The memory, the round, glass-like sphere in Joy's hand, was not any color she'd seen before. Memories which had formed through her affect on the mind were a golden yellow. Those produced by Sadness, a deep blue. Anger painted memories as a saturated red, Disgust made them green, and Fear made them violet.
Riley, the whole person of whom Joy, and the other four emotions were a part, also recently began recording mixed memories; memories which carried more than one emotion, resulting in striped and dotted memory orbs with more than one color.
But this memory, which Joy had spotted and picked from the racks which stored today's new memories, was not any of their colors. It was not grey either, a color which would signify it as objective knowledge detached from emotion.
It was orange. A dark, rich orange, which one could gain a glimpse of in the physical world by staring through orange-stained glass at a raging bonfire in a moonless night. This was the color of the memory Joy had found. Her own memories sometimes dipped to a dark shade which resembled an orange, but it came nowhere close to this orb.
The memory itself was blank. It showed her nothing. When fast-forwarding and rewinding it, it remained blank. In all her experience with memories, she'd never seen one with no visual or audio.
As she stood in place examining it, something occupied the lower corner of her vision. She turned, and saw Sadness, standing uncomfortably close and looking at the same thing. Sadness had a habit of walking up to people quietly, without saying a word. It could sometimes be startling, but Joy never let it get to her. She looked down at Sadness, making eye contact.
Sadness was considerably shorter than Joy, and had a plump face with wide, round glasses. She had been staring at the orange memory, her mouth slightly ajar to reveal her top teeth, which showed that she was slightly awestruck. Now she was looking up at Joy.
Joy took a step back from her, making their distance from one another a more comfortable one. "Have any idea where this might have come from?" She asked, holding out the orange memory in one hand.
Sadness merely shook her head at this. "Um," she composed her mouth shut. "I came over here to ask... Riley's about to fall asleep now, and... ah... who do you want on dream duty?"
"You're pretty well-read on the mind manuals, Sadness." Joy said, pleasantly ignoring Sadness' excuse for being curious about what she was doing. "Is there a chance of there being some kind of... defective memory?"
She tilted her head, "Ah... defect? What do you mean-"
"You know," Joy said quickly, walking around and past Sadness in the direction of the control console, with Sadness following close behind. "A runt, a fifth wheel, the target of all forms of quality control."
"Not... not that I know of."
"I've got dream duty." Joy announced to the other emotions next to the console, as she pressed the foot button next to the deposit shaft, causing the wide, transparent air tube to connect with the protrusion in the floor. This caused all memory orbs created during the day to roll into tunnels under the floor like a marble maze, all converging at the air tube, where they were sucked upward into the ceiling.
Anger, the shortest of the emotions, was looking at the orange memory in Joy's hand. "What'cha got there, boss?"
She looked at it again, holding it aloft. "I'm hanging onto this. I've never seen its color, so I'm a bit hesitant about sending it down to long-term."
"Suit yourself," he shrugged as he walked past, in the direction of the ramp which led up into the upper tier, where the Emotions' sleeping quarters were located.
Joy watched them leave, and turned her head back to see Sadness still next to her, touching the orange orb. The touch of Sadness' blue hand did not effect the orb.
"Thanks for trying." Joy said to her. "But I don't think It's going to be as simple as that."
Sadness retreated her hand and shrank down diminutively. "Sorry..."
"No harm done." She said lightly as she patted Sadness' back in the direction of the rampway, where Anger was already heading. "Head on up to bed, now. I'm sure I can sort this out before morning."
The skinny, crescent-shaped Fear was the next to pass by. "You have to be sure about something like this, Joy. That thing might not even be a memory." he was matching his fingers together with spastic anxiety, darting his gaze left and right.
Disgust was also observing it. "Yeah Joy," she said in her usual tween accent. She was staring at her own self-displayed fingernails with a look of feigned aloofness. "You remember, right? What happened the last time you thought you could take care of everything on your own? It wasn't long ago."
"Yep!" Joy answered to both of them, not any less chipper. The air tube had finished taking today's memories, and withdrew into the ceiling. The lights in headquarters had dimmed and shut off to a more comfortably dark atmosphere that matched the mental night sky outside. "I'm thinking that's the case right now, too. I can handle this myself." She went over to the control console, and pulled up a chair to it.
Fear's attention was still on her and the orb. "I think what Disgust meant is learning from your-"
"Forget it, Fear." Disgust pulled him along, in the direction of the sleeping quarters walkway. He went along.
Fear was still openly displaying his paranoia as he went along. "I just get... jumpy. It's this little thing called pattern recognition. And I'm recognizing a pattern."
"That... incident," Disgust said. "It really didn't displace Joy, at all, from what she feels is her role in Riley's mind." They were heading up the walkway with Sadness seen just entering the quarters.
"But she let Sadness come in and do her thing without interruption."
"Yeah, that's right." Disgust said. "She made a flawed decision, realized what was wrong with it, and acted to amend it. And the entire time she was still driving events. And she's still driving right now. If anything, what happened reinforced what she is, and what she thinks she is, as much as it did for Sadness."
Fear looked down at Joy on the main floor. She was pacing in front of the console and not yet sitting down, out of earshot of their conversation. He then looked back at Disgust. "You're a lot smarter than you look."
Disgust frowned, looked down at herself in appraisal, then snapped her vision up at Fear. "And... what's wrong with the way I look?"
"Oh! I didn't mean-"
She let out an aggravated sigh, turning and walking away as she waved a hand at him in an act of snubbing.
Joy was left alone on the main floor of headquarters. The large, cinema-like screen in front of the console normally displayed what Riley saw, and heard, as well as all other input given by the five senses. But when she slept, it displayed her dreams.
She was now alone at the console. It had recently been given a sizeable expansion, with a greater number of buttons, switches and levers. It was now broad enough that all five emotions had a spot, and could operate it in a potentially simultaneous order. This led to a broader scope by which Riley could experience things, as well as memories with greater depth and complexity.
Yet still only five core emotions. Joy stood at the console, watching tonight's dream open. She then looked at the eerily colored memory, still in her hand. The curiosity of it grabbed her attention, and she sat down, half-listening to the dream. "You skate like it's been something for you since age, like, one." The dream's audio said this in a surreal, echoed voice.
Joy got up and headed for the small plateau which the air shaft normally junctioned to. She raised the orange orb, treating it like a normal memory being put on display.
"It's pretty normal in Minnesota..." Riley's own, somewhat shy voice could be heard. The orb floated into position as a beam projector shot out of the floor behind, firing its light through the orb and projecting it on screen. The projection canceled out the dream, displaying a recollection of the memory in its place.
And it did show something. But it was not anything Riley had percieved in her outward senses at any point in the day.
Smoke, dark and thick. It cleared to reveal silhouettes of an equally dismal shade. But the silhouettes moved, in a predictable pattern and consistency. They were never stopped from this motion, never hindered, never altered or modified. More of them entered the scope as it panned away, and they became clear. The silhouettes were machinery. Gears and cables and belts. Hammers and wheels and belts and reels.
It looked like something straight from the inside of the mind. None of the mind's inner workings registered in Riley's outward senses. The inner workings of the mind never caused any of the emotions to become invested enough to make it a direct experience. This made the existence of this memory all the more an enigma.
There was a red light, labeled "Puberty" on the far right side of the console. It began blinking.
The projecton vanished.
Joy turned around, and saw the memory being taken from the projection spot. And saw what was taking it, in the dim lighting of Headquarters, becoming darker by the memory no longer being projected. No dream came to take its place, meaning Riley had become at least half-awake.
Joy witnessed a long, extended arm gripping the orb. It was part of a dark body that attached itself to the ceiling, from which an unnatural number of additional limbs protruded, gripping the ceiling and keeping it there. In spite of the length of its appendages, it was not very big overall, being no larger in volume than Joy herself.
She immediately ran up to the memory and leaped, grabbing the orb. It was trying to steal it, and thus was her first reaction.
The multi-limbed entity fell off the ceiling from Joy's weight pulling down, and landed on the floor. Joy's hands were still gripped on the memory, as was the multi-limbed Entity's single extended hand. It got up on its many feet, moving away from Joy like an insect as it pulled the orange memory away. It headed for the windows of Headquarters, on the other end from the viewing screen.
Joy got her footing, and then yanked it back. This pulled it off its feet and she continued trying to detach its grip off the memory by swinging its now airborne form to the side.
Its grip finally broke as it flew across the room. It landed on the control console in a mess of thin, tangled limbs. Joy took several steps back, memory in hand as it regained its insect-like footing. It turned to face Joy, revealing a pair of bright, white oval eyes. Its color was dark grey. It darted at her, at the memory.
Joy looked left and right, and saw a train of thought outside, in motion on account of Riley now being awake. Not wishing to contend with the spider-like entity, she ran toward the dock which would open as the train stopped at Headquarters. Hearing the spider-like entity bearing down behind her, she stopped next to the door just as it was opening for the train. And then she tossed the orange memory through the door, landing it in the train car beyond, in a crate loaded with mental content.
Joy stepped aside and saw the entity and its many darting legs head straight for the orb on the train, ignoring her. She had no control over the door, and hoped it'd close before it came back in.
Its oval-eyed head peeked back into Headquarters. "No!" She shouted as she walked into its line of sight. "Shoo! Get out of here! You have what you came for. Leave!"
It crooked its head a bit, and reached a long appendage into headquarters, in her direction. The arm was long and weak, and she swatted it down with a minimum of effort. "Come on!" She said haplessly. "You have to leave now."
The light, on the control panel far to Joy's right, was still blinking. And now it brighened, and remained lit. It flashed brightly, to the point of illuminating all of Headquarters. Joy was suddenly hit with dizziness, and an abundance of energy. She suddenly wanted to run a mile, and then another mile while being weighed down.
The hand, which Joy had swatted down, jumped back up and grabbed her wrist. It suddenly had become much stronger. Her own sudden overabundance of energy was rendered moot by it lifting her in the air, where there was no leverage. It dragged her out the door, into the train of thought.
Riley, a young girl late in the age of twelve, had awoken in the midst of a fascinating dream. She could not grasp what exactly it meant, or of what it was a recollection of, but it was important. Of that she was certain. She knew it was important.
And what she had just done. What she had just done... had made her sit up. It was done in a state of half-sleep, and to her it was an enigma. All of what she had learned from her parents and her experiences and the more objective knowledge offered by school provided no explanation for the undeniable and absolutely true feeling she felt in her senses.
Anger, Disgust, Fear and Sadness had awoken. And when they did they were met with Joy at the control panel. But she looked different. She had a decidedly darker color, which leaned away from yellow in its golden hue and more toward orange. Her hair was no longer blue, but green.
"Okay, who are you and why do you look like Joy?" Disgust said.
"I am Joy." She said naturally. "I just... some things happened last night. It's no big deal." She turned back to the controls before they could reply. "Riley's awake now guys. It's time to do our job.
They left it at that. It was not the Emotions' nature to be confrontational or difficult. And they had no reason to believe anybody could enter or exit Headquarters without their knowing. It had to be Joy. She was simply going through something.
The real Joy awoke on a hard surface. She got up, and found she was surrounded by metallic structure. The sky was visible above through a long shaft to the top. And all around were storied platforms, in the shadows of which the glow of furnaces and fires could be seen. The place was swarming with mind workers, who carried out their tasks indifferently. One of them went slightly around her passing her by, pushing a wheeled cart.
"Okay..." she said under her own breath, ever agreeable and accepting of whatever situation arose. "This gives me deja-vu..." Except this time Sadness was not with her. "I'll have to find out where this is, and how I got here." There were stairways under and above the storied platforms surrounding the deep shaft, at the bottom of which she stood. Moving, visible protrusions from machinery in the upper floors imposed their shadows into the light beaming down from above.
She got moving. There were manuals in headquarters which detailed all of the workings of Riley's mind, but she had a bad habit of not studying them, and quickly forgetting whatever she did research in given situations. Joy needed to find a map, or someone who could point her in the right direction.
