Board Thread:Speculation House/@comment-26025032-20160119021526/@comment-13499046-20160119232318

From Ironwoods talk about Atlas studying Aura and finding out what it is and how it can be contained/moved etc. I'd say this isn't much about her processor or even memory (all of which will likely be intact) but whether or not her soul will be intact, and thus whether or not she is still "alive" in the eyes of the people of Remnant.

What this really comes down to is what you think a soul is, since souls and Aura are clearly linked and they almost seem to use the terms interchangeably (although they aren't really interchangeable, based on Pyrrha's exposition from way back when). It could be that just because Penny can think and feel and has a neurological system imitating a biological one that she just has a soul, and thus Aura, which would certainly be in line with my thinking about souls in general.

Or it could be that souls are in fact sort of seperate from the body, at the very least after death, which is of course the thinking of pretty much every religion with an afterlife (Glynda's almost dismissive remark about religion, the only thing we have to go on concerning religion, suggests that RWBY may not have a literal afterlife). This is in line with the whole transferring souls thing, and and supports the idea Penny got her soul from someone else, although Atlas still could have found out a way to make one artificially, and it still in theory could just be a by product of Penny.

Then finally, was Penny's soul destroyed in that attack? It's hard to say, as we do not know, where, or even how, Penny's soul is stored inside her body. It could be all throughout her, in which case it is probably gone, or just in one place, then it probably isn't. If Penny is rebuilt and just gains a new soul, as a result of her architecture, or from Atlas technology, will it still be her? How much of Penny's personality comes from her processing and how much from her soul? We don't know, and likely will never know. But if I may hazard a guess, Penny will probably come back, and she'll probably be slightly, or even very, different. Penny as we know her will probably be dead. Much like Church actually, everyone always forgets that he died in Season 6. Although of course, Miles and Kerry managed to pull an annoyingly cheery ending out of Volume 2 so maybe she'll be just fine.

Sorry for length and terrible formatting, I write like I talk and I ramble something awful. That's why I normally just lurk.