Inside Out reImagined

Navigation through Language and Smoke

As soon as the plane touched down, and as it continued rolling down the runway, Fear was the only emotion holding onto the console. The others merely watched from their seats, all of which had slightly jumped up during touchdown, before rolling towards the console; however, all of them had managed to push themselves away without touching the levers and buttons.

This rolling and slowing down lasted longer than the emotions expected, and what was worse, the plane didn't fully slow down at first, but instead, began taxiing, making the loops through the strips of the airport, with no clear end to the car-like driving of the plane — or the shining of the "fasten your seat belt" light.

Joy started feeling an insatiable itch. She desperately wanted Riley to just... leap from the seat and run across the plane until she got to the airport, and then run across the airport until she got outside and greeted the open air of Shanghai, and then run across Shanghai until she got to her new home, and then run some more, just for good measure. Yet, she understood that without a lot of memories of Shanghai, Riley simply wouldn't be able to run very far before getting hopelessly lost, and tried her best to restrain herself.

Luckily, though this was one of the longest minutes of Joy's life, it eventually came to an end as the little sight through the window stopped changing, and the plane came to a full stop. Soon enough, other hallmarks of "de-planing", such as the light for the seat belt going off, followed; as soon as Joy saw it, she hit the console, and Riley freed herself from the seat belt and stood up in a heartbeat, largely ignoring Fear's simultaneous presence.

"Hey there, slow down! We're not leaving yet!" Riley's mother pointed out as soon as her daughter had leapt up, and likewise, the family's father remained seated for the time being, even though both of them had also unbuckled their seat belts.

"Well, that's a shame..." Sadness spoke from the far left, always being the one to muse how unfair life was, sometimes. However, this elicited a visceral reaction from Joy, who held onto some of the console's buttons more tightly, and the console reacted by flashing blue before returning to gold, a telltale sign of emotional whiplash.

"Aww... can it be soon, though?" Riley asked her mother, as the whiplash took effect.

"We'll be ready when we are ready!" Riley's father commented, not realizing how stupid he sounded at first. This elicited a chuckle from Joy, who just knew where Riley's carefree spirit came from. However, he was quick to follow up with an entirely different thought: "But regardless, I think I can reach in and get our carry-ons."

For Riley herself, there wasn't much to retrieve; only her schoolbag, containing her favorite Chinese tablet and not much else, and nothing from the storage above herself. However, her parents had made sure to pack as much as they could get away with, in terms of both check-in and hand luggage, and her father struggled to both locate everything and pull it out. Yet, even the emotions could tell that this was far from everything that the Andersens had amassed during their life in Minnesota.

"That can't be everything! What about everything else?" Disgust asked, though they fully knew that the other emotions wouldn't give them an adequate answer, and therefore, as usual, they would have to rely on the console.

They punched in code after code, going after all sorts of memory sub-types that would help Riley, and consequently, the emotions remember how the whole moving process should ideally go. Soon enough, the memories came: some auditory, with Riley's father's voice explaining something about his startup's "new parent" (whatever that meant in corporate terms) financing the move, though many details still went over Riley's head. Other memories were photographic, depicting the Andersens' Minnesota house just before the family left for good, with many of their belongings in wooden boxes, some remaining in place in the house, others being carried away by vaguely Asian-looking movers.