Inside Out reImagined

The Librarians

Of course, there was nothing in the rulebook that said that bottled memories couldn't be drunk — or at least, there probably wouldn't be, if there was a rulebook at all. In fact, Sadness could really see how each color of bottled memory would be an enticing, family-friendly drink: orange juice for Joy, grape juice for Fear and so on.

Even then, instead of being defeated by thirst, she kept thinking about what it meant for a memory to be bottled, and consequently, what taking a sip from one of those bottles could mean.

The reason these were so brightly-colored, while most Mental Notes and even processed memories were pale, was because, in order to make these, a large bulk of Mental Note material had to be distilled into a pure element of Imagination. Therefore, it was easy to understand that while normal memories, like the ones in Piano Field, could already bring her down to her knees, bottled memories were a million times more potent than that.

And so, Sadness thought about the possibility. Feeling even more of herself than she already did would probably be fine, but as for the purple, her best guess was that it would end up amplifying her fears — that neither Joy nor Bing Bong cared about her at all, that every other thought form just wanted to be as far away from her as possible, and so on — and make her behavior completely unpredictable, possibly justifying everything the others thought of her.

It would seem that this sort of negativity was already spiraling before Sadness had even touched a bottled memory, and once it was, she knew that even a sip would send her off the deep end.

What else about bottled memories could Sadness remember? Oh, right: Mind Workers, on their own, would have never gone through the trouble of making so many bottled memories — unless an order for them came directly from Headquarters.

And that was when it started clicking, illuminating everything Sadness had experienced thus far, just like how lightbulbs illuminated the cellar after a single switch was flipped.

Joy wasn't just suppressing her and Fear, the actual emotions working in Headquarters. Whenever any traces of her and Fear's elements of Imagination could be found in the day's Mental Notes anyway, she also ordered for those to be directly extracted, potentially rendering the recall power of the memories useless.

Joy would literally sacrifice Riley's own ability to remember — let alone that of the other emotions — just so Sadness and Fear could figure in Riley's life as little as possible, and deliberately employed the worst way to deal with this sort of overflow.

Well, second worst, right after directly relieving Sadness of duty.

This was too much to take in, even based on Sadness's thoughts alone — and just before she sat down and buried her head in her knees, she made sure to check that she hadn't drunk from any of the bottled memories, even by accident.

It would probably take a miracle to get her out of here at all, at this point — and even if she was out of here, what would the point be?

That, however, was when Sadness overheard Mind Worker voices, one male and one female, actively discussing work in the vicinity. And, given that the cellar had an echo of its own, and the echo was absent from the voices, they must have been tending to the Memory Lane directly above.

"Right, well, orders are orders, and Riley will need to learn a new language, or even several, and that means a lot of space might need to be cleared. So, something has to go, right here." the male voice began.

"But why right here? Why not Piano Field, which is where the Formative ended up?" the female voice curiously asked.

"Because! When we looked over from the Train and saw just a gaping gap of nothing — that wasn't nothing just a few moments ago! That was Preschool World, and it seems we have to thank someone for getting rid of it. And now, we're working in that empty space, and making it bigger. So, if we can get rid of stuff close by, by either forgetting or filing it away somewhere else... we can actually get this Chinese Field up and running!"