Inside Out reImagined

The Big Flight

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"If the human brain were so simple that we could understand it, we would be so simple that we couldn't." — Emerson M. Pugh, 1938 (first attested 1977)

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Joy awoke in her room, her peaceful, dreamless slumber interrupted by light shaking and the sounds of water and turbulent air.

She opened her eyes and rose from her bathtub, where she had slept. She had had a comfortable sleep, with the water temperature just right and none of her limbs touching the huge bathtub walls. She knew that she wouldn't trade her bathtub for the most comfortable bed in the world.

Indeed, if Joy wanted, she could rest for five more minutes. Yet, she had a job to do and buttons to push, and could not waste a single minute, let alone an entire five, getting ready.

Joy's morning routine was trivial. Once she stepped on the rug by the bathtub, which had her name written on it in blue on gold, she first caressed her bathing suit — a lime one-piece, decorated with blue, disparate bursts and thin, intersecting black lines — finding it pleasant to feel the tight touch as it dried. Then, stretching her arms and raising her heels, she shook herself a few times, a bit like a dog, until her body was dried.

Her hair — brilliant blue locks flowing to her mid-back like a river of happiness — more closely resembled a literal river dripping with water, though. Yet, once she rolled them up like a towel and squeezed them, they, too, fully dried up, against all expectations.

In fact, expectations would get a human nowhere in Joy's world. In the human world, bathtubs got room-cold throughout the night, and people who spent that long in bathtubs would have increasingly shriveling fingertips. In addition, a bathing suit was not suitable for anything but water, and neither Joy's body nor hair could dry that fast.

Yet, Joy didn't care one iota about what humans would expect, especially because she... wasn't exactly human.

At first glance, it was easy to mistake Joy, in her stature and demeanor, for a preteen girl. However, a second glance revealed gold, glowing skin formed from millions of particles that spontaneously appeared and disappeared, shimmering like TV static viewed through a golden window.

Finally, a third glance revealed her true nature. Her feet looked more like socks than feet, without any toes, and while she still had fingers, they did not have nails. In addition, while she could hear perfectly well, her ears were also missing, instead of just being hidden behind her hair.

The truth of the matter was, Joy was an emotion, living and working within a human mind; namely, the mind of one Riley Andersen, who had recently turned fourteen.

Of course, unlike the human brain, the human mind was an expansive place, not limited by physical constraints, or, well, anything besides Imagination. Any emotion would struggle to explain Imagination, but they all knew one thing: Imagination allowed for everything that was, well, imaginable, and those in touch with it were living their literal dream.

This especially applied to emotions amongst all thought forms, as each of them represented a single element of Imagination. This purity allowed for an immense prowess over the essence, unmatched by any other thought form. There was no overstating it, or repeating it too many times: Imagination allowed for anything, especially if you were an emotion.

That being said, Joy still had a job, in which Imagination didn't matter nearly as much as she would have liked it to, and she still needed to do one last thing to get ready for the day. After all, she was a commander, leading Riley to a bright future, and the looks of a preteen girl on summer vacation were definitely not allowed in the dress code of her workplace.