Mena went to bed that night not worrying much about Nick’s words. After all, even a suave smooth-talking superstar gets tongue tied sometimes. “I think my wiles and my giles distracted him,” Mena said to herself as she snuggled her sheets in soft pajamas. “Especially my giles. They’re trained especially well to disarm men like him.”

Even the daunting thought of tomorrow didn’t deter Mena from drifting off into dreamland. She was already on Cloud Nine so much that it was upgraded to Cloud Ten. Best of all, her awesome dream from last night continued right where it left off.

A field of red poppies danced in the wind beneath a cerulean sky as Mena lay on a checkered picnic blanket. Beside her, tall, shadowy, and handsome was a boy with chocolate brown skin and black locks of hair that draped over one of his eyes. He was wrapped in a velvet purple robe that shimmered as the wind blew through it.

“Oh Prince Tal,” Mena said as she plucked petals from a poppy. “Care to ravish me with one of your dark poems of praise?”

“Of course, my goddess of the night,” Tal said, and he perfectly swung his locks aside revealing a jet-black eye with a red pupil.

Mena swooned; he was so gothic. But her swooning was soon disturbed by a rustle in the poppies. She quickly swiveled her head. She could have sworn she saw someone, but they had long vanished.

Tal produced a sheet of parchment from his cloth robe, a hint of pectoral muscles showing in the wind, making Mena wish she was a wind goddess and could blow it right off. He began to read in his pubescent yet smoky voice:

“Within a lake serene, lies my heart, never seen,

I’m darker than the deepest blue, and sadder than the saddest hue

But right when I’m about to do what I should never do

A hand reaches out from a picture of you.”

Mena sighed and laid on her stomach. “Oh Tal, you’re so tortured”—she quickly murmured beneath her voice—"You can torture me any day.”

“What was that?” Tal asked, her chiseled brown cheeks reddening.

“Uh, nothing, I coughed. All this pollen is turning on my allergies”—and Mena quickly muffled her face in the blanket. “And my hormones. But go ahead. Read on.”

Tal tried to pretend like his companion wasn’t a total nutcase and continued reading his somewhat dark poem.

“Your raven locks, your braced teeth shining brightly in the night

Those thick eyebrows, like caterpillars, oh how they fill me with fright.”

Mena giggled over his silly wording. Her ears pricked up when she heard another rustle, and this time she could have sworn she saw someone in the grass by Tal, but they vanished yet again.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

“Your love is the key to my heart that a lock protects,

Now come with me, my dark goddess, we can go have… a platonic relationship.”

Both of Tal’s mismatched eyes widened and Mena sat straight up, “What?” he said, shaking his head. “That’s not what I wrote.”

“Tal,” Mena screamed, “Look there.”

A man dressed in a suit made entirely of poppies scrambled off with a piece of parchment. “Hey,” Tal exclaimed, as the man quickly ran off. “That’s my original poem. That lout replaced it with this…sanitized one.”

“Drat rats,” Mena said, pounding the ground in anger. “It was getting to the juicy part. I so wanted to hear that.”

“Oh, you are so ravishing when you are consumed with anger,” Tal said, a sly smile on his face. “ Your negative emotions, they fuel me.”

“Oh, do they?” Mena said, biting her lips and playfully shoving Tal. “Does that make you want to show me your nice… long…set of abs?”

“Of course,” Tal said with an eager look on his face, and he reached towards his robe, undoing the buttons on it. Each time he got lower and lower, Mena’s heart pounded harder and harder until he got to the last one and…there was…

“Brown Liccan, brown cow,” Mena exclaimed, swooning back and forth with her hands clasped together ”Huh….”

When Tal undid the last button, there was a black box in front of him. A man in a dark cap, sunglasses and suit stood before them holding a black rectangle. “What are you doing?” Mena exclaimed. “And what is that black box?”

“We are censoring your dreams, so you remain pure and noble,” the man said very professionally.

Mena scowled, her face beat red from sheer embarrassment. She stomped over. “Hey buddy. You can’t simply waltz in here and ruin my abtastic fantasies. Especially because I go to an all girl’s school and I don’t get any abction at all.”

“Sorry,” the man said, “But for a pubescent female witch, witnessing an attractive and tortured male’s abdominal muscles is a direct violation of Code 085.”

“Stuff your code,” Mena hissed. “I need to see abs. Who even are you anyway?”

The man in his dark uniform blew a whistle and two other men emerged from the poppies, both standing with a firm salute. Both had the brain with the eyeball insignia on their uniforms. “We are the Dream Police Operatives of the Clearmind Society and our goal is to make you a respectable dreamer like everyone else.”

Tal stood flabbergasted, but soon, his eye glowed bright red. His hands pulsated with dark shadow energy. “How dare you mess with the fantasies of my future bride to be. I will send you worms back to the rotten apples from whence you came.”

But before he could fry the Dream Police to a crisp, the two other cops pulled out an enormous belt and clamped it around his toned waist. Suddenly, not only was Tal blocked from using his abilities to obliterate the cops, but even worse, Mena couldn’t see his abs.

“Hah,” one of the Dream Police said aloud. “We have placed the Belt of Ab-stinence on you. Now this young witch will never see your precious abdominals ever again.”

Storm clouds rolled in over the cerulean sky, and with a lighting burst and a thunder crash, rain poured down on Mena. “NOOOOOOOOOO!” she cried, holding her hands up to the sky.

When she awoke screaming, everyone ran in to see her. Auntie Grizabella hopped up on the bed in her cat form. She dabbed her tail in the ink on her nightstand and wrote on the notepad, “Mena, what’s wrong?”

“Curse that Nick Clearmind!” Mena howled.

“Nick Clearmind?” Janus asked in her jet-black nightgown. “I actually let him in now.”

“Sup ladies,” Nick stood before the three girls and the cat, already dressed in his spiffy sweater vest and khakis, silver medallion swinging on his neck. Seeing it drove Mena into an absolute fury. She leaped from her bed and began to shake him frantically, her eyes cracked with red veins.

“Hey Mena. Hey, let go of me!” he screamed as he was attacked by a crazy Mena.

“Stop messing with my dreams!” she demanded at the top of her lungs.