As Professor Carrie lay unconscious on the floor, an apparent victim of Mena’s poisoning, everyone gaped at Mena. The young witch was wishing more and more she could disappear. She was overcome with the same feeling she had when she destroyed Deidre’s bakery, only magnified times a thousand because this time it was murder, or at least unintentional professor-slaughter. Perhaps they’d send her right back to the gallows from whence she came, but this time without a strange but dashing wizard fellow to save her. Or…she could make a break for it and disappear into the Yellow Brick Zone.

That was it. Before they could stage a trial, she’d head for the mythical zone between worlds. She had seen her auntie use an ability that if you clicked your heels together and chanted the magic words, you could escape to a brick road floating in space and time. Now what were the words?

Mena made a motion and walked to the center of the room. “What are you doing?” Ashlan shouted.

Mena closed her eyes and clicked her heels together and cried, “Follow the Yellow Brick Zone, take me to worlds unknown!”

She opened her eyes, but she was still in the room. Suddenly, a high pitched lispy voice came from the cadaver lying on the floor, “No need for that, Miss Mena!”

“Professor Carrie!” a terrified Groundborn shouted from across the room. “He’s come back as a zombie!”

Everyone immediately looked at Janus who raised her hands, “I didn’t do it. I’m not a bokur! We only reap the living, not raise the dead!”

Professor Carrie immediately sat up and spat out the small circular things Mena had put in her potion. He giggled. “That’s how a normal person would have reacted if they ingested Mena’s potion.”

“B-b-but…” Mena stammered, “What did I do wrong?”

“For some reason,” Professor Carrie said, “Instead of gopher guts, you used gopher nuts!”

“Gopher nuts?!” everyone exclaimed, some with weird looks of repulsion on their face.

“Yep,” Professor Carrie responded. “Gopher nuts from a green gopher bush! That’s what they eat! What did you think I was talking about?”

The whole room fell silent.

“Now Mena,” Professor Carrie said, his bucktoothed mouth pursing into a small smile. “Why did you use the wrong ingredient?!”

“I’ll admit it!” Mena said, her face bright red and tears in her eyes. “I used magic translate to read the Dulabet! I-I’m sorry! I can’t read that language.”

“It’s okay,” Professor Carrie responded. “I’m surprised Gemini put you in a grade when you can’t read the textbook. Perhaps, we can get someone to tutor you in remedial Dulish!”

“I’ll do it,” Ashlan said, very proud to be the first one to offer.

“Very well!” Professor Carrie said. “I’ll talk to him about that. But for now, onward with the Cute Fluffy Mammals!”

As he walked to the next island table, Janus spoke wistfully with her head in her hands. “Choking on gopher nuts from a green gopher bush. What a terrible way to go.”

“I know,” Mena said. “Nobody deserves to die that way.”

“Exactly,” the bony girl said, her beady eyes gazing out from her raccoon eyeliner, “It wouldn’t make for very romantic poetry.”

Mena carefully moved her stool away from Janus when she wasn’t looking.

**

Following the chime of the afternoon bell, Mena exited Professor Carrie’s room carrying five volumes of “The Infinite History of the Language of Dula,” that he’d given her. Her face was buried beneath a blockade of books, but she still smiled and spoke with a chipper tone, “A few extra reading assignments is a small price to pay for nearly killing the teacher!”

“You’re taking this a lot better now, Rainy,” Ashlan said. “I can’t believe you were going to bolt! And I never even heard of that spell you were chanting.”

“You hadn’t?” Mena responded. “I heard my auntie using it to teleport from our house.”

“You mean, Grizabella Willow?” Ashlan said, her face stretched in a toothy grin over knowing yet another piece of trivia.

“Yep! Did you hear a lot about my auntie from your mom?”

“Nope!” Aslan said, “Grizabella didn’t hang out with Arabella and Toyah, she mostly kept to herself.”

“Wow,” Mena said, “I had no idea my auntie was a lone wolf!”

Mena fell silent, deep in thought over her auntie. She often imagined her mom and her aunt spending a lot of time together in the Dream Castle. She couldn’t believe Grizabella wasn’t part of Arabella and Toyah’s girl squad.

“So, are you excited about getting a private lesson from Gemini?” Aslan said. “My father is always skeptical of his methods, but they tend to give good results.”

“Oh yes I am,” Mena said, grinning away as she carefully bounced up the stairwell with her books.

“Quite interesting too,” Aslan remarked. “Since it’s after dinner. The time he wishes to not be bothered.”

“Mmm, that’s true,” Mena said. “But I’m mostly interested in asking him about the door in my dreams.”

“Ooh,” a wispy voice said. “Did you say, a door in your dreams?”

Mena turned around to see Janus Harvestar following behind them, her thin bony face bearing a tiny smile.

“Oh, do you know something?” Mena asked.

“Of course,” Janus said in her pixie high voice, quite unbefitting for a skeletal face. “When people see a black door in their dreams, they’re about to die!”

Mena’s eyes shot open and she giggled nervously. This Janus girl was quite skilled at creeping her out. Fortunately for her, the door in her dreams was gold, and to make things better, the bell for the second period rang.

“Oh, would you look at the time,” Mena remarked. “Or hear the time! It’s time for Lucid Dreaming!” And she shuffled quickly away.

Mena said goodbye to Aslan and hustled into the class, but when she arrived, she almost wished she was dealing with Janus instead.

Much like her dream, the classroom she entered had no ceiling, only the overhead ambience of a starless night sky. Green ember torches at the five corners of the room allowed Mena to see where the desks were. The temperature could only be described as bone-chilling, and the most ominous thing was a wooden chair in the center of the space with metal clamps on the arms, a metallic helmet with an overhanging pendulum. Mena saw May with her nose buried in her romance novel and immediately sat next to her.

“Hey!” Mena said causing May to peer warily from behind her book. “Fancy meeting you here!”

“Uh…hey…?” May said awkwardly. “I forgot your name… I hope you’re not mad.”

“Not a problem, it’s Mena,” the young witch said with a light bob of her head, and she gazed around and shivered. “This place is pretty spooky.”

‘I’m trying to pretend I’m not here,” May said, twitching. “It’s not working.”

“What’s with this classroom?” Mena asked.

“My mummy said that Professor Caligari is the daughter of a phantom. They like the dark. I think she’s a phantom too.”

“Incorrect,” a cold, irritable voice said from the depth of nowhere.

The whole class jumped as two bright green flames appeared in the darkness. They became a pair of green eyes. Professor Caligari’s silvery, moon-white skin glowed in the dark, and she looked like she was about to draw all her ire on May. “My father is a phantom,” Caligari stated matter-of-factly. “But my mother was a human. As such, I am a mortal being like you all. And if you…”

Caligari pointed at May who had shuddered behind her book again. “May,” she said in a surprisingly high tone.

“IF you, May, are so quick to draw judgement, then you will quickly get on my bad side.”

“I’m sorry, ma’am,” May said and quickly bowed her head.

Caligari, with no more than a gesture, changed the subject. “You are all here to learn how to control your dreams. The better grasp you have over your subconscious, the less likely you are to be subject to the will of nightcreepers and the dread they bring.”

Caligari turned towards Mena. “I am a master of lucid dreaming. How did I get this way? I regulated all my whims and insignificant emotions to the back of my mind and now I am completely disassociated from them. That’s what it takes to survive in a dream world gone wrong.”

Mena swallowed hard. The woman meant business. Caligari walked over to the wooden chair with the metal helmet. “The first rule of lucid dreaming: emptying your minds right before you dive into the unconscious, for a clear mind gives them nothing to feed from. First, I will test how poised you are before our intensive training. Any volunteers?”

Predictably, nobody lifted their hand, but Caligari seemed to anticipate it. “That was a rhetorical question. Every single one of you is regulated to come up here.”

Caligari took no time to meditate on who to choose. Her blazing eyes shifted to Mena, and the young witch felt her face freeze and her ears grow hot.

“Willow. Get up here.”

Mena nervously slid out of her desk and tentatively walked up to the chair.

“First, this pendulum will lull you into the subconscious,” Caligari said. “But as you watch it, it’s important you clear your mind of all thoughts and keep your mind’s eye open. If you do so, you will have a small portion of lucidity in your dream. I will then see if you were successful in your dream bubble.”

Mena sat the wooden chair and whimpered quietly as the metal cuffs locked themselves around her arms. The helmet hung over her head and she watched the dangling pendulum with an endless spiral etched into the silver. Her eyes followed it and a dull haze loomed over her mind, but—suddenly—Mena’s eyes caught onto something on Caligari’s overly stern face. Looming over her glowing green eyes and beneath her squared bangs was a sharp black unibrow. For some bizarre reason, Mena could not get it out of her mind. It was both gross and humorous, and even if Mena was not exactly a master of her own thick, triangular brows, she immediately lost all fear of Caligari.

As she drifted into her subconscious all she could see was a clear blue sky full of sharp unibrows flapping around like birds. “Willow!” Caligari cried out.

Mena’s eyelids flew open. “What?!”

What are those in your mind’s eye?”

“Unibirds…” Mena said spaced out before catching herself. “Er…I mean birds.”

A look of pain in Caligari’s eyes was followed by a blazing stare. It looked like it could sizzle Mena like a sausage. She pointed at the chair. “Get down from there.”

As Mena cautiously walked back, Caligari said sharply. “I don’t know what Gemini sees in you, Willow.”

Mena’s eyes watered in embarrassment, but when Caligari saw them, she added, “But I suppose there’s always room for improvement.”

“May Cumberson,” she called out and May threw her book down and hustled surprisingly fast to the chair. May squeezed her round rump into the small chair, causing some giggles.

“The same applies to you. Clear your mind. Empty it of everything.”

“Okay…” May said as she watched pendulum swing.

Mena hoped May would do better than her. May’s eyelids lowered behind her round glasses and closed.

“Alright,” Caligari said. “Let’s see how your mind fares…”

May’s head drooped and she snored loudly. Caligari’s face changed to a mixture of surprised and disgusted. “…She actually fell asleep.”

The disgruntled teacher smacked her face with the palm of her hand. “This is going to be a long year…”

After a disastrous first day of Lucid Dreaming, Mena said goodbye to May and headed to dining hall. As the evening sun tinted the world a shade of orange marmalade, Mena sat at her cloud table with Aslan and the Tessellation Twins, pouting. She had barely dug into her pink and purple striped sweetloaf, mostly prodding it around with a fork.

The Tessellations pretended not to notice as they chatted to each other about the high marks they received on the first day (despite Aslan pointing out that there were no graded exams in any classes today.)

Ashlan put her large, paw-like hand on Mena’s back. “I don’t know why Gemini wants a miserable muck-up like me,” Mena said refusing to meet Ashlan’s concerned gaze.

“Because” Ashlan said, her voice rising in a haughty tone. “You’ve got more imagicnation in one brain cell than any of these Groundborns…”

Mena frowned at Ashlan, and the lioness immediately realized her poor choice of words. “Sorry, old habits,” she whispered so Marie and Laetitia would not hear her. “But surely, Gemini must see potential in you.”

“Methinks,” Laetitia said, a sadistic expression on her face and her finger twirling around her ear. “The painted fool has less marbles than the last headmaster, and I’m talking about an ancient narcoleptic who sleepwalked during class.”

“Pleeeaaasse,” Marie cried petitioning the heavens. “Can we remove him and put a real man in charge?”

“Who?” Ashlan said.

Marie clasped her hands together and said in a sing-songy voice, “Professor Gaia!”

“I second that,” Laetitia added. “Nothing finer than a human who predicts his own demise. And he’s got nice hair too!”

“Oh please,” Ashlan responded rolling her eyes. “I don’t think he’s that much saner than Gemini. This is the guy who has an emergency bunker in the castle basement. So happy I don’t have to take his conspiracy theory class.”

“You take that back,” Marie shouted, but Mena ignored all their squabbling and stood up.

“Guys,” she said with a dejected expression. I’ve got to prepare for Gemini’s lesson…”

Aslan’s emerald eyes shined, and she smiled as she looked up at her friend. “Just remember, you’re the only one with private lessons with the headmaster. Whatever he needs you for, it must be important.”

Mena gave a soft, slightly eased smile. That was the nicest thing she heard all day. “You’re right. Thanks Sunny.”

Ashlan gave a slight swagger and winked back at her. “You got it, Rainy!”

Mena followed the map on her schedule to the top of the moon tower. She puffed and panted up a spiral staircase, which led to a mystery door with dark hieroglyphs of shadowy faces. She heard lots of voices from behind the door; it seemed Gemini was not the only one inside. She knocked on Gemini’s door, gasping for breath and wishing she had devoured that sweetloaf for energy.

“Gemini…I’m…here…”

“Weeeelcome, Mena.” The door creaked up, revealing a Gemini who looked very different from the brightly dressed man she had known before. He was clad in a black and red velvet cape that he swooped back and forth as he opened the door. There was a creamy white masquerade mask over his light green eyes, and his hair was styled in a way that it swung over one eye. Clutching a glass of blood red wine, he had a sly grin of decadence. Mena thought he looked strangely handsome. “You’re just in time for the once-in-a-millennium Intergalactic Gala and State of Interplanetary Affairs.”

From behind his mask, his eyes gave a ravenous look of desire. “And you are the guest of honor, Mena. Don’t dawdle now, the fate of all this planet’s dreams depends on you!”

He beckoned her inside with his cape, and Mena entered nervously, but strangely excited, not knowing what awaited her on the inside.