"Alright, now that we've absolutely made sure that Bully Prime is not following us... have we made sure of that?" Disgust asked, prompting Fear to react on the console and make Riley turn around — and, as far as anyone looking at the Consciousness Screen could tell, Riley had already turned in such a way that the skating rink's entrance was out of her sight, and while it was in her sight, the girl being the focus of most of two days had not shown up by it.
"We are clear!" Fear noted.
"Then, I think we are overdue on what we learned about her and what changes about my action plan!" Disgust noted, motioning to interact with the console, but with their movements resembling typing on a typewriter, instead.
"I especially liked the part where she suggested a romantic evening on the ice. Once she gets better at skating, of course." Joy blurted out, trying to keep conversation while simultaneously making Riley navigate through the Shanghai streets, turn by turn.
"Romantic... you mean to say she has a crush on us or something?" Fear asked.
"I don't think she knows English well enough to understand what 'romantic' means to us." Anger noted.
Disgust, however, only loudly gasped at Fear's remark. "That might actually be one of the worst scenarios ever to be noted by yours truly! Bully Prime feigns romantic interest in us, trying to get us to confess to her, and once we do, boom! She immediately turns around and is like: 'So you're a lesbian? Ew...' And we don't know what gay rights in China are like! She could potentially turn all of China against us! And I don't think we'd ever have a fighting chance against all of China!"
"Okay, this Bully Prime character needs to stop existing, for good. We met the girl, she had a genuine interest in us, she told us her name — um..." Joy took another glance at the Mental Notes, only to find a second pile of dust that used to be a pearly white memory. "And she also wrote it down for us, so we have no excuse for not knowing it — and no excuse for not using it, from tomorrow onward, wouldn't you agree?"
"So what? Do we just look in our backpack, right now?" Anger asked, hoping to punch some more holes in any story Joy told.
However, at least for the time being, the fading emotion happened to be much more level-headed than Anger would have wished she was. "No. We do that after I bring us back home! Simple as that, and I don't know what's up with trying to defy me just because I'm 'out of sync with myself'."
And, for the time being, Fear and Disgust both had to agree that Joy's approach made more sense than Anger's.
The rest of the walk home went on without much incident. At one point, Fear thought he saw a flash of purple that reminded him of the girl in the skull tee, yet Joy was quick to dismiss him, noting that it was probably just a particularly vibrantly colored door to a store.
Once Riley finally got home — this time, deciding to take the elevator, as even forty-five minutes of skating tired her to the point where she wasn't sure she could climb all the way to the top floor — things took a slightly different turn. As Joy motioned to look in the designated Chinese notebook for any notes left behind by people who weren't Riley, Disgust took a better look at the Mental Notes — and once they did, they called out: "That was no storefront at all! It was her all along!"
"So, we really do have a stalker on our hands?" Fear asked, as it took everything in him not to go into a full panic.
"You're joking, there's no way the Mental Note captured the detail all that well..." Joy insisted, as she tried to decipher whatever the girl in the skull tee had left behind as her own name, in the translator app on Riley's tablet.
YOU ARE READING
Inside Out reImagined
FanfictionSmack dab in the middle of puberty, Riley Andersen often feels as though she can't control herself. To one's surprise, though, five emotions inside her mind think very much the same; they just can't pull their girl's strings like they used to. As lu...
