Inside Out reImagined

The Emotions conspire

The work situation of the emotions, allowing them little space or time to themselves, meant that whatever they had, they treasured more than anything else. Each emotion's room — or "dorm", if you were being less serious — was a sanctuary to them and them only, if only for brief moments before Riley woke up and after she dozed off.

On any other circumstance, Anger would not have invited anyone to his room, and would burst in flames the moment someone else stepped in. The other emotions knew this, as they would react to intrusions to their own space in the same way. If he brought them over of his own volition, he must have really meant business.

Admittedly, both Fear and Disgust found Anger's room to be a bit funny — and not just because it catered to neither of their elements of Imagination. For one, the wardrobe, which only needed to be slightly taller than Anger himself, looked to Fear more like a chair that he could sit on. For another thing, since Anger was known to smash things around and set his own head on fire, everything was soft and inflammable, almost like in a padded cell. Even his nightstand, where his own copy of The Mind Reader lay, looked more like a pillow than anything else.

Yet, looking at the room was still obviously not why Fear and Disgust were here, and soon enough, they stopped searching for anything — not that there was much to find — and turned to him.

Fear wasn't one to start speaking, especially since he knew everything Anger did to him over the course of Riley's life. Instead, Disgust opened: "I know things in Headquarters are dire, but are they really so dire that you had to touch me in all the wrong places?"

"Heh, now you know how I feel around him, all the time." Fear answered. "But yeah. Here to discuss the elephant in the room?"

"He'd better say that, or else, I'm going back at once." Disgust declared.

"Indeed, there are problems we simply can't ignore anymore." Anger noted, before quickly adding the context that his coworkers desired: "And yes, those problems begin with J and end with 'oy'."

Indeed, everything Joy had done ever since kicking Sadness out, all in the name of "damage control", had started to get out of hand, to the point where the emotions didn't even dare think something that was out of the line. If they were not discussed now, they wouldn't get to be discussed at any point in the future.

Yet, the very reason Fear and Disgust were brought here also proved to be the obstacle to getting anything discussed. After all, Joy was only doing things for Riley's sake, and Disgust especially knew that it almost seemed like Riley herself was on Joy's side. They were thus the first to reply, perhaps a bit too loudly: "I mean, it's definitely courageous of you to say that, but I don't see how anything can be done. If Joy is going to continue being a pain in the—"

"Shh!" Anger calmed them. "She'll hear us!"

"Oh, so you're now the one to keep your voice down!" Disgust spat back — but nevertheless, made sure to be quieter from now on. They were pretty sure that the doors to all the emotions' dorms were pretty good sound insulators, though...

"It's a serious matter!" Anger instructed. "If we want to succeed in the mind, then you gotta listen to me, do you understand?"

"Yeah!" Fear added, understanding where Anger was coming from. "You don't want to be found out by Joy, this very moment, now, do you? She would end up doing something even more ridiculous than..." Suddenly, he shivered, continuing: "...kicking out Sadness..."

That he had dared to say Sadness's name out loud was already a good sign for Anger. Yet, he still wanted to hear out Disgust, too.

And, as it would happen, Fear's declaration convinced them, too. "Ugh, fine... So, you said something about Joy. What are we doing about her?" they asked, already wishing for the interruption to be over as soon as possible.