The room Tyler woke up in was dark except for a single sliver of yellowed sunlight escaping through a crack in the boarded window. He groaned as he blinked himself awake, the entire right side of his head throbbing. His mouth tasted metallic and dry like sandpaper, and every muscle his body ached.

When he tried to move his arms to try and relieve the pressure building in his head, he realized that he was tied by his wrists and ankles to a cushioned dining chair with thick, wiry rope. A noose sat snug around his neck, attached to the cracked ceiling above him with some excess rope wrapped and hanging from a broken ceiling fan. There was an empty space on his waist holster where his gun was supposed to be.

A shot of panic made him jerk forward in the chair, the old wood creaking underneath him. The air was ice cold, making his weak lungs constrict and wheeze. Puffs of his breath were all he could see as his eyes got used to the darkness. Even with the yellowed white light slowly making its way through the window as the sun rose- Tyler could only guess since his vision was limited- everything else in the room was obscured by shadows.

Since he felt wide awake with a massive headache and he could feel the itch of dried blood down his left temple and back, Tyler assumed he was knocked unconscious. That was, objectively speaking, better than being drugged, which happened more often in his line of work than he liked to admit. Still, he could feel a twinge of pain in his neck when he tried to lift his head. Maybe he hadn't escaped the drugging after all.

Being a 24-year-old profiler in the Behavioral Analysis Unit wasn't the safest job, especially when chasing down a psychotic killer who targeted people like him.

Finding Brendon Urie so early wasn't a mistake on his own part. It was a trap made for Tyler, he realized all too late.

"Fuck," he whispered, letting his arms go limp to relieve the pressure on his wrists.

He tried to go through the list of possible ways of tortures Brendon would put him through. Though all of the images appearing in the back of his mind made goosebumps appear on his forearms, nothing could be more horrifying than the half rotten head of a man sitting in the rubble of the singing table.

To say he killed those people was an understatement compared to what he actually did. That man- correction, that monster- had slaughtered all eight of them, tearing them apart in ways only someone having a psychotic breakdown could imagine doing.

Now, Brendon was going to do the same to Tyler. He was there, tied to a chair, with the sinister presence of the man watching him from a dark corner.

As the sun began to peak out more and more through the cracks of the boards in the single window, Tyler tried to take in as many details of his surroundings as he could.

Currently, he was propped against on the far right of one wall. The space was too small to be an actual room, at least ten by ten square feet, with a wooden door on the opposite wall to the left. The ceiling was made of a curvy metal, and the walls were wood. On the wall to his right, a handmade square window had been boarded up long ago because the wood used to block it had already begun to splinter with weather. Some of the nails stuck out, the heads bent and rusted.

The floor felt to be made of hard clay-like dirt under his bare feet, with a dining table broken in half in the middle of the room. Two chairs sat facing each other on either end of the table. Considering the size and spaces on the table and style of the armrests, the chair he sat was part of the dining set. He wondered where the fourth one was.

On the wall to his left was a metal rack like one that belonged in a garage, with a variety of butcher knives and other tools. A metal table was under it, also covered in nails and other miscellaneous objects you'd only find in a hardware store. His stomach churned when he sees a hacksaw plugged into the wall with the blade still dripping blood.

He didn't know how long he'd been awake, but considering the time it took for the sun to creep into the room, it must've been a while.

A creak pulled him out of his spiraling thoughts, and he could see the figure stand up from a chair across the room from him. Tyler jerked again, attempting to get out of the ropes with no avail. He could see the figure stand, holding something thin and shiny in his left hand. It took him a moment to realize in horror that he was holding a cattle prod.

"Look who's awake," Brendon said. "I was afraid I'd killed you with all those hits it took to take you down. I'm going to be honest, you're tougher than I'd anticipated. I should've upped the dosage of the benzodiazepin."

"Wh-why didn't you? Kill me, I mean." Tyler's voice was still raspy from not using it for however long he was unconscious, and he coughed as a result.

Brendon chuckled, the sound striking a cold spike into Tyler's heart. The prod crackled to life with white sparks. "Because, Tyler, the fun is just beginning. Why would I want to kill the only person who might survive my experiments?"

Tyler swallowed roughly. "E-experiments?"

Of course. That fit the profile exactly. The murders in his mind were experiments. Urie had a PhD in Chemistry, after all. But what was he trying to accomplish with this much overkill? Was it an extent of his research on cures for mental illness, or was it something that was unprecedented in the profiling of psychotic killers like him?

"You truly didn't know? I thought you of all people would understand, or at least have a semblance of my actions." Brendon clicked his tongue. "I suppose I can spell it out for you. You see, I'm trying to unlock the potential of the human psyche. People like you and me, we're at an advantage because we're smarter than everyone else. Our brains are already susceptible to change, to expansion."

"That's why you chose young prodigies," Tyler mumbled, slowly putting pieces together. "People with natural inclinations for mathematics and science, prodigious skills, eidetic memory, high IQ's, autism, mental disorders. Their minds aren't fully developed yet, so they're more pliable for influence."

"They're not mental disorders. I call them mental extensions," Brendon growled, walking forward.

"You think you're expanding their minds?"

"There have been several studies done to show that exposure to extreme torture can unlock parts of the human mind that are otherwise dormant for a person's lifetime. Youth with higher IQ's have an easier time accessing this part of their brains, so it takes less amount of pain to do so. Believe me, I've tried with ordinary people. It doesn't end well."

Tyler's throat constricted. He closed his eyes and mentally started flipping through every murder file in the Columbus that he'd read during their investigation, including the eight people already to confirmed to be killed by Brendon.

There were too many to count. Tyler had to narrow it down and only focus on the unofficial kills, the ones that were the same MO but different victims. The names of other murders in LA flashed behind his eyes as he rummaged through his well kept mental files of victims.  Only one of them fit the profile.

"Was that ordinary person Ryan Ross?"