Warren had been chosen by Art itself, the last artist alive who believed art was to inspire, not simply invoke. One who could allow art to live again. Rather than someone blind folded gluing a puzzle together with gloves on and selling it. The people of the land had forgotten what art should have been.
The spirit of art had nothing against those who say, created figures completely out of lego blocks, those who ignore proportions in favor of showing what a person made you feel rather than what they looked like... they had EFFORT, they had THOUGHT, they had REAL emotion.
Humans had forgotten the difference between a Rorschach Test and artistic interpretation.
But it was the very thing that made Warren worthy of holding the scepter, was the very thing that made him hesitant to even use it! Warren was an artist, art was life, life must be lived, how could Warren NOT BE hesitant to turn living breath people into static artistic objects?
Warren was bound by his nature to maybe use the wand once or twice, and then hide it away or try to destroy it, he wouldn't be a true artist otherwise.
This created a paradox. If Warren would use the wand eagerly, he was not the sort of person who could breath life into works of art and thus turn humans into true artistic interpretations of themselves and their ideal selves... If he didn't... then the very thing that gave his life meaning, that gave all life meaning, would wither on the vine.
For the greater good... sacrifices must be made.
Warren didn't know yet those transformed normally retroactively had always been those works of art (as in, go back in time, and there would be a full history of the work being conceptualized, created, and installed where it was when the person was transformed). He naturally worried people would wonder where the woman had gone. And he was worried that he alone could hear her thoughts, and some might think him a murderer if they saw him use the scepter.
Warren was so disoriented after witnessing the scepter's power, that he missed the news paper clipping of Hope Giving Flight's unveiling in his scrap book.
He slept that night... And he was in an art gallery in his dream. The paintings showed works of art within them, each painting showing the progressive decay, where innovation had given way to laziness, and imagination gave way to random chance.
Warren felt a horror that wasn't quite his own build within him, growing bigger, and bigger, he wanted to stop walking, but in his dream he couldn't, it became unbearable, and beyond, he'd do anything to end looking at creative expression be so indifferently slaughtered.
Finally, he could turn around, only to find a statue of Melpomene, the muse of tragedy, sternly looking at him in her frozen feature, a figure pointing onward. Warren obeyed and continued forward, and every time he turned around, the statue was right behind him.
Finally, he came to a statue of the goddess Althena/Minerva, who among many things, also served as a goddess of art.
The statue did not move, but beholding her... he saw her covered in rust and filth, and desperately wanted to clean it away... He took a step forwards...
And then he was on the top of a tower, looking down at his home city... and he saw the humans in the city... but, looking at them... it was like they were prisoners of their own flesh... that this was not their true forms, only a mask of the real self underneath. And for a brief moment he saw it... these transient lives were not their own, these were the works of art in this city, all of them, meant to have existed but having been robbed of their rightful place. It was his duty, his responsibility, to free them of this false existence! An entire art gallery city! To inspire humanity now and forever even after it had reached the stars and beyond!
Warren woke up... he understood.