Nightmare Fuel / Dust and Echoes

• The Prologue opens in media res, as the Covenant is attacking Remnant — and it quickly degenerates in a three-way melee between the aliens, the Huntsmen and the Grimm.
  • The Covenant are freaked by the Grimm. It says everything you need to know about the "Shadow Beasts".
  • And it ominously ends on Salem about to address the Prophets of Truth, Mercy and Regret as an equal.
• Chapter 2 opens with a Grimm attack — in the point-of-view of a victim, who desperately tries to run to safety only to fail and be mangled by a Beowolf.
• Naturally curious about this new world, the UNSC Everest sends several scouting teams to explore. They're experienced soldiers...and completely unprepared to handle the Grimm. Half of the teams never make it back to the ship.
  • The teams also are placed before a Sadistic Choice: see, they want to stay incognito as long as the command doesn't officially contact Remnant, but several human settlements are about to be ravaged by the Grimm and there's no one able to help except for the Terran soldiers. Only one team chooses to not intervene, and their officer is shown to be haunted by her decision.
• The subtle, pervasive, uncanniness of Remnant being so similar to Earth. Which leads to the greatest question: why is that so? Did someone take humans from one world to transplant them on another? Was it the first time? And for what reasons?
• Haki Felt. Once a promising student at Haven Academy, her sanity slowly degraded from being exposed to raw Lightning Dust — suffering shock after shock that ruined her brain until she assaulted and killed her team and teachers in a fit of dementia. She managed to run away and entered Salem's service, whom she worships as a goddess and decides to serve by attacking the SPARTAN Blue Team. And she almost wins.
  • The reason why is is her Semblance, Murder the Time: it allows her to rewind time in order to take her opponent offguard, as suddenly your fatal blow has been invalidated and you've left yourself open to her counterattack.
• The SPARTAN supersoldiers come off as pretty unnerving to a Remnantian, as they act much more like robots than people.
• The brief mention of the Cult of the Ash Bride makes clear that some people know about Salem and worship her in order to be spared by the Grimm's ravages or commit various atrocities to prove their religious devotion to her.
• No matter how much they want to be left out from the war, Remnant's people will have to participate as the Covenant won't hesitate to glass their homeworld merely because they're a subspecies of mankind and as such guilty of existing.
  • Sienna Khan feebly tries to claim faunus and humans aren't really the same, only to be answered back that the Covenant won't care about the slight distinction: they will only see humans with extra bits and kill everyone.
• Qrow's anxiety as he's boarding a shuttle and desperately struggles to rein his misfortune-inducing Semblance in, fearing to cause an accident. If you're familiar with the Columbia space shuttle disaster, you know that even the tiniest mishap can cause the destruction of a space vessel with her entire crew.
  • After being put in a cryopod, an engineer notes this particular pod had a lot of malfunctions. Word of God assures it was mere annoyance, but what if the pod had been damaged to the point it would have caused grave injury to Qrow?
• Exploring Eridanus II, the nearest glassed human colony from Remnant. The sheer Scenery Gorn and creeping realisation the entire planet is a mass grave... it's haunting.
  • After happening on a destroyed house, Qrow cannot help but imagine Patch Island suffering the same fate.
• Seeing the fate of Eridanus II, a world long since glassed and dead, is very different from seeing it first hand. Thus is the fate of Vyraj, seeing the overwhelming power of the Covenant lay waste to the Inner Colony and most of the population. And everything they tried to do on Vyraj meant nothing in the long run, and being unable to do anything to save the colony.
• Out of a population of roughly three hundred million people, it's estimated less than a hundred thousand, at most, was able to escape Vyraj. And that number is far more likely to be much lower.
• On the planet Peponi the Remnantians and the UNSC discover a Forerunner Relic called the Cartographer which is a Star Map that shows the location of other Forerunner Relics in the sector. Much to the Remnantians horror the device contains the location of Remnant as well as multiple colonies. If the Covenant get their hands on it they will know where to find Remnant and considering Remnant has multiple Relics they'll have every reason to go there.

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