The fluorescent lights of the delivery room in Chiyoda, Tokyo, hummed with a sterile consistency.
"He's beautiful," Yumi whispered, exhausted but beaming. She adjusted her glasses, looking down at the bundle in her arms. "Look at his grip, Kenji."
Kenji, a high school math teacher, laughed softly, wiping a tear from his eye. " let's start with breathing." The baby squirmed, his face scrunching up in the universal expression of discomfort, and let out a loud, healthy wail. The heart monitor beeped a steady rhythm alongside his cries. It was a textbook birth. The doctors were pleased, and the new parents were filled with a terrifying, wonderful joy. They named him Kazuna.
As kazuna drifted off to sleep in the plastic bassinet, his breathing evened out. To his parents, he was resting.
But he wasn't. The moment kazuna's eyes closed in Tokyo, they snapped open in a wooden cottage on the outskirts of Eldoria.
Here, the air didn't smell of antiseptic; it smelled of dried sage, woodsmoke, and rain.
"He's awake!" the midwife announced, wiping her hands on a roughspun cloth. "And lively, too. Look at those eyes."
Elara reached out for her son. The candlelight flickered, casting long shadows against the timber walls. "He is strong," she said softly. "Welcome to the world, Kael." For every twenty-four hours that passed for the world, the boy lived forty-eight. When kazuna slept in Japan, Kaeleon was awake in Eldoria. When Kael slept in the cottage, Ren woke up in the high-rise apartment.As the boy grew, his development was normal. By the time he was physically one year old in both worlds, he had experienced two years of life.
But the trouble began when he started to speak.
In Tokyo, the apartment was filled with educational books and flashcards. Yumi, an English teacher, was eager to teach him.
"Kazuna, say 'Apple'," Yumi coaxed, holding up a red fruit.The toddler looked at it, his brow furrowing. He knew this object. He had eaten a stew made of it just "yesterday" in Eldoria.
"Rina," he said clearly.
Yumi paused. "Rina? No, sweetie. Ringo. Or Apple."
"Rina," he insisted, pointing at it.
Yumi exchanged a worried look with Kenji. "Is that... is that baby talk? It sounded so specific."
"Maybe he heard it on TV?" Kenji suggested, though he looked unsettled.
Meanwhile, in Eldoria, the situation was mirroring itself.The boy sat on a mossy log while his father, Bram, chopped wood. The boy pointed at the large, domesticated lizard pulling the cart nearby.
"Say 'Drakos'," Bram said, smiling.
The boy shook his head. "Tor-uck," he chirped.
Bram stopped swinging the axe. "Truck?" He looked at his wife, Elara. "What is a 'Tor-uck'? Is he speaking an ancient tongue?"
"He says words I have never heard," Elara admitted, looking at her son with a mixture of love and fear. "Yesterday, he called the fire Gas-u. He speaks with the confidence of a man, but the words are gibberish."By the time the boy was three, the "gibberish" had become sentences.
In Tokyo, during a parent-teacher consultation for his preschool, the teachers pulled Kenji and Yumi aside.
"Kazuna is... brilliant," the head teacher said, hesitating. "But he creates his own language. He speaks of 'jaba' . He talks about 'Slimes' in the garden. And sometimes, when he is frustrated, he speaks a language that sounds like... well, it sounds like nothing on Earth. It has syntax, it has grammar, but it is not Japanese, English, or Chinese."
Yumi held her purse tight. "We thought it was just an active imagination."
The waiting room of Dr. Sato's pediatric psychiatry clinic in Shinjuku was aggressively calming. Gentle instrumental music played at a barely-there volume, and the walls were painted a soothing, neutral beige.
Kenji sat with his hands clasped tightly between his knees, staring at the polished floorboards. Yumi kept readjusting Ren's collar, her movements jerky and nervous.
Kazuna physically four years old but experientially pushing eight, sat between them on the couch, his legs swinging well above the floor. He looked bored. He had just spent "yesterday" playing in the Eldorian woods; sitting in this beige room was terribly dull. "Mr. and Mrs. Tanaka? Dr. Sato will see you now," the receptionist said softly.
Dr. Sato's office was brighter, with a large window looking out over the dense urban sprawl of Tokyo. A high-speed train silently zipped past in the distance. Dr. Sato himself was a man in his late forties with kind crinkles around his eyes and a voice like smooth gravel.
He listened patiently as Yumi listed their concerns, her voice tight with anxiety. The "made-up words," the frustration when they didn't understand his syntax, the bizarre stories he told as if they were current events.
"He talks about... skinning rabbits," Yumi whispered, horrified. "We've never even taken him camping, Doctor. Dr. Sato nodded thoughtfully, making a note on his tablet. He turned his chair to face Ren, lowering himself so they were eye-to-eye.
"Hello, kazuna-kun," Dr. Sato said gently. "Your mom and dad tell me you have some very interesting stories."kazuna looked at the doctor, analyzing him with an unsettlingly mature gaze. "They aren't stories."
"Oh?" Dr. Sato smiled. "Tell me, kazuna-kun. When you think of this place... what do you call it? 'Eldoria'?"
"I don't 'think' of it," kazuna corrected, his toddler voice crisp. "I go there. When I sleep here, I wake up there."I see. A very vivid dream world."
Kazuna let out a sigh that sounded far too old for his small frame. "It's not a dream. Dreams are fuzzy. Dreams go away when you wake up. Eldoria is sticky. It smells like pine resin and wet wool. The mud is cold. It's real."
Kenji flinched next to Yumi.
Dr. Sato maintained his calm smile. "Pine resin and wet wool. That's very specific detail, Ren-kun." He leaned back in his chair, lacing his fingers together.
"Kazuna_kun, I think you have a gift," Dr. Sato declared, looking over the boy's head to reassure the parents. "A truly spectacular, vivid imagination. Many children have imaginary worlds, but yours is exceptionally detailed."It's not imaginary," Kazuna said again, stubbornly staring at the doctor's tie.
"I know it feels very real to you," Dr. Sato soothed, bulldozing right over the boy's protest. "People with minds like yours, Ren-kun, they become great artists. Novelists. Manga creators. You're going to be a great writer someday."
Kazuna frowned. A writer? In Eldoria, writing was for scribes and mages, scratching runes onto vellum.Here is what I propose," Dr. Sato continued, sliding a large pad of blank paper and a box of thick wax crayons across the low table toward Kazuna. "Instead of getting frustrated trying to explain Eldoria to your parents with words they don't understand, why don't you show us?"
He tapped the paper. "Don't talk about it as if it's happening right now. That confuses people. Instead, pour all of that imagination onto the page. Draw the things you see."
Kazuna looked at the crayons. They smelled waxy and fake, nothing like the charcoal sticks he used on the cottage floor in Eldoria. He looked up at his parents. Their faces were masks of desperate hope. They wanted him to just draw a picture and be a normal, imaginative little boy.
"I have never in my life seen such a case of maladaptive daydreaming" Dr Sato told his parents
He knew he was going to treat kazuna for a long time.