Naegi blinked down at the fan Togami seemed so alarmed by. That was the thing that had been putting gas into the air? He didn't know a whole lot about electronics, but it really just looked like an ordinary battery-operated fan to him. He couldn't see a canister of gas or anything attached to it, and it wasn't as though it could just produce drugs from thin air.

Maybe he was missing something. Naegi looked up at Togami. "I guess it could be. But how did it get chemicals into the air? Or… did you mean that it just blew them over to where they'd hit people who went near the body?"

"Both." Togami scowled. "Do you remember Kirigiri's idiotic plan to pretend to murder you?"

"Yeah…" Naegi said slowly, eyes going back to the fan. "She didn't say anything about a fan, though. And she said she got rid of everything she was going to use for it."

"No, she said she dismantled it," Togami corrected. "All she got rid of was the poison. She very carefully didn't explain the rest of her set-up to us, but it sounded as though she left the materials intact enough that anyone who knew how she planned to do it could duplicate her efforts." His lips tightened. "I'd been wondering just what method she'd meant to use."

Naegi shook his head, but remembered to stop the movement before he began speaking again so that Togami could read his lips without trouble. "I know you sound pretty sure about it, but — well, I just don't see how it's supposed to work."

"Understandable," Togami said, rolling his eyes. "It's so crude I'm amazed it worked at all. You can hardly be expected to spot how it works when it's so inefficient." He gave the fan another suspicious glare before turning back to Naegi. "It's a form of a humidifier. You attach something soaked with a liquid to a fan, and as it spins, it forces some of the liquid into the air."

"Oh." Now that Naegi thought about it, he thought he might vaguely remember seeing a few other kids try a similar trick with wet cloths during the hottest days of summer. He'd thought it just cooled the air down a little, but he supposed it made sense that some of the water would get pushed into the air, too. "And that works?"

Togami snorted. "No. Not well, anyway. It's the sort of cheap alternative to air conditioning people only resort to when they can't be bothered to afford anything better."

"And Kirigiri said she only wanted something that looked impressive," Naegi said, thinking back to the conversation when she'd explained part of her murder plot. "She wasn't really trying to kill me, so she must've chosen something that wouldn't work well on purpose."

Togami's frown deepened, the way it always seemed to whenever Naegi tried to point out that Kirigiri's motives weren't as awful as Togami kept insisting. "Except that it did work."

Naegi blinked. "That's right… you said you started to feel some of the effects the first time you came in here. Maybe it would work better than you thought."

"Possibly," Togami allowed. "If the drug was powerful enough, it might not take much." His eyes flickered away from Naegi, back down in the direction of the fan.

Naegi followed his gaze, grimacing at the sight of the sponges sitting in a pool of liquid. If he understood Togami's explanation, that wasn't actually water spread around the base of the fan — that had to be the remnants of whatever chemical the culprit had used. It probably couldn't do much in liquid form, at least as long as they stayed well away from it, but Naegi had the urge to back away a step anyway. If one of them tripped, or it splattered up on them, then…

Wait.

Naegi shifted his weight against the pole and one of his legs, just long enough to use one of his feet to give a gentle tap at Togami's ankle. The other boy looked sharply back at him, startled by the unexpected contact. "Did you just kick me?"

"Sorry — I wanted to say something to you," Naegi said. "It didn't hurt, did it?"

"No," Togami said, still looking a little unsettled. "But I'll have to come up with a better way for you to get my attention." He shook his head. "Well? What was so important?"

"The bucket I used to put out the fire," Naegi said slowly. "I thought that was water, but… was that actually the culprit's drug?"

"That's… possible," Togami said, frowning as he considered the possibility. "But that seems like an excessive amount of a knockout drug to leave lying around. Everything we've seen in this place so far has been in limited quantities — I can't imagine that there's enough of this drug around that the culprit would so easily abandon that much of it."

"The bucket was nearly full when I used it," Naegi said.

Togami nodded. "It would have had to be, to put out a fire big enough to burn that much of the corpse. And if it was a chemical instead of water, odds are good that it wouldn't have put the flames out without any side effects. Even in the best case scenario, you should have gotten a lungful of the drug, probably enough to knock you out."

Naegi remembered enough basic chemistry that he didn't have to ask what the worst case scenario could be. Instead, he shook his head and said, "It didn't even make me dizzy."

"Good." Togami's eyes flashed with far more viciousness than Naegi would have expected. "You don't have the strength to spare."

He did have a good point. Despite feeling better after resting most of the night, Naegi knew he was still far weaker than he needed to be. With his body's defenses compromised, he would have been an easy target for the drug's effects.

Still, that didn't mean Naegi liked seeing that painful level of concern in Togami's eyes. "I'm getting better, though," he assured the other boy. "The pole helps a lot — I hardly feel unbalanced at all, and it's taking much longer for me to get out of breath. And I think the dizziness is starting to go away after all the water Ogami kept making me drink."

"You should never have been hurt badly enough that you needed to recover at all." Togami sounded unmollified, but Naegi could see a little of the worry in his eyes lighten, just a bit. And as long as they were still stuck here in Hope's Peak, surrounded by evidence of a murder and with an unidentified corpse at their back, that was really the best either of them could expect to get.