RE: [DL] A Dastardly Dude (Was: The juices are flowing...)

[RYAN.KIMMET@DFAS.MIL]

>>That's the villain. I'll actually tie this in to the Weird 
>>West/HOE dual-characters later on, if anyone is still interested.

>I would be interested to hear your take on it. I had pretty much decided to
>make Willian H. Bonney the bad guy for my story (he's an NPC travelling with
>the posse at the moment) but now that I think about it and read through your
>idea, I reealise how much I had stressed to the posse how magnificent his
>horse is (I decided Billy the Kid would have a nice horse) so I could quite
>easily adapt it to be the horse who is the bad guy all along, and WHB is
>just his latest victim...
>Brian "I like it!" Leybourne

And I like your twist--that horse could explain a lot about Billy the Kid's exploits!

The HOE tie-in I was thinking about was along the lines of the devil-horse taking over the town, setting up those mystic barriers so that nobody who came to town could ever leave, and using the town as a base of operations for its grand plan: stealing the Reckoner's own power so it could replace them! 

The rituals involved would take decades, perhaps even centuries, to complete so that the big R's wouldn't notice that their power was carefully being siphoned off  and stored a little bit at a time. And after a while, the horse would gain enough stolen power to start having brief visions of the future. One of these visions revealed that one day the Reckoners would walk the earth, in the form of the four horsemen of the apocalypse. 

Horsemen! If the devil-horse could somehow manage to become one of the Reckoner's mounts, it could use all the power it stole over the years to take control of that Reckoner, turning it against each of the others at opportune moments until they were all destroyed. It was a longshot, but it could work!

And when another future-vision revealed that the Reckoner calling itself Famine lost its mount when it came to earth near the city of Lost Angels, the devil-horse vowed that by then it would be ready to offer itself to Famine as a replacement steed.

Now all it needed was time. If all went well, it would be nearly unstoppable by the time Judgement Day came. But at the moment, it was vulnerable. So anybody who stumbled into its little town would become its slave. They would stop aging and be forced to help with the ritual, unable to escape until it was too late . . . 
______________________________
Ryan M. Kimmet
Innovative Logistics Techniques, Inc.
RKimmet@DFAS.MIL