Togami kept a close eye on Naegi as the two of them walked out of the dorm room, checking for any signs that might point to increased pain or returning fatigue. Naegi seemed as all right as could be expected now, with his injured arm carefully cradled in the sling and his good hand using the music stand pole to balance his weight, but Togami didn't expect that to last long.

Once they were both safely in the hallway, Togami closed the door behind him — and frowned. He'd left the door unlocked while Ogami had been awake and taking care of Naegi, so that she could leave if necessary without having possession of his room key — but now, with Ogami unconscious, the situation had changed. There was nothing to stop the murderer from returning to finish what they'd begun, especially if they suspected that Togami and Naegi hadn't bought their frame job, and this situation was complicated enough without throwing another dead body into the mix.

But locking her in would cause a different set of problems. If she stayed asleep, there would be no issue — but if she woke up to find Naegi missing and the door locked, who knew what she might take it into her head to do? The culprit must have been in that room, after all, and there could still be important clues to their actions that he and Naegi hadn't uncovered yet, clues she might destroy by flailing around without restraint.

And aside from that, Ogami had gone so far as to break down two doors already, even though one had been at Asahina's request. Togami remembered the girl's broken eyes when he'd found her sitting alone in the dark in the immediate aftermath of Asahina's death — it wasn't a stretch to think that fear for another person she'd sworn to protect might drive her to defy the locked door rule a third time.

"Is it really okay to just leave her like that?" Naegi asked, frowning at the door. Apparently he'd been thinking along the same lines.

"No," Togami decided, swinging the door back open. "Wait here a moment."

He strode quickly back into the room and retrieved a pad of paper and pen from one of the desk drawers. He jotted down a simple note informing Ogami of the basic facts of the situation, then left it on the bed in front of her, so that she ought to see it immediately if she woke. She'd guarded most of the other dead bodies, so she ought to understand the idea of not disturbing the scene without another student present. That would have to be good enough.

Returning to the hall, Togami found Naegi giving him a rather puzzled look. "What were you doing? Did you try to wake her up?"

"No, if she's drugged, I doubt there's much we could do to snap her out of it." Togami pulled out his key and locked the door with a reassuring click. "I left a note telling her what happened and that she shouldn't do anything stupid."

For some inexplicable reason, this brought a smile to Naegi's face as they started walking down the hall. "That was nice of you."

"It was sensible," Togami corrected him sharply, trying to ignore the warmth that Naegi's smile sent curling through his stomach. "She might have done any number of obstructive things if I hadn't told her."

"Okay." But in spite of his agreement, Naegi quite annoyingly didn't sound like he believed Togami at all. "I'm glad you two are getting to be friends again."

Togami gave Naegi a dark glare. "She is not my friend, and certainly not 'again.'"

But even in the face of that glare, the smile didn't drop from Naegi's lips, and Togami ended up having to look away from the boy at his side before he did something ridiculous like bend down to kiss him in the middle of the hall. That would have given Naegi completely the wrong idea as to how Togami felt about his refusal to see sense.

Fortunately, they rounded the corner and reached the storage room before Naegi felt the need to say anything else on the subject. Togami quickly scanned the room before entering, just to make sure no one seemed to be concealed inside, but it seemed empty enough, with the shelves pressed directly against the wall to avoid creating any hiding places. When he was sure it seemed safe, he walked in, Naegi following just a step behind.

"We need some kind of portable light source," Togami said, turning to begin to study the items on the shelves. "Flashlights, a lamp, something like that. It will have to be battery-operated, though, since I don't know what the killer did to sabotage the lights. If they blew the fuse for that room, anything with an electric cord won't work."

Naegi nodded. "Okay. I'll start from the other side, then."

Naegi had always been good at spotting anything unusual or out of place. If that side of the room held anything useful, he could trust Naegi to find it. Togami left him to it, turning his attention to the shelves in front of him.

He'd looked through the storage room before, when it had first been unlocked. He hadn't explored it exhaustively, but he'd taken note of the general organization and types of items it contained. Most of the shelves held food, drink, or the various other consumables the students would have needed if they'd resisted longer before beginning to play Monokuma's game. He could ignore most of those things, skipping over the large sealed packages of some revolting instant noodles or the stacks of enough soda cans to hydrate an army.

When he reached the shelves that contained other miscellaneous items, he started paying more attention, looking over each shelf to make sure he didn't miss something useful tucked away behind another item. He didn't see anything that looked like a portable light, though he did find a box full of several different sizes of light bulbs.

"I found some candles," Naegi said from across the room. "No matches, though."

"Probably for the best," Togami said, grimacing. "I wouldn't trust an open flame in a room with unidentified chemicals in the air. I wouldn't put it past the mastermind to stock the school with flammable gases that could destroy the whole building."

"I don't know about that," Naegi said slowly. "Sure, there's a lot of dangerous stuff in the school, but… it's mostly been smaller scale, things people would use to kill just one or two other people. There haven't been any weapons we could use against a lot of people at once." He frowned suddenly. "Except the poison, I guess."

"Which we couldn't access until more than half of us were dead already," Togami pointed out, pausing his search as he considered what Naegi had said. "That makes sense. We know the mastermind has access to explosives, but they haven't given us anything like that. They gave us weapons that we'd need to pick a deliberate target to use — nothing where we'd have the option of setting off enough destruction to cause an arbitrary death, while the killer could pretend they'd kept their hands clean."

And of course, with Ikusaba physically present in the school, there was another reason the mastermind wouldn't have wanted the students to have access to the tools for general mayhem. Whether Ikusaba was the mastermind herself or just their tool, it only made sense that none of the weapons would give the students the ability to harm her unwittingly. But of course, Togami knew he couldn't say that aloud, not if there was a chance someone was still observing them through the cameras. Fortunately, he knew he could trust Naegi to be clever enough to work it out for himself.

"Not that it matters," was what he chose to say, instead of his musings on the mastermind's thoughts. "I still won't trust fire in that room even if we did find matches."

"Okay," Naegi said, moving past the shelf with the candles. "Then I'll keep looking."

Togami moved on as well, getting closer to the dustier areas near the back as he dismissed more and more of the irrelevant items. Why hadn't there been some kind of inventory of the storage room contents? If he'd been in charge of the room, it would never have been so shoddily managed. It would have been properly cleaned, too — food storage should never have been allowed to gather dust this way.

He glanced at one of the upper shelves near the back, and paused as an unexpected empty space caught his eye. Most of the items back here had been relatively undisturbed, judging by the layer of dust — but he could see a large, clean rectangle that indicated something had been removed from that shelf fairly recently.

No — not that recently. Togami remembered the investigation before the fourth class trial, when he'd told Jill to search the storage room to get her out of his hair. She'd said something about a large object being missing then, but it hadn't turned up during the trial, so it hadn't seemed all that relevant. Still… he didn't know what it was or who had taken it, and he didn't like the idea of not knowing.

"I think I found something that will work."

Togami looked over at Naegi. The other boy was gesturing at one of the bottom shelves near the back corner on his side of the room. Tucked between bottles of dishwashing soap and boxes of pens, there was a large electric lantern.

Togami crossed over to pick up the lantern, flicking the power switch to check whether it worked. When bright light flooded the storage room, he turned to give Naegi a grim smile. "Perfect."

Naegi nodded. "Then let's go upstairs."