A Few Important Claricatios: Madeleine's "Ability"
Madeleine doesnt sleep— at least not in the conventional sense. Her body rests, bu her consciousness never shuts off. Instead, when she sleeps in one world, she wakes up in the other.
Here's a basic example:
• If Madeleine is awake in World A from 6:30 AM to 7:30 PM, she is simultaneously asleep in World B during that time.
• If she takes a short nap in World A—for instance, from 12 PM to 1 PM—she will temporarily awaken in World B for that exact hour.
She cannot control the shift. It is involuntary and unpredictable, though it always tied to sleep.
Unlike typical portal or dream-based fiction where time seems to stop in one world while the character is in another, time passes equally in both worlds for Madeleine. She experiences life in two timelines at once. If she's awake in one, she is asleep in the other—this is how she rests. From her perspective, she never sleeps at all. To others, however, her sleep appears erratic, unexplainable, and concerning.
If someone or something wakes her in one world, she will immediately collapse and awaken in the other.
To explain it, Madeleine tells others she has narcolepsy, though no medical tests support this claim. And she's not trying to deceive anyone—there simply is no real explanation. Not one that would be believed.
There are only two worlds. So while Madeleine never knows when she'll shift, she always knows where she'll end up.
She exists as a parallel between them: one mind, two bodies. The versions of her look nearly identical, though slight differences in routine—diet, sleep quality, stress—do cause variations. Both go by the same name. Both live separate lives. But only one consciousness ties them together.
To others, it may seem like a strange condition. To Madeleine, it's just an exhausting, inconvenient fact of life.
At its heart, this is a story of two romances tied together by a single mind. A messy love triangle brought to life by a mysterious sleep condition. A story where the girl could have them both, after all, her two lives never cross right?