[Author's note: I decided to continue this story. The title may change soon, so keep an eye out]
"They're here! They're here!" Joy danced around carrying a large cardboard box.
"What's here?" Anger asked, confused by the mid-day delivery. Joy beamed at the inquisitive eyes fixed on her, drinking in the attention.
"Oh, just the tools that are going to have us completely prepared to handle our upcoming Haunted House trip."
Fear took a nervous step back. "Um, What kind of tools?" he timidly asked.
She continued grinning as she placed the box on the floor and opened it, talking as she probed its contents. "I called Dream Productions and asked if they could send us some props from the Nightmare Department."
"Why do I not like where this is going?" Fear mused, apprehension tightening in his chest. His eyes widened with a small gasp as she pulled out a long rubber snake.
"I heard that if you expose someone to something they're afraid of over and over again, they'll eventually become desensitized to it and not be afraid anymore." She approached Fear with the snake. His heart leapt into his throat when she looped it around his neck, as if it were a scarf. "So we're going to take all the things that Fear is afraid of and keep showing them to him until he gets used to them. Then by the time we go to the haunted house, he won't overreact and Riley will have a great time!"
"Everything Fear's afraid of?" Disgust eyed Joy's box critically. "You should have ordered a bigger box."
Joy considered her words, "Well, this'll cover the haunted house basics anyway." She dug through it again, "Let's see, we've got snakes, rats, spiders, eyeballs, some creepy masks…"
"Joy, I have a bad feeling about this idea." Fear quivered. "I don't deal well with stress under normal circumstances. Adding random scary things to my daily routine can't be good for me."
"I agree." Sadness hesitantly added. "Immersion therapy needs to be done slowly, or you risk causing trauma."
"We don't have time to go slow. We go to that haunted house on Saturday." Anger reminded her. Then he chuckled with devious delight. "Besides, it's not every day I get permission to spook the great purple chicken. This is gonna be fun!" He rubbed his hands together eagerly and rummaged through the box.
Disgust hovered next to him, peeking over his shoulder for something she could use that wasn't too gross. Everything she saw however was too scaly or slimy or, in the case of the ugly black spider Anger pulled out, way too creepy crawly.
"Here's a winner!" he proclaimed, holding the plump, hairy thing up by the thin wire attached to its back. Disgust recoiled.
"Ugh, don't get that near me!" She demanded.
"Why, is it too spooky for you?" He asked, grinning devilishly, inching it closer to her.
She retreated a step back. "This whole exercise is for Fear, not me, remember?"
He continued to advance on her. "And why not include you? If I can get the both of you used to spiders, who knows? Maybe Riley will want to get a pet tarantula."
"Ew, NEVER!"
"Come on, give it some love." He chuckled wickedly giving chase as she ran from him.
"You are so immature!" She shouted.
Fear watched their antics pensively, wringing his hands and gulping to settle the fluttering feeling in his gut. He felt someone approach from behind and yelped when he saw it was Joy holding an ugly rat puppet.
"So, are you ready?" she asked with an expectant grin.
"No. But that's not going to stop you, is it?" He stammered.
"Oh, when this is all over you'll thank me."
"I highly doubt that." He said, crossing his arms. He felt something brush against his hand. Looking down he was greeted to glassy, reptilian eyes staring at him.
"SNAKE!" He screamed, running around like a newly beheaded chicken. "Get it off! Get it off!"
Joy tried hard not to laugh at him as he wrestled with the rubber novelty he had somehow forgotten had been harmlessly around his neck for the last few minutes.
Then, she noticed Sadness gazing up at her with enormous eyes filled with doubt.
"This isn't going to end well." The blue one sighed, turning her head to the mayhem of the other emotions.
Disgust hand retaliated against Anger by whacking him with a couch pillow. He, in return, had doubled his efforts to expose her to his toy spider. "You wanna make it a fight then? Ooh, now you're gonna get it! This baby's going right in your hair!"
"Over my dead body!" She declared, walloping him another time with even more force.
Meanwhile, Fear was on the floor, somehow he'd gotten himself tangled up in the snake and was screaming every two seconds.
Joy sighed and plastered on a hopeful smile. "It's only just the start." She told Sadness. "Give it a chance. It'll work, I'm sure of it." She then ran into the fray, yelling, "Guys! They're only props, remember?"
/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\
As the afternoon wore on, Sadness's doubts were validated numerous times over. Though Joy had tried to dismiss them early on;
Like when she shoved the rat puppet into Fear's field of vision while he was guiding Riley back to class after lunch and he reactively pulled a lever that made her startle and drop her books.
Or when a spring-loaded bat sprang out of his locker when he was getting paper for his clip board and he spent the next five minutes running around in a circle, annoying everyone else with his non-stop screaming about it wanting his blood. Not to mention the paper flying everywhere.
Or when Anger asked Fear to fetch a memory from the short-term racks, only for the purple emotion to find a shrunken head hiding behind it. This in turn caused him to knock several memories off the shelf, one of which he slipped on trying to flee the head, landing flat on his back.
Joy brushed them all off. Her plan would bare fruit soon enough, she convinced herself. But after her wind-up mouse caused both Fear and Disgust to crawl onto a chair to avoid it until Anger stomped on it, and a seemingly harmless "boo" while wearing a rubber clown mask had caused him to climb the memory racks until he was well out of anyone's reach, at which time he remembered his fear of heights and she had to climb up after him to coax him down, the lead emotion was beginning to see that frequent repeated exposure to scary things had driven her timid co-worker to the edge of his last nerve.
He now clutched the controls with shaking hands, his eyes darting about around him, distracted from his task of helping Riley focus during study hall. Joy gave him a piteous look, double guessing if she should use the severed hand she had been hiding behind her back.
"Um, are you okay?" She asked instead. He blinked at her twice, then his eyes narrowed.
"Do I look okay to you?!" He snapped, voice squeaking, arms flailing. "You've been tormenting me all day, and now you want to know if I'm OKAY?"
She pulled back a little and let out a disappointed sigh, "I really thought this was going to help."
"By help, did you mean give me a heart attack?! Great idea Joy, by the time Riley goes to the haunted house, I'll be DEAD. Then you'll never have to worry about her being afraid of anything ever again for the rest of her life! Good luck with that." He crossed his arms, slightly hugging himself as he did so, and went back to tending the console, making Riley re-read a passage he had missed.
Despite her good intentions she couldn't deny the wave of guilt crashing down on her now. His offended tone, his defensive demeanor, she realized she had pushed him too hard too soon. Instead of strengthening him, her decision had left him threadbare and weak.
"Hey, it's not that bad…" She lifted her arms to him in an attempt to smooth things over with a hug. Only, she had forgotten the rubber severed arm she had been holding.
It lay now on his shoulder, where he took one look at it and let out a shriek, stumbled over his own feet, and falling on the ground. Still he frantically tried to pull himself away from her.
"Oh, I'm sorry! That one was an accident, I swear!" She apologized.
"Get away! G, get away from me!" He stuttered, crawling backwards until he bumped into something lying on floor behind him. Slowly and carefully he reached back to try and identify it. It was lumpy…and it was breathing…
"She sounds sincere…" Sadness sighed when he turned to look and saw her there. He startled but quickly recovered his senses.
"Sadness? W, what are you doing on the floor?" he asked, momentarily forgetting his pounding heart.
"Nobody was listening to me, so I decided this was the best place to reflect on my misery. Then it seemed like a good place to keep out of the way of all that running around going on. It all looked so tiring." She blinked slowly. "It's nice down here."
"Uh, yeah." He hesitantly agreed. He had been so pre-occupied with being on the lookout for his co-workers' pranks that he hadn't noticed she'd not been with them at the console for so long. And nobody else had seemed to notice either, an old habit they were all still trying to get rid of, which made him feel she was entitled to wallow in self pity as she was.
Joy's expression indicated she may have been thinking the same thing.
"Alright," The lead emotion said, "No more." She walked over to the box and tossed the prop appendage into it. She gave another look at her teammates on the floor: Sadness, whose warnings she'd ignored, and Fear, whose hands were still shaking even as he helped Sadness to her feet. She then turned to Anger and Disgust, her expression weary and defeated. "We're giving up on the Scare Plan guys. Put 'um back."
"Aw, really? But I had some real great doozies cooked up for Flinchy over here." Anger protested. Her glare did not falter.
Disgust happily relinquished the rubber knife she had hidden under her skirt. Anger grunted and pulled a toy dead lizard from his pocket.
"Oh, I know you've got more than that." Disgust sneered, pointing at him accusingly. He snarled at her, but Joy cut in before he could say anything.
"Anger, all of it." She frowned, her tone like that of a scolding mother.
"Tattle-tale!" he spat at Disgust as he turned out his pockets to hand over a fake eyeball he'd been planning on sneaking into Fear's tea mug, a wind-up pair of chattering teeth he was going to drop down Fear's pants, and a creepy hairless baby doll he was going to hide on the couch under some pillows for Fear to discover whenever.
"And that's all of it?" Joy asked.
"Every last stinkin' prop." He grunted through his teeth, obvious with his displeasure.
Satisfied, Joy sealed the frightening paraphernalia up and stuck the box by the delivery door to get picked up in the morning. She then approached Fear and placed a reassuring hand on his back.
"There. No more scaring." She told him softly. "We'll find some other way to prepare for the haunted house."
"Thank you!" He shouted with relief, wrapping his long skinny arms around her in a gracious embrace. "Thank you! Thank you!"
She smiled awkwardly as she dragged him a few steps on her way back to the console.
"I say you gave up too easily." Anger complained to her. "We knew he was going to freak out a few times. I bet if we drilled him a little longer, he'd learn not to be so jumpy."
Joy didn't give him an answer. She managed to pry Fear off her and resume lifting Riley's spirits amid the doldrums of Study Hall.
Anger shot Fear a glower, which only deepened when the purple emotion caught his gaze and flashed a smug grin. So the beanstalk thought he'd won, huh? The red square fumed, but then paused when in idea sparked in his mind. He calmed himself and turned back to the monitor.
"Well, since we wasted all that time on you, your royal cowardice, you can at least make yourself useful and help us make sense of this last paragraph." He pointed a blocky finger at the last batch of sentences on the page Riley was reading.
"What, this?" Fear glanced at it and read aloud; "Being one of the greatest pandemics in history, the Bubonic Plague of the mid 1300s was notorious for unleashing a rampage of death across Euro…"
SKREEEEEEEEE!
The words on the screen suddenly were replaced with the screeching face of an undead monster lunging at him.
Everyone jumped yelping in surprise at the purple-hued phantom. Everyone but Anger, who was laughing whole heartedly, his mirth aimed at Fear who had frozen on the spot, eyes wide, mouth open in a silent scream.
"Ha! Look at his face. How's that for scare therapy? He never saw it coming."
"Uh, none of us did." Disgust glared at him. Sadness and Joy too, looked perturbed and disappointed with him.
"Anger, what was that? I told you, no more scaring Fear. And why did you use a memory? You know Riley could see that." Joy stalked over as she scolded him.
"Did you really have to remind her of that zombie movie we watched over the weekend?" Disgust added incredulously, "She was just getting over how scary and gross it was."
"Now she'll start having nightmares again." Sadness frowned.
"What? Come on, Riley's fine." Anger tried to defend himself "And a nightmare never hurt anybody."
"If Riley's fine, then why won't the memory go away?" Disgust repeatedly slammed the return button, but the memory remained in the projector, the room still engulfed in its violet glow.
She and the others looked over and saw that Fear hadn't moved, remaining stiffened with a slack jaw, eyes unblinking up at the screen. He was a statue with horror etched on his face. His hand was pressing down on a button, leaning his weight onto it.
"Fear, you can let Riley relax now." Sadness tugged gently on his sleeve. He didn't answer, nor acknowledge that she had spoken to him.
"Great, you broke him." Disgust accused.
Anger snorted, "I didn't 'break' him." He turned to Fear and yelled, "It's just a memory, Beanpole! Suck it up and let go of the controls already!"
Fear didn't react, but Sadness flinched and sniffled and frowned.
"Yelling at him isn't helping." Joy reprimanded him, then she sighed. "Go to your time-out corner."
Anger stared in outrage. "What?! For this? He's the one making everything difficult!" He yelled, gesturing to Fear.
"I gave an order and you disobeyed it. Corner. Now." She stood her ground, pointing to the square, Anger-sized cubbyhole in the corner of the room.
Anger fumed, giving Joy a stubborn stand-off until it became clear she wasn't about to reverse her decision. He let out one last snarl before turning on his heals and stomping to his corner, muttering to himself about how unfair she was being.
"Fear, Anger won't try scaring you anymore… Can you hear me?" Joy shook his shoulder a little, but he was still unresponsive.
"He's gone catatonic." Sadness cried, hugging his free arm. "We may never hear his voice ever again!" she leaned into him, sobbing sloppily, tears soaking his sleeve.
His fingers twitched slightly and he began to slacken. He blinked, pupils growing from pinpricks to the deep pools of confusion as he returned to reality.
"Oh Good, he's okay." Joy smiled, relieved his freeze up hadn't been permanent as Sadness had proclaimed.
"Are you okay?" Sadness asked him meekly, hesitantly releasing his arm.
He regarded her silently, perplexed as she stared at him with her large inquisitive eyes. But his attention was stolen away by the realization that his hand was still pressing on the console button.
He jerked it away with a gasp, the purple hue fading instantly. This time when Disgust prodded the return button, the memory was effectively banished back to Long Term, though Sadness could have sworn it looked a bit brighter now than when it had arrived. She decided not to mention it however, as Fear was already fretting his actions and stumbling backwards away from the console, mumbling incoherently to himself.
"There we go. Memory's gone. Everything's all better now." Joy tried to defuse the impending freak-out by focusing on the positive of the situation, but it didn't stop his muttering or pawing at his face, or inevitably screaming and running up the ramp to the sleeping quarters, slamming the door behind him.
"I told ya, I didn't break him." Anger stated from his corner. "Can I come out now?"
Joy lowered her brow, unable to hide her frustration any longer. "No." she sighed flatly. She stepped forward, ready to follow Fear and cajole him out of the bedroom, but Sadness gently took her arm and gave her a knowing look.
"I think he may need some time to himself."
Joy paused and knew instantly her teammate was right. An afternoon of ignoring Sadness's better judgment had proven disastrous. So, despite her own instinct to try and fix everything right away, she left the situation to sort itself out.
"Yeah, you're right. Fear will come out when he's ready." She gave Sadness a confident smile. "He couldn't have been spooked that badly, right?"
Sadness gave a quick nod but frowned when she caught sight of the glowing purple orb dropping down into Long Term Memory to get filed away by a random mind worker who wouldn't give it a second thought.
Its presence down there made her uneasy, but Joy had been so discouraged already today, that Sadness declined to voice this feeling and instead be happy the lead emotion was listening to her now. Why ruin the mood with more bad news?
Maybe it had only been her imagination that the memory had gotten brighter. Maybe, even if she wasn't mistaken, it wouldn't mean anything for Riley. But she had the sinking suspicion that it would mean something, and worse, there'd be nothing that could be done about it when it chose to happen.
[To be continued]