"Gross gross gross gross gross!" shrieked Disgust. Her hand went to her nose and she gagged. "I can smell it from all the way in here! That's... that's..."

"Disgusting?" Anger offered.

"Ugh!" His green coworker shuddered, backing off the console as if it had a disease. The little red brick smirked before sitting in the chair once more. He opened his newspaper. The main headline this time?

"Huh, 'Dead Bird Attack,' continued on page 12..." Anger mumbled to himself. He flipped over to the proper sheet, and was greeted by a picture of the aforementioned dead bird. "Yeesh," he said, "looks nasty." But he continued to read. It gave him something to do, after all.

"Stop looking at it!" Disgust screamed at Fear, who was still petrified and staring at the monitor. "Just - just stop it! Stop it already, before I hurl!"

"S-S-Sorry! Sorry," Fear said. The purple emotion swiftly turned a knob and pressed it down, telling Riley to look away from the horrid sight. She did just that. Her eyes darted back to the pond beside them. It was - admittedly - a much better view: no dead animals, no disgusting feelings of squishy birds hitting one's head, just soothing ripples in the water.

They only had a second to recover before their attention was needed again, but - in that time - the emotions were occupied. Still at the console, Fear was matching Riley's gaze. He looked with her into the soothing reflections of the water's surface, doing his best to let that calming sight wash over him and settle things down. Sadness was bawling on the couch, going on about the meaninglessness of life. Joy was next to her, slouched over, hands on her cheeks and eyes listlessly staring at the monitor. She was clearly doing her best to ignore the nihilistic wailing of her little blue friend. Behind the two foils paced Disgust, softly muttering things to herself - things like, "It's all over it's okay just breathe," and "It's fine we'll get through this this is nothing to worry about," and, "That dead bird was so gross! So gross! Ew, ew, ew, nasty!" In spite of the murmurings and mutterings, though, Anger was able to continue reading his newspaper.

"Just a few moments ago, we were struck in the head by what experts are calling the most unlikely thing in the world," he read, "A dead bird fell right from the sky, and found itself in our hair. Research suggests the chances of such a thing happening are exactly one in five zillion and three, but it happened nonetheless. Still baffled, our main researchers can only say that-"

But as he was reading, another headline, tinier and one column over, grabbed his gaze and latched it to its contents:

"We're Being Laughed At!"

He did a double take, but there was no mistake. As he skimmed the short article, the simple truth came into focus. HQ went silent, save for that echoing noise; a quiet, trickling chuckle leaked in from the monitor's speakers. This was soon joined in by others. And all of them were undoubtedly directed at one person: Riley.

The eleven year old jerked her head up and noticed the kid from earlier pointing at her, one hand over his mouth, giggling at the incident. "Wow!" he said through half-stifled bursts, "What are the chances of that happening?" Riley didn't respond; more laughter caught her attention. She spun around to see two other kids - kids she recognized from her school, no less - giggling at the sight, looking right at her. She glanced left, and right, and saw that if people weren't laughing, they certainly were staring at her and the dead thing (the dead thing, she noted, which had copious amounts of purple-and-crimson guts now exposed to the world).

Inside her head, Fear was agitated, to say the least. Panicked, he shoved a lever forward. Twitching, he pressed a button. Nervous, he twisted a knob, but he'd miscalculated and misfired; instead of fleeing the embarrassing situation, Riley became frozen, petrified by panic. Her muscles locked up, her breathing sped up, and her heart felt like it had been replaced with a jackhammer. 'Move, Riley, move!' she thought to herself.

"Come on!" Fear yelled, "Move, move, move!" He yanked the levers back and forth, but all it succeeded in doing was increasing her breathing. It was a nightmare for Fear if there ever was one; for every laugh, for every staring eye directed to Riley, Fear felt twenty more reach through the monitor and stab him. If it weren't for his duty to Riley, he'd have run off in a panicked scream. As it was, it took all he had not to duck down beneath the console, whimper, and beg someone else to take care of it.

But he didn't do that. No, he frantically pressed those buttons, only succeeding in making Riley lock up.

Under his breath, Anger spat out the single curse word he knew (he'd been saving it for a time such as this). He had watched the situation unfold, and an increasing frustration was building up. He felt angry at the others for just standing there like dopes, not doing a thing but staring at Fear with dangling jaws. He felt frustrated with Fear, of course, for letting his panic get the best of him and lock up on Riley. He felt somewhat heated at Riley (though he'd never admit it in a million years) for taking the "statue" route instead of scrambling out of the situation, and - most of all - he felt blistering rage at everyone else in the park for daring to look at Riley and laugh at the situation!

So, he threw the paper down and then scampered over to the console. "Whaddya think you're doing?!" he demanded to his violet coworker.

"I-I-I-" Fear sputtered out, like a broken record.

"You're making it worse!" Anger spouted, the faintest of heat waves cracking his scalp.

"Sorry! I'm sorry," Fear whimpered.

"You want Riley to stay here and be a laughingstock? Is that it?"

"No!" Fear said defensively, eyes wide with... well, take a guess, "No, no, no! I'm not- I just- I mean-"

"Then let's move!" Anger declared, seizing the lever in an iron grip (he was heedless of the pain this caused Fear, whose hand was still there). The red emotion then gave it as hard of a yank as he could. Fear himself got even more panicked at that, recalling a movie they'd seen recently, where the main character threw a temper tantrum, wound up wrecking the party he was in, and then promptly made one embarrassing mistake after the other for the majority of the film.

Not wanting that to happen to Riley, Fear leaned all the way across the console, straining himself until he could reach the recall tube commands. He promptly ordered up the aforementioned memory of the movie, then prayed it would be sufficient to keep Anger from making the same mistake. The big, hulking protagonist showed up on-screen, his messy brown hair hidden in a purple glow. After the memory began playing, all there was to do was stay standing, jerked back and forth by Anger (he was still unaware that he was crushing some small purple fingers).

It took no time at all for Riley Andersen to move out of the park, running past the now-sympathetic faces of those who were staring at her - including the little kid from earlier. He had walked over and began poking the dead bird with a stick, asking a nearby adult if it was "a species of Snipe?"

But Riley didn't hear that. All she heard was a second burst of laughter, and - assuming it was still aimed at her - she double-timed it, legs moving like engines. She did anything she could to take her burning cheeks far from the sight of others.

Gradually, her lungs forced her to slow to a walk, and she looked back and around. She was now on a street corner, three blocks from home, and - happily - noted that nobody was so much as glancing in her direction. That was good. She slowly wound her breath to a normal rate (though her heart's pounding fit lingered a moment) and resumed her walk home. That's where she wanted to be, away from all the prying eyes and laughing grins.

Inside, Sadness had walked up to the console, trading places with her red counterpart. Anger himself had returned to his chair, grumbling about "people and their stupid sense of humor." Sadness spared him a sympathetic glance before getting Fear's attention. She had brought with her a bag of ice.

"Here," she mumbled, dropping the ice into Fear's now-throbbing palm.

"Th-thanks," the purple emotion said, attention entirely focused on the source of his pain. "Heh, s-strong grip..." he mused to himself. He walked briskly back to the couch, then sat down and tended to his aching appendage.

Naturally, this left Sadness alone at the console, and - through her soothing influence - coaxed Riley's cheeks into cooling down. The blushing, burning sensation faded to nothing, and Riley sighed despondently. She kept on walking. Home couldn't arrive soon enough. All she wanted was to walk in, go upstairs, throw herself onto her bed, and forget all about that dead bird.