Togami would have liked his announcement of Kirigiri's guilt to be greeted with gasps of outraged comprehension — but Jill and Ogami were apparently having difficulty following along. The confusion didn't clear from either girl's face as they stared at him, one set of eyes blank and quiet, the other wild and impatient. Kirigiri continued her facade of cool indifference, of course, but Togami had expected no less. And as for Naegi — well, after that first glance in the other boy's direction, Togami had to turn his eyes away. If he intended to continue down this path, he couldn't allow himself to focus on the fact that Naegi couldn't have looked more hurt if he himself had been the one accused.
He tried to push Naegi out of his head as he looked back to the other girls — just in time to see Jill open her big mouth.
"If we're talking murder methods, it takes more than just the same kind of poison to line it all up," the genocider said, one hand on her hip. With her usual disturbing grin wiped from her face by the reference to her alter ego, there was nothing left to moderate the bloody intensity in her eyes as her stare knifed through him. "Come on, baby — you know I'll follow you anywhere, but you gotta lead the way!"
Togami nodded sharply. "Of course there's more to it than simply the type of poison — the entire method was identical. The fatal dose of poison was administered as a gas — but if you recall the last trial, this particular poison's natural state at room temperature is a liquid. In order to use the poison as a gas, Kirigiri constructed a makeshift humidifier using a fan from the storage room and sponges from the clinic — the very same items that were missing during the last investigation."
Jill cocked her head. "Something pretty big sure went missing from the storage room right around then, and no one's fessed up to nabbing it."
"That was the fan," Togami confirmed. "The shape left in the dust on the storage room shelf exactly matches the base of the fan Naegi and I found at the murder scene, along with the poisoned sponges."
"And you believe this would have been capable of filling the room with poison gas?" Ogami asked, frowning. "I'm not certain that I understand how such a device would be possible."
"It would be simple enough," Togami said, shrugging. "Attach the soaked sponges to the front of the fan, and as the air blows through them, it would create a mist of liquid in the air. Crude, but clearly effective."
"Sure, as long as you breathe it all in," Jill said, tapping her scissors against one palm with a faint clacking sound. "But who'd stick around in the killer air? If you noticed it and got out before it could take you down, what stopped GI Jane from catching on?"
A hint of motion drew Togami's eye to the left, and he turned to see Naegi leaning as far forward as he could without jarring his sling. "That's right — the lethal dose for administering the poison as a gas was much higher. You'd need to breathe in half the bottle for it to work. Why didn't she just leave?"
The fevered brightness in Naegi's eyes at this potential crack in the argument filled the back of Togami's throat with sour bile. Was Naegi really going to go so far as to fight him on this? Couldn't he just wait and trust Togami to make his case effectively?
Hadn't he meant it when he'd promised to be on Togami's side?
No… he couldn't let himself think like that. Togami thrust the creeping doubts to the furthest reaches of his mind. Naegi wouldn't lie to him, he knew that. The kind-hearted boy wasn't capable of giving a promise unless he fully intended to keep it. Circumstances might force him into breaking it, the situation with the hidden room had certainly proved that quite painfully true — but that fault could be laid squarely at a more malevolent door.
And so even if Naegi fought against him now, it wasn't because he didn't care. Every word that Naegi spoke in opposition to him was nothing more than another piece of evidence demonstrating just how cruelly Kirigiri had deceived him. He would understand that in the end, once Togami had proven her guilt beyond all doubt.
Togami tightened his jaw until it ached, raising his chin with the haughtiest expression he could muster. He met Naegi's eyes with renewed determination, and this time he didn't allow himself to falter at the emotions he found there.
"Obviously there must have been something that prevented Ikusaba from leaving the classroom," he declared, doing his best to infuse his words with a measure of his old confidence. "If she's a part of the game, then all the rules would apply to her as well — including the one about locked doors."
"But the door couldn't have been locked — could it?" Ogami asked, frowning. "You and Naegi were able to enter, after all."
"It might have been unlocked before we got there," Togami retorted. He would have gone on explaining to Ogami — but next to her, Kirigiri's lips curled into a smile so obnoxious the words boiled right out of his head.
"You sound determined to turn this into a locked room mystery," the girl said. "But so far, you're the only one making that argument. Any of us can speculate on what might have happened — but you and Naegi were the first ones on the scene. Do either of you have any actual evidence proving the door was sealed?"
Calling on Naegi again, just because she was unable to answer these questions on her own… Togami shot Kirigiri a venomous glare before looking over to see Naegi shaking his head.
"No… I don't remember anything like that," the other boy said. "But I never really looked at the door. The body was all the way over on the other side of the classroom, so that's really where I was focusing. And besides, the door was already open by the time I got there — I don't think I ever touched it."
Togami frowned, thinking back. That was right… he'd left the door standing open after he'd fought his way free of the classroom's poisoned air in that first terrible search of the room. It had been exactly as he'd left it when he and Naegi had returned later, so Naegi wouldn't have had a reason to think about the door at all. And that meant that he himself was the only one who could answer this question.
Was there something he'd missed, back when he'd first entered the ruined classroom? Had he forgotten some key fact about those early moments, in the dizzying whirl of events that had followed after? He cast his mind back to before he'd even known there had been a murder, when the only mystery he'd been trying to solve was why Monokuma had suddenly gone silent. He'd followed the blinking light of the device from the robot's eye up to the fifth floor, all the way to the furthest classroom. The door had been shut when he'd first reached it… and then…
"There was something holding the door in place!"
He could feel it now, the smooth metal of the door handle resisting his grip as he pulled at it. That had been strange, hadn't it? After all, when he'd entered the room during his first exploration of the fifth floor, he'd been able to open the door without any trouble. But this time, it had been different — crucially so.
"When I tried the door for the first time, it stuck for a moment before it opened," he went on, too intent on his recollections to bother checking whether anyone else was trying to speak at the same time or not. "The handle turned, so I knew the rule about locked doors wouldn't be in play. But something caused that door to take more effort to open than it should have."
To his annoyance, none of the others looked appropriately impressed by this information.
Naegi frowned at him, a vertical line creasing between his eyebrows. "You didn't say anything about that before."
"It didn't seem relevant," Togami said, shrugging. "I'm saying it now."
"With quite convenient timing," Kirigiri said, and Togami just knew her voice would be so dry it would set his teeth on edge. "Does your sudden flash of memory include any other explanation of what could have held the door shut like that?"
"There was quite a lot more to look at in that classroom that the door," Togami snapped. "The body was on the other side of the room entirely — the door was fairly low on my list of priorities."
"Hang on… if the body was on the other side of the room from the door…" Naegi said slowly, pressing his fingers to his chin, "then what was Ikusaba doing over there instead of trying to get out of the room?"
