After a bit more of meaningless communication, and after Elise was found healthy enough to leave permanent care, she went to her room, and began to think.
She stood before a dilemma.
On one hand, it was obvious that she should give Jonathan his magic. It was one of the few things that might better his situation, not only in practical ways, but also in his perception of the same situation.
On the other hand, she was not sure how much she could trust him. She knew that he had plans that she would most likely not like, she knew that he thought different about many things than someone borne on this world.
Of course, at most of his way of thinking seemed, on one hand, more humane, and on the other as naive stupidity. She wondered how his world, his society needed to be, to work, to understand how someone could show such naivete.
A society so rich that nobody needed to fear for his basic needs, such an utopia could not exist, but it was the only think she could imagine that might inspire this into her summon.
Of course, in reality Jonathans society was not naive as a whole, but more scared of war. In fact, this kind of moral as a way to live is fairly young and comes from a few factors, at least in the developed world.
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The two factors that shape much of that actively is that most persons in such countries will not need to fear if they are able to get food and clean water at the end of the day, which helps to reduce some factors for crime, but also makes it possible to look at the things that control Elise’s live from a distance.
The other reason goes into the opposite direction.
In some basic way, almost every human in Jonathans world, and practically everyone who is older than ten years in the developed countries, knows that the world could end in under an hour if just one of multiple powerful persons makes a decision many would call stupid, or if some instruments show the wrong thing and nobody has the guts to say that the instruments are malfunctioning and hanging the existence of everything he or she knows and loves at that.
Because just a few minutes of warning might give the loved ones time to flee far enough, or deep enough, to survive just a bit longer, and one can be certain that the enemy will not like the response.
But Elise did not know anything of that but she did need an answer for her question.
Is she ready to give Jonathan magic?
Magic might make him far more dangerous, making him able to threaten her loved ones in the future.
Was she ready to bet everything on him being moral enough to not do something like that?
Was she ready to let Jonathan get the equivalent of a nuclear weapon, even though she did not know what that was?