We had been puzzled by the fake request we'd received. It was dark outside, and we weren't able to go home during the snowstorm. We had gathered around the table to discuss our plans from there on out.
Just then, with no warning, the first person collapsed. I'm pretty sure it was Amino. He suddenly crumpled up, falling from his feet onto his side. Then, white smoke started spewing out of nowhere. Someone screamed, "Fire!" But there weren't any other signs of a fire, and it didn't feel hot. I had been nervously trying to figure out what to do, but before I knew it, I also started to lose consciousness. I had no idea what happened after that.
"That's the truth behind the smoke." Kirigiri pointed underneath the table. A small aluminum can-type thing had rolled under there.
"What is this?" I crawled under the table, pulling it out from under there. "It looks like a can of juice... but there's no hole to drink from."
"It's a home-made smoke generator, isn't it? Someone rolled it under the table. We can feel fortunate that it doesn't seem to have been tear gas or sleeping gas. But that hideous white smoke blanketed our fields of vision entirely."
I had lost consciousness pretty quickly, so I didn't really know what had happened after that. "What exactly happened?"
"Well, I don't really know. But everyone started collapsing, one after the other, and so I immediately pretended to collapse too," Kirigiri said.
"Pretended? What do you mean, pretended? Are you saying you're the only one that nothing happened to?"
"Yes. Because the smoke itself was harmless. I believe that everyone collapsed not because of the white smoke, but due to some other cause. It is a fact that the first person collapsed before the smoke came out. I wonder if perhaps, at some point, you were made to ingest a soporific. Do you have any recollection of that?"
"Hmmmm... Soporific?"
I didn't know about the others, but at the very least, I could speak for myself in saying that I hadn't ingested anything since arriving at the Sirius Observatory. There shouldn't have been any point at which I could have taken any drugs. But thinking back, right before I lost consciousness, I did feel sort of drunk. I thought I just wasn't feeling well, but...
"Still, what's up with you being the only person who escaped danger?"
"Perhaps it's thanks to my constant training," she said bluntly. "Sensing danger is my specialty. But, when I do sense it, it's often nothing more than a simple 'bad feeling' or 'foreboding', and so frequently it's only in looking back on events that I am able to string together a logical explanation of events... Grandfather calls it 'hearing the reaper's footsteps'."
I hear that great mathematicians are able to come up with propositions even when they skip some calculations along the way. I've heard of a lot of episodes where they struggle to explain themselves afterwards. I wondered if she was that kind of genius.
No, right now, we don't really know why we fell unconscious, so it's possible she's just being silly. Or maybe she's the culprit, and so obviously she'd be able to avert danger...
Wait, what "training"...?
"Everyone started collapsing one after the other, so it was clear that some dreadful criminal plot was being put in motion," Kirigiri continued. "I pretended to collapse to see what the culprit planned on doing. But when I did, I heard the reaper's footsteps again."
"What happened?"
"They were the culprit's footsteps. It seems our culprit is the very cautious type. They came closer to me, and forced some strange drug on me. It wasn't chloroform or ether. It likely wasn't an anesthetic... Perhaps it was some sort of synthetic narcotic. They covered my mouth with a handkerchief, and though I held my breath for a bit so as not to inhale it, at some point I still lost consciousness..."
