"All right, Mrs. Netzel." One of the paramedics stood up from his crouching position and looked Mrs. Netzel in the eye. "Looking at what tests we took of Erik and hearing the description of Emmeline, whom we presume as your daughter,…" Mrs. Netzel nodded. "…We'll need to take him via ambulance to the Emergency Room at Niemeyer's Children's Hospital."
Mrs. Netzel was perplexed of hearing the announcement. "What if I took Erik there?"
"Ma'am, if he were to start convulsing again, we would want him to be in a safe environment where he would be least likely to receive any injuries."
The image of Erik convulsing, not spazzing, in the backseat and receiving multiple injuries from banging his head, getting his arms and legs stuck, that kind of horrific stuff.
"I suppose you're right." She sighed and rubbed her head. "I'll follow you to Niemeyer's and I'll bring my younger son with me. Is that all right?"
"Yes," The paramedic nodded. "We're planning on getting Erik ready pretty soon."
"What day is it today?" A paramedic was asking Erik.
"…Mum-bay." Erik replied, still feeling groggy. He still felt pretty proud of himself for being able to hold himself up—but now without his upper arms.
"Alrightie!" Joy cheered, still tired. "Look, Mom! No hands—well, arms in this case! And we guessed Monday correctly…what was it? One, two, three…four or five times in a row!"
"Technically it's still 'no hands'." Sadness corrected.
"So, how are things outside in the Mind World?" Anger asked.
"Mmm…" Fear hummed nervously and grimaced. "Not very much progress; things are still slow."
"Shoot." Anger hissed.
"Ah!" Fear gasped, running quickly towards the console. "No hands or arms!"
"What're you talking about?" Joy asked.
"They've got both arms—and both legs!" The tall, lanky Emotion answered, wide-eyed.
Four paramedics began to lift Erik off the floor, each one holding a limb. No one knew exactly how weak the preteen was but they were confident of the conclusion that he most likely wouldn't be doing too well strength-wise if his mental and verbal strengths were weak but soon to improve.
Erik looked around interestingly at whatever was going on. Not one, not two, but for paramedics were carrying him down the staircase. "Why four?" A tiny flick in his eyes or a slightly raised eyebrow asked. It didn't make much sense to the mentally fried preteen why manual transport was so tedious. After all, he wasn't full-grown yet, nor was he on the heavy side.
"And down the stairs we go." Sadness sighed.
"And out the door and probably into an ambulance." Disgust finished. "From what it sounds like, they won't let us ride in Mom's car."
"Easy does it, easy does it, easy does it." Fear chanted. "Total strangers are carrying us out of the house and out the door and into an ambulance to take us away to some place we've never been to."
"Just as long as they don't try anything wrong, just as long as they don't try to do anything wrong." Anger chanted quietly through clenched jaws, at his wit's end and more than ready to beat the living daylights out of that big sissy. He was still frightened all right, but this added nonsense was in no way helping his nerves.
"They're taking Erik to a hospital, not a psycho ward or some experimental science lab." Joy tried to assure Fear. Fear's spoken worries made also Joy sigh a little in frustration. Not to mention it got a somewhat annoying but funnily creepy song stuck in her head.
"By the way, Sadness, what is going on with your hair?"
"My hair?" Sadness questioned, all of a sudden set self-conscious by the tone of her fashion-savvy cohort.
"Yes, your hair." Disgust affirmed. "Go look in the mirror."
Sadness dashed up the slope to the break room's mirror. "Oh my." She whispered. Her hair too was singed at the ends and was stiff straight in multiple directions.
It seemed strange that nobody was noticing this type of things until after that blackout or whatever that was. Maybe it was because they were all too tired to notice and/or too busy taking care of Erik.
Anger still had that hangover's headache feeling. Emotions didn't have literal skeletons, but he could remember in the midst of whatever happened quick, sharp, stinging bolts of pain going through his box-shaped body. It was just like what Fear remembered, even though Anger didn't know that: pitch black darkness and pain—jolting episodes of stinging pain.
"What happened?" He wanted to ask. However, there were more important things to keep a sharp eye on. These total strangers whom they had only encountered for a mere few minutes were doing to take Erik away from home to some hospital or a place like that. Away from his parents and siblings, there was no one the Emotions could turn to for trust. As Anger said, just as long these guys don't try to do anything wrong.
A processional had formed down the staircase and the brief way to the front door. Two paramedics in front carried again-bundled equipment in those strict secure cases. Then came the remaining four paramedics and Erik, the star of this morning's horror show. Last in the line was Mrs. Netzel, purse on her left side and Ace still in his pajamas and wrapped in a blanket resting on her right arm and shoulder. The first two uniformed men had already made it to the ambulance and were making preparations in the vehicle to ready their urgent excursion and make sure that their passenger would be safe.
Mrs. Netzel had just finished calling her husband at his job to tell him about what happened to Erik. Explaining exactly what had happened was tough task, even if it just required a few words. He responded that he'd be on his way to the hospital as soon as he could, thanking goodness that his boss would easily understand the situation.
Following the paramedics carrying her elder son, Mrs. Netzel shut the front door on her way out. She tried to lock it as quickly as she could but under the dire stress she was feeling along with holding the lovable, live fifty-pound weight resting on her arm, it wasn't an easy task. At the satisfying chuck! and click! with the correct turns of the door key, she speed-walked to the car and set Ace securely in his booster seat in the back.
She turned around to see the progress of transporting Erik into the ambulance. The paramedics had just laid him down on a wheeled, elevated gurney. His legs were strapped to the bed to avoid the chances of slipping and falling onto the ground. Despite him seeming expressionless, she wondered if he was scared at all. She thought…
Mrs. Sadness let out a stressed yet brokenhearted sigh. "Poor Erik." She whispered.
If anything more terrible happened to him, a grand part of Mrs. Netzel's world and heart would die. Her three children were her world; as a matter of fact there was a whole island inside her mind dedicated to them—Mother Island. That Island was one of the top Islands in Mrs. Netzel's Mind World and was born at exactly same time she found out she was expecting Emmy.
The teary-eyed chubby Emotion touched a button, releasing a frown. She was reaching for another one, but Mrs. Joy stepped in to stop.
"Wait!" Mrs. Joy said. "We can't cry now. We have to be strong now."
Surprisingly, Erik had caught direct eye contact with his mother. Before he would slip away into the mysterious interior of the ambulance, he weakly smiled and waved. Despite his poorly, tired complexion, an abundance of warmth and assurance twinkled from his eyes.
Mrs. Joy, tenderly enthralled in this moment, tapped a tiny button on the console. Mrs. Sadness had barely managed an even tinier click on her part of the console.
Mrs. Netzel sadly smiled and waved goodbye as a result.
"Thanks, Mom." Joy said under her breath. She grinned as she tiredly but happily leaned against the console. Erik's Emotions took notice that his mom could no longer be seen.
"Bye, Mom." Sadness added, barely letting out a sad smile. "Now what?" She looked at the screen hopelessly.
"Well, there's no going back." Disgust noted.
"No, duh," Anger grumbled not only at Disgust's comment but also Fear trembling at how strange this moving place was and having nobody but strangers inside.
The Emotions looked through the screen at the interior of the ambulance. There was so much equipment on shelves everywhere. It didn't have the best lighting so most everything had a dark tinge to it. It seemed a bit cool, like the equipment they saw on the shelves of a secret agent's association base in spy movies. They didn't know exactly what each object was, but it was still pretty awesome.
They heard the engine of the ambulance start. That's when looking at all the epic coolness came to a halt. Through the two oval-shaped windows of the back doors of the ambulance, they watched Erik's house shrink and shrink until the ambulance turned along a bend where home sweet home couldn't be seen. This made Fear even more frightened.
"We are so away from home." He said shaking.
"Again, no, duh." Anger said.
"But," Joy cut in, trying to calm down Fear. "From what at least I heard, Mom should be following us."
"Hopefully she'll have a say as to where we're going." Fear responded, trying to settle down. He lowered his voice in whispers to himself. "I just hope we're not ending up in a psycho ward or science lab."
"We are not going to a psycho ward." Disgust said. "We can hear you by the way."
Joy winked at Disgust to say 'thank you.' She slid over to the wide windows to see the Mind World. She was having high hopes that the Mind World would be making some progress to recovery. She sighed with a pinch of disappointment; she couldn't see much improvement out there. With that, she skipped back to the console, all while mumbling in song, "They're coming to take me away, ha ha! They're coming to take me away, ho ho, hee hee, ha ha! To the funny farm! Where life is beautiful all the time…"
"More needles?" Anger questioned in disbelief of another outrage.
"No, just the one." Sadness reprimanded.
The paramedic sitting in the back next to Erik pulled out an unfortunately familiar face.
"Okay, Erik," He began. "I'm going to ask you to hold your left arm straight.
"M' gay." Erik responded and followed the given instructions.
The paramedic carefully yet accurately pressed the needle into the inner bend of the elbow.
"Ow." Sadness whimpered. She could almost feel the pain of a tiny injection into her own elbow. She bit down on her lower lip and squinted her eyes almost shut as she turned a knob to shrink the view from the screen into a slit. Finding out that the little poke was over, she brought the screen back to the normal view. "Okay the worst is over." She paused.
"Okay, great job." The paramedic smiled. Erik deserved a high-five for that, but it was less likely that the kid would be in the right condition to do that.
The next thing Erik knew is that a thin, long rubber tube laced around his lower face like a necklace being held up too high. The paramedic gracefully draped two sides of the tube in the top cleft of Erik's ear. He inserted two prongs, each one having an open hole at the end, into Erik's nostrils.
"Okay, that is seriously annoying." Disgust raised her upper lip. "Why do we need that? We're breathing just fine as it is."
"We really don't know, Disgust." Sadness said.
"I never expected any of us to know, Sadness." Disgust responded.
Anger was still near to hitting his last wit. He really wished he could explode and let out his frustration onto the console. But a crazy outburst of well, anger coming out of Erik on that gurney would most likely get him sent to the psycho ward, which was the last thing anyone wanted.
Disgust sighed. "I still bet everything that Erik still looks awful…well, even more awful than what he did when we woke up."
"Is he doing okay back there, Rick?" A paramedic in the front asked the one next to Erik.
The paramedic, Rick, looked at their passenger, who grinned and gave a solid nod. He smiled back and answered his colleague, "For sure."
Erik looked through the long windows in front of him. The ambulance had barely come out of his hometown and dove into the ever-moving highway. A couple of cars behind him appeared a very familiar car—his mom's car. He couldn't make out Ace but could barely see his mom. She looked stressed. He doubted she could see him.
"Poor Mom." Fear lamented, beginning to imagine what was going on in her head just by looking at her expression. "I bet anything she's probably more scared than we are."
The other Emotions raised an eyebrow at him, as if saying, "We?" He chuckled sheepishly.
"I went to Belgium last year." Rick began talking to Erik. "In Europe?"
"Coo." Erik responded, unsure as to what to think of going to some European country he barely heard about.
"Hey, hey, hey!" Joy chimed. "Did you hear that?"
"Hear what?" Disgust asked. She pointed to the paramedic. "Him? What's so cool about Belgium? Pft! We only said 'Cool' just to be courteous."
"No, after the guy talked about Belgium." Joy corrected, beaming in an ear-to-ear grin. "We used to say 'goo' for cool, but just now we said—"
"The C sound instead of 'G'." Disgust finished and smiled back. "Great! We're finally getting somewhere, though we haven't gotten to 'L' sound yet."
Internally, each Emotion cheered over the accomplishment but continued to pray that their boy would be okay by the time this mess was over.
Rick continued, "I spent most of October there, of course, visited Brussels for a few days." Erik continued to give the man his attention in semi-interest. "One of my favorite places to visit—or tour, rather," He chuckled sheepishly. "…was the University of Brussels. "There I got to see the place on the campus where the first Solvay Conference took place."
"Solvay Conference…" Sadness repeated the name.
"Yeah, Solvay Conference." Anger said but started to ponder along with at least one other Emotion. "I recognize the name, but what was Solvay again?"
"That's right!" Fear snapped up straight and pushed a few buttons on the console to bring back a memory sometime from last summer vacation. Watching a memory with a few other memories behind glide up the recall tube, he saw Learning Island, an island that looked like the top of a desk with books, pens, paper, and a flexible lamp on top, slowly but surely moving to Erik's lifelong fascination in learning whatever piqued his interest.
The golden memory landed on the stick-shaped projector and played the memory of skimming over a few pages in a book about 20th-century scientists. The observant browsing stopped at a black-and-white myriad of solemn-faced geniuses. Sure enough, Solvay Conference was in there—the first one took place in 1911.
"Nineteen ewuh-ven." Erik responded, trying to pronounce his words more clearly. "Rad-yay-sun an the Guh-wanta. Righ?"
"Yep, 1911." The paramedic confirmed. "Radiation and the Quanta."
"Well, that was easy to remember." Joy noticed, resting a finger on her chin. The fact about 1911 being the year of the first Solvay Conference was a piece of some knowledge that a good number of people didn't know. Ironically, this was much easier to remember than what day of the week it was—um…Monday, was it?
She turned around and watched Learning Island; sure enough it was up and running. As happy as she was at the site, she and the others had to keep up with whatever Rick was talking about.
"As it turns out, they don't have the Conference at the University anymore." Rick continued.
"Reall-eh?" Erik asked, wanting to learn more.
"Nowadays, they have it at some hotel somewhere in Brussels. So it's still in Belgium. The last Conference that happened was when I was in Belgium." He chuckled. "Perfect timing, right?"
"Yeah." Erik couldn't help but grin back.
Rick sighed with a smirk. "Unfortunately I didn't get to be there."
As the preteen's interest was running full speed in spite of his brain's yet-to-arrive full recovery, Joy was typing cheerfully at the console like a student taking notes whilst listening to a classroom lecture. Many points in this discussion didn't feed the interests of the Emotions, but still; this was the kind of stuff Erik loved. They were in charge of keeping note of whatever fed his interest; after all, they didn't want him to have a brain with nothing cool learned and stored inside. A couple of the Emotions had to admit: a few tidbits of what Erik and Rick were talking about were pretty cool.
Old memories were recovered, and new memories were made as the Emotions listened with a mix of pleased and dreamy expressions as if hearing a very good story. The Train of Thought delivered various facts about what facts were remembered from the book or about Solvay Conferences.
The discussion began to close when a puzzling question popped up that made Erik have to ponder. "So, do you know what the latest Solvay Conference was about? The one in Brussels last October?"
"Oh, great!" Disgust said. "What do we do? I don't even think we know this one."
"We don't!" Anger confirmed. He pushed a button to receive at least something about last year's Solvay Conference. No results. He angrily slammed his fist multiple times. Nothing. He growled.
This came to show that while Erik was making progress, things weren't quite back up to par yet. Nervously biting down on his lower lip and trying to think of at least something, Fear sputtered and held himself. He waddled inch by inch towards the console in the hopes to help Erik.
"We'll just make a wild guess." Sadness finally suggested. "Anything science-y that sounds like physics."
"Whatever!" Anger responded. "Something-quantum-something. Legit enough!"
"Yes!" Fear spat out, somewhat satisfied by the proposition for the guess. He quickly pressed down on a button.
"Guh-wanta…Thee-ree?" Erik guessed, hoping he was correct or at least close to being correct.
"No, not quite." Rick responded. "Quantum Theory was talked about in the Conference beforehand, in 2011. Theory of the Quantum World. Last year's was Astrophysics and Cosmology. But can you guess who was there?"
"Dang it!" Anger loudly whispered before mentally cursing Yosemite Sam-style.
"Well, now we know." Disgust said. "Now…for this question. Who was at the Conference last October? It can't be Einstein?"
"No," Sadness said. "Einstein's been dead for about 60 years now. Didn't scientists take his brain out after he died?" The mere subject of Sadness' question made Disgust want to barf her own brains out.
"How about Stephen Hawking?" Joy suggested after remembering herself watch parts of some movie about him a few months ago.
"Sounds good." Sadness said. Fear gave a thumb up. Disgust simply smirked. Anger nodded in approval. With the unstoppable agreement, Joy submitted the probable answer.
"Well, this is a nice moment." The Emotions thought in unison as another bright yellow memory joined the previous negatively multi-colored memories. In the midst of the internal and external chaos happening, it was nice to have a ray of sunshine.
"Stephen Haw-ging?" Erik guessed.
"Yes." Rick said. "One of the many faces in that band of scientists." He turned to look at one of the other paramedics with an overall satisfied expression. "Hey, Ben!" He called. "We've got another science buff back here!"
The paramedic science thing is based off a friend's telling of herself during an ambulance ride, only it was about a pinch of French history, mainly about Marie Antoinette. Cool, huh?
Any hooskets, thanks to all for the faves, watches, and reviews! They are greatly appreciated, and I am most flattered. See you Insiders soon!