Inside Out reImagined

Dreams Not Meant to Be

Bing Bong was all too ready to march into nowhere, based on nothing but a vague promise of helping Sadness fix her comms tablet, before getting her job back for her. In fact, he didn't even question anything about it until he realized that the edgy emotion was staying in one place.

"Huh? Aren't you going with me?" he asked.

"Maybe if we knew which direction to head..." Sadness responded.

"What do you mean, which direction? The direction that will help you with everything!"

"Yeah, that's probably not on the map..."

"Map? We don't... actually, we probably do need a map." With this realization, Bing Bong headed back towards Sadness, before the two took for the train station they had just left.

Unless your name was Joy and you could take to the skies just by the sheer power of Imagination, you didn't really have a layout of the mind in front of you. Nor did you have a sense of direction: it was either day everywhere in the mind (while Riley was awake) or night everywhere in the mind (while Riley was asleep). Besides Headquarters, the only other landmark in the sky, that could perhaps help you navigate, was the Consciousness Grid.

That being said, the new urban aesthetic of Goofball Island, that Sadness happened to bring with herself, did end up creating a whole train station — and a train station was nothing without a map.

A map and schedule telling where the Train of Thought started and stopped, if one existed, would be the most peculiar thing to happen to any thought form, and if it were to be deliberately created, would, just like taking to the skies, require the sort of Imagination that Sadness just didn't have control over. However, a rough, even stylized map would be better than nothing.

With a plan of action set, Bing Bong and Sadness looked through the window on the train station door, just to check that there was no longer a commotion caused by nothing than "emotion", and headed in.

Surely enough, even at the vestibule, they were greeted with a grand map, from floor to about six feet of height, of the portion of Riley's mind surrounding Headquarters. That much, perhaps, was good news.

That being said, reading the map, to any extent, was going to be extremely difficult. This task befell Sadness; Bing Bong was not very good at understanding abstract symbols, and had no experience with words, at all.

For one, the map took extreme liberties with the geography, almost as if it tried to be more convoluted than the mind itself, and one could not just draw parallels between it and the Consciousness Grid. Of course, this was nothing out of the ordinary if the map was a transport map, common throughout America as well as China, only meant to highlight the connections rather than the geography — but that sort of advantage got nullified when there was only one major vehicle to speak of in the mind.

Needless to say, it took a lot of scanning and squinting, even considering her newfound "normal" vision, for Sadness to find the location of the "you are here" marker pointing to the Goofball Island train station.

But that was another thing: the writing by the "you are here" marker did not simply say that this was the Goofball Island train station. Rather, it was marked as something about an "area mishap sphere", coupled with something that could potentially fool an absent-minded passer-by into believing it was Chinese, but wasn't.

"Whoa, what's this strange new writing? Has Riley finally learned basic writing, only to be presented with writing, version 2? Even version 1 is too much for me, I tell ya." Bing Bong suddenly spoke, breaking Sadness's silent contemplation.