With Kirigiri staying behind in the headmaster's hidden room, Togami found himself at a bit of a loss for what to do next. He wouldn't have minded staying in the main part of the room to look through the headmaster's other belongings — but he suspected that wouldn't be in the spirit of Kirigiri's request to be left alone. The last thing any of them needed was to waste time arguing over semantics. With a sigh, he headed through the doorway back to the destroyed hallway.

He paused just beyond the threshold, eying the ruin around him. Could there be anything to be gained from examining this mess in further detail? It was always possible that there were clues buried here, hints that might give some further scrap of insight into the mastermind's plans… but it seemed just as likely that those traces would have been long since wiped away. How far was the risk of finding nothing balanced out by the off-chance that Kirigiri had overlooked a crucial clue?

As the debate whirled through his head, Ogami looked over at him. "Do you want to remain here longer?"

That decided him. "No," Togami said firmly. He didn't want to spend the rest of their investigation time gambling on the chance that Kirigiri had been incompetent — and so he wouldn't. He strode back down the hall without another glance at the room around him, ignoring the dozens of hiding places that clues might be lurking. He wasn't going to fritter away his precious time on possibilities — not when there was a far more certain source of information he hadn't fully investigated.

His eyes flickered back to Jill as the three of them made their way back through the ruined hallway. She seemed as unfazed by the destruction around them as she'd been by almost every other piece of the mastermind's game. Was that ease a facet of her genocider personality, or was it proof of just how far the world had fallen in the two years that they'd lost?

He didn't know the answer, not even after pondering the question all through the long walk back to the first floor of the dorms. He could never quite read Jill as well as he would have liked, and the fact that she was the only one who knew information that he needed made that even more worrying. Not that he expected her to lie to his face, of course, there'd be no point talking to her at all if he thought she'd deliberately deceive him — but that was a long way from being completely trustworthy. How much of what she claimed would actually match up to reality?

Not that it made a difference to his intentions, of course — since he still needed to know the secrets hidden in Jill's head, his pace never slowed or wavered until he reached the bathhouse door. But the moment he crossed the threshold — the labyrinth of paper and string stopped him in his tracks. He'd forgotten just how much of the room Kirigiri had taken up with her notes.

Ogami gasped from behind him, and Jill gave a low whistle. "Didn't know you were so into arts and crafts, darling!"

"It isn't mine." Togami contemplated the mess for a moment, then let out a sigh of resignation as he began to pick his way through the lone path to the center of the room. Pulling the whole mess down might have been faster and easier — but there was no guarantee it would leave the room any more accessible than it was now. Besides, Kirigiri must have gotten something of value from it if she'd put all this work into it — there was no point in ruining a tool before ascertaining whether it might still be useful.

"This… all of this was not here a few days ago." The words Ogami murmured as she copied his path barely reached Togami's ear. "And… if the three of us didn't create it… why would Kirigiri make all this? Does it have some purpose?"

"She said that she wanted to see how past events are connected," Togami explained as he finally reached the end of the twisting path. He immediately claimed one of the benches in the center of the room, leaving no space for the genocider to worm her way next to him. To his surprise, she sent him a wide grin instead of pouting before she plopped down on the opposite seat.

But instead of taking the seat beside Jill, Ogami continued to peer at the tangled strings around her. "These represent the events of the killing game?" She reached out to touch one of the papers, as gingerly as if she feared it might explode. "Then if she's done all this… does Kirigiri understand what's really been happening?"

"She certainly seems to think so," Togami said, shrugging. "But there's no point in worrying about what she knows — she's quite capable of handling her own arguments. Right now, I'm more concerned with what you know about what's happening." He pointed squarely at Jill.

She beamed back at him. "Sounds like a blast, darling — go on, ask me anything, and I'll be glad to bare it all!"

Togami couldn't stop his grimace at her phrasing — but at least she'd agreed without argument. "I want to know about the world outside this school."

Nothing about Jill's smile seemed to dim, but her face froze around the grin until a simple glare would have been less awful. "Yeah, figured that was what you were after when you dragged us all the way in here. But it's like I told you already, darling — I wasn't around for most of it. Even if I give you all I've got, it's never gonna fill in some of those blanks."

"I don't recall asking for your commentary," he said, taking an odd kind of comfort from the easy way ice flooded through his tone. "All you need to do is provide the information — I'll decide what to do with it."

For some bizarre reason, the cold words brought Jill's smile back in full force. "Anything you say, darling! So what is it you're looking to hear?"

"As much as possible," Togami told her. "Start with your first memory that something was wrong and work from there."

Jill shrugged. "Well, there's not much to tell if that's it. As far as I knew, one day everything was a-okay, and the next it was screaming chaos all over the place. Cities burning, people turning on each other, the whole armageddon schtick."

She'd obviously tried to speak as lightly as she ever did about death and mayhem — but in spite of her efforts, the words sank into the room with the force of lead weights. Whatever she'd experienced, there was no doubt that it had been terrible enough that even a remorseless serial killer shuddered to recall it. Even though he'd been the one to demand she relive the memories, he found himself unexpectedly unsettled by their impact on the girl before him. He let his eyes flicker away from the genocider, giving her time to pull herself back together —

And he found himself staring straight into Ogami's wide, horrified eyes.