Inside Out reImagined

Loose Ends, Tied Up

Joy couldn't believe what scheme she was almost pulled into.

Of course she realized that the sudden return of an imaginary friend from long ago, who she would be elated to meet, had to come with strings attached — not even Joy was naive enough to believe otherwise. Yet, the sorts of strings — ones that could potentially slice through her leadership in one swift motion — served as one of the rudest possible awakenings, further ruining her mood.

Nevertheless, after she was finally done with that diversion that was almost an insult to Riley, she remembered that she needed to make a call of her own.

It was really easy, actually, and she wondered why the other emotions struggled with a thing as basic as memory independent of Riley's memories in the first place. When she had turned to face Bing Bong and the grand plan to get him to return to Riley's life, she began strongly associating the high chair she had sat on with Console Maintenance — a really easy association to make, since the reason she had pulled it out was precisely because the console started not working on her. Then, she had the whole conversation with Bing Bong in her room, where no one else could hear, and once it was over, she exited her room, looked over Headquarters from high up, noticed the chair, and turned around for the call with Console Maintenance.

The three, it would seem, continued to debate Bully Prime, with her Mental Image continuing to take up prime Consciousness Screen real estate, and interpretations of her being so far away from any real person, let alone the actual Skull Shirt Girl, that she might as well have become a different person. Yet, Joy knew she couldn't remove that Mental Image just yet, as it would call their attention to her — not something she wanted when she was still a busy bee working extra-hard to fix both the console and the mind as a whole.

Actually making the call was a bit more tricky. Once she moved to the selection of other devices on the network, she was, of course, greeted with the four other emotions, and momentarily, even thought that she should probably get around to replacing the Sadness icon with Bing Bong, just so that the blue emotion's face and name, coupled with "is calling", wouldn't immediately put her in a bad mood. What was more important, though, was that various essential Mind Workers, like the heads of Console Maintenance and Dream Theatrical Studios, were tucked away in a hard-to-find menu, which Joy almost felt like learning the existence of for the first time.

Oh, well. She didn't say that her memory was perfect, or even comparable to a human's. She just meant that she had an edge over the other emotions.

With all that said, the only task remaining for Joy was to pick Console Maintenance to place the call, and then wait until the department's head picked up.

As with the emotions and their comms tablets, the Mind Workers also had phones with built-in cameras, so Joy could actually see who picked up, in addition to hearing them. The only real difference was that none of the Mind Worker phones had the capability to call emotions — which was a real boon, since if the emotions had to deal with fans from all over the globular mind, they wouldn't have any more time to guide Riley.

And, incidentally, it was also another reminder why the idea of Bing Bong reaching out to her, all by himself, was just too good to be true.

In this case, the Mind Worker picking up was Fritz, as indicated by the name tag on his hard hat. He was broadly teal, with some slight masculine features, and as with most Mind Workers — anyone who wasn't a Figment and never came in line of the Dream Theatrical Studios camera, really — nudity was the norm, not the exception, for him, with the only thing he was wearing, besides his hard hat, being his tool belt.

"G'day, Console Maintenance. How can I help you?" Fritz spoke, rather professionally, but nevertheless with a noticeable Southern accent.

It was perhaps for the best that Joy also put on a strictly professional tone for him, despite others she had talked to so far today making her go through the entire palette of feelings, even rivalling Riley herself. "Alright, this is Joy from Headquarters and... the console seems to be broken, but for me only... can you come to Headquarters to check it out, as soon as possible?"