You can't tell how old he is, but you suppose that's how he's made his fortune. A face of indeterminate age, he's got, somewhere on that hazy line between twenty and a hundred that the world he's built blurs even further. The lines on his face look like they've been beaten in by time and salt, and his brown eyes see you and the space beyond you, all at once.

The drone purrs quietly at your shoulder, having maintained its post throughout the journey to the cabin. A journey through the forest, animals lazily strolling through the undergrowth, with an idyllic stillness and clockwork perfection to the way the nature fit together, ever since you passed through the gate. And the cabin itself isn't quite what you'd expected, a patchwork thing of old shipping containers, with solar panels shining on the roof and the faint, distant hum of the machinery below melting into the noise of the world.

His world, the machine at your shoulder taking the sparse cabin in as his eyes record your presence.

"It's beautiful, isn't it?" he asks, something not quite friendliness in his sparking eyes. Waving a hand out the window, he takes in a breath, savoring the silence on your lips.

She had been strange and beautiful too, coming not halfway up your chest with a sway of her hips and eyes perfectly blue, guiding you smilingly into her creator's abode.

"Mosquitoes sting," the man announces, that famous face sweeping across you to gaze into the clear blue sky. "Geese drown the world in noise and filth, deer eat up all the trees you've worked so hard to grow. And people hurt you. But here, in my little house of crates..."

There it is, that grin your employers sent you to capture, and every journalist in the worlds would sell their mind for a year or more to be right where you are now.

"There's none of that," he breathes. "No mess, no fuss, just a clear, gorgeous world; every claw, every strand of hair, every eye, perfect to what human minds yearn for."

"I can see a tree in a dream, and grow it from the ground, here, busy little swarms just sketching it into reality."

Outside there is a tree, its leaves rippling from green to orange to violet and back again.

"I can see a pretty girl in the pages of a book, and she can be mine by nightfall."

And there she is again, peering in shyly. You'd never guess she weren't... real, you decide, looking at the eyes of the inventor and his little love.

"Everything."

The man smiles, drawing you closer and sparing a glance for your camera.

"Everything in my little world is how it should be; everything justifies its own existence."

Brown turns to gray in a moment, hard and cold, and for a moment his skin seems to stretch taut across his skull.

"Except the people."

Your camera falls from the air with a dull sound, and the forest outside goes still.

"Except for you."