Distorted World: Studio Apartment (6)
Through the hole beneath the mattress, I climbed down into the corner of a studio apartment. A doll sat there, sewn as though someone had tried to copy me — and even the clothes were the same. Not what I was wearing now, but the outfit I'd had on at the very beginning. The same clothes the corpse had been wearing.
"Ah, it's nothing. There's just a doll that looks like me."
I tilted the camera so the doll in the corner made it onto the stream.
I skimmed the chat, then strode across the room and came to a stop in front of the doll.
"It doesn't look particularly dangerous. And Error hasn't said anything."
I studied the doll more closely. From a distance it had looked exactly like me, but up close something was off. It resembled me, that much was certain… and yet it felt like it was about two percent short of the real thing. I couldn't put it into words. I didn't know what was missing. Maybe that was just the nature of a doll.
"It's not a perfect replica of me. Then again, capturing my heavenly looks in something as paltry as a doll was always going to be impossible."
An honest review. An objective assessment.
I only looked. I didn't touch it. It didn't seem dangerous, but there was no reason to take chances. I just crouched nearby and stared at it blankly.
"Error, this isn't a Distortion Entity, right?"
"If it was a good… no, a harmless Distortion Entity, there wouldn't be any reason to avoid it, so they might have just guided me here without a separate warning."
An ordinarily copied doll, apparently.
Living things could be copied. I was no exception. I'd already suspected as much — I'd had a feeling. I'd seen the corpse hanging from a rope, after all. That body had been me as well: copied, then distorted.
"Not everything in my studio gets copied no matter what. There were studios with no mattress, and studios with no mirror, remember?"
I paused for a moment at one viewer's guess.
A doppelganger of me could exist, too…
The possibility was real enough. There had been a corpse. There was a doll. A Distorted World was a place where anything could happen.
"Error."
"Is there a Distortion Entity somewhere in this Distorted World that looks exactly like me?"
"…?"
"Yeah. Not right now."
Error started guiding me again. I nodded and headed for the refrigerator.
A few viewers begged me to take the doll. I ignored them cleanly.
I passed through the refrigerator into another studio. I'd gone in through a fridge, but I came out through a hatch. The refrigerator in this studio sat off on the opposite side. Nothing strange about that. Earlier I'd gone through a front door and come out a bathroom door.
I opened the drawer.
A studio apartment unfolded inside it.
Thankfully, there was no corpse this time.
I passed through the drawer into the next studio.
Error posted in chat immediately.
"Huh? Mirror?"
"You can go to another studio through a mirror too? I genuinely never thought of that."
I carefully reached a hand toward the mirror.
Ripples spread across the glass, and my hand slipped through as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
And so I passed through the mirror into yet another studio.
This one was completely empty. Not a single piece of furniture. When I looked back, the place I'd come through was blocked by a wall.
Even if it looks like that, I should be able to pass back through no problem. I just came from there, and I already went through a mirror — a wall shouldn't be any harder.
With that thought, I reached out and touched it.
It was solid.
"…Guess I can't go back to the previous studio?"
I looked forward again.
This studio had no bathroom door. Instead, there were five front doors.
Skritch… skriiitch……
From beyond one of the front doors came a sound like nails dragging across metal.
"It's coming from the middle door."
Skritch— skriiiiitch—!
The sound began to grow louder.
The sound cut off all at once.
A beat later—
Tak—!
A different sound came from beyond the middle door. It sounded like a door-lock cover flipping up.
The sound of buttons being pressed. Apparently there was an external door lock mounted on the other side of that front door — and whatever was over there, presumably a Distortion Entity, seemed to be entering the password.
Tak—!
Clack-clack-clack-clack!
BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG!!!
"It doesn't look like it's going to break, so let's watch for now."
BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG!!!
BANG—! BANG—! BANG—!
Bang— bang—
…
…
……
The sound stopped.
It was a creature that gave up fast. Not even five minutes, and it was already out of patience.
A viewer had picked up on my deeper meaning. Everyone was making such a fuss that I'd briefly put myself on camera — as in, look upon my heavenly face and calm yourselves.
For the record, even without a situation like this, I'd been periodically putting myself on stream since earlier anyway.
"Well… it's not that I wasn't scared at all. I was reasonably tense."
I watched the chat. Error would give us the answer now.
The place Error had pointed me to was the middle front door — the only one that had been making noise until a moment ago.