are very common. (I think the little girl looks more like a loaf of bread.)

No one else found a toy that could represent them.

The idea that "if we don’t find Jones, we’ll turn into toys" seemed utterly absurd—even more absurd than the sudden disappearance of the window on the staircase.

Besides, if the people who disappeared turned into toys, there should only be fourteen toys here, not twenty—the six of us haven’t disappeared yet.

As a result, we split into two factions. One believed the unfamiliar toys appeared with Jones and there had to be a connection that required careful analysis.

The other faction thought the toys might just be a "red herring" (a false clue meant to distract and mislead), and their appearance was purely intended to make us waste time.

I was a fence-sitter. Whichever side started making their case, I’d find myself thinking they had a point.

When it came time to vote on our next move, both sides cursed me out.

...Strange, who was it that said that, anyway?

*

Reading this, Mai Mingle turned to glance at the child-like doll outside the door.

It was motionless, still in the same position.

After a moment’s thought, she took the notebook, walked out, and nudged the doll a few times with the tip of her foot. It was made of hard plastic, impossible to cut open. But once she nudged its clothes aside, she saw several scissor-sized puncture marks on its body—clearly traces left by Eugene’s group during their search for Jones.

It seemed the toys had never been switched out; they were still the same batch.

Mai Mingle then took the opportunity to check all the toy samples in the office and found there were indeed twenty of them. One was the very same coloring book with the little girl on the cover.

’But what is the connection between these toys... and the employees?’

*

If you were to ask me what the one silver lining in this nightmare is, I’d have to say it’s that the manager disappeared along with everyone else. That’s just great.

But then I think about how I might follow in his footsteps—

*

Eugene had perhaps tried to write something lighthearted to lift his spirits, but his attempt had clearly failed.

Beneath that abruptly broken-off sentence, he had added another line: "Sigh. I can’t think about what happened to them. I almost threw up on my own leg just now."

’Those few kids... I’m afraid they must have suffered a great deal of terror at the end of their lives, didn’t they?’

Mai Mingle reminded herself that this was the Nest; perhaps they had never been living people to begin with.

But precisely because this was the unpredictable Nest, she couldn’t be certain whether they had ever been truly alive. What if they had been?

She let out a soft sigh, her gaze sweeping across the page.

Because it was all text written on paper with the same pen, it would have been hard to tell that some time had passed between the previous sentence and the next if Eugene hadn’t used a word like "just now."

...Huh?

’I have a feeling this point is very important.’

Mai Mingle turned the thought over and over in her mind, committing it to memory. She even whispered to herself, "This seems important... I’ll think about why it’s important later. I can’t figure it out right now."

It was the first sound she had made since entering the third-floor office. Even though it was her own voice, it sounded strained and dry as it suddenly fell into the silent air, floating before the wall full of photos crossed out in red. It sounded almost like a stranger’s.

Mai Mingle held her breath for a few seconds. Thankfully, no other voice suddenly spoke up to answer her.

She was really good at scaring herself.

*

We had no other choice. We searched the entire third floor all over again.

The result was no different from the last time.

There aren’t many places an adult can hide... It’s past seven now. Aside from the SCRATCH SCRATCH of my writing, no one in the conference room has spoken for a long time.

More than once, I thought they had all disappeared, and my heart leaped into my throat. But every time I looked up, everyone was still there, just too despairing and dejected to speak.

*

Somehow, we started arguing about what "Jones" really is.

Liraimon refused to join the discussion. He went to check the breakroom and the pipes outside, trying to find the "toxic gas" that he believed was causing our mass hallucination. Osho told him not to act on his own, but he wouldn’t listen.

Patricia believed "Jones" is the monster in each of our hearts, a primitive fear of Neanderthals left in the Homo sapiens subconscious from our evolutionary history.

Osho mocked her for spouting high-flown psychiatric nonsense even at a time like this.

I think Jones is probably some kind of supernatural entity that happens to take human form; maybe a ghost or a curse, you know, the kind of stuff you see in horror movies.

My theory got a nod of agreement from Jane, but Osho refused to admit that forces beyond the scope of science could exist in the world.

Anyone could see that Osho was terrified.

He’d better not see this sentence.

*

Mai Mingle turned the page, and when she saw the next sentence, her blood ran cold.

*

I flipped back several pages, and Laura was indeed with us in the beginning.

*

’...What does that mean?’

’Laura just vanished?’

Even Mai Mingle couldn’t help but flip back several pages and quickly reread the notebook. That was right; although not mentioned often, Eugene had indeed written about Laura a few times.

But in the last two entries, everyone else had made an appearance, while Laura alone had vanished from the notebook... When did she disappear?

It didn’t seem like Laura left on her own. Could it be that she had vanished without a trace while she was still in the middle of the group?

*

Did the time limit run out?

Why did it start with Laura? Wasn’t Jane the first one among us who Jones told to look for her?

And we waited for several minutes, but none of the rest of us disappeared.

Even Liraimon, who had gone out alone, came back safe and sound when he heard us crying and screaming.

In the end, it was Patricia who wiped away her tears and proposed an idea that temporarily calmed everyone down.

"Laura must have belonged to one of the earlier groups of colleagues looking for Jones, not our group."

We asked her why.

She took out the employee list and said that Laura’s name was in the top ten, while the remaining five of us were all in the last section.

It seems the order in which Jones asked employees to play hide-and-seek with her was based on the employee list.

The reason Laura didn’t disappear with the previous group and instead stayed with us for several hours was because she’d been helping her sister with her kids recently and hadn’t slept well last night. So, she had been secretly taking a nap in the conference room at noon today. Patricia knew about it at the time; when the manager was looking for Laura, Patricia had even covered for her.

"I remember glancing around the office at the time and wondering why the company was so empty today. Thinking back now, the first group of colleagues who were supposed to look for Jones but had just treated it as a joke must have already disappeared by then. As for whether the stairs were sealed off before or after that, I have no idea."

In other words, Laura should have originally been one of the people in the previous group looking for Jones.

But because she was asleep at the time (I don’t know if she’d already received the demand to find Jones before she fell asleep, but looking at it now, it’s very likely she had and just didn’t take it seriously), the time she spent asleep was temporarily "frozen"—and when she woke up, she was pushed into our group.

None of us knew if this theory was correct, but I think the others, like me, were desperate enough to want to believe it.

After all, this would mean that if we fall asleep now... our own eventual disappearance could be postponed, couldn’t it?

Maybe when the sun rises tomorrow, everything will go back to normal.

We’re going to sleep now.

*

Mai Mingle immediately reached out and snatched up the employee list.

JL Toy Company Employee List

Marketing and Sales Department:

Lekoni, Little Carter, Melina, Belli, Julian

Administration and Customer Service Department:

David

Finance and Accounting Department:

Gable, Angelina, Laura

Human Resources Department:

Froth, Hayman.

Production Department:

Felix, Theresa, Alton, Scott, Eugene.

Design and Development Department:

Patricia, Jane, Osho, Liraimon.

Patricia was right. Laura was indeed listed alone further up, in the Finance and Accounting Department, while the other five were all at the end.

Mai Mingle put down the list, a little dazed for a moment, and looked back at the wall full of photos crossed out in red.

’...Something... doesn’t quite add up, does it?’

She picked up Eugene’s notebook again.

She had actually realized a moment ago that Eugene hadn’t written another word after the group decided to go to sleep. She was just unwilling to accept it, and only after flipping through it one more time did she finally, resentfully, put the notebook down.

Even if Eugene had managed to fall asleep under those circumstances, he couldn’t have escaped the final outcome through sleep. So, without a doubt, because they failed to find Jones, they all disappeared in the end.

Mai Mingle sat silently in the chair for a long while.

...She thought she knew where Jones was hiding.