A/N: Written for ImagineGal in Yuletide's NYR challenge in 2008.

He hadn't taken any pictures since the UFOs had come. Never mind that a real live UFO would be the picture of the century - or, rather, it would have been before every television station started to run shaky video footage of the invaders and UFOs were more common than birds.

He'd had dreams of being a brave reporter, the kind you see in newspaper comics. A plucky kid with an honest face and a fearless eye for a story - that was going to be him, he always told himself. But then the meteor hit, and his camera started to malfunction.

The meteor crash in Onett lit up the scientific community with its vast quantities of unknown metal, and spectacled men in tweed blazers had come from as far away as Winters to take a look at it. At the same time, the sleepy little town was shaken up badly by the deaths of three suburban kids who had snuck out late at night to see the meteor crash. There was a small fire in the forest - maybe from a red-hot shard of the meteor or something like that - and the poor kids had been caught in it. Really tragic, of course. They'd been neighbors, friends since childhood. One of them was only seven.

He hadn't been assigned to that story, nor to the meteor. He was only a rookie, after all, so they sent him down to take pictures of the record-setting roadblock set up by the Onett police.

More than half of the pictures he took that day had developed with a strange shadow over them. He swore, checked his light meters, bought a new flash blub, and barely managed to turn in his contribution on time.

Despite his problem in the darkroom, the accompanying photos were well received by the reading public, and while he still got stuck with the human interest stories, they at least sent him abroad to take pictures of the Threed circus.

This time, all of his pictures had ended up with the same shadow. Some of them were even worse - two shots of the big top made it look like the entrance was bristling with ghostly fangs, and one photo of the interior came out of the chemical bath showing the crowd looking up at the camera with staring eyes and pale, ghoulish faces.

He threw away the camera, burnt the negatives and prints, and arrived at work the next day with neither pictures nor a good explanation of their absence. He didn't really blame them when they fired him.

After that, he had packed up all his belongings and moved out to Fourside. He'd bought a new camera and started taking his own pictures of the parks there. Maybe he could improve his technique and sell the photos to greeting card companies, or something like that.

It was around that time that the cult from Happy-Happy Village had moved in. There had been a few of them on the bus with him, talking among themselves in low tones and peering out of their blue hoods. The parks were pretty, but the more he heard talk of the cult, the more his pictures started turning out as weird negative photos of upside-down landscapes dotted with stiff neon figures, even when the camera had been pointed at picturesque shrubbery and romping spring squirrels.

Eventually, he couldn't even take pictures of the parks anymore. The flowers were always covered with glistening slime, or the parking meters were lurching sideways like living beings. When it finally came out that the cult had killed a girl in Twoson, he couldn't bring himself to be surprised. He locked his camera in a trunk, tossed all of his darkroom supplies into the street unceremoniously, and quietly waited in his apartment, jobless and terrified, for more proof that he was going mad.

Even the murder couldn't stop the cult. It was far too late for that. People were laughing in the streets when they carried that golden idol up to the roof of the Monotoli Building. He took to collecting newspapers, piling them in one corner with their front pages up. Stonehenge Troubled by Unexplained Phenomena. Gang Activity Heats Up in Onett. Monotoli Celebrates Raising of Statue. And then, after that, stranger headlines. Dead Walk in Threed. Carpainter Offers Donation of Skull to Museum. Mani Mani Promises Urban Renewal Coming!

The newspapers made it clear. It wasn't him that was going crazy, not at all.

It was the world.

After that, it happened so fast. He ran from Fourside just in time to catch the news in a cheap hotel outside of Summers: there was a war on. No one really knew who they were fighting, but something was invading. He saw the great gibbering hole in the world where Fourside used to be, or maybe still was. He watched taxi cabs rear up with a peculiar malevolence in their headlights and crash themselves into expensive convertibles and pushcarts selling hot-dogs. He even saw the UFOs in person, finally. They made it night for forty-eight consecutive hours.

That pale, straggling dawn afterwards was the last time the photographer had seen the sun.

There was precious little news from the outside Summers, and it started to look like he would be stuck here forever. Fourside was still gone, and whatever had engulfed it was spreading. More UFOs came, and robots, and even stranger things like the walking dead and uprooted signposts. And, of course, it was always night. He lived on the top floor of a hotel whose owner had long since abandoned it, eating soggy sandwiches he got from the convenience store owner who seemed irrationally grateful to see him every day. She was starting to run out of stock, and since neither of them quite knew what they would do when there was nothing left, they avoided talking about it.

He met the man in the shattered remains of what used to be a swanky club. He was huddled against the wall, clutching a wrinkled photo with both hands and chewing the stem of a pipe between his teeth. He was wearing a ragged trenchcoat and a slouching hat that might once have been a bowler, and looked to be about fifty at the youngest.

"Be careful," the man said when he approached. "I'm keeping the robots away."

The robots were everywhere since the darkness had fallen, stomping up and down the streets and sweeping the walls with their icy blue optics. He hadn't actually seen the robots hurt anyone, but there were fewer people in the streets these days.

He sat down next to the strange man and tried to peer at the photograph in his hand. It looked like the Stonehenge, only with a great mass of glistening pinkish-grey tubes bursting out of the center like metal viscera. He shuddered and looked away.

"So you know what this is," the man said. He didn't, admitted as much, and then went on to tell the man the story of his strange odyssey in photography. He'd never told anyone about it before, and it felt strange and relieving all at the same time.

The man just nodded, and when he was finished, he told the photographer how he was shielding the both of them from the robots with his mind. He was a psychic, you see. One of a line that had started with an alien abduction. That was how he knew the nature of the threat facing the world - he'd seen it in his dreams since he was tiny. He even knew its name, but that would have to wait, he added with a wry smile.

Yeah, it sounded a bit crazy. So did his story about the slime in his photos.

The man said he was called Buzz Buzz. It wasn't his real name - he didn't want anyone to know his real name anymore, as it made it easier somehow for the robots to find him. He'd renamed himself after the white noise he heard in his head when he dreamed of the UFOs.

"If you show up here tomorrow," Buzz Buzz said, knocking the ashes out of his pipe on the sole of his shoe, "I'll let you in on something good."

He wandered over the next morning. It looked like Buzz Buzz had slept there.

Buzz Buzz nodded curtly at him when he entered, then pulled open a concealed cabinet door in the stage front. There were stairs going down - some kind of storage, maybe, or a bomb shelter. Not that bombs were what was going to destroy the earth, after all.

Buzz Buzz took the stairs two at a time and yanked the light on once he reached the bottom. It was like a junk shop inside - piles of machine parts were strewn around randomly. Broken toasters, bent springs, the guts of robots and downed UFOs...and a lot of half-finished machines that didn't look like anything the photographer had seen before.

"What's this?" he asked, picking up some little hand-held device the size of a phone receiver.

"Something I built," Buzz Buzz said breezily. "Finds strong brain waves, transports you to their location. Only really picks up psychics and other sorts of chosen ones. Keep it, you might need it."

"Chosen ones?" the photographer asked, tucking the thing in his pocket. Buzz Buzz smiled - the first time he had ever seen him do so.

"I'm going to tell you a story," Buzz Buzz said. And he did.

It was a beautiful story about three boys and a girl who save the world from all the darkness and madness and fear. They were the ones who saved the world from Giygas.

"Giygas?" he said. Buzz Buzz nodded. "Who's that?"

"He's the way the world is now. He's the shadow in your photos."

The photographer bit his lip.

"Too bad," he said quietly, "that story isn't real."

"It is," Buzz Buzz said. "It just didn't happen."

After that, he came back to Buzz Buzz's strange studio every day. Buzz Buzz would smoke his pipe and talk about psychic powers and the way the world should be, and the photographer would listen. Each day Buzz Buzz had finished more of whatever it was he was working on.

"What are you building in here, anyway?" the photographer eventually asked.

"A time machine. One way only." Buzz Buzz smiled again, lopsided and painfully normal. "I thought those kids deserved a second chance."

On the way out, the photographer saw a dead robot for the first time. It was covered in scorch marks, and it reminded him of those three boys in Onett. They were the lucky ones.

Buzz Buzz's time machine was done within a week. One day when the photographer came into the studio, he found Buzz Buzz perched on a folding metal chair with a screwdriver tucked behind his ear and a very self-satisfied look on his lean face.

"It's done!" he announced, clapping his hands like a child. The machine took up almost the entire room and pulsed with multicolored lights.

"That's your time machine? Finally?" the photographer said. Buzz Buzz nodded, running his hands up and down along what looked like the control panel. "It's big."

"It doesn't have to go anywhere. It just has to send me somewhere else."

Buzz Buzz touched a match to his pipe, and the smoke curled up and hung around the single uncovered bulb in the center of the room. It was bright in here - too bright, almost, to the point where the photographer wasn't quite sure how Buzz Buzz managed to work without squinting - but it was better than the gloom outside.

"Can it take two?" the photographer asked, quietly. Buzz Buzz shrugged.

"Probably. It's one-use, not one-passenger. But you have to be a robot."

"...what?" the photographer said, startled. The robots were the things out there, all heavy footfalls and bright metal and terrifying implications.

"You can't go through time with your body intact. You have to put yourself - your soul - into something else. Something inanimate." Buzz Buzz dug through a pile of discarded papers and came up with something tiny clutched between two fingers. The photographer peered at it over the tops of his glasses. It was a tiny metal bee, its round body encircled by black and yellow stripes. "This," Buzz Buzz said proudly, "is going to be me. If you're going to come with me, you're going to need something like this. Something you can be."

"Well," the photographer found himself saying, "I've still got this camera..."

He wasn't sure when the idea to go back had gotten into his head, but Buzz Buzz never questioned it. Buzz Buzz never really questioned anything about him. As the photographer crept back to his top-floor room and bashed open the lock on the trunk that contained most of his old life, he wondered whether or not this had been Buzz Buzz's intention all along. The camera was still there, flash-bulb still unbroken and leather strap barely worn, under a pile of old clothes and newspaper articles from before the War had really started...though, if what Buzz Buzz had once told him was true, the War had been going on in some way or another for as long as there had been people.

He lifted the camera gingerly out of the bottom, admiring the glint of glass and chrome as though it were a work of art. It was still pristine, untouched by the gloom and desolation that had turned the resort town outside into a grotesque patchwork of shattered buildings and monochrome dust. Deep in the clutter of his room, he found a pen and a discarded notebook, and began to write a series of instructions.

Buzz Buzz didn't say anything when the photographer showed up the next day, with the little pocket transporter and the hand-written instructions tied onto the strap of his camera with twine. He just smiled - a genuine smile, without a trace of irony or fear - and threw the switch. There was a flash of light, and a howl that sounded like wind rushing over the mouth of a great hole. That smile was the last he ever saw of Buzz Buzz.

It was a hell of a longshot, he knew. He'd convinced himself that anything was better than the world where Giygas's influence was oozing steadily into every corner of reality, but being stuck as a camera for the rest of his life didn't sound very good either.

Luckily, people tend to pick up abandoned cameras, especially when it's an expensive model in mint condition with a piece of paper and something strange and shiny attached to it.

The photographer had spent so long in a world without logic that he realized only belatedly that his instructions probably sounded pretty insane. He was never sure what finally convinced the old man to follow them...cameras, after all, had no ears, and could only see what was in front of their lenses. Maybe it was the fact that the camera was stamped with a model number from a year in the future, or maybe it was the weird little device that came with it, or maybe the guy was just a bit crazy to begin with.

His new owner tested him with a self-portrait - he must have been pushing sixty, with most of his face hidden behind a great bushy beard and a hat that went out of style decades ago. After that, the old man took a few more pictures - bowls of flowers, a flock of crows, the night sky - and then, apparently, began to follow the instructions that had come with the mysterious camera from the future that had, by all appearances, dropped out of the sky.

He recognized the boy instantly - his picture had been all over the proofs of the Onett Times back when the meteor hit. Buzz Buzz must have made it, because this kid wasn't dead at all - he'd scuffed his knee, and it looked like something had chewed on the baseball bat he had slung over his shoulder, but he was very much alive and staring at the camera with an expression of mild puzzlement. He didn't look much like a hero of legend - in fact, he looked so painfully, wonderfully ordinary that the photographer might have cried for joy, if he still had eyes.

From then on, he lived life in moments. The old man used him to capture snapshot after snapshot, and those pictures strung together to tell a story without words.

Click.

The black-haired boy is stepping out of a cave, barely looking at the camera. His face is dirty, but his expression is content and strangely grown-up.

Click.

She's sitting on a chair, her twiggy legs mid-swing, and the morning sun shining through her barred window throws stripes across the whole room. She's looking at the boy who's just come through the door, and she's happy to see him. She's not afraid. She's been waiting.

This is a better story than the one that ended with photographs of that girl dead on the floor of a church, face painted blue, throat cut.

Click.

There's a girl with blonde hair leaning against the door of a black, beat-up van. She's grinning and laughing with a musician in a battered bowler, showing him some trick where she makes fire dance from her fingers. The boy is clutching a guitar that's a bit too big for him and concentrating hard as a tall fellow in a shabby suit points him towards middle C.

The shadow is here, too, but it wavers at the edge of the picture, uncertain.

Click.

A different place, this one covered in snow. A brown-haired boy holds his hat on his head against the wind and clutches his friend's hand through a wrought-iron gate. The other boy has thick glasses and a determined expression - he's going on a long journey, alone.

A boarding school this close to the Stonehenge, so close to that terrible explosion of alien metal, would have never survived. They must have all been killed, or gone mad, or worse.

Click.

They're climbing out of a great crater, the three of them. The black-haired boy is giving the girl a hand up, and the serious boy with the glasses is about touch a match to a rocket's fuse. There's a blank-eyed, shambling creature coming towards them, and the boy is clearly trembling, but the rocket is pointed straight at the monster.

The corpse-people of Threed aren't staring at the camera this time - they have their milky eyes fixed on the three children, who are ready with fireworks and frying pans and mock-fearless smiles.

Click.

The tent is lying at their feet. The teeth are still there, but most of the fabric has been burned or torn to shreds. The boy with the cap, who seems to have gotten used to photographs by now, is giving a thumbs-up to the camera.

Click.

He'd always hated the nauseating slime the most, and in this picture it's back. The children are covered in it, head to toe. The girl has jumped into a steaming hot spring, bobby socks and pink dress and all, and the blonde boy is captured in mid-fall over the water. The girl has caught his sleeve, and the other boy has given him a quick shove from behind, and they're both laughing - though the boy with the glasses mostly looks surprised. The slime is starting to dissolve and leave a slick rainbow of oil on the surface of the water.

Maybe that slime's not so bad, if it can be washed away by a playful jump in a hot spring.

Click.

This picture's blurry, because the warehouse is dark. But there's two boys, two shapes formed of bright and muted colors, and at their feet is a glinting pile of indistinct fragments, metallic gold.

Mani-Mani was hollow inside, after all.

Click.

The sun is flaring off the camera lens, and there's a new boy sitting on a bright red towel. The girl is wearing a brand-new swimsuit and shading her eyes, the boy with the glasses is still in his school uniform, and the boy with the cap has a pink ice-cream cone that has dripped onto the sand and made tiny droplets of sugary mud.

They're all grinning except the new boy, who does not know he is supposed to smile for cameras.

Click.

The photographer's instructions had been very clear. Follow them. There will be four of them, eventually. Check in often, and take pictures of what you see. You'll understand soon enough.

Sometimes, he wondered whether or not he still existed in this past-but-different world - whether or not he was currently getting fired in Onett and moving out to Fourside to start life again.

Well, it didn't matter much. There was no story in the history of the world better than this one, no pictures he could have been more pleased to take.

Forget getting fired. He'd turned out to be the greatest reporter in the world after all.

When everything is said and done - I think you'll know when that time comes - collect your pictures. Make copies, box them up in order, and send a box to each of them. Do whatever you like with the negatives, but I suggest you keep them.

After that, I want you to destroy this camera.