Illusion Report

The moment the words left her mouth, she felt like she was clearly Mai-lock Mingle. After waiting silently for a minute, she was forced to revert back to being just Mai Mingle.

By the time the third minute had passed, the conference room remained dead silent. The walls, photos, and furniture were like a cast of professional extras, holding back laughter and refusing to look at her. All that was left was a completely stumped Mai-at-a-loss Mingle.

’...Did I guess wrong?’

’Jones isn’t in one of the photos on the wall?’

’And here I was, so full of confidence a moment ago. Good thing no one saw that.’

There were plenty of eyes around, but not a single person—if you could even count Jones as one.

’How could Jones not be here?’

Mai Mingle spent a little more time reviewing her deductive process. She even played the devil’s advocate in her own mind, trying to pick apart her own logic, but no matter how she looked at it, she couldn’t see where she had gone wrong.

’Could it be... that I have to identify which specific photograph is of Jones?’

That was asking a bit much.

As an outsider, how could she possibly know which photo corresponded to which employee? She wasn’t even sure about the last six employees.

Faced with twenty strangers, what could Mai Mingle possibly use to determine which one was Jones?

’Did some of the Nest residents deliberately skew the fairness of this challenge just to corner me?’

Mai Mingle looked at the photos one by one, but every A4-sized picture showed the same frozen smile.

Even though she knew deep down that she probably couldn’t bluff Jones out, she still tried shouting at a photo, "Found you!"

After shouting like this four or five times, it looked less like she was nearing the end of her puzzle-solving and more like she was losing her mind alone in the conference room. Mai Mingle stopped before the toys outside the door could start laughing.

She frowned, subconsciously resting her chin in the web of her thumb. The gesture, however, reminded her of something else.

’Chebri said that the new form is crucial for clearing stages... Could the final step to finding Jones in the photos rely on the wooden door mirror?’

It seemed worth a try.

That being said, Mai Mingle didn’t know how to go about trying.

She pinched the air in front of her cheek, found the spot where the "handle" should be, and pulled the "door" open. Then she aimed her face at the photos—the portrait in each one was about the size of a real person’s face. But as she lined it up with one after another, all she felt was foolish. Nothing happened.

’So, what do the photos look like when reflected in the mirror?’

To make it easier to take a "selfie," Mai Mingle took every photo down from the wall and spread them out on the conference table. To her surprise and concern, every single one came off smoothly.

’...She’d had a nagging thought that Jones’s body was standing inside the wall, with only its head sticking through the photo, smiling as it watched the people in the room try to find it.’

’But now all the photos are off the wall... Does Jones not have a body?’

’Or was I really just wrong from the start?’

Mai Mingle held up her phone in one hand and a photo in the other. With the photo facing her and her phone raised slightly higher, CLICK, she took a picture.

The wooden door mirror on her neck reflected the twenty faces in sequence, fifteen of them marked with red X’s. She looked from her phone to the photos and back again, but the constant comparison yielded nothing.

A sense of frustration began to bubble up in Mai Mingle.

"If you don’t come out, I’m tearing up all these photos!" she threatened tentatively.

The conference room remained silent.

"I’m gonna do it!"

But Mai Mingle didn’t dare to actually tear them. What if ripping the photos meant failing the mission? What if she ended up trapped here to die, eventually disappearing just like the toy company employees?

Clutching the stack of photos, she was at her wit’s end, completely out of ideas. After staring blankly for a moment, a thought suddenly struck her, and she turned and walked out.

’Things have already come this far. What’s the harm in trying one more thing?’

There was another way to see the reflection in the wooden door mirror.

Carrying the stack of photos, Mai Mingle strode into the restroom and stopped in front of the sink. She glanced up slightly—and sure enough, the mirror within the mirror’s reflection formed another seemingly endless, interlocking corridor.

To avoid blocking her view while holding up the photo, she backed up a good distance this time. Her eyes were positioned just above the wooden door mirror, allowing her to look past the raised photo and straight into the restroom mirror.

Mai Mingle put down a photo she’d just checked and picked up a new one. She put down another, then grabbed the next... It became an almost mechanical, assembly-line-like motion. At times, she even had to remind herself what she was looking for.

After a dozen or so photos, Mai Mingle found it.

She had almost missed it.

In the mirror’s reflection, it was still a standard, smiling work photo. The plain, unremarkable face in the picture was crossed out by two red lines, dividing it into four quadrants.

Even though the face was forgettable, Mai Mingle had grown familiar with it after trying all sorts of methods. Just as she was about to put the photo down and grab the next, the mirror’s angle shifted slightly, and in her peripheral vision, she suddenly caught a sliver of navy blue.

’...A sliver of navy blue that hadn’t been there a moment ago.’

Mai Mingle froze. After two seconds, she faced the mirror and adjusted the angle of the photo and her own face, finally seeing Jones clearly for the first time.

Within the mirrored corridor, formed by layer upon layer of interlocking reflections, something that should not have been there had appeared.

’...How to describe it?’

So she hadn’t guessed wrong. Jones really did have its head stuck through the photo.

The smiling face in the photo was Jones’s face—and that face was still attached to a neck, and a body. The body was even dressed in a navy blue casual suit.

But Jones’s body wasn’t standing upright and hidden inside the wall, as Mai Mingle had imagined.

The photo was like a picture frame. Jones had its head stuck through it, but it was lying prone on the ground, limbs splayed out, its body forming a horizontal line with the face in the picture.

In other words, Jones was crawling through the mirrored corridor like a giant gecko, with a photograph for a face.

Mai Mingle’s gaze met the one in the reflected photo, and Jones suddenly let out a PUFF of laughter.

The mouth under the red X opened and closed. "You found me? Wasn’t easy, was it? How’d you manage to find me, huh? The photo is flat because I’m hiding in the reflection, and reflections are flat—doesn’t all that sound perfectly reasonable? Doesn’t finding me in a reflection sound perfectly logi-gi-gi-gi-gi-gi-gic? It was all improv, really, hahahahahahaha! I was originally supposed to hide in the wall—hey!"

The last word exploded out of nowhere, echoing through the restroom and making Mai Mingle jump.

It didn’t sound like the gushing-blood speech of a Nest resident whose artery had been cut. It was like Jones was... calling someone?

"I did what you asked! The mirrors are lined up! Now hurry up and crawl out and kill her, kill her, kill her!"

’What?’

A jolt went through Mai Mingle. She suddenly realized she was still holding up Jones’s photo. She quickly flung her arm out, tossing the picture away from her hand and out of the mirror’s view.

Once the image of Jones, prone and crawling on all fours, vanished, Mai Mingle fought back a wave of dizziness and glanced into the mirrored corridor.

Deep within the corridor of reflections, born from the wooden door mirror that was now her face—

—the translucent face she alone had noticed a short while ago suddenly floated up, rushing forward as if it meant to break free, using Mai Mingle’s face as its door.