The Room You Can't Leave Unless You Milk
The Room You Can't Leave Unless You Milk
[The Room You Can't Leave Unless You Milk]
It was a phrase with somewhat shocking meaning.
What would it feel like to nod off and wake up trapped in a place like this?
With a dazed look on my face, I shook Cha Hye-rin, who was lying next to me fast asleep, to wake her up.
"Noona, where is this place? Did I drink and pass out? I don't remember falling asleep in a hotel room like this."
An unfamiliar space and unfamiliar air.
Setting aside the cryptic phrase engraved on the inside of the door, I tried to guess why I'd woken up here.
I was definitely sleeping peacefully in my own room.
So why had I woken up in this weird place?
Did I drink last night? Did I get drunk without realizing it, and Noona brought me here and put me to bed, so I remember nothing?
Wooong-
She squirmed, eokij-eokij, coming to her senses and opening her eyes.
With half-lidded eyes not fully awake from sleep, she looked at me.
"Cha Yu-hyeon? What? Why are you in my room?"
"Noona, that's not it. This place feels a bit off."
"?"
She sat up, looking around.
A small hotel room with neat interior design.
A fluffy bed. An angular dining table, a clean vanity, a simple kitchen, and even a bathroom attached to the room.
"Where is this......?"
"I don't know either. That's why I asked you, Noona."
"......?"
I asked just in case, but she looked completely clueless too.
No, in my memory, I was definitely jerking off in my room and falling asleep comfortably, so why had I woken up here?
I thought maybe Noona had brought me to a hotel after I got drunk, but that didn't seem right either.
What the hell is this?
Noona blankly looked around. She still didn't seem fully awake.
"Cha Yu-hyeon, don't mess around. Noona's sleepy..."
"No, I'm not messing around."
The more I adjusted to the situation, the clearer my mind became.
It was such an unrealistic situation that closing my eyes and opening them to find myself back in my room wouldn't have been surprising, but as time passed, the scenery stayed the same.
"......."
"......."
Our words dwindled sharply, and tension rose.
My arms shrank back in wariness.
"Where is this place? Cha Yu-hyeon."
"I told you I don't know. That's why I asked you, Noona."
"A hotel? It looks like a hotel room. I was lying on the bed asleep earlier. How did we end up here?"
"Beats me..."
"No way, kidnapped?!"
Noona came up with the perfect word to sum up the situation.
We'd been dragged to a room we didn't know about, without us realizing it.
What else could you call this if not kidnapping?
"Gasp, Yuhyeon-ah. I'm scared. This isn't funny, so don't pull pranks like this."
"I told you it's not a prank."
"Th-then who kidnapped us?"
"We'll figure it out starting now."
I carefully got up from the bed.
Leaving the frightened Cha Hye-rin behind, I started investigating the room.
[The Room You Can't Leave Unless You Milk]
I fiddled with the door handle on the inside of the door to try and get out, but it seemed firmly locked and didn't budge.
There were no windows for escaping outside. It was a somewhat stuffy space with no windows at all.
The phrase on the door that I'd tried to ignore kept nagging at me.
[The Room You Can't Leave Unless You Milk]
"Yuhyeon-ah, what's that? The writing there? What does it mean?"
Hiding her body with the blanket, peeking out just her head, frozen stiff while sitting on the bed and watching me investigate the room—noona pointed at the phrase with her finger.
"The Room You Can't Leave Unless You Milk?"
"......."
I didn't know what to say.
The Room You Can't Leave Unless You Milk? It wasn't even some knockoff concept from an erotic story like "The Room You Can't Leave Unless You Fuck."
It was a deeply unbelievable and bewildering name for the room.
"What's milking? Milking means... squeezing milk. Isn't it a word they use a lot for milking cows?"
"Probably, yeah?"
In general, that's what milking means.
"The Room You Can't Leave Unless You Milk? There's no cows here, right? So what are we supposed to milk? This isn't a dairy farm—what's with the random milking?"
"......."
In my mind, there was one thing here that could be milked.
They use the word milking for squeezing milk from cows, but they also use it for squeezing breast milk from women who lactate.
But from a normal person's perspective, they wouldn't usually think about squeezing their own milk.
"......."
I looked at Noona's breasts.
A plump, perky pair of tits. Maybe because she'd gone to sleep in just a thin t-shirt with no bra, their shape stood out vividly.
"Huh? What? Why? M-my breast milk doesn't come out!"
As I stared at her chest, Noona seemed to realize it might mean that kind of milking, and she shyly covered her breasts with both hands.
"Right? It doesn't come out, does it?"
"Of course not, you crazy bastard!"
Thinking I was teasing her, she threw a pillow at me threateningly.
As Noona said, she wasn't a cow, and she'd never been pregnant or given birth, so of course no breast milk. What were we supposed to milk?
I read the phrase again and sank into thought.
"The door really won't open? Are we locked in?"
Cha Hye-rin got up from the bed and cautiously approached me.
She tried opening the door herself.
The door showed no sign of opening. There weren't even any other escape methods.
"What is this? Call the police. Tell them we've been kidnapped to some weird place."
Her eyes shook uneasily as she looked for a phone to call the police.
We searched the bed together, but there was no phone.
We'd been dragged to this suspicious hotel room in the exact clothes we'd fallen asleep in back home, with nothing on us.
"There's a landline here? Maybe it connects to the hotel front desk?"
I picked up the receiver from the neatly placed landline on the desk, but it just beeped—didn't work.
Of course, the room had a TV and computer too, but they were just there like decorations and didn't function either.
"Who locked us in here?"
Cha Hye-rin scanned the surroundings with distraught eyes.
Trapped in an unfamiliar space, with no idea how to get out.
The fridge had food, so food wasn't an issue for now, and there was a bathroom for bodily needs.
But the anxiety was unavoidable.
"......."
At a loss for words, Cha Hye-rin plopped down on the bed.
In the meantime, I'd knocked on the door calling out if anyone was outside, and even tried slamming a dining chair against it to see if it'd open, but it was all for nothing.
"No CCTV or hidden cameras. Doesn't seem like anyone's watching us."
"......."
After checking every corner of the ceiling, walls, and objects, I confirmed there was no recording equipment.
"No way to contact outside, no use trying the door. Who put us in this place?"
"......."
"Noona, why aren't you answering?"
"......."
I was busy checking the room to grasp the situation, but Noona standing there silently without responding bugged me.
She blinked with a terrified expression.
"Noona, you scared?"
"......."
"Aww, scaredy-cat. All that fear and no guts. Snap out of it. We gotta get out of this weird place."
"Yeah......."
Cha Hye-rin had always been faint-hearted and quick to scare.
She couldn't even watch most horror movies. If she saw scary news or heard ghost stories, she'd stick to my side babbling nonsense until she calmed down, but trapped in a place like this, she couldn't pull herself together.
"For now, let's eat something and sleep. Deep breaths. Nothing's threatening us right this second."
"Uh, yeah? Eat what? Stuff from that fridge? No way. How can you just touch random food without trusting it?"
"I checked the food—it doesn't seem off. It's all common stuff you see anywhere, and packaged."
There were brand breads and lunchboxes from convenience stores, bottled water, and even frozen foods you could microwave.
I unwrapped some bread and chewed a bit—no poison or sleeping pills or weird effects.
"You sure it's really okay?"
"Yeah. So eat something, rest up, and let's think slowly. We've got time."
"......."
Cha Hye-rin took the bread, drinks, and frozen foods from the fridge that I handed her and nibbled a bit of each.
"I didn't sleep properly earlier either. What time was it when we got here?"
I checked the clock on the wall. It pointed to 8 o'clock.
"Dunno...? Around 2, maybe?"
I didn't remember the exact time, but I thought it was around 2 too.
It'd been 6 hours since we got trapped in this room.
If I'd gone to bed at home at midnight, that meant I'd only slept 2 hours.
No wonder I was tired after staying tense without rest.
But was the time this clock showed reliable? Did time flow here the same as in reality or outside?
Doubts crept in, but I decided to sleep a bit and think again when I woke up.
I lay down with Noona on the double bed and closed my eyes for a while.
When the fatigue left my body and my mind was refreshed, I opened my eyes—and the room had changed somehow.
New food had been stocked in the fridge, and the food wrappers we'd thrown in the trash were gone, cleaned out.
How?
Even while resting with my eyes closed, I'd been on alert.
No way I wouldn't notice if someone entered, restocked the fridge, and emptied the trash.
"Noona, did anyone come into the room at all?"
"No, I didn't see anything?"
"Then who restocked the food?"
When I raised the question, Noona's eyes widened like a rabbit's, goosebumps rising.
Food magically appearing in the fridge, trash emptying itself. Like it was programmed that way.
Unreal.
Supernatural phenomenon.
Thinking about it, us getting trapped here was like that from the start.
No memory of being kidnapped, just falling asleep at home and waking up in this room.
Was I dreaming? Was the whole room an illusion or hallucination?
Pinching my wrist hurt. My thoughts were clear, and talking to Noona showed she was normal too.
So, let's hypothesize.
We're trapped in an unrealistic room.
The only way out is milking. It's a room you can only leave by milking—that's the setup.
Actually, I'd seen it before but ignored it, but now one object started bothering me.
A glass bottle marked with 500mL measurements.
It sat alone on the central table.
If we're milking, doesn't it mean squeeze breast milk into this glass bottle? Fill it up to 500mL.
That must be how we get out of this room.
"Noona, you really sure no breast milk comes out?"
"Hey, you gonna keep saying that? I'm not pregnant, never had a kid—how's milk supposed to come out?"
"This whole trapped-in-a-room thing is unrealistic, so maybe you can produce breast milk, Noona."
"Huh......?"
If this room's set up that way, whether she's given birth or not probably doesn't matter for the breast milk coming out.