The year is 1970, and the hooded man sits in the very back of an abandoned building with a mysterious object in his hands.
A month ago, he had a name, a life, wishes, dreams, and aspirations. Then everything changed when he stumbled across a struggle between four-dimensional creatures during a hiatus in the mountains, and one of them dropped an artifact and left it there.
It contained a set of instructions that changed its language based on the reader as it was woven of handwavium and the ink was processed from a liquid form of lalalaicanthearyouium.
Think of an entity's given name while holding the artifact and looking at an image of any form of the entity or the entity itself and that entity will perish. Use the dials on the artifact to control how the entity will die and that person will die immediately.
He looks at a photo. We see a flicker of... someone. A terrorist? Or is it a Prime Minister?
With this artifact, a real life Death Note, how can this man maximise his influence over society and how could he keep getting away with it without being identified?
Some things we know:
- He acts based off what he believes is best for humanity. He'll kill a serial killer or terrorist on the loose but he'll also remove a person from power if he thinks it's best.
- He's a middle-aged American.
- The instructions are true to the letter. Without a person's name and image, it doesn't work, and the effect is immediate without possibility of delay.
- He is not wealthy at all. Yet.
- No one has caught on to a pattern, but if he's not careful and doesn't take the necessary steps, they're able to with some Sherlock Holmes finesse.
Extra specifications for less broadness:
- He wants to build up control over the world and help push it along to a better state of technology, peace, and all around good enough to impress aliens.
- For the sake of this question, many people would not be happy with his decisions. Say a pattern emerges and people of perfectly good health are dropping dead. People start realising that it's only when a person's name is publicly released or available and that person's face has shown up in newspaper clippings or on television. Who knows who's next on the chopping block? And if they do detect him, his methods still take life away. It's not by the book.
- Good answers require that he a) maximise his chance of remaining undetected or not captured (remember, it starts from 1970) but also maximise his influence over the world.