Togami stared at Kirigiri, trying to find some meaning in her emotionless mask. Her face never flickered, though, neither kind nor cruel, showing nothing more than mild interest in whether he was going to answer her question.
"What is it?" Togami asked, narrowing his eyes at her.
"Not here." Kirigiri headed for the door, clearly expecting him to follow her.
Togami very nearly let her leave without him. It would serve her right if he did, ordering him around like he had nothing better to do. But on the other hand, she'd just said that she wanted him to prove himself to be trustworthy. Doing as she demanded was almost certainly part of that.
In that case, he supposed he didn't have much choice. Togami strode out after Kirigiri, quickly catching up to her. To his mild surprise, she didn't turn towards the bathhouse, which he would have expected to be the best place to show him something that she apparently didn't feel the need to share with any of the others. Instead, she headed for the stairs, climbing up to the third floor.
"What exactly do you think you're going to show me in here?" Togami asked, frowning, when Kirigiri opened the door to the rec room. "If you're looking for an Othello partner, I'm not interested."
"I'm not." Kirigiri closed the door behind them, then walked over to open the large metal cabinet in the corner of the room.
Togami looked the cabinet up and down, then raised an eyebrow in her direction. "A giant metal box, very interesting. Anyone would be delighted to walk up three flights of stairs to see it."
Kirigiri's lips tightened, but she didn't respond to the needling. Instead, she carried on with whatever she had apparently come to do, pulling her notebook out of her pocket and removing several of the sheets. Togami frowned at her, trying to work out what she was doing as she attached the papers to the cabinet wall, in the shadow of the door. One of the papers seemed to have writing on it, but with the way she'd positioned it, it would be very difficult to see –
Ah. So that was it. Togami glanced at the security camera, and sure enough, its location wouldn't let it see inside the locker with any clarity – definitely not closely enough to tell what was written on any of the papers. So she wanted to communicate something to him privately, was that it? Something that she didn't want to say in the bathhouse, for some incomprehensible reason of her own.
All right, then. Togami didn't particularly trust anything that Kirigiri might want to tell him, but he was certainly interested to see what it was. If nothing else, this might give him some insight into just what the inscrutable girl might be planning. So as she stepped away from the locker, he took her place, leaning forward to read what the note had to say.
"After considering the information Alter Ego provided from its data analysis, I have come to the following conclusions. First, we are being denied information about the outside world for more reason than to provide us with motivation to leave. Second, while the headmaster may have been involved in these events to some extent, he is not the mastermind behind everything."
Togami read the words over several times to be certain he'd gotten it right, just in case the dim light had blurred the words. This was what she'd brought him here to say? That made no sense – the first conclusion was too obviously right, and the second was too obviously wrong.
He turned to tell her so, but before he could open his mouth, she thrust a pen into his hand. Well, if she wanted to keep all her speculations from the mastermind, that did make sense. Togami shrugged and turned to the paper, writing in the blank space below her notes.
"Your second conclusion doesn't match the information I received. How did you reach these conclusions?"
Kirigiri had produced a second pen, and as soon as he'd finished, she leaned in to begin her reply.
"An alternate source of information about the headmaster."
Togami gave her a hard look, but he might as well not have bothered. She might as well have been writing about the color of the walls, for all that her expression gave away. He turned back to the paper.
"What source?"
"One that I prefer not to share at this time."
Togami didn't even bother to write down a response to that. If she couldn't figure out his opinion from the look he gave her, he'd have to revise his opinion of her intelligence drastically.
Kirigiri eyed him for a moment, then returned to the paper.
"I have no intention of telling you everything I know. Consider this information an olive branch of sorts – an attempt at determining whether we can be allies in the future."
Togami scowled at the paper.
"You think I want to be your ally, after everything you've done?"
This time, Kirigiri was the one who didn't write a response. She just raised an eyebrow at him, lips curling into her insufferable smirk. She didn't need to put it on the paper – the word yes was written all over her face.
And damn her, she was right. Of course she was. Togami wouldn't be here right now if he didn't want to be her ally. He might find her alarmingly suspicious, personally irritating, and obnoxiously overbearing, but she was also the main force behind his separation from Naegi. If he wanted that ban lifted, he needed to develop some kind of working relationship with Kirigiri.
So was that what she was doing? Was this actually an attempt to rebuild the bridges she'd burned when she forced him away from Naegi? Togami wouldn't have thought she'd do anything remotely helpful – but then again, she'd already demonstrated that she didn't like stalemates. Every time she interrupted Monokuma's rambling tangents or prompted a class trial away from an argument showed that she would always act when she felt matters were getting off track.
And no one could deny that the current situation had gotten horribly awry. For all that Kirigiri had justified her actions by claiming he and Naegi had been causing divisions in the group, separating them hadn't done much to fix the problem. If anything, that had made it worse. It was just barely possible that she'd recognized her actions for the colossal blunder they'd been, and that this was an attempt to fix her mistake without actually admitting she'd been wrong.
Of course, it was also possible that it was nothing of the kind. He'd been expecting a trick when she brought him in here, and he hadn't seen anything yet to prove that wasn't what she was trying. He couldn't see what the trick in the information might be, but that didn't mean it wasn't there. Kirigiri was smart, if nothing else – anything she tried wouldn't be immediately obvious.
Togami considered a moment longer, but with the current information he had, he couldn't determine which scenario might be right. He turned back to the paper.
"What do you expect me to do now that you've told me this?"
Kirigiri shrugged.
"Whatever you see fit. I wanted to share a portion of my conclusions. I've done so. The next step is yours."
And with that, she pulled the sheets of paper off the locker wall and began methodically shredding them. Once they had been reduced to illegible scraps, she stowed them in her pocket and left the room without a backward glance.
