“Affirmative,” Caligari said, her feet spreading apart into battle stance. “I’ll report there immediately.”

She turned her head back towards Mena and her friends.

“Wait here,” she said, casting a particular glance at the ever-precocious Mena. “This is for your own protection. Mal-Essence is super hazardous.”

“Mal-Essence?” Mena asked, climbing onto her ward bed. “is that what this ickiful goop is called?”

Caligari nodded. “Aye, the most toxic waste in the Nightmare Void, but it can also be created within a witch or warlock with a high concentration of imagicnation”—Caligari turned her head back towards the member of the Lollypop Brigade. “Now wait here and talk about something nice with your friends.”

Mena cozily tucked herself in. “Will do.”

She gave Mena and her friends one last reassuring look before the phantom professor plunged into the depths of the shadows. What wasn’t so reassuring was the fact taht Mena, May and Janus went diving into the shadows along with her too.

As Caligari glided through a void of purple and violet sky, suspended over the floating yellow brick zone, Mena, May and Janus traveled her trajectory as well. “W-why are we flying with her?” Mena shouted as she looked below at the road composed of golden-yellow bricks.

“You didn’t book a cruise on the S.S. Ghostliner?” Janus asked, smiling dreamily as she gazed into the void, but Mena and May didn’t laugh. They screamed “Ahhhhhhh” as another tear in the sky opened up, transporting them to another room in the Dream Castle.

Having not been part of the school’s equestrian team, Mena had never seen the unicornea stables before, but she didn’t need her imagicnation to tell her that things were in complete disarray. Winged thoroughbred mares and stallions with singular eyes whinnied and neighed from behind their wooden stables as an ink black horse blasted rainbow beams from its red iris. Wood beams shattered and members of the Lollypop Brigade were sent airborne.

“This place is completely unstable,” Mena screamed.

“Pun intended?” Janus quipped.

Caligari turned around. Her unibrow raised at their sight. “Mena?”

“Hi teach,” Mena responded back, slightly blushing, but Caligari immediately understood what was going on.

“I forgot to untether our minds,” the phantom professor said and placed her hand on her forehead, “Release.”

Right as Mena endured the severing of their ties, the horse gave a horrifying whiney and shot a rainbow beam straight at Caligari. “Professor, look out,” Mena cried.

Caligari raised her hand and her body was enveloped in a luminous green force field. The beam refracted off it and blasted straight into the ceiling, unleashing a hail of wood and debris.

As the black mare drew closer, Mena observed the horse’s piercing red eye and the tar like substance stretched across her body. With gnashing white teeth and a manic look in her eye, the horse shrieked, “I crave a stronger body, one befitting of my Mal-Essence. Give it to me.”

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“The unicornea…” Mena gasped, drawing the cover up to her face. “She’s possessed by my Mal-essence.”

The horse pointed her horn at Mena and galloped forward.

Mena winced, but Caligari quickly stepped in front of her, her hand surging with a jet of ectoplasm.

“Mena, run…” Caligari said, sternly, but it was too late.

“Give me a greater body-hee hee,” the horse demanded again.

Mena’s teacher was now directly between her and the horse, and in the split seconds when the horse charged, Caligari fired the bolt of green directly at the raging mare. The blast missed her narrowly, and the horse shrieked over it. She stood up on her hind legs. As the front hoofs extended towards Caligari’s body, a chunk of miasma leaped from the horse and grabbed onto Caligari’s left hand. Caligari’s arm writhed and twisted, surging with malevolence but she quickly blasted the horse with another bolt from her right hand. It shot her right through the wooden wall of the stable and out into the night.

The shadowy miasma tangled itself around Caligari’s arm, and she screamed in pain. “Cali,” Mena screamed as her teacher tumbled backwards. Two members of the Lollypop Brigade unhooked a first aid kit and wrapped her wound in magic gauze, smothering the wound.

Caligari’s body stopped flailing, and she looked up at Mena, nearly out of breath from the human half of her body. “Mal-Essence…” Caligari warned. “It’s symbiotic in its greatly weakened state. It grabs onto someone or something to feed off…and it chose me.”

“Are you going to be okay?” Mena squeaked as tears rolled down from her eyes.

Caligari grimaced. “My left hand was the only thing affected by it. The infirmary needs to drain it as quick as they can. Otherwise, it will build its energy again and try to consume you, Mena.”

“It wants me too?” Mena asked, her hands held timidly to her face. “But it couldn’t reach me?”

“No…” Caligari said. “Your Rainborn blood is too strong for it. Your friends purified it. But it will try to regain its energy through people who are weaker…like me.”

The Lollypop paramedics loaded Caligari onto a stretcher. She lowered her unibrow with a firm expression, her mouth opened in a gentle smile. “Don’t forget, I care about you, Willow…as bothersome as you are.”

“I care about you too,” Mena sobbed as Janus and May crawled over from their beds to place their arms around her.

As the Lollypop Brigade tended to Caligari. Mena heard a low whinnying. She stepped onto the stable floor and walked to the first wooden stable where a winged white mare with a rainbow eyeball sobbed. Mena soon recognize her as the horse she rode at her homecoming. “Iris?” Mena asked causing the sobbing mare to look up. “What’s wrong?”

“Me-hee-heena,” the horse cried. “My sister Scarlera…the black tar got my sister.”

“But why did it choose her?” Mena asked leaning on the wooden gate.

“I don’t know,” Iris sobbed. “It couldn’t have anything to do with me-hee-hee always getting the biggest stallion men and the tastiest sugar cubes from the equestrian team and…” Mena frowned. She had no idea her favorite horse was so preferred by everyone over her sister.

“Maybe I should have shared the good horsetune,” Iris sobbed at last.

"At least, she's still making good with a horse load of puns," Janus said and walked over to Mena, a quizzical expression on her normally dreamy face. “Seems the Mal-Essence is attracted to anyone with negative emotions and great power.”

“I see,” Mena said at last. “We cannot let it take over any more people.”

“Can you get her back-ack-ack?” Iris asked, trying to make her singular eye look shiny and glossy.

“We’ll try…” Mena said softly, so only her favorite horse and Janus could hear her.

A Lollypop Brigade commander peered out of the shattered wall into the night. “The horse seems to have fled with the Mal-Essence,” he remarked to Caligari. “Any idea where it would be going?”

The unit lifted Caligari up on her stretcher and headed to the infirmary, but she managed a reply with a weary expression. “I don’t know. But Mena’s powerful Mal-Essence needs to be stopped. It will continue to snowball from host to host until it reaches her again.”

Mena shivered. There was nothing she desired less in all of Autolycus than to be at the mercy of the cursed ink yet again.