Swamped

You can't think of anything, so you just ring the bell twice.

"You don't need anything right now? Fair enough. I'll go and check on Ms. Rebecca, then. But feel free to ring if you need anything, I'll hear it."

Donnie walks off. Looks like all you've got now are these books, only one of which is at all bearable.

Maybe you'll just re-read that one when you hit the end.

---

You're now Sally.

And you're strapping on a breather mask to help with investigating and cleaning out Ms. Rebecca's room. Seems this is what got the navigator in such a poor state. You definitely don't want to get a whiff of that gas, then.

You step in and take a look around. Three sailors are cleaning up dead inside-out bugs, another two are standing by the closet door. Goodness, this place looks awful.

You turn to the two by the door.

"Why are you two just standing around? I thought there was work to do here."

"The door's where the box that started this whole mess is," the shorter and thinner of them explains. "And that means the closet's probably filled with gas by now."

"So what? We've got breather masks, don't we?" you reply.

"Yeah, but glaxin's thick stuff," says the larger sailor. "We may be okay breathing it, but we'll have a tough time seeing anything. And if it fills up the room, it might be hard to get out without any escaping."

"Not to mention, breather masks can fail. The chance may be low, but it's more than I want to take with something this dangerous."

You nod.

"Okay, I think I get it. You're looking for a safe way to get in there. Had any ideas?"

"Donnie's got a neutralizing gas, but he says he doesn't have enough to spare," the big sailor replies. "Needs it in case anyone else gets exposed."

"And I don't suppose we can make more of it?"

"Oh, that's actually not too difficult, I was just explaining that to Billie here. You just have to boil up some onions... well, there's some other stuff too, but it's mainly onions."

"Onions?" you ask, puzzled.

"Yeah, don't really know the science that well, but when you boil 'em up in water, the steam has a bit of onion in it. And it turns out that's real good at clearing up glaxin gas. The catch, though, is that you need a lot of onions. And the cook's not going to be eager to give them up."

"Seems to me you'd want the stove in the room too," the shorter sailor says. You suppose that's Billie.

"Well, that's probably easier than capturing the steam, but it's not actually necessary. Anyhow, the point is, we could make more gas but we'd use up most of our onions. So that's as far as we got for ideas."

"Right," you say. You're not entirely sure you followed that, but you suppose you can try to think of something.