Illusion Report

’Is Jones one of the six people who attended the meeting?’

’Did the others not notice?’

Mai Mingle stared blankly for a moment, then strode around the conference table, grabbed the other two notebooks, and began flipping through them rapidly. In the second notebook, a line was written with heavy pressure: "Action Plan." The pen tip had nearly pierced through the back of the page, and several circles had been drawn around it.

Jones: Adult, possibly female, at least Jane thinks so.

Height approx. 5.5 feet (167 cm).

Places that can hide an adult woman???

We shouldn’t split up.

Divide the third floor into zones, search together, move together, do not split up.

Think about horror movies.

Pantry

Room 301 (incl. sample cabinet)

Room 302 (incl. conference room)

Manager’s office

Men’s restroom

Women’s restroom

Electrical room

Is it a supernatural force??? A haunting?? Then "Jones" could also take a form we can’t comprehend, right?

Should we check all the humanoid things in the company??

Haha, might as well shout "I found you" into every corner and see if that damn thing comes out.

Going crazy, going crazy, I just want to go home.

Mai Mingle closed the notebook.

The person who wrote this had torn the paper with their last stroke. After "want to go home," not another word was written.

’The things crossed out with a pen... does that mean they were already searched, but nothing was found?’

She glanced through the glass door of the conference room at the office filled with cubicles. It was silent outside. The fluorescent lights, the computer desks, the jackets draped over chairs, the trash cans under desks, and the water cooler in the corner all seemed to be frozen in a corner of time.

The third-floor office, which seemed untouched by any outsider since the "search for Jones" began, made one thing clear: in just one short day, everyone had disappeared, leaving not a single survivor.

Did the fact that no one found Jones mean that they were still hiding in some corner of the third floor?

’Is that why the way out to the world has remained gone?’

’It seems this is the interview challenge the Kai Family prepared for the Hunters. It’s precisely because there’s no way out that their standard for successfully passing is to return to the first-floor entrance...’

’The Hunters sent to other floors probably have their own different challenges.’

Although she didn’t know the significance of the wooden-door mirror around her neck, all the clues so far pointed to one thing: Mai Mingle had to continue the "search for Jones."

’...Among the six people at the meeting, who is Jones?’

Mai Mingle looked at the names on the whiteboard again.

Patricia✓

Osho✓

Liraimon✓

Eugene✓

Jane✓

Laura✓

The first two notebooks didn’t have their owners’ names written in them, so the only person who could currently be ruled out as Jones was "Jane."

The names Osho, Liraimon, and Eugene all seemed to be male, making the probability of one of them being "Jones" slightly smaller, but she couldn’t rashly assume they weren’t...

Amid her chaotic thoughts, Mai Mingle opened the third notebook. She realized almost immediately that this one probably held the greatest hope for solving the mystery of Jones.

The reason was simple: the notebook’s owner, Eugene, had not only left his name but had also recorded the entire situation in meticulous detail, almost like a diary, right up until his own disappearance.

5:15 PM

(It’s quitting time, but none of us can go home.)

(I swear I will write this whole thing down. If Jones can alter our perception, then a written record is the only reliable source of information.)

At Osho’s suggestion, we searched the office thoroughly again several times. We looked inside every cabinet, under every desk, behind the sofa, and even in the refrigerator.

Osho said that if this is a haunting, we should also check every humanoid item. When you think about it, the number of humanoid items in a toy company is unsettlingly high.

Even though Jane stressed that the person was an adult and couldn’t hide inside a toy, we still squeezed and cut open every single humanoid toy.

Mai Mingle silently made a mental note: ’So the second notebook belongs to Osho.’

’In that case, Jane, Eugene, and Osho can all be ruled out, right?’

Mai Mingle hadn’t gone to check the toy samples in the office earlier. But now, it seemed that if she had, she probably would have discovered the traces left by the missing employees—the disemboweled toys.

She turned the page.

*

After checking the humanoid toys, we returned to the conference room.

Everyone is in despair... Osho is furious, kicking the wall hard and cursing "Jones" with a stream of profanities. Jane has just been sitting there in a daze since we got back.

Laura has been crying softly for a long time, on and off. Patricia comforted her for a bit at first, but now she’s pretending not to hear it. To be honest, I find her crying really unnerving too.

Liraimon has been trying to analyze the situation, listing several possibilities. In the end, he said he thinks we’re experiencing a collective hallucination. It’s a good thing he said "collective hallucination." If he thought the rest of us were just products of his own hallucination, there’s no telling what he might have done to us.

I’ve already thrown up twice. When the pressure gets to be too much, I...

No Jones in the toilet, either.

*

Mai Mingle frowned, counting the names in the past few paragraphs.

’Wait a minute, including Eugene, the writer, isn’t that already six people?’

’But I guess that’s not so strange...’

"Jones" seemed to be able to disrupt people’s perception. When face-to-face, no one knew that the person they were looking at was actually a stranger they didn’t know at all—or perhaps not even human.

So when Eugene was recording everyone’s actions, he would naturally see them as his real colleagues. If they could spot something wrong just by looking, they would have found Jones long ago.

’But if that’s the case, can I still find any clues?’

*

6:02 PM

To keep our strength up, we all forced ourselves to eat something from the fridge. Judging by the times our other colleagues disappeared, we probably have a two-hour deadline. If we can’t find Jones, will we meet the same fate and disappear too??

I don’t dare to think about it.

Just thinking about it makes my stomach turn, and I don’t want to run to the restroom again.

Patricia brought up something terrifying.

"Were there always this many samples in the company?" she asked.

She’s a product designer with the most seniority, but she said she suddenly noticed that many of the samples on display in the company were ones she’d seemingly never seen before today.

Could it be that our disappeared colleagues have all...?

The idea was too absurd for anyone to say out loud, but everyone was probably thinking the same thing. Laura kept praying softly.

We quickly decided to find the company’s product catalog and compare it with the current samples.

We don’t know where else to look for Jones anyway, so we might as well do something instead of just sitting here.

We made a mess of the samples earlier, so we had to tidy them up first before comparing them one by one with the product catalog. For any older products not in the catalog, Patricia would write down what she remembered.

*

Mai Mingle turned her head and glanced out the door.

The child’s doll she had thrown out earlier was still in the same position it had landed in, its limbs scattered in a heap on the floor. Its head was tilted from its shoulders, staring fixedly at the conference room door.

’...It hasn’t moved, has it?’

The faint, fragmented reflection on the glass door vaguely showed a part of the carved wooden door. Mai Mingle’s gaze swept past her own reflection and fell back onto the notebook.

*

We have the results.

I don’t know what to make of this result... I was just being paranoid.

The dozen or so colleagues who disappeared haven’t joined the army of toys. We all remembered there being about ten or twenty samples in the office. After checking, it turns out there are exactly twenty samples, no more, no less.

With so many, it’s normal for Patricia not to remember or to have misremembered. Even Patricia herself started to have doubts.

When we found out the number of samples was correct, Osho was very unhappy and complained that Patricia had wasted precious time.

(PS: He also said that me writing this down is a waste of time. But I think he doesn’t like me recording this because he hates the feeling that this is like leaving a final message.)

But we soon discovered that of the twenty samples, not a single one was a toy produced by the company.