Nightmare Fuel / The Three Investigators

Per wiki policy, Spoilers Off applies here and all spoilers are unmarked. You Have Been Warned.

---

General

• The danger that the three boys get into gets progressively more dangerous with each book. While the first few perpetrators of the early series are much more harmless, later perpetrators are frequently armed with guns. The boys are also often taken hostage and knocked unconscious. This violence only ramps up in Crimebusters and beyond.
  • This is scary not only for the Investigators, but for their parents and guardians too. There are times where the boys will fail to return home leading to a frantic scramble by the adults to find their missing kids. It's unclear whether or not the Investigators tell their parents the extent of their adventures, but they probably wouldn't be too happy to find out how often their boys get hurt, kidnapped, taken hostage, or held at gunpoint. By the Modern Era, the investigators have survived two plane crashes, drownings, several encounters by dangerous wild animals, almost run down by the military on an island, gun shots (one of them even had gotten grazed by a bullet), another one of them very briefly had a cardiorespiratory death via electrocution, and so many more dangerous occasions it would be pointless to even count. It's really no wonder their parents want to discourage them from their detective work at all costs.
  Bob: You know what [my dad] thinks of our detective work.
  Jupiter: Probably the same as Aunt Mathilda and Uncle Titus.
  Pete: Or my parents. I think sometimes they'd rather I deal drugs in the schoolyard than hang out with Jupiter Jones, the boy who keeps their beloved son in trouble.

Original Release

• It may have only been special effects in the end, but the various ghostly manifestations in Terror Castle in the very first book are genuinely terrifying, especially the hanged woman’s ghost in a mirror—which we actually get an ILLUSTRATION of.◊
• There is something unnerving about Mr. Won in The Mystery of the Green Ghost. An old Chinese man who seems to believe that the Ghost Pearls can extend his life, straight up swallowing one right in front of Pete, Bob, and Chang. He also seemed fully willing to kill all three boys for those pearls.
• The Mystery of Monster Mountain has an actual double take over Anna Schmidt's life. She looked so alike that her cousins, Hans and Konrad, thought she was the real thing. The real Anna had been attacked and locked into a hermit's cabin in the woods for seven days before she was found.
  • Also, the apparent fact that Bigfoot is real.
• In the story of Death Trap Mine, Allie and the investigators find a genuine dead body in the mine when they snoop around for the first time. Cops are called and yeah, it was a real corpse.
  • Later on in the story, Allie and Pete are taken hostage by the robbers and driven away, later abandoned in the desert when their car breaks down.
• During The Mystery of the Headless Horse the kids are trapped underground by a mudslide and have to spend the night trying to dig themselves out. Turns out their guardian / parents had been searching for them all night, terrified that something might have happened to them.
• In The Mystery of the Magic Circle, Pete gets ambushed by an unknown assailant from behind while trying to call for help. He is knocked unconscious and then shoved into an old car rusting in a wrecking yard and left to bake alive in the hot sun. Pete would have died of heat stroke if suffocating didn't get him first. When Jupiter and co. confront the perpetrators, Jefferson Long, the man who attacked Pete, had fully intended to let a kid die a slow and painful death. He was genuinely shocked to see Pete was even still alive. And all of this was just to get a little revenge on Madeline Bainbridge for her movies taking money and attention away from his "crime fighting" reporting.
  • Earlier in the story, the boys escape an actual burning building and had to be rescued by firemen.
• In The Mystery of the Two-Toed Pigeon, Pete is forced to be the distraction since Bob and Jupe are too recognizable. He poses as a bird activist selling balloons and is forced to stand his ground as the suspect Kyoto, a man who does not speak English, frustratingly attacks his balloons with a knife. Pete is rightly terrified, but manages to hold his ground and maintain cover until Jupiter makes the switch between the birds, though he is understandably shaken afterwards. The experience is so intense that Jupe feels terrible for putting Pete through a harrowing experience.

Crimebusters

Book #1- 11

#3 Rough Stuff

• At the start of the story, in what was supposed to be a fun vacation, turns into a fight for survival as the Investigators and Bob's father, Mr. Andrews, survive a plane crash. And they have little to no food, water, and supplies to go around. Not only that, but they're being hunted down by some shady individuals with little to no qualms about shooting and killing teenagers.
• When Jupe, Bob, and Pete try to head to civilization using a borrowed jeep from a nearby tribe, it's revealed that someone had cut the breaks. It's only thanks to Pete's miraculous driving skills that they managed to crash without real harm or injury.

#4 Funny Business

• While investigating the next room, Pete is attacked by an unknown assailant and is shoved off the balcony of the hotel. Thankfully, the pool was right underneath the balcony and Pete managed to get out of the fall unscathed (just a little wet). If he had been just slightly off the mark... well. It's a good thing he wasn't.

#5 An Ear for Trouble

• Dusty Rice straight up dies at the end of the story. Greed drives him to search for Pancho Villa's treasure and he gets caught in the subsequent volcanic explosion. The Investigators and the others can only watch in horror as they hear his dying screams as is consumed by lava
  • To add weight to this, Dusty is the only character ever to die during the story (usually people die offscreen or before the story even starts).

German Extended Release

Books

Book # 56 - 71 (Henkel-Waidhofer Era)

#67 Der Schatz im Bergsee (The Treasure of the Mountain Lake)

• This is now the second time the three boys have survived a plane crash. But this time, it seems as though their situation is much worse: their pilot is completely incapacitated and Pete is nowhere to be seen. In fact, most of the front seats (including Pete's) had been ripped from the plane during landing, leaving the very real possibility that Pete was thrown from the plane when it crashed, especially since it wasn't clear if he had stayed in his seat or not.
  • The fact that Pete was instead found in the woods nearby instead of near the crash site seems to supports this. The novel implies that he and the front seats had been ripped from the plane and Pete was thrown into a tree. Upon gaining consciousnesses, Pete likely had wandered around while he was both panicking and suffering from shock. Its honestly a miracle that Pete survived with only just shock.
  • Bob figures out that they had been unconscious for at least three hours by the time they woke up. Any longer, both Jerzy and Pete might have died from their respective injuries.
• As if that isn't any worse, some divers randomly show up and tie up Bob, not interested in helping a teenager who survived a plane crash at all.

#68 Späte Rache (Late Revenge)

• The parents' worst fear has been realized, Pete gets kidnapped after a late night date at a club with Kelly.
  • In the radio play, Pete's kidnapping is just short of what a horror movie would sound like. The night starts simple enough, with Pete and Kelly parting ways after a late night date at the disco's, but when Pete gets into the car he gets held by gunpoint by someone in the backseat. The mysterious man forces Pete to drive into the woods and then turn off the lights of his car. Pete initially refuses, but the man forces his hand. As he flicks off the lights, you can hear Pete hyperventilating from the panic, muttering a string of no's before he lets out a terrified scream. Then, the scene just ends. Unlike the book, we don't really check in with Pete until the end, leaving us wondering what exactly happened to him.
• Aunt Mathilda falls off a ladder and breaks her shoulder, a deadly accident for older people. Thankfully, she is able to make a full recovery.
• The creepy letter that Jupiter receives later on, telling him no uncertain words that while they might not wish Pete's death, the kidnapper's full intention is nothing more than just to make Peter suffer.
  • Pete's accommodations in his dingy dark room proves this. He is in a dark empty room with barely any light, the only furnishings being a metal bed. He is also fed prison-like food. Since his watch had been taken away, he can't even tell what time of day it is and quickly loses track by the second day. Its unclear how long Brady would have kept Pete in there, but considering the fact that he believed he was falsely imprisoned for eight months, its only fair to assume that Pete's kidnapping would have been at least that long, or even indefinite.
  • Jupiter and Bob both theorized that the kidnapper likely had taken Peter at random because he was just easier to grab hold of (especially since he had been at the club late at night several days in a row). They could have just as likely grabbed Jupiter or Bob (more likely Jupiter as Bob was not involved in the case). It's hard not too wonder what would have happened if the roles had been reversed, as Peter only was able to escape by not only outsmarting, but overpowering his captor, something both Jupe and Bob are lacking.
• In the end, Pete has been gone for about four days days: he spent roughly three days imprisoned (he freed himself towards the end of the third day) and spent one entire day of trekking through the woods to get home. By the end, he had actually lost weight due to whole ordeal and eating so poorly.

Book # 72 - 119 (Triumvirate Era)

#76 Stimmen aus dem Nichts (Voices from Beyond)

• In this case, the elderly Abigail Holligan is tormented by the disembodied voice of her sister Metzla, who died some time ago from a brain tumor and now seems to be threatening her from beyond the grave. While the Investigators quickly figure out that it's not a real haunting, the truth turns out to be far more disturbing: psychologist Dr. Clarissa Franklin, who is set to inherit a large sum of money from Mrs. Holligan, has been secretly recording Metzla's delirious rants as she lay dying in order to literally scare Mrs. Holligan to death, all because she didn't want to wait for the old woman to die of natural causes. It's an unprecedented display of greed and cruelty that not only cemented Franklin as one of the series' most ruthless antagonists, but showed that this era was going to be much darker than the original books.
• When Jupiter and Peter are caught trying to find incriminating evidence in Dr. Franklin's apartment, she orders her fiancé to shoot them — and he actually does it. Jupe's life is saved only because the bullet was stopped by a recording device he was carrying in his breast pocket. In the audio adaptation, the scene is made even more harrowing by Peter's scream as Jupe is gunned down before his eyes, as well as the ice-cold delivery of Franklin's preceding lines:
  Dr. Franklin: Jack, shoot them.
  Peter: You're Insane!
  Dr. Franklin: We'd be insane to let you go. I'm sorry, but your lives aren't worth 20 million dollars.
  Jupiter: Sir ... listen ... please be reasonable!
  Mr. Cliffwater: Shut up!
  Dr. Franklin: Listen to them begging for their lives like dogs! Shoot them.
  *BANG*

#81 Meuterei auf hoher See (Mutiny on the High Seas)

• Pete getting pushed overboard and nearly was left behind and lost at sea. If Evan didn't "spot" him, he would have had a slow and agonizing death by exhaustion and then drowning in complete darkness.
  • And the reason why Pete couldn't sleep in the first place is because Jupe teased him about the real danger of being trapped in a submarine so far underwater, something which Jupiter gets to experience in full force later on.

#83 Die Karten des Bösen (Cards of Evil)

• The Investigators discovering Mrs. Summer's cat, 'Come in', hanging from a wire in a tree by its neck, dead. Jupe deduces that the poor cat had likely been poisoned prior to being strung up due to no injuries. He somehow gets better?
  • The truth to this is much more horrifying than the presented story. Mrs. Summers and the Professor had intentionally drugged the cat to make the poor thing appear dead to the Investigators and strung the cat up by the wire. That was the reason why the tomcat was so terrified of them. The worst part is that it isn't certain what happened to Come in after the end of the story.

#93 Das schwarze Monster (The Black Monster)

• Pete getting supposedly kidnapped in the beginning of the novel. It turns out to be Jupiter and Bob playing a prank on him for his birthday, but it does seem poor in taste considering that Pete had been kidnapped for at least four days in one of the previous books.
• In the finale, Pete and Bob getting attacked by Hannibal the gorilla while at the headquarters at the junkyard and barely managing to escape with their lives.
  • Also horrifying enough, Carter using addictive drugs as a reward for Hannibal so he could go steal jewelry. The withdrawal symptoms made him aggressive, causing it to escape from the circus in attempt to steal the necklace Pete had gotten from the fortune teller on his birthday.

#95 Insektenstachel (Insect Sting)

• Mrs. Hazelwood's nightmares. One has her dream of spiders crawling into her mouth looking for something to eat and another has locusts eating the hair off her head.
  • And her Insectophobia just didn't come from nowhere. She had been swarmed by wasps when she was a child and was terrified ever since. It doesn't help that her family didn't exactly help her psychologically afterwards, saying that she was 'faking it' for attention.

#99 Das Haxenhandy (The Witchphone)

• What happened to Jeremy: he was kidnapped by the witch, who shoved him in a metal cage and then tormented him while he was inside. Keep in mind that Jeremy is literally a child. He spent the whole night inside that cage and only had been found the next day by a couple of joggers. He's unfortunately not the only victim, at least three other children besides Jeremy had been captured and tormented in this manner.
  • Pete gets a taste of this when he was captured by the witch himself and tormented in the same manner, locked in a cage in the middle of the woods. The only reason he was able to escape is because the witch forgot to take Peter's lockpicks away from him.

#100 Toteninsel (Dead Island)

• Pete is (unknowingly) assaulted by Skinny, who makes him take the fall for his consequences. Skinny leaves Pete on a boat where no one seems to trust each other, terrified that he may be sniffed out and die for over a week. Poor Pete has no way to escape and Jupe and Bob are helpless to do anything to help him.
• The revelation that Bob has been hypnotized by someone who was supposed to meet up with Skinny and that both he and Jupe were tricked onto the island using Pete.
• Olin tricking everyone out of the base by pretending he had a bomb. When Bob regains memories from his hypnotism and freezes in the escape, Pete and Jupe are horrified. Turns out the bomb was a dud, but holy moly that was intense.
• Jupe, Bob, and Pete explore the military base and finds out that it was originally a tomb for the deceased that the military had desecrated. They hid their missles in the coffins and threw out all the human remains into huge piles. The thing is, they aren't just bones, they're mummies. By the time the Investigators find the cave, a dangerous mold had grown because the preserved bodies were rotting.
• After discovering that Olin was part of the CIA, Jupe realizes that the Plan B of operation involved sending a bunch of trained military soldiers to kill everyone who had discovered the truth. Cue a desperate scramble to escape, using every trick in the book to make sure they keep out of side and are able to make it to the airport on time. Even after they escape, it becomes clear that the government would likely be waiting for them when they return. If Jupiter hadn't gotten Jelena to get the press involved and reveal the information, everyone would have been in some serious trouble.

#109 Die Höhle des Grauens (The Cave of Horror

• The reveal that Blackeye the Mynah Bird wasn't just repeating scary quotes, but that he was repeating Walt's words when Mr. Anderson threatened to kill him.
  Blackeye: I'm scared! Go away or I'll shoot you!

Book #120+ (Modern Era)

#120 Spur in Nichts (Evil Games)

• At the beginning of the story, both Jupiter and Pete are kidnapped and locked in cold, dark rooms with no memory of how they even got there, Saws style.
  • Bob returns from a trip from Idaho to find his two best friends gone. He searches for them, only to find out that they've been missing since yesterday and failed to return home. Their parents / guardians are understandably distraught.
  • The reason Jupiter and Pete got trapped like this in the first place is that they had seen something Thorndike was trying to hide. They got caught and he forced them to drink a forgetful potion to make them forget the last twenty four hours. Then he sticks the two teenagers into a horror movie setup without telling them. You can really sense the terror both Jupiter and Pete had to go through thinking it had all been real.
  • Bit of a mix of Fridge Horror and Fridge Sadness, this is not the first time Peter has gotten kidnapped and woken up in a dark room with no idea where he is.
• Pete slicing his arm open after trying to climb the elevator shaft. He gets startled by the movement of the lift (which had been sabotaged by Leah) and ends up losing his grip. Pete's arm gets caught on the loose wires, which slices a four inch gash on his right arm, which starts bleeding pretty badly. Turns out it isn't too bad, but Pete had to suffer quite a bit before it gets treated, the blood had already stopped by the time he got to the doctor's. In later media, it's revealed that Pete's injury had actually scarred.
  • In the radio play, Pete gets his arm sliced open trying to open the roll-up door instead when the pipe rebounded onto his arm when he finally opens it. A less flashy way of getting the injury, but in this version, Pete almost immediately collapses right after it happens and acts as if he is in a lot more pain.
• At the end of the story, like those people before them, Jupe and Pete never get the memories of those twenty-four hours back and it is unlikely they ever will.

#134 Der tote Mönch (The Dead Monk)

• While attempting to catch the Dead Monk, Peter falls down an old trash chute and just barely manages to hang on; quite literally too, he was just hanging onto a ledge with three fingers (good thing Pete has the muscle to hold on honestly). Bob then makes an almost terrifying decision to hang over the ledge with Jupiter holding his legs in an effort to reach Peter before he falls to his death. When they finally bring him up, the three are so stunned and horrified by the whole incident, it takes them at least five minutes to regain their bearings to chase after the perpetrator.
  "Help! Help!" A chill of terror ran down their spines. They had never heard Peter scream like that before.
  • Peter does almost fall, the ledge he hangs on breaks and Bob just barely catches him.
  Suddenly there was a crunch! The rock Peter was holding to! It moved, it was giving away!
  "Jupe, come on!" Bob yelled. "I can't take it anymore!"
  "Help! Help me!" Then the stone broke free of the wall and Peter fell into the darkness. But at the very last second, Bob grabbed Peter's hand. Finger clawed at fingers, muscles tensing to the breaking point.
  • As if that isn't enough, the Dead Monk shows up and threatens to kick Jupiter, the one holding them all up, down the abyss too. But then he suddenly runs away, thank god too, because gives Jupiter a chance to finally get some leverage to pull them all up.
  • Apparently, at some point during the final stretch, Peter was considering letting go because he didn't want his friends to fall with him, even if it meant falling himself which is a mix of horrifying and heartwarming at the same time.

#146 Der Biss der Bestie (Bite of the Beast)

• Pete getting so worked up by adrenaline that he runs a train crossing and ends up dangerously speeding to keep up with the car. It's only afterwards that he realizes how foolish he was and that he could have easily have lost his license at best, or gotten into a horrific car crash at worst.
• The confrontation with the hyena in the museum. Pete manages to barricade him, the kids, and the dog in the bathroom, but the animal ends up breaking in. Pete manages to get the kids through the window and unwilling to leave the dog behind, ends up facing the hyena in a small altercation. He manages to tranquilize it with the dart they had collected as evidence earlier and narrowly gets his foot chomped by it, losing his shoe in the process.

#152 Skateboardfieber (Skateboard Fever)

• Pete was literally almost gunned down by a group of mysterious men. He barely escapes into the Jones' Scrapyard having dodged a bunch of bullets. Once the adrenaline cools off, he is rightfully terrified and panicked about what had just happened.
  • Even scarier when you realize that it was likely the secret service people who almost killed him. And Pete was completely innocent too, if that did come light, it wouldn't be a far stretch for the government to cover up his death.
• The fact that the two men from the secret service were fully willing to beat Peter, a sixteen year old, up to get the information they wanted. Since Pete had no idea what they wanted to know, how long would they have tortured Pete before they realized he genuinely didn't know anything? They even talk about lying to the judge later to explain the injuries Pete would have sustained in the interrogation, claiming that no one would believe Pete's testimony if he did tell them what they did. Thankfully, Pete was able to escape before they ever did. It's crazy to think that if Peter didn't illegally escape from government custody, he would been in a world of hurt.
  • While they didn't manage to torture Peter in this manner, they did intimidate and interrogate him about information he just didn't know about and forcing him to stand in a tiring and painful way in order to get him to spit things out. Peter had to lie to them by pretending he knew something to get them to stop.

#153 Botschaft aus der Unterwelt (Message from the Underworld)

• Somehow, 'Professor Moriarty' managed to create a scheme where Uncle Titus was wrongly arrested for harboring stolen goods.
• Sometime in the story, Jupe realizes that their headquarters must've been bugged, so they search and find four bugs hidden throughout their hideout. When their adversary realizes they had found the bugs, Pete is attacked and supposedly bugged, but he can't find any evidence of it. Later, after talking with Lester Price, he realizes that Pete's bug was implanted inside him. After calling him to the headquarters the next day, Jupe finds a transmitter had been embedded into Pete's shoulder and has to dig around with a tweezer for ten minutes to get it out.
• Mr. Grey proposes a nightmare scenario for Jupe, asking him which of his two friends he would save if he could only save one. Under pressure, he chooses Pete (because he had saved his life several times over), Pete was instead supposed to play chess against one of Mr. Grey's men. Jupe is then asked to stand on a rickety old bridge along with Jack (Mr. Grey's stablehand), where it would begin to collapse depending on the outcome of the game.
  • Jupe and Mr. Grey accidentally fall off the waterfall when the police arrive, much to the horror of both Pete and Bob. Thankfully he manages to survive.

#154 Der Meister des Todes (The Master of Death)

• Jupiter's sleepwalking episode. Inexplicably, the bravest of the Three Investigators is for some reason suffering from the most fear during truth and dare and during the night (later revealed because Frank spiked his drink with a drug to increase his anxiety). Peter and Bob wake up to find Jupiter randomly standing in the center of the room Italian written on the walls.
• Towards of the ending of the story, Pete technically dies (a cardiorespiratory death). He gets electrocuted in the pool and goes into cardiac arrest. When the other Investigators and Frank pull him out, he has no pulse and he's no longer breathing. It takes Frank doing emergency CPR to bring him back to life.
  Shortly thereafter, [Frank] pressed firmly on Pete's chest with both hands.
  "May I know what's going on, please?" Bob tried again.
  Frank looked up at him for a moment, without stopping what he was doing. "He's not breathing anymore!"
  • The survival rate for cardiac arrest outside hospitals is between 12-24%. So yes, Bob is right: Heavens, that was way too close.
  • In the radio play you can hear Peter's agonized cry as he's electrocuted (in the novel it happened very quickly and Pete was underwater). But in a bit of Fridge Horror, people can't cry out if they're electrocuted with too high a voltage because of muscle spasms. That means the shock wasn't that intense because Peter was able to cry out, but it also means he was shocked for way longer and was suffered consciously the whole time, at least, until his heart stopped. Yikes.
• The creepy coincidence that the "victims" Frank had chosen in attempt to scare the film crew all suffered brushes with death: Zack was electrocuted and had a bookshelf fall on him, Peter went into cardiac arrest coming across live wires in a pool and had to be resuscitated, and Latona had a blank fired on her. Frank had chosen these at random, but by sheer coincidence they all came true. Makes you wonder if Frank is the new master of death...

#176 Geist des Goldgräbers (Ghost of the Golddigger)

• The not great way of how John Dewey died. He had gotten bit by gold fever and started abusing his workers and they got fed up. One day, they stormed his cabin and hung him on a tree until he died. Then nobody bothered to let down his body and is corpse hung there, rotting while birds picked on it and it fell down.
• All encounters with Mr. Sobeck, a huge Nile Crocodile belonging to Miles Kendall. He is notably aggressive and has almost killed both Peter and Bob in their respective encounters.
• Peter finding Miles Kendall's week-old dead body in the freezer in a chest, wearing a bathrobe. Understandably, he screams, but Jupiter has to grab his mouth to stop him from revealing they are snooping around.
  Peter's eyes widened and he opened his mouth to scream. At the last second, Jupiter put his hands over his mouth. Peter screamed anyway, suppressed and almost silent. He fell to his knees in shock. He let go of the lid and it slammed shut, hiding the horrific sight. But even if Peter didn't open the chest a second time, he would never forget what he saw.
  • And Jupiter forcing himself to investigate the dead body despite Peter, who had retreated to the other side of the room, begging him not to open the chest.
  [Jupiter] opened the lid of the chest again. Even the First Investigator was not indifferent to the sight of a dead person. But he fought down his shock and impulse to run away and devoted to the discovery with sober objectivity.
  The dead man was dressed in a moss-green bathrobe covered in with frosting. Ice crystals also glittered in his hair. The eyes were closed. Initials were embroidered on the bathrobe: M.K.
  • Turns out that Miles Kendall had some sort of medical emergency while in the pool and ended up drowning. Barclay ended up finding his dead body. The residents collectively decided to hide his body until they found his will as they didn't want the home they lived in for all their life to go to Kendall's greedy nephew. The best idea they had was to put his body in the freezer until they figured out what to do.

Specials and Live Shows

Der drei Tag (The Three Days)

Im Zeichen der Ritter (In the Sign of the Knights)

• The fact that Jasper had likely died trying to retrieve his bag and perished when he got caught in the nets. Which meant that he was likely burned alive...

Fremder Freund (Strange Friend)

• There's this kind of a weird scene in the beginning of the story where Peter is trying to dry his coke-stained jeans in the bathroom. He takes them off, so he's just standing there with no pants on and this creepy old dude sort of just eyes him up and speaks cryptically to him. It's kinda hard not to think this scene is just has really weird vibes, especially when Peter gets increasingly uncomfortable the more he talks with him.
  Peter: (uncertainly) You mean me?
  Old Man: I don't see anyone else here. The two of us are all alone.
  • Turns out that the old man was actually a friendly girl's uncle and he was just suspicious of Peter because of his niece's fan-crush on Peter, but it doesn't make the scene any less weirder on the first hearing / reading.
• This whole story (and even in the other parallel stories), Peter straight up has a stalker. And this stalker has been following him for months already (since last summer, whenever that is), according to the pictures found in the locker. This guy has been collecting a bunch of Peter's stuff for quite a while and has even broken into his house to leave cake and even steal his clothes. At the end of the story, it's clear that something is not quite right with William and keeps trying to insist that his name really is Peter.
  • The creepy part is that in other parallels of the story, Peter still receives the creepy phone calls with heavy breathing on the other side and William is still seen in every story trying to take pictures of Peter's car. Peter even eats the whole cake that he made in Jupiter's story, thinking his mother made it. Unlike the other stories, which aren't connected personally to the trio, Peter's story is. If you consider any one of the other two parallels stories to be the 'canon' one, Peter would still be continued to be stalked by William by the end of the story. Good thing it's implied that even if the stories don't happen first, they will eventually chain into another.

Phonophobia

• The Reveal that the Colorphonic is an acoustic torture device, not only just to induce sensations like hot and cold, but also emotions like fear, anxiety, pain, and panic. Phonophobia is a song that becomes it's accompanying piece.
  • In order to complete the performance, Yamada hooks Pete up to Colorphonic and straight up torturing him by making him experience all sorts of painful and terrifying sensations to increase his heartrate to make Phonophobia even more deadly. Pete's status as a Synesthete means that he is experience twice the number of horrible and agonizing sensations. Hearing Pete's tortured screams is not fun to listen to at all and his friends can only watch (and suffer) in horror. The worst part is that, in order to incapacitate Yamada, Jupe has to add to Pete's torture by making him even more scared to make the Colorphonic take Yamada out too. It's... probably a really good thing that the Colorphonic ended up completely erasing Pete's memory of the whole case. He might be missing some memories, but it probably would be better not to have any memories of his torture.
• In the book adaption, Pete's time listening to Phonophobia is downright horrific. He becomes absolutely sick, like someone stole all his air, and keeps seeing flashes of green and blood red in his eyes due to the doubled sensations as a Synesthete. He throws up and gets an intense nosebleed, but has to be taken to the hospital. That night he gets haunted by the 'bloody' song, feeling as the song is now inhabiting his bones.
  • The whole concept of 'Phonophobia' is basically weaponized music. Listening causes fear, anxiety, nausea, and if intense enough - possibly even death.