The first Friday in his new house, Kenji Tanaka, aged forty and feeling every minute of it, fell into a sleep of the dead. The move from his tiny Tokyo apartment to this two-bedroom suburban haven had exhausted every last yen of his energy. He'd done it. After a lifetime of writing middly-successful genre novels, he had a place of his own. Quiet. Normal. Boring, even. It was perfect.
He was woken by what he assumed was a neighbour's very loud, very strange television.
A deep, guttural growl was answered by a chipper, melodic shout of "Fresh griffin eggs! Get your fresh griffin eggs!" This was punctuated by the chirping of birds, which was normal, until one chirp was followed by a clear, exasperated, "...and I told him, if you can't keep your worms in your own nest, don't expect me to tidy up!"
Kenji's eyes snapped open. This was not a television.
He shuffled to the window, grumbling about delinquent kids and bad dreams, and yanked the curtain aside.
The breath left his lungs in a silent whoosh.
Gone was the view of his neatly trimmed lawn and the Suzuki's house across the street. Gone was the street. Gone was everything except an impossible, breathtaking vista of an endless, twilight forest. Giant, gnarled trees, wider than skyscrapers, stretched into a sky dotted with softly glowing, slow-moving moons. His house—his very ordinary Japanese suburban house—was nestled snugly into a colossal branch of one such tree. Luminescent vines dripped like party streamers, casting a gentle, blue-green light.
Below, there was no ground. Only a swirling, pearlescent fog. The city was built in and on the trees themselves. Across the chasm, he saw a shop carved into a massive stump, run by goblins in immaculate Victorian-era waistcoats and top hats, polishing what looked like brass astrolabes. A travel agency, "Wing & Whistle," had a perch outside where two finches in matching mustard-yellow cardigans sipped from tiny cups. An elf with ears like elegant scrolls and dressed in silk robes that wouldn't look out of place in a Riyadh souk was calmly arranging glowing fruits. Directly below his window, a group of iridescent-winged fairies were shaking their tiny fists at a red-skinned devil, who was brandishing a stick and a crystal ball.
"It keeps buffering right when I'm scrying the Abyss!" the devil bellowed. "My subscription is paid! This is a scam!"
As Kenji stood, mouth agape, a window in the tree-bark wall next to his own slid open. A figure emerged—a man, or something like it, with sharp, handsome features, two polished black horns curling back from his temples, and large, leathery bat wings folded against his back. He wore a navy-blue uniform with silver braiding.
"Alright, break it up!" his voice was a calm, authoritative baritone. "Bartholomew, stop yelling. Tinkerbell's troupe, stop enchanting his scrying orb to play cat videos. You know the dimensional bandwidth is terrible on Fridays." He flapped his wings once, hovering between them.
Kenji was still trying to process the words "dimensional bandwidth" when a polite cough sounded from behind him.
He spun around. Standing in the middle of his kotatsu was a fairy, no taller than his knee. She had sleek dragonfly wings and wore a severely cut pinstripe pantsuit, complete with a tiny clipboard.
"Good morning, Mr. Tanaka," she said, her voice a crisp, businesslike chime. "My name is Pip. I am your assigned dimensional integration assistant. I understand this is disorienting. If you'll come with me, we need to get you registered at the Bureau of Dimensional Displacement."
Too stunned to refuse, Kenji, in his pajamas, found himself following Pip out of his front door—which now opened onto a winding wooden walkway that spiralled around the enormous tree trunk.
Pip right outside his home opened a portal and on the other side a bird as big as a car with shirt and badge similar to pip was waiting on a disc floating right under his window. He followed pip to sit on the saddled birds back.
The bird took flight and Tanaka shouted out loud just getting out of his daze, " OH MY GOoooD, what in the bl**dy H€ll is going oon."
That's how they made a entry into the Bureau, with Pip trying to calm him down and ensuring that everything is going to be made clear to him.
The Bureau was a marvel of organised chaos, a labyrinth of desks manned by centaurs, gnomes, and one very sleepy-looking sphinx. The clerk, a creature of living crystal, tapped a shard on Kenji's forehead. "Aptitude: Dream Weaving. Rare. Interesting." He was given a pamphlet: "So, You're a Reality Bender! A Beginner's Guide to Not Unmaking Your Socks."
Pip explained the rules. "Your home is an anchor point, Mr. Tanaka. It exists in both worlds, but is only accessible from each on a specific schedule. For you, it's from Friday night to Sunday night here. The rest of the week, you're in Tokyo. And," she added, pointing to a reflective surface on the crystal clerk's desk, "there's a side effect or a boon depending on how you take it, long term will effect you on other side as well."
Kenji looked. Staring back was not the tired, middle-aged face he knew. It was the face of his eighteen-year-old self. Skin unlined, hair thick and dark, but with a knowing softness in the eyes that his younger self had never possessed. He looked like a youthful hero from a spring-themed anime—delicate features belying a nascent strength.
He was still satisfied until he heard about effects on him on the other side, " what do you mean by long term will effect me on other side."
As they set off to go back with his identity card, Pip started explaining more about his situation.
"Nothing wrong, only benefits honestly, you won't be aging in this side of the world and by default your body will start a process of aging backwards which is extremely slow, so you will live longer but still under the age group that won't go against common sense. Common temporal recalibration," Pip said, making a note on her clipboard. "Your prime is reset to your dimension's local time. Now, about your talent. Dream Weaving requires understanding. You can't just imagine a car; you must understand combustion, mechanics, and the principles of the internal combustion engine and yes it's a fantasy world with most modern accommodation so don't flatter yourself thinking technology is special to you. Try bringing something simple from your world."
Kenji, feeling bold, concentrated on his smartphone. It appeared in his hand, but it was a lump of grey, inert rock. But when he went back inside his house, it was a phone again.
"Precisely," Pip said. "The fundamental particles of your world are not native here. You must learn to weave the idea of the phone using the local dream-stuff. It will take practice."
"Also, almost forgot, your house itself got some magic, no one with ill intent against you can enter or harm you in any way while in there, it's the protection you get from your own planet."
After giving him few more pointers and a beginners guide book as thick as a body builder's thigh, Pip took her leave and asked to call her via fairy crystal present in his room and instructions on the guide book.
He turned around and saw a crystal a little bigger then a marble on table.
Not long after, being stuck in this world for next two days reminded him of another issue.
Feeling overwhelmed, he stood on his porch looking at the elven grocery store close by, wondering what to eat because he doesn't have any groceries (do they even have instant ramen here?).
When he was about to look at the guide book putting it on the window sill, as heavy as it was, holding it was not easy. He heard a window opening suddenly, looked back up, and unfortunately tipped the book over.
"Oh NOOO, no, no, no, no " Just as he was about get a panic attack, a shadow across window passed down real fast and before he knew it the very same police man, but in dragon form, the one he saw when he first got here, was holding the book with a cheeky smile, and pipe in mouth letting out rings of smoke.
A dragon shapeshifted into this lazy looking man with horns and a green tail standing over the railing right in front of him. His neighbour was a dragon, or at least a dragon-kin, with intelligent amber eyes, olive skin, elvish ears, well shaped jawline and a eastern dragon head smoking pipe tucked by the corner of his mouth.
"New anchor, eh?" the dragon-kin rumbled after taking a peek at the book, his voice like shifting gravel, quite uncomfortable at first.
"Haha, yes thanks for the book, sorry to bother but I am completely new to the area, so not sure what currency works here, because am completely out of groceries and supposed to be here for next two days." Asked Kenji.
"Oh my, those guys in bureau are surely taking their jobs for granted, as for your inquiry sir…" Dragon paused, "you can call me Kenji" replied Kenji.
"Yes Kenji, you can use the currency of your world here at big supermarkets. They convert in real world time so you need not worry, but small shops or some species prefer the payments in their own preferred currencies."
Right after he said that, he whistled, and a gigantic, colourful bird with a patient expression and a little leather harness landed on the walkway.
"This is taxi bird and can take you to the supermarket."
"Just pay me back later whenever, being neighbours and all that," the dragon said with an amused snort, smoke curling from his smoking pipe. "I only accept Fairy Gold."
Kenji, too grateful to argue, climbed onto the bird's back. It was only as they soared through the canopy, the wind rushing through his miraculously young hair, that the reality of his situation truly sank in.
He was eighteen again, in a city in the trees above a bottomless void, unemployed with hardly any knowledge about this world, and already in debt to a dragon.
He couldn't help it. He threw his head back and laughed, the sound young and bright and utterly lost in the magical, chaotic, and wonderfully soft noise of his new home, with some magical creatures giggling alongside him and others giving him weird looks as he passed by them on the taxi bird.