Curious People unfolds in the bustling yet anonymous landscape of a modern metropolis, where a series of seemingly disconnected individuals are drawn together by an insatiable need to understand the unexplained. The central figure is Hideo, a reclusive puzzle master who runs a small, dusty shop filled with unsolvable mechanical contraptions. His quiet life is disrupted by Mei, a street-smart high school girl who documents oddities on her blog, and Akira, a disgraced journalist obsessed with a cold case that the city has long forgotten.

The conflict ignites when these three discover that bizarre, low-level anomalies are occurring across the city: street signs that change locations overnight, people with shared false memories, and a persistent humming sound only heard by a specific few. While the authorities dismiss these as mass hysteria or pranks, Hideo sees them as patterns in a grand puzzle, Mei sees viral stories, and Akira sees evidence of a conspiracy.

Their investigation leads them to the Curious Ones, a shadowy collective of artists and hackers who believe that reality is a consensus hallucination. The group isn't malicious; rather, they conduct public experiments to see how much inconsistency the human mind can tolerate before forcing a logical explanation. A notable early arc follows the team as they track a phantom train station that appears only on Tuesdays, leading Hideo to confront his own agoraphobia.

As the narrative progresses into a second arc, the dynamic shifts from exploration to intervention. A rival organization, the Clarifiers, emerges with a brutalist ideology to eliminate all ambiguity and enforce a single, documented truth. They begin hunting the Curious Ones, forcing Hideo, Mei, and Akira to protect the very mystery they were trying to solve. The story resolves not with the world being explained, but with the protagonists accepting that some doors are better left open. Mei learns that not every mystery needs a headline, Akira finds peace with his unsolved past, and Hideo steps out of his shop to embrace the beautiful chaos of an unpredictable world. The final panels show the city returning to normal, save for one subtle, deliberate glitch that suggests the Curious Ones have simply moved on to a new experiment.