Mena’s eyes glinted as she gave a devious smile towards Straw-Woman. “Why don’t I use Straw-Woman as a broom and fly up there?”

“You wouldn’t!” Straw-Woman responded with a jilted crack of her voice.

“The talking potato sack is right,” Gemini said with crossed arms and a knowing smile. “You could if you want to be disqualified, but this is a test of your own magical merit. Not using your bewitched items.”

“Drat rats, “Mena said with her own invented curse.

“Come on, Mena,” Straw-Woman said with an encouraging look. “We can jump across the gaps and prove this meanie man wrong.”

“Y-you’re right,” Mena stammered. “But what about the enormous gap three blocks down. There’s no way we can jump that.”

“Uh…” Straw-Woman said, her felt smile fading before she waved her straw arms desperately. “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.”

Mena looked down below her. The paneled floor had given way to a brisk sky full of white clouds. “There’s no way I’m going back down there,” she said with a firm expression and a nod of her head.

Seizing Straw-Woman who screamed, “Wait can’t we count to three first?!” Mena took a running sprint and leaped across the gap. She could feel the open air below her, the great divide separating her world of dreams from the solid ground below. Her boots plopped onto the next panel of floor, and with continuing momentum, she ran and leaped across the next gap.

The distance was further, and she extended her legs more in order to reach the next block. With another rebound, she touched down and sprinted towards the final block. Mena was sure with her charged up determination she could make it. She leaped but this time the distance between the blocks was twice as much.

“Miserable magicaps!” Mena cried as she kicked her legs to stay afloat a little bit longer. She dove forwards, reaching as far as she could. Could she make it?

Her fingers, holding Straw-Woman’s hand, wrapped around the end of the block and Mena’s body, clutching Straw-Woman hung off the edge. Mena’s heart sped up as she kicked her legs over the perilous pit below.

Relax Mena, she thought. Please relax. I’ve got to stay calm and do this for my auntie and Deidre.

With strength spurred on from her brain, Mena lifted her body up onto the final platform. She stood tall and looked up defiantly at Gemini who stood safely above her. “Nice agility, but this isn’t the circus,” Gemini laughed with a cruel caw. “You won’t get into my academy that way.”

“Right!” Mena said excitedly. “I’ll have to use magic…but what kind?”

“I dunno,” Gemini said in a dead-pan voice while pointing at his head. “But perhaps a girl so full of imagination will think of something.”

That’s right: Imagicnation!” Mena said, pointing at her brain too. She closed her eyes and pondered deep in thought.

Suddenly, the words of Straw-Woman brightened Mena’s thoughts: “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it!

“That’s it!” Mena exclaimed raising her finger. “I’ll imagine a bridge. Now what kind of bridge helps you cross the sky?”

Mena caught wind of Gemini’s dazzling, multi-colored eyes and she immediately knew what she’d imagine—she’d cross the sky on a rainbow. Mena closed her eyes and held her fingers to her brain. She chanted the following rhyme, “Blue orange, yellow, green, violet, indigo and red! Envision these colors inside my head!” Bright streaks flashed in the darkness one at a time until they formed a bridge of color right before her mind’s eye.

“Whoa!” Straw-Woman gasped, and Mena did too. She opened her eyes and saw a half-formed bridge of rainbow. “Miraculous magicaps! I did it!”

She approached it. One hand clutched Straw-Woman’s hand and the other remained pointed at her brain. She remembered her auntie telling her she had to stay focused in order to keep her imagined object solid.

Gemini started fixedly at Mena, his eyes turning a shade of bright green again as together, Mena and her scarecrow stepped onto the shining bridge. It was surprisingly solid for colors filtered through the prism of her mind. As Mena made her way across the chasm, she closed her eyes again. She focused her mind on lengthening the rainbow bridge in order to reach Gemini. It grew slowly but surely as she kept concentrating.

“Wow, you’re really doing it!” Straw-Woman exclaimed.

“I am!” Mena cried happily and the thought added a bounce to her step.

They were nearing the end, about to reach Gemini when Mena had an abrupt and outrageous thought. “Wait, isn’t there always a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow?”

An enormous yellow-gold pot filled sparkling coins appeared in the darkness of her mind’s eye, and Mena couldn’t stop in time. She collided with it right as it solidified before her.

Her concentration broke and the rainbow bridge and pot dissolved into thin air. Though her head smarted, she knew she was plummeting through the sky; soon she would fall through the bottom of the castle and back down to the ground. She screamed and threw her arms out to grab onto something. Suddenly, Gemini’s hand hoisted her back up.

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Reaching Gemini’s perch with Straw-Woman, Mena watched as the room rotated and she saw multiple Gemini’s revolving around her. She raised her fingers to her head and with a stunned grin, she asked, “Did I earn my place in the blah-gicademy?!”

Gemini gave Mena a serious look, several in Mena’s case. “You earned a concussion maybe.”

Mena shook her head, dislodging all the stars and colors from her vision. Her arms sank and her body was ready to give out. “So, I didn’t pass?”

“Well…” Gemini said. “You didn’t make it up here all on your own.”

Mena’s head pained her, and she tried to hold back her tears of disappointment. “I guess I should pack my bags…”—she gave a pout realizing the truth—"if I had some…”

She turned away from Gemini before the Clown Prince cried, “Wait!”

Mena looked up at him, her eyes crystalline from tears.

“You know,” Gemini said. “There’s actually no entry exam.”

Mena felt the dizziness returning to her head. She weakly raised a finger. “W-what?”

Gemini gave a wide grin and a thumbs up to the dumbfounded young witch. “I simply wanted to see the daughter of Arabella Willow in action.”

Now Mena’s head was really spinning “Y-you know my mom?”

“Uh-huh. She was the one of the best students headmaster Bivion had. Always so full of imagicnation and clever ways to use it. I wanted to see if the apple fell far from the tree…or the ledge in this case!”

All Mena could utter was a stupefied squeak.

Gemini’s rainbow eyes lit up like the rainbow bridge. “Seems you’ve got a lot of promise, witchy-poo. But much like your mom, you’ve got one problem.”

“That is?”

Gemini put his finger to his head. “Sometimes all that imagicnation runs away on ya, and you create things you shouldn’t! Like that pot of gold. Fortunately, the classes of Nightdream Academy can help keep that in check!”

“So, I’m in?”! Mena asked, her eyes drifting off.

“You’re more than in! You’ve earned an all-expense paid scholarship to our learning academy.

“Great…” Mena sighed as all of the action—from nearly being executed, to getting pulled up on that anchor, to leaping from platform to platform, to getting tricked by Gemini and nearly dying in the process—all caught up with her.

“Goodnight,” Mena said with a courteous smile, and fainted.

**

Mena awoke and found herself in a dimly lit room. The only light seemed to filter through a strip of light beneath a doorway. She was wrapped tightly in blankets, and her consciousness was still hazy. She heard two female voices behind the door and wondered nervously who they belonged to. One was a stern, almost emotionless voice, the other was sort of gruff and haughty.

“It’s been nearly four hours since they brought her up here,” the first said. “The headmaster is worried, and you know how he gets at night.”

“Professor, it was a bump on her head,” the haughty, sort-of know-it-all voice responded. “Everyone is taking this so much more serious than it is. She’s the daughter of THE Arabella Willow.”

“Well then,” the cold voice said. “Do your duty. I do not want to trouble the headmaster further.”

“She’s not my duty,” the haughty voice said, and Mena could swear she heard the voice snarl and growl. “But I think she and I are going to be good friends all the same.”

Mena shivered as the second voice transformed from a girl’s voice to the snarl of a beast. The door creaked open, and Mena saw a horrifying silhouette spread across the floor. It wasn’t a person, it was a lion’s mane.

“A lion?! Oh my,” Mena said as she pulled the covers up over nose, but she could not look away from the shadow. Somehow, they had released a lion into the room, and it was potentially going to eat her.

“S- stay away!” Mena yelled! “Don’t come closer! I know lots of spells and I can turn you into a frog!”

“Now why would you want to do that?” A finger reached out and lit a candle on a nearby shelf. Immediately light extended over the figure, and Mena could not believe her eyes. It wasn’t a lion at all. It was girl with elegant emerald eyes, a small triangle nose and a bushy, mane-like head of brunette hair. Light freckles dotted her cheeks. Both her eyes and the way she pursed her lips gave off a sophisticated air. She wore a cloak adorned with yellow and orange suns. She looked at Mena with a relaxed gaze as Mena lowered her covers.

“Where I come from,” the lion-like girl said with her mannered voice. “We exchange family names and a formal greeting. We don’t behave like spellcasting baboons.”

“W-where are you from?” Mena asked timidly.

The lioness raised an eyebrow. “I’m surprised someone of your presumed magic class doesn’t recognize where I’m from. But if you insist—I’m from Dula, the Land of No Body.”

“Magic class?!” Mena murmured. “Dula?” She had never heard of any of these terms or places before.

“I’m surprised your mother never told you any of these things,” the lioness said, but she paused. “Oh, but where are my manners. Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Ashlan O’Ryan.”

“Mena…Mena Willow,” Mena said, still unsure what to think of this girl—other than she was a bit snooty. “And what do you mean my mother? She never told me anything. She died when I was a baby.”

Ashlan’s mouth hung open in disbelief. “Your mom is…Oh, I’m so sorry, Mena.”

Mena looked at Ashlan who seemed to be enduring a loss herself. “Did you…know my mother?”

Suddenly, life return to Ashlan’s brilliant green eyes. “No, I didn’t. But my mother did”—and as if forgetting that she had learned the woman died, Ashlan’s eyes glittered. “She told me the most fascinating stories about the friendship they kindled here. How they were two of the most brilliant spellcasters in the whole Nightdream Academy. They practically ruled the school together!”

“Wow” Mena said, almost stupefied now. “Your mother and my mother were friends?”

Mena gazed back at Ashlan with intent to hear more. Her auntie never talked much about her mother at school. It was mostly about herself.

As if narrating an astounding theatrical drama, Ashlan announced, “Arabella and Toyah, the two leading ladies in the school with the biggest brains of Imagicnation. They dazzled all the teachers! All the girls wanted to be them, and all the guys wanted to be with them…”—Ashlan smirked and raised and lowered her eyebrows—"some of the girls did too! Together they had the greatest thing ever…”

“Friendship?” Mena said, admittedly feeling a bit starstruck by her mother’s life she knew nothing about.

“Fame!” Ashlan said back. “There’s no greater feeling than when everyone loves you.”

“That’s pretty neato,” Mena said. Though she mostly dreamed about finding her own Fabias at this school, being the apple of everyone’s eye seemed appealing too.

“That’s why I’m so happy that the headmaster selected me to be your roommate,” Ashlan said with eyes as bright as stars. “Not only can I show you the ins and outs of the Nightdream Academy, but together, you and I can become the next Arabella and Toyah!”

“Wow…” Mena’s eyes shone as brightly as Ashlan’s. Perhaps fainting wasn’t so embarrassing if it led to her becoming friends with the daughter of her mother’s best friend.

A loud bell resounded through the castle, shaking the Mena’s new bedroom. “The Dinner Bell! Great!” Ashlan said. “Not only can I introduce you to my friends, but it’s the beginning of the Summer Solstice for the new findings.”

“What’s so important about that?”

Ashlan’s mouth grinned with visible fangs. “Together with the other new findings you will be weighed on the magic cloud and that will determine, not only your magic class, but which arts you can take here. Which of course determines whether you will be a failure or success in the Nightdream Academy… and in life!”

Mena’s jaw dropped, and Ashlan smiled, “No pressure.”