I’m Just a Poe Boy

It had taken some time for Poe, in spite of all of his powers, to construct a way to view the events of the past that he craved to see. It was delicate work pinpointing the exact space and time of the events that he wanted to witness transpire; in fact, it had taken him far longer than he had anticipated to simply locate his adversary’s home world. A tinge of jealousy touched him as he considered that what he had been given as a place to live was a lifeless metal shell that approximated a planet. It was completely artificial and while it had been staffed with various mechanical servants he had not even been given a companion to help guide him through his first days as a Horseman. He had been left on his own and metaphorically thrown out to sea to see if he would sink or swim. For some strange reason, the Invigilator had seen fit to bequeath Mason with not one, but two A.I. guides.

He forced power into the window that he was creating and waited for the image to become clear. The effort he needed to maintain the as yet incomplete image was incomprehensible. He had viewed the past many times, but had never encountered such a strong resistance as he did now. This led him to believe that the interdimensional overlord had put up barriers in case Poe had wanted to observe his enemy in some capacity. He pushed even more energy into the whirl of colors that sat in the air before him. He continued to push until he felt something snap and the image came into view.

Poe watched the holographic replay of his replacement struggling to destroy his first world. He rubbed his forehead, predictably he had gone with a meteor strike. They always went for a meteor strike their first time or nuclear war, and for half a moment he wondered why that was. Was it because it was the easy way, or was there something more to it, perhaps? Was that the image that advanced people picked? Why not a designer built germ instead? He considered more primitive people would probably go with a plague or a flood. More advanced individuals would probably make technology turn against its users.

Even he had used a meteor on his first go round. He wasn’t original in any way, he knew, but his ability to eliminate worlds had grown over time, and he had embraced the calling. His power had grown because of it, and he had become the best the Invigilator had ever seen. He didn’t need creativity when he was productive. Then he considered Mason. The man had only made that choice because of time constraints. He had been under the gun and went with the most reliable method that he could think of, that made sense and he could forgive the man his choice. He had no doubt that if he had been able to actually think things over then he would have gone for something with more panache.

Now, he watched as yet another world died, albeit a mock world that had been built solely for the purposes of breaking in a rookie. It was all in an effort to satisfy that monster, the Invigilator, and he wouldn’t have any more of it. It was time to put an end to all the incalculable deaths that were going to be ordered by that maniac. He was going to stop his replacement. First, he would try recruitment. If he could convince him to join him then they might be able to turn against their extra-dimensional overlord and defeat him together. It wouldn’t hurt to get an extra pair of hands in this knife fight.

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However, if he decided that he’d rather countless lives rather than challenge the gigantic alien then he would simply slay him, and climb over his corpse as he made his way back to the Invigilator. Realistically, a fight was destined to happen at some point between them; he could feel it. There would come a reckoning and on that day the multiverse would be freed from tyranny and he would be the one to dictate who lived and who died.

He watched this Mason, the one that he had not gotten to in time, as he refined his craft and he had to admit that the man caught on quickly. He was smart and dedicated, but Poe could see that his mind had also been altered. It had been sculpted to make this sort of work simpler for him. By that he meant that Declan Mason would have no qualms or second thoughts about destroying one world or a trillion of them, but what caught his eye was that there was something that the invigilator had not been able to erase. It shone from his soul like a supernova to his eyeless sockets.

This man carried a love for one woman so deeply that he could not let her go. Even here, across time and space, in a simple replay he could see the man’s devotion to this female. He could see where the Invigilator had tried to squelch her memory but could not do so. The only thing he could do was to divert his singular drive to reunite with this woman into saving her otherdimensional duplicates. Clever, he would still mourn for her, but would also still go to the planets in an effort to save every doppelganger that bore her image as he simultaneously obliterated each planet he visited.. Eventually he would amass more women than he knew what to do with (if Poe didn’t kill him), but Poe saw this as the opportunity that he needed to convert Mason over to his side. All he needed to do would be to get the original girl; the one that he really loved, and he would be able to make that man do anything he wanted. He would be a puppet, and Poe would be holding the strings.

The Horseman looked at Mason’s vibrational signature. With that, he would be able to physically enter the universe he had originated from. He knew that the world there was gone. It had fallen victim to the great pan-dimensional fiend himself, but that didn’t mean there was nothing that he could do. No, what was a little time travel to those who knew the secret of crossing dimensional borders? It would drain most of his power and it would certainly expose him to the Invigilator when he went in for the extraction, but it was a price he had to pay if he was going to win the long game. In the game of cosmic chess Poe was a master of the King’s Gambit. Once he started playing a match he played for blood. Mason was not his opponent. He was merely a pawn in the Invigilator’s game, but that didn’t mean he wouldn’t bleed before he was sacrificed. Poe would wash himself clean in that blood, and emerge stronger than before.