Hannibal!Stuck
By Brenden Benson
Prologue-
Homicide Detective Terezi Pyrope stands in the midst of a crime scene as police officers investigate the corpses around her. She is in a typical suburban hive: middle class but comfortable. There are two apparent victims, a married couple it seems. Mr. Razeal Aeonic lays still and motionless as his corpse is taken away in a body bag. His wife, Almira, is flat on her back in a pool of blood, close to her hive's security monitor. As the officers go about their business, Terezi goes about hers: surveying the double homicide and slowly piecing together a picture of how the events transpired. She has been tasked with providing a layout of how the murders went down, and who would be the one behind it.
She removes her red glasses as she grows more and more concentrated, revealing her blinded eyes. She was an amazing success story; a practical, modern day miracle. A blind woman with a sight for things that even an aided eye could not find. In her mind Terezi constructs the scene before her, then begins to rewind, ressurecting the victims and setting them back to their typical routine. The officers vanish, the blood returns to the trolls' bodies, and all peace is restored. Razeal goes back up the stairs to where he was before; Almira goes back to the kitchen to continue putting the dishes away. Terezi's mental persona backs out of the hive and onto the road, setting up for the kill. All of the ambulances and police cars surrounding her fade away, the detective going deeper into her hyperimaginative self-conscious. Finally, with a deep breath and a final look around the neighborhood, Terezi storms onto the porch and prepares to murder the couple.
She kicks in the door and is almost immediately spotted by a worried Razeal Aeonic. The male troll rushes down the stairs to protect his wife, but only finds himself on the wrong side of a gun.
"I shoot Mr. Aeonic twice, severing jugulars and carotids with near surgical precision. His sour yellow blood splatters against the wall and stairs behind him. He will die watching me take what is his. This is my design," Terezi says, self narrating her actions.
Behind her, the detective hears the whimpering of Aeonic's wife as she desperately dials the emergency number on her hive's security monitor. But sadly, help would never arrive for her, as Terezi aimed her gun and fired a single bullet, which surges through Almira's neck. The blood paints itself across the wall next to her, covering the monitor, her one savior, in a yellow coat. Almira collapses to the ground with a thud and nothing more.
Terezi, solemn, says, "I shoot Almira expertly through the neck. This is not a fatal wound, the bullet misses every artery. She's paralyzed before it leaves her body."
She pauses, walking towards the woman in sadistic glee. "It doesn't mean she can't feel pain, it just means she can't do anything about it. This is my design."
Almira stares up at her attacker with a empty look in her eyes as her blood spills out further onto the hardwood floor. Terezi steps over the body and presses a few buttons on the security system. A dial later, and a male troll's voice picks up from the other side.
"This is Alternian Security, what is your emergency?" the voice inquires.
Terezi registers the question and immediately flashes back to reality and reaches out to an officer beside her.
"I need the incident report for the hive security system," she informs him, before being given a file. She flips through a couple pages before noting, "This was registered as a false alarm."
She continued flipping, only to stumble upon to something else. "There was a registered false alarm... last week... He tapped their phones."
"Yep. The phone lines have been tapped," a telephone repairtroll reported as he gave local telephone pole a look. Terezi shook her head in affirmation at his diagnosis, then found herself back inside her mental recreation of the previous night.
"He recorded the couples's conversation with the security company."
Once again in the role of the killer, the detective stares at the slowly dying body of Mrs. Almira. She takes out a recorder from her coat pocket and holds it up to the monitor before pressing play. Almira's voice comes through the recording as if nothing is wrong, as her body lays there on the cold floor.
"Almira Fafell," the voice answers, indentical to the answer she gave last week.
"Can you please confirm your password for security purposes?" the man replies through the monitor, none the wiser.
"1025."
"Thank you, Mrs. Lafell. We detected a front door alarm."
"Yeah, sorry."
"Is there anyone in the house besides yourself?"
"I'm just here with my matesprit."
"Do you require any assistance?"
"No. Thank you so much for calling," the prerecorded Almira said before Terezi hung up the line.
The detective, still wearing the suit of a homicidal killer, turns to the paralyzed body before her, and practically shivers from anticipation. "And this," Terezi says, all emotion drained from her voice, "is when it gets truly horrifying for Mrs. Almira."
