The Gallery

A strange ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠ceiling.

That was the first thought that struck me the moment I opened my eyes. A square light fixture sat flush against the ceiling, and somewhere overhead a ventilation fan hummed faintly. The room was cramped, furnished in the style of a hotel guest room.

What had I even done last night…

I'd definitely gone drinking with a high school classmate I hadn't seen in ages, and we'd split up before the last train left. After that I'd ducked into a convenience store for a bottle of water, come home, and plugged my phone into the charger.

I had no memory of ever walking into a room that looked like this… hotel.

Kidnapping.

The word surfaced, and I dismissed it just as fast. Who would go to the trouble of abducting one drunk—and a useless one like me, at that?

Besides, that wasn't the only thing that was wrong.

My head didn't hurt. The sour reek of alcohol that should have been sitting in my mouth was gone, and my stomach, which ought to have been twisting itself into knots from the hangover, felt perfectly fine. If anything, my body was strangely, unnaturally light.

"What is this…… huh?"

Before I even had time to be properly startled, an unfamiliar voice spilled from my mouth.

…It was a woman's voice. High and thin, and I had never heard it before in my life.

I slowly pushed myself upright. The blanket that had been draped across my chest slid away, and through a thin T-shirt the unfamiliar outline of a pair of breasts came into view.

Am I still half-asleep…?

I lifted both hands and looked at them. My fingers were slender, and my wrists were far thinner than I remembered. Even the veins that used to stand out along the backs of my hands had all but vanished.

Without thinking, I set a hand on my chest—

Soft.

And big.

I reflexively threw the blanket aside. The thighs that emerged below a pair of black shorts were pale, and my legs had grown conspicuously thinner than before.

…There was still one place I really needed to check.

But was I actually supposed to check it?

Waiting around isn't going to change anything.

I ended the brief debate with myself and slipped a hand inside the shorts.

What should have been there… wasn't.

Instead, something entirely different met my fingertips.

Stay calm.

Until yesterday I had been a healthy, able-bodied adult man. That much was certain.

And yet I'd woken up trapped in a room I'd never seen, and my body had become a woman's?

What the actual fuck.

…This is so fucked.

Who the hell had done this to me.

It wasn't as if I'd ever said I wanted to be a woman, and I couldn't think of anyone I'd pissed off badly enough to warrant this. I hadn't even sent a 5,700-character hate mail because a novel I was reading was boring—I hadn't done anything remotely like it.

I was pissed.

Really, truly pissed… but lying around in this room wasn't going to tell me a damn thing.

The moment I got down off the bed, the changes to my body came into even sharper focus. My center of gravity was different from usual, and with every step I took, long hair tickled the back of my neck and my spine.

A small bathroom was attached to the room, three paces from the bed.

I opened the door and found a toilet, a sink, and a shower stall partitioned off by a glass divider. Arranged neatly on the sink were the usual amenities—lotion, foam cleanser, hand soap, and the rest.

Well, aren't they thoughtful.

I turned my gaze to the mirror above the sink, and a woman I had never seen before looked back at me.

Sleep still clung to her white face. Large eyes, a high, straight nose, a slender jawline—every last feature was exactly my type.

Though, honestly, a face like this would probably be anyone's type.

Black hair falling all the way to her waist, and the thin body visible beneath the oversized T-shirt, weren't exactly ordinary either. Wondering if someone had fitted me with an extremely elaborate mask, I probed along the jawline and through the hair, but I couldn't feel any kind of seam or edge.

I washed my face with cold water and looked in the mirror again. Nothing had changed… of course it hadn't.

Still a woman, huh.

I'd only checked roughly before. I should probably take a proper look now.

…I kind of had to, right?

I looked in the mirror and pulled up the hem of my T-shirt.

A stretch of white stomach came into view, and then, flaunting their presence, a pair of large breasts appeared. At their centers, pink nipples stood out in vivid color.

Seeing them up close, they were far more…… enormous than I had even expected.

"Ohh……"

I wrapped my hands around them, and the soft flesh filled my palms. Each time I gave a light squeeze and let go, the pliant breasts sprang back to their original shape.

If they were this addictive, I could probably spend the whole day just touching them….

No. This was not the time.

I pulled the T-shirt back down and stepped out of the bathroom.

My phone had been set neatly on the nightstand beside the bed. Apparently whoever had kidnapped me had been considerate enough to pack it along.

The time on the screen read 3:17 p.m.

The carrier indicator was gone. And in the Wi-Fi list… nothing came up at all. To make matters worse, even emergency calls wouldn't connect. The screen just sat there for a long time, stuck on a message about retrieving location information.

"Did I actually get kidnapped. For all I know we're in the middle of the ocean……"

I muttered it, then shut my mouth.

Someone had abducted me and even changed my sex. As the unreal situation settled, bit by bit, into something that felt real, a chill ran down my spine.

What if I get raped just because I look pretty now.

—#%$#^%

…Wait. What was that sound.

I closed my eyes and concentrated, and a low murmur of voices reached me from beyond the door. It wasn't one or two people, either—enough that I wondered how I hadn't heard it until now. I couldn't make out what they were saying, but I could tell a considerable crowd had gathered.

…I ignored the noise from outside for the moment and searched the rest of the room, but there wasn't much to find. Nothing in here I could use to defend myself. It wasn't as if I could tear the desk apart and fashion a weapon out of it, either.

A few sets of underwear in the closet, and a hoodie and shorts identical to what I was already wearing. That was everything.

Ah. Come to think of it, I wasn't wearing any underwear right now, either.

I hurriedly pulled on a pair of underwear and the hoodie. The whole time I was getting dressed, the voices outside kept coming.

I held my breath in front of the door.

At least I couldn't hear any screaming or sounds of a fight, so it didn't seem like an immediately dangerous situation.

Let's go out.

I pressed the handle down, and the door opened without the slightest resistance.

Outside was a space that looked like a hotel corridor.

Guest-room doors stood at regular intervals along a stretch of red carpet. The door directly across from me was numbered 1923, and the one beside it 1922.

The door I had just come through was Room 1924.

…So the corridor ended at Room 1924.

I started to step out, then hesitated.

A single gray door in the wall right beside my room had caught my eye. It was narrower than the other guest-room doors, and the handle was a different shape.

More than anything, that door had no number on it.

A storage closet? A maintenance room…?

The voices were coming from the opposite direction, so that was the way I needed to go.

I passed the open guest rooms and headed for the end of the corridor. Judging by the rumpled blankets and the bathroom doors left ajar, the others had woken up in their rooms the same way I had.

What waited at the end of the hall was a large glass door, with metal lettering mounted above it.

The space beyond the door was far larger than I had expected.

Low sofas and tables were scattered around the room, and a long conference table occupied one side. A beverage fridge and a small kitchen counter were built into the wall.

Most of the people were clustered near the floor-to-ceiling windows.

Is there something over there?

I didn't know a single thing about any of this, so I figured I should at least get closer and try talking to someone….

"Is anyone getting a signal?"

"I've been telling you, there's nothing. Calls don't go through either."

"Where even is this? I have an important meeting today."

"If anyone knew where we were, don't you think they would have said so by now?"

"Shouldn't we check if there's anyone else in this building first?"

"There's nothing outside. Where the hell are we?"

Voices piled over one another from every direction.

A middle-aged man in a suit was telling people to turn their phones off and on again. Nearby, a woman sat on a sofa crying, and someone else was calmly drinking a beverage as if none of this were happening at all.

I stood in front of the glass door and looked out past the lounge. Through the floor-to-ceiling windows, a high-rise almost identical ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠to this one came into view.

A glass-enclosed Skybridge stretched between the two buildings, and white light leaked from windows here and there on the opposite side.

Beyond that, there was nothing.

No sky, no ground, no roads, no surrounding buildings. Every stretch of space besides the two towers was pitch-black.

It was too strange to just call it night. Even on the outskirts of a city you'd normally at least see stars, or the moon….

There was really nothing out there at all.

"Excuse me."

I turned toward the voice nearby. A woman holding a phone was looking at me.

"Did you come out of one of the rooms over there?"

"Ah, yes."

"Which number was it?"

"Room 1924."

The woman tapped her phone screen a few times.

"And you were alone?"

"Yes. I opened my eyes and I was just… there. Do you know anything about this?"

"We're all the same. Whether we got kidnapped all at once, or why we're here—nobody knows a thing."

She let out a short sigh and glanced around at the people gathered in the lounge.

"Then that's twenty-four in total. I don't think anyone's left in the rooms."

Twenty-four people.

From what I'd seen, their ages and clothes were all over the place. They all looked like adults, at least—but there were people in pajamas, people in suits, even someone in full work clothes.

They really just grabbed whoever, huh.

If we had anything in common, it was only this: not a single one of us knew why we'd been brought here.

That was when a faint light flickered at the center of my vision.

I turn into a woman and now I've come down with some disease I didn't have before?

I rubbed my eyes hard, but the light didn't vanish. If anything, the blurry outline sharpened, and a single translucent window floated up into the air. Through it, the dark space and the people gathered in the lounge showed faintly.

Two lines of text were written on the window.

Was this that thing?

Those ghost-story, anomaly-gallery novels that had been all over web novels lately?

Did I just awaken a gallery too???

Mom, Dad, I got a gallery!!!!

I reached out and tried to touch the window, but my fingers passed through the letters without any sensation at all.

Of course. Operating a gallery with your mind was the golden rule.

I gave it a try, thinking that I would enter the Ghost Story Gallery, and a translucent board that looked like an internet community unfolded in front of my eyes.

I clicked the post at the very top.

Comments were stacking up in real time.

So the gallery already knew I'd come in. On the flip side, besides me, not a single person around here was reacting to the status window at all. People were walking right past it without so much as glancing at the window floating in midair, which meant I was apparently the only one who could see it.

I looked back at the gallery. Below the list of posts, a write button was visible.

…If you were new to a gallery, the polite thing was obviously to do the initiation first, right?

I hit the write button, pictured the title and body I wanted, and pressed submit. A new post rose to the very top of the board.

Come to think of it, the window that had appeared first had a notice on it besides the Ghost Story Gallery.

I pictured the previous screen, and the board vanished, replaced by the original selection window.

This time I selected the notice, and a new list appeared.

An Individual Notice?

A notice that was individual—did that even make sense? I couldn't just leave that alone.

I selected the Individual Notice at once.

Oh my god.