Board Thread:Speculation House/@comment-27186569-20170521134631/@comment-25936766-20170602215230

13th madman wrote: So, rare materials needed to sustain an aura generator. This is entirely baseless speculation. Or assumption, more precisely. For starters, define "rare materials". It can't be Dust, Dust is purely elemental.

But to be fair and honest, everything regarding Penny and her Aura is an assumption.

--

We do not know what makes animals and people have Aura, and we know even less of how Penny has hers. We only know a few things of what one can do with it, and not really anything about how Aura works.

Though I do personally doubt there's such thing as an "Aura generator". Aura is more like spiritual, it's directly related to the Soul. A machine could theorically simulate Aura's effects, but not generate it unless it was some weird fountain of souls.

So everything involving Aura and Penny, is theorical at best. The hard part is that some hypothesis are not unlikely, though even then they still leave questions. For example:

1-Aura requires a certain level of awareness and/or complexity. A freaking dog has Aura (apparently. Otherwise that dog's entire being makes no sense), so the requirements are not high.

People are sentient by nature.....machines are not. A machine only reads 1s and 0s and follows their programming. They have no self-awareness or even a mind. But Penny does, and she's the only synthetic so far that supposedly has Aura.

If we follow this, then theorically any sufficiently-advanced AI (which may not even be too advanced) would be able to develop Aura along with maybe an identity, and theorically a Soul. It also means that like a normal person's Aura, hers would regenerate like usual.

Though it is unknown, probably doubtful, if she would develop physically like a Hunter. A human body changes, a 100% synthetic body does not and cannot. Sure, there's the option of upgrades, but those aside, would her robotic body actually get stronger?

Then, regarding the idea of rebuilding Penny, it depends on whether you can actually recover the Soul of someone who died. And what one could do with such a thing afterwards. If you can't, then theorically they could make another "Robot Person", who would develop their own identity and Aura, but that would not be Penny unless with very specific nurture.

2-Penny is a ghost. By this I mean, Atlas used the Aura Transfer machine to transfer someone's Aura to an empty robotic shell. This explains more easily why Penny has a personality and Aura, and the explanation is simple.

However, while the explanation is simple, the details are not. Would Aura regenerate that way? Would it even work properly? Penny's hand got teared up slightly at the palms when she stopped the truck, so either the crash was too damaging even for her, or her Aura doesn't work properly. The same would go for when she got teared up.

There's also the question of Memories. The previous idea can be justified as "saving up data", but here it's more difficult since in this hypothetical scenario, she's a ghost possessing metal scrap. Not to mention that regardless of the answer, Penny at least believed she was a robot, and if she ever had a life before that, she's as silent about it as Ruby is about Summer.

The biological answer is that since she doesn't have her previous, actual brain that handles the memorization, there are no memories post-transfer of her previous life. But that brings the question of just what are the relations between the psychological/biological and Aura or the Soul itself.

Another explanation, but more speculative, is that her memories were erased before, or after, the transfer, or at least are inhibited. Probably because having a traumatized little girl in the most advanced Atlesian weapon, would be very dangerous.

Now, following this hypothesis, then when it comes to rebuilding her, it's the same as the previous one in terms of whether one can collect the Soul of a dead person. If you can, then you could simply transfer it to another body, but if you can't, there's nothing one can do but visit the gravekeeper again.

Those are the most common-and-believable I've seen so far, as to how she has Aura. But like I said before, there's the question of Memories. To avoid redundancy, let me ask at this point: '''What would they affect, assuming she lost them and recovered them? Or some other machine was given her memories as data?'''

Would that machine then gain her identity, and thus Aura? Would nothing change beyond Penny remembering? Would she or the machine identify those memories as hers, or feel disassociated from them, and if so, what would that cause?

Then there's the question of whether her memories can even be recovered to begin with. There's the "physical, semi-physical, and virtual" ways, but all have issues:

Physical: There was some memory bank somewhere in her body. But assuming it wasn't teared up or damaged, her body was left on a falling (IIRC) stadium up in the air in the middle of a Grimm attack.

Semi-Physical: Similar, only that instead of a physical memory bank, it's all files and bytes stored within her. Then the question is if those could be accessed remotely even if she is effectively shut down and tore apart, or whether she herself would need to be recovered physically beforehand (if only to repair her to the point she can turn on). In which case, there's the previous issue.

Virtual: Her memories were uploaded in real-time to the Atlesian network. However, this has plot issues (mainly how she would've been pretty much unable to escape back in V2 from the soldiers, since anyone could've told them where Penny was), and.... that network got a virus.

TL;DR: Penny is a Puzzle.