Nightmare Fuel / Resonance Days

As a moments subpage, ALL SPOILERS ARE UNMARKED

In the hereafter of Resonance Days, horror does not end in death.

Resonance Days

• Arriving in the afterlife is an extremely unsettling and disorienting experience. Witches wake up with absolutely no memory of who they are, and if they don't run into anyone soon they are left to figure out the rules of the afterlife on their own, and they are arguably the lucky ones. Magical Girls retain their memories of their old lives - which includes their often very painful deaths - and most understandably think they are still alive and in a witch's labyrinth. And if a witch and a magical girl died in close proximity to each other, they arrive in the afterlife together - meaning that the magical girl has to decide what to do with someone who looks innocent, but has the name and one notable trait of the monster who murdered them, while the witch has to deal with someone they don't know treating them with hostility or outright violence for reasons they can't understand. And if that's not enough, Genocide City and Drop Dead City, where most witches and magical girls first arrive, are massive, bleak concrete cities with not a single inhabitant.
  • Mami's first action upon awakening was gripping her neck. What follows is a very vividly uncomfortable description of what it felt like to have her head bitten off.
  • Charlotte's experience upon first waking up, as recounted by Mami. Imagine waking up completely naked, with no memories at all save for your name, and even less idea where you are. Standing above you is someone you don't know, but who seems nice... right up until you do something that feels completely normal and natural, which causes her to immediately point a gun at your face before shooting your head of. And when that somehow doesn't kill you, she proceeds to hunt you through the building which you have way of navigating, using weapons she can apparently get out of nowhere. And the hunt ends with you hanging by your fingers off a massive drop with her getting ready for the kill. It's no wonder the two of them don't like talking about it.
• Reibey torturing Annabelle and her gang for their failure. Unlike his previous angry outbursts, he remains disturbingly calm throughout the affair, sarcastically talking down to the void walkers like a disappointed mother, while violently throwing them against the walls in ways that would be lethal if not for their immortality. Nikki is so terrified that she is clinging to Arzt for safety, which does nothing to save her (nor does Arzt and Nie's attempt at protecting her), as she is given the same treatment as her sister. Recall that Nikki is mentally a child.
• The Reveal that Reibey has the shades of every previous incarnation of the heroes enslaved to his will. Not only does Reibey have access to extremely intimate knowledge of the heroes from their own previous lives, but the Shades are clearly not happy about their situation, judging by how much the Kyoko shades want to kill the incubators. And according to Reibey, their unlife is permanent, with no hope of salvation.
• Upon realizing that her body is essentially just a shell containing soul vapors, Kyoko takes a syringe and repeatedly stabs herself in the finger, chest, neck, and head. Given her mental state, it at first comes across as serious self-harm. Charlotte and dr. Young seem unperterbed however, stating that this is something all magical girls go through. Mami shot her own head off.
• Kyoko nearly falls asleep to Oktavia's harmonica playing, until she realizes what tune it is; The Symposium Magarum, the melody played by Oktavia's orchestra just before they both died.
• Bertha's Brothel is not a pretty sight, filled with drug dealers, kidnappers, slums, and what's worse. Probably the most frightening sight, however, is a trio of butontikos smoking soul vapours directly from an imprisoned calliope.
• The Madam claims that she was an idealist in life until that life was cut short by a bullet through her head less than a week after she contracted. Given that we know of a magical girl who uses guns and has a grudge against Oriko Mikuni, it's not hard to guess who killed her...
• Leechers, the afterlife's version of drug dealers, slave traders, and organ thiefs, all rolled into one. Ingesting the soul vapors of another person leads to a temporary power boost, and mixed with certain other subtances it works as a drug, which has resulted in the trade of soul vapors being one of the most profitable underground businesses in the hereafter, and Leechers are the ones who harvest it. "Donation" is rarely voluntary, and since no one can die in the afterlife, they can be drained to the point of death again and again. Forever. Annabelle Lee, who is otherwise not exactly a paragon of morality, finds the whole thing abhorrent.
• Etherdale, even aside from the presence of Leechers, is probably the worst possible place for a magical girl or witch to spawn. Since it's very isolated and has two nearby spawn sites, magical girls and witches that arrive tend to show up with no way of getting help or support through the extremely frightening events. This leads to a lot of them going crazy and becoming wild witches, resulting in the formation of a Coven that starts warping the enviroment, making it even more likely that new arrivals go crazy and form a new coven, assuming the existing ones don't get them first. And to make matters even worse, any attempt at establishing civilization there has failed because the negative energies from the spawn sites quickly causes mental deterioration even in sane magical girls and witches. Anyone who spawns in either of the sites is pretty much doomed to going insane.
• The Reveal of Lily's true nature. Annabelle Lee encounters a former wild witch who was captured by the Persephone's Protectorate who's utterly terrified of the Fairy. When AL asks why, the wild witch explains that the Fairy (aka Lily) has a Compelling Voice that will make those who talk to her do whatever she asks of them, no matter how horrible, and nothing can bring them out of it. And Kyoko, Oktavia, Mami, and Charlotte are all currently with Lily.
  "Her magic allows her to control people through her voice. It is very subtle, but very powerful, and increases in potency the longer she talks to you. If she says hello, you like her. A short conversation will leave you agreeing with her. A day, and you will feel as if she were the greatest thing that had ever happened to you and that you now owe her an infinite number of favors. And at the end of a week…
  
  At the end of a week, it won't matter anymore," the doll said gravely. "Nothing will matter. She could confess to any lie, and you will go, 'Oh, that explains a lot. Well, I sure you had your reasons.' She could tell you to perform any atrocity, and you will do it, and you will love her for telling you to do it. Every member of the Persephone Protectorate is under her sway. That's why they are so efficient. That's why they are so dangerous. Because of her. The Fairy. Or, to be more accurate…
  
  The Siren."
  • Demmi mentions that the first time they learned about Lily's power, it was when a patrol ran into her in the woods and tried to capture her. All but one of them are now her loyal followers, and the one who got away did so by cutting off her ears.
  • After just a week, Lily's influence is strong enough to convince the extremely stubborn Kyoko into giving herself up to the void walkers, a fate that she has so far done everything in her power to avoid. This is seen from Kyoko's perspective, and there is still some small part of her that realizes that something is very wrong and is screaming at herself and anyone else to realize it. To no avail, as she obediently does whatever Lily asks of her.
  • At the climax of the arc, Lily is able to bring 1,275 soldiers to bear against the Etherdale wayhouse, all of whom are influenced by her voice.
  • The trouble with Lily doesn't stop with her death, as the survivors now have to deal with absolute pandemonium as the information about all her dirty dealings were leaked to the public by a bitter former victim of her; She was working with tons of different territories, had bribed top politicians and companies, and those territories are now in riots over the leaked information. Janelle and Demmi are notably close to exhaustion trying to just get help while every available government is in shambles trying to recover.
• About midway through the Etherdale arc, Lily mentions that the swamps are home to "horribly mutated crocodiles". While this is played for laughs when its first mentioned, it turns out to be very real, as Mami's squad are attacked by a massive beast with four eyes and covered in cancerous growths.
• Lily's death, while absolutely deserving, is a rather horrifying affair. In the dark ruins of the Wayhouse, she's attacked by Hungry, who savages her until she just barely manages to throw her off. At which point she's pricked from behind by Arzt's syringe hand, which injects her with the compound used to counter her voice. The compound gives her a head-splitting headache and paraluzes her entire body, meaning that Arzt has all the time in the world to sadistically gloat over having her at her mercy. Because Lily's ears were torn off earlier, Arzt's voice slowly turns from her normal smooth tone to a distorted, practically demonic sound as she turns Lily's paralyzed body around so she can see her, sits down on top of her, and brandishes her syringe hand filled with red liquid, all with a sadistic smile on her face.
  "Now," the voice purred, "how WOULD you like TO SAMPLE one of my ORIGINAL VINTAGES?"
• Early on, Charlotte explains to Kyoko the consequences of using the wrong name for witches, that the longer someone keeps refering to them by their old names the more uncomfortable they will get, going from mild annoyance, to genuine anger, paranoia, and eventual insanity. Kyoko resolves to avoid calling Oktavia Sayaka, but still prefers to use nicknames for her. When she slips up in Marsters, however, Oktavia makes it clear that this is not much better and goes on a furious rant accusing Kyoko of only seeing her as a poor copy of Sayaka, implying that she is getting a lot closer to that insanity than she had been letting on.
• Annabelle Lee goes on a rant to Mami about why she joined the Void Walkers, and it does not paint the afterlife in a pretty light. According to her, ending up a civilized and nice place like Freehaven happens to just one fourth of girl in the afterlife, the rest spawn in areas with leechers, wild witches, dangerous wildlife, or dockengauts. And even if you do get lucky, it's not gonna last because humans aren't meant to live forever. Eventually, a happy life is gonna lose its appeal, and sooner or later anything you do to pass the time will get old. Less than seven percent of girls in the afterlife make it through two centuries without joining Oblivion, and less than a percent of a percent make it to a third. It's no wonder the Void Walkers is such a powerful faction.
• Chapter 27 gives a lovely look at what a decapitated person looks like mid-regeneration, and it is not pretty even before the eyes regrow before the eyelids.
  In place of a head, it just had a pink, fleshy mass that heaved in and out like a paper bag filled with maggots. Lying next to it was another sickening lump, this one in the process of melting away like butter on a skillet. However, she could still make out the dissolving traces of green eyes, lips, a nose, and what was probably its hair, the latter of which had sort of liquefied into a green puddle that formed a halo around the repulsive thing.
• The Monsterland arc gives a lot of focus to the Dockengauts, long established as The Dreaded of the afterlife. And there is a very good reason for it!
  • After Kyoko falls into a Dockengaut lair, which is assumed by everyone in the setting to be a Fate Worse than Death with no escape, we learn what Dockengauts truly are; They are hive minds of spiders who crawl over each other to form a body, each "spider" having too many legs with razor-sharp barbs, "antennae" that are actually stingers, and a mouth filled with needle-like teeth. The females only have four legs, but are so large that Kyoko initially mistakes their legs for worms. And each solitary spider is strong and vicious enough to tear large chunks of flesh out of a body, which Kyoko finds out the hard way when they eat her arm! And if a rapidly-regenerating super-intelligent swarm of man-eating spiders wasn't terrifying enough, there's also the fact that these monsters have also made Incubator contracts, so now they have magical powers on top of everything else. Kyoko barely manages to hold one off (at the cost of her ponytail and arm) long enough to run like hell.
  • If Dockengauts were terrifying physically, their mentality is even worse; They're cannibal sadists who delight in making their victims suffer for as long as possible, before letting them regenerate to start the process all over. And since they're so hard to kill or even harm, once someone has been taken by Dockengauts, that's it. No one in the afterlife is willing to go into Dockengaut tunnels to rescue them, and they will be so broken emotionally and physically that they have no hope of escaping on their own. When Kyoko tries to rescue a "meat-slave" she finds while running through the tunnels, she is rewarded by being attacked by the Dockengaut that was in the process of eating the girl from the inside out.
  • At the end of the arc, when Kyoko and Charlotte have fought themselves to near death against a pack of Valks, two Dockengauts reveal that they have been watching them the whole time, eat the two valks within seconds (whereas it took Charlotte and Kyoko everything they had just to kill one of them), and make it clear that they intend on keeping the two girls as meat-slaves forever.
• The other fauna of the Dockengaut homeworld is not much better;
  • Within minutes of arriving, the family are attacked by the unholy spawn of octopodes, spiders, and hermit crabs, disguised as regular rocks, one of which was so large it was disguised as a cliffside.
  • The Cantavier is some kind of giant worm with a body somewhat reminiscent of a cactus, rising out of the roof of its cave lair in segments with similarily segmented arms across its body. It catches prey in sticky bubbles that are nigh impossible to break out of, even with a Magical Girl's strength, and leave the conscious until it picks them up like refridgerated leftovers and eats them alive.
  • Valks are the step below Dockengauts in the food chain, and it's easy to see why; Space-raptors with blood and spit so toxic that it can shut down a Magical Girl's Healing Factor for days, intelligent enough to herd its prey into traps, and vengeful enough that if you kill just one of them in self-defense, the rest of its pack will hunt you down with no break or pause until you are dead and eaten. Charlotte and Kyoko spend one of the longest chapters in the fic just running like hell away from a pack of them, and by the end they don't even win, ending up broken and wounded at the bottom of a cliff with the last two valks ready to eat them.
• Mephisto, the Ideal Witch of Dreams. A Physical God with unlimited power over dreams, who can torment you forever with your worst nightmares with the ultimate goal of eating your soul. When you've fallen into her trap, there is no escape. She can't be fought, she can't be argued with, she will eat your soul, the horrible nightmares are just her way of amusing herself. The best you can hope for is that she'll put you in a Lotus-Eater Machine instead of leaving you conscious while she agonizingly digests your soul over the course of centuries.
• Despite the group winning against Mephisto in the end, there is a massive catch. The epilogue of Restless has the Ideal Witches reveals that one member of the group made a deal with Mephisto, meaning the psychotic witch still has some grasp of control over them. And Mephisto's defeat made it very clear that she was more than a little frustrated at her defeat. The nightmare is far from over. If anything.....it might have just begun.
• Oblivion up until now has been mostly a comedically tragic figure, seeing how she still acts like a little girl while being the God Empress of The Empire. Then we get a reminder of why giving a preteen child ultimate power is a bad idea, as despite having the power to free all the people suffering in the dungeons, she does nothing because she thinks it's cool.

Ghosts of Christmas Past

• We get to see what it looks like from the point of view of the afterlife whenever Homura resets the timeloop. Blank, white spots appear in the sky with no warning. As they start spreading like cracks across the entire world, people try desperately to run away, but there is nothing that can be done, and they are all consumed by the nothingness in seconds. And worst of all, no one knows what it is or what causes it, nor is there time to find out.

Walpurgis Nights

• The origins of Witches in the afterlife manages to be even more disturbing than the original version. On top of being naked and without any memories, things have gone from being merely representative to being outright torturous.
  • Gretchen and Homulilly were fused to a massive clock.
  • Ophelia was crucified, impaled with her own spear and left in a church filled with creepy dummies, several of whom are hanging from ropes.
  • Oktavia was having her hands broken while impaled with her own spear.
  • Candeloro was trapped in a car wreck while another car was constantly pulled back up before dropping on her, crushing her entire body while using her rifle to stab her.
  • Charlotte was restrained in a hospital bed while being force fed sweets, before being set on fire.
• We get to see the implementation of a drug smuggling operation, followed by an attempted mass abduction and mind manipulation scheme, through the eyes of Gretchen and Homulilly as their own insecurities and curiosities, along with that of their classmates, are used against them. It's only by the sheerest of luck that the entire thing didn't end in a massive tragedy for everyone involved.