It took Jack, Jonas and Murray a few days to return with their decision. They had gone and met with the idiots in their village, a meeting I had decided to observe using the Oculus and a scrying construct or three, allowing me a front-row seat for the entertainment. It turned out that neither Jonas nor Murray were good at talking to the people there. There was a certain clash in personalities between them, made only worse by the fact that the majority of the idiots had the same stubborn streak. Granted, it was only due to that stubborn streak that they remained in their village; otherwise, they'd have left already and joined a different, better-organised community.

Jack, on the other hand, was amusingly irreverent, with a mischievous streak a mile wide and almost pathologically unable to take things as seriously as they should be taken. The kind of guy who would crack a joke as the hangman placed the noose around his neck, ready to pull the lever sending him to his death, the kind of guy who would look at a nuke, ready to end the world, and make light of it, maybe with a joke likening the effect to a severe sunburn. That irreverence gave him the ability to talk with them without either side getting offended or annoyed; they simply started joking around, mocking one another without a care in the world. It was quite amusing, and their interactions were a major reason for the scrying constructs I had used to observe; otherwise, I would have stuck with the Oculus, but that didn't allow me to listen, only to see what they were doing. It was one of the artefact's major downsides, but given that I regularly used it to observe the sky and the other planets in the solar system and even tried to map the stars, it wasn't always a major downside, just occasionally.

Either way, I learned quite a bit about Jack and even added a couple of points to my research regarding the enchantments. Their conversations had a certain flow to them, allowing me to see and hear things I normally wouldn't have been told. Simply because I wouldn't have thought to ask about them and because the people experiencing the effect wouldn't want to talk about it. Things like a sudden increase in certain urges, stronger instincts, things like that, nothing a male would want to talk about with a female, making me wonder if I had missed other things due to certain blinders we all habitually put on ourselves.

Intellectually, I knew that it was almost inevitable that I had missed things due to that, simply because our minds all had a certain cultural conditioning to accept certain things as normal.

It would take a long while for that conditioning to be replaced if only because people weren't actively aware of that conditioning. They simply followed their experience and later used that experience to teach their children. Even the Change, as extreme an event as it had been, wasn't enough to completely change people's perspectives and the way they thought, it forced them to adapt to new situations but their fundamental characters weren't changed.

Alas, while such observations were fascinating in their own right, they weren't truly important, at least no in the short term. Those observations would become important once cultures formed again, especially if I wanted to become part of one such culture at some point but for now, they were simply interesting things to ponder, not something I needed to solve. Not that I believed I'd be able to solve the issue, I was well aware that I was still far from a capable social operator, which would be needed for this problem.

I could readily operate as a teacher, at least with a class interested in learning a subject I was fascinated by and knew a lot about. It would almost certainly be a different situation if the education I provided was mandated by some government or something like that, creating an environment in which students didn't want to learn but had to attend anyway. If there were such a case in one of my classes, they'd be asked to leave the tower after interrupting class once or twice, meaning my students knew it was a privilege to learn from me, that the lessons weren't provided because I was paid or because I had to but because I wanted to help them, giving them a motivation very few students would have been able to match before the change. Survival was a strong motivator, and gaining abilities to survive and do so in a modicum of comfort was even better.

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Either way, the current situation didn't require me to solve anything; I only had to listen to Jack, Jonas, and Murray discuss their options. It turned out, Murray wanted to have the procedure and, by now, he didn't have all that many questions. He was interested in possible ways to train as a warrior, and, as I soon realised, his physique and fighting-style seemed to be a decent match for the original style used by Sigmir, which was a bitter-sweet realisation.

From the various training fights I had enjoyed with my beloved, some of which had ended in a very different sort of wrestling, I had a fair idea of how her style worked and how one would have to train in order to use it. I even had a bit of knowledge in regards to the initial training, but it was not that Murray truly needed that part; he already had a modicum of training. He just wasn't quite on the right path if he wanted to reach a similar destination to Sigmir's. Or at least the destination Sigmir might have reached if we had never met, as our meeting had changed her style and what she felt necessary in her life quite a bit. Her protective instincts had taken a much greater role, morphing her original style of brutally effective and offensive combat into something more cautious, allowing her to protect those behind her instead of cleaving her way through every obstacle in her path.

As I considered the issue, I realised that I might want to try enchanting a statue to fight with her style. It would be an interesting intellectual challenge and it would be quite useful to teach people how she had fought, giving Murray and people like him an opportunity to learn while immortalising my beloved. It might even be enough to add a bit of divinity to Sigmir, though that part was a bit of a stretch, not something I considered truly possible. It might work, and if it did, the task of reviving her would be a lot easier, as it would change the issue from the resurrection of a mortal to the incarnation of a minor deity.

Nodding to myself, I decided to extend that sort of support to Murray simply to see how far he could go with it. Additionally, it would serve as a test-case, potentially opening things up in the future.

Jonas, on the other hand, was a little more difficult. He was quite ambitious, in a way neither Jack nor Murray were. While he was currently uncertain of his path for the future, it seemed that he was unwilling to put any limits on what paths he might be able to take, something I could respect even if I knew it would slow his path to power down greatly. But if he managed to survive this initial period of seeking his path, he might just become someone great. Only time would tell, and unless things went seriously wrong, he would be protected in that time, thanks to his connection to Murray, Daniel and Samantha. Jack, too, though he was still dithering with his decision regarding the enchantment.

That part was fairly amusing, in my opinion. Jack had changed his mind about whether he wanted the enchantment or not at least five times. Well, I had observed him changing his mind five times. How often he changed his mind without verbalising his thoughts was anyone's guess, so it might be a lot more often.

The main bone of contention was one I couldn't quite empathise with. It seemed as if he wanted to be seen as a capable leader and protector by Samantha, but if he could only be that capable protector thanks to the power given to him by Lia, he wasn't willing to take it. Almost as if he believed himself to be in competition with Lia and wasn't willing to accept help from that competition, as illogical as that was. To say nothing about the idiocy of thinking that a fairly intelligent woman like Samantha would accept to be the price in a competition, but that was an entirely different topic.

A part of me wanted to give Lia a small push to make her own decision, whether she wanted to remain here, maybe take over the tower as its Mistress or something like that, or continue to journey with Luna, Silva and myself. So far, she hadn't even verbalised her conflict, though I could easily see it brew within her mind.

It would be interesting to see their decision and the results of them.

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