While Wally is still hiding in Home’s walls, silently convinced that his turning Invisible won’t matter to anyone, there are things happening outside that Home gets to see unfold. And they’re very unsure if they should be relaying it to Wally or not.
What Wally doesn’t know is that his disappearance, and the Audience’s inability to find him, does have an effect on everyone. It’s just not an immediate, obvious one.
His not coming out over the span of that week was a shift in everyone’s lives, one that sent ripples of unease through the neighbors.
The Schedule was built around Wally’s day after he left Home and while everyone was able to “fill in” the spots where he should have been without raising alarm, some of them still noticed that something (or rather someone) was missing.
I’m not sure who would be the first to really notice that something wasn’t right. But someone does and it triggers a domino effect for the rest of town.
The neighbors notice, Wally’s friends notice, it just takes a bit for them to go into motion.
As for the Audience…
Once they start harassing everyone else over their Script, things start to fall apart in short order. Unlike Wally, they weren’t self-aware prior to this event. They didn’t know about the script or that they weren’t really acting like themselves.
But suddenly, having this impossible Thing looming over them is very hard to ignore, with all its unspoken demands and fiercely trying to press its will on them. Add in Wally’s disappearance and the sudden awareness that there’s something there that hadn’t always been there, and it quickly becomes something they are not ready OR WILLING to deal with when their friend is missing/possibly in danger.
And, frankly, unlike the quiet, gentle painter of the Neighborhood, they aren’t as passive and easily usable.
(part of that was due to the Audience’s control over them all being something gradual. It didn’t snap into place all at once.)
They don’t know how to handle what’s happening (considering the idyllic nature of the world/place they live in) and they quickly spiral off script and break character like crazy once this new, unexpected pressure is applied to them. Because there isn’t a precedent for how they should be reacting to all of this.
Suddenly the unseen watcher is quickly losing control of them all and it really doesn’t like it.
Eventually, it throws a fit and, like a child throwing the mother-of-all-tantrums, it (accidentally) destroys its connection to the Neighborhood and releases everyone from its control.
(Needless to say, there’s a subtle town-wide identity crisis. Everyone has a decent idea of who they are, but they’ve spent years acting like caricatures of themselves and need to reground themselves a wee bit.)
But a lot of them set it aside as it dawns on them that maybe this was why Wally always seemed off. Maybe he knew about this but had been unable to say.
Maybe this was why he was missing.
Eventually, they manage to find him (with at least one of them piecing together that the invisible person they found was their missing resident) and the healing, for all of them, can finally start.
And that’s all I have so far. But I am gonna workshop more for this.
