Knowing everyone

This snippet presents two characters in the same scene.

Who is the point of view character?

Matthias tossed the last of the hazelnuts into the basket and stood awkwardly shuffling his large sandals in the grass. How could he say aloud what was in his heart?

The Abbot put his paw around the young mouse's shoulder, sensing his secret yearnings, for he had ruled Redwall wisely over a great number of years and gained much experience of mouselife. He smiled down at his young charge and spoke kindly to him. "Come with me, Matthias. It is time we talked together."

Redwall(1986)

There's no single point of view character.

There are two characters, Matthias and the Abbott.
We see inside both of them: Matthias has a yearning in his heart, and the Abbott can sense it.

This is what we call third person omniscient point of view (as opposed to third person limited).

Omniscient means 'all-knowing'.

The idea here is that the storyteller knows everything about every character: what they want, what they're thinking, feeling, their history, anything.

And they can communicate that whenever they want:

Unlike in alternating point of view, where the storyteller can 'zoom in' on only one character per scene/chapter, in omnisicient mode they can fly in and out of characters at will.
And unlike limited subjective point of view, where the storyteller can only communicate what could be known by the main character, in omniscient the storyteller can describe anything they want.

Do you see how the storyteller goes inside each of the characters in these examples?

"It's quite the island you have here," yelled Adjouembe over the roar of the helicopter. Of course he was thinking, if you're so rich, why do I have to come here to make you pay your bills? But it wasn't the time to say that. Customer service and all.

Mr Malady smiled, enjoying what felt like a home advantage. This man's a rube, he thought. Anyone can buy an island. It's what you do with it that counts. He waved his guest towards the monorail platform. "We do our best, Mr Sana. Please let me take you to our offices where we can discuss this awkward matter further." Above the piranha pit, he thought.

Casey was shaking. Suddenly all those shark movies were coming back to her. The beach looked so close, she wanted to dive in and swim then run onto the sand, but she knew that would just make a mess. She tried to breathe and make steady progress, looking constantly from side to side for any sign of a shadow in the water.

Behind her, Malachi had started to pray. He'd never been religious; it'd been his mum's thing, and his sisters, but now that he was thinking about his legs getting bitten off he'd found God and was letting Him know he wanted an airlift out of this situation. He moaned as a wave lifted his surfboard suddenly.

Write a snippet using third person omniscient, in which you dive inside two different characters in the same scene.

We said that omniscient means 'all-knowing'. In the snippets above, that 'knowing' has been limited to knowing about the characters.

But why restrict ourselves? If the storyteller is all-knowing, then they could describe anything in a story.

Let's look at an example that goes even further.

Point of view