Phase aligned... what?  That sounds like something a ship in a sci-fi story might do to a passing asteroid.  She just nods.  Presumably they know what they're doing.

"It's okay. Most people don't know what those stand for."

Smiling, he turns to Eelesia. "Why don't you go first. Demonstrate how this works. Please, step on the dais and withdraw your Barrier Jacket."

"Of course."

Eelesia hops up onto the illuminated dais, spins around, and then her body is engulfed in eye-searing eldritch hues, like the Color Out Of Space is trying to burst through the seams of reality. A moment later, the eldritch colors all suck into a small card-shape and disappear, leaving behind only the metal jewel-set card form of her Device. Eelesia herself is now dressed in ordinary slacks and a sweater.

Healer Zenos runs the scans.

Images appear on the wall behind him. He waves at them, pulling them out in holographic form to hover in front of him.

The first one shows something that bears some resemblance to a nervous system, at least until it rotates in some higher dimension, collapsing down to a point before exploding outwards in a rough sphere of swooping protrusions and rippling ribbons of light. It kind of resembles a ball of trees made of feathers, as rendered by an artist who'd never actually seen either.

"What we're looking at here is an extrapolated image, approximately the shadow Eelesia Rimac's soul would cast on her linker core as seen from within. It lets us get a good look at the skein dynamics around her interface with the dimensional sea as well as watch her mana respiration in real time. Which all looks perfectly normal for a healthy A-class mage, by the way."

The other is a near-perfect life-size image of Eelesia herself.

"Fair warning, most people find this next part a little gross if they're not used to it."

With that, he pokes the hologram, and it... comes apart. Disassembling itself to reveal all of Eelesia's internal organs laid out in detailed full-color, operating in real-time. Little free-floating tags of holographic text appear throughout, reading out data on metabolics and cell conditions.

That's disturbing, though Verity's rule when it comes to medical things is if it helps keep people alive and healthy, it doesn't matter how creepy it is.  She looks at the internal organs enough to identify what she's looking at, but winds up turning back to the abstract feather trees.

"Okay," she says.  "Would I get scanned seperate from Araeneve or at once?"

"Good question. I think we'll try separately, first."

She nods, and heads towards the platform, ready to step on once Eelesia gets down.

With Eelesia exchanged for Verity, he runs the PADATS.

A pair of perfect reflected sine waves form, the hologram displaying a flat (2d), pair of opposed curves like a river of darkness in a mirror. One end converges to a point, while the other frays into invisibility. Arcs of light zip between the two black sine curves, forming ever-shifting bands of monochromatic light.

Healer Zenos stares. "What."

"Okay... This is different."

She looks over at the image.  "That's the one that normally shows the soul?"

"It shows a projection of the soul on the linker core, yes. But I have no idea what I'm looking at, here. You don't appear to have a linker core, but without a linker core the PADATS should just be blank. I've never even heard of anything like this."

He fiddles with the settings. The image stubbornly refuses to change.

Well, it refuses to change in response to his fiddling. If Verity or Araeneve fidget or move around at all, they might notice that the gap between the sine curves shrinks as they get further apart, and grows as they get nearer each other.

Considering how Araeneve is prone to pacing when nervous, this doesn't take too long once its clear there's something strange going on.

They make a humming noise.  "It's picking up me?  Or our bond," they guess, sidestepping closer then farther from Verity, keeping their eyes on the changing waves.  

"I wonder if it'll just show a hologram of me if I jump on."  They look at the healer, tilting their head quizzically for permission.  

"Your bond?"

He waves Araeneve up.

The frayed ends of the twin dark rivers bloom into full 3d, filling the room with snaking corona'd tubular constructs. Five of them, each like the silhouette of a snake crossed with a pitcher plant, shrinking to sharp points as the far ends fade into the extradimensional distance.

He blinks. "...I think the two of you, collectively, are a linker core. How does this bond of yours work? What do you know about it? What can you tell me?"

"Daemons are the souls of people in my world," Verity says, gaping at the suddenly appearing images while trying to come up with a rundown on daemons.  "Everyone on the ships, and the world we came from before, is born with one.  When we're children they start out as Ditto - a formless blob which can take the forms of other daemons around it.  During puberty, they change into one of a few hundred other shapes permanently, based on personality.  Each can do different magical things.

"We need to stay within about 20 feet from each other at all times, or there's psychological pain.  It's possible to Separate by ignoring the pain and walking much farther until the bond reconfigures itself into a version without distance limits, but almost no one does it.  I haven't.  

"If a person dies, the daemon vanishes.  Also if the daemon dies the human always dies too.  That's rarer since they're so much more durable, but it sometimes happens.  Also, there's psychological pain if our daemon is touched by another human - they can only be touched by their person half or other daemons.  Or inanimate objects, I guess.  

"Um." She tries to think of other facts.  "We have different minds, but things transfer over.  Emotions, especially.  We're the same person with two consciousnesses and bodies, not two people tied together.  Normally conversations have the two humans talking to each other, then the two daemons talking to each other at the same time.  Lots of daemons only talk to their person or other daemons.  They usually express emotions the human is trying to ignore or hide."

She still thinks for a few more seconds, but can't come up with anything else obvious.

Eelesia listens raptly, but restrains herself to not interrupt.

"I see."

He has questions, he ticks them off on his fingers as he asks them.

"Do the properties of the emotion sharing change if the bond changes? What counts as a touch? Does the pain have specific properties or effects? Do you know why death propogates? What, exactly, counts as death and is it recursive?"

"For death, no one has ever been revived after their daemon vanished.  I haven't read much about it.  There is a popular horror movie monster called a 'zombie' that are people who've had their souls die or been removed, and some people think they might have been based on something real or possible.

"Touch is skin contact.  Daemon fur or feathers counts as them, but human hair doesn't count as human.  Gloves are technically enough to stop it, but still taboo.  It's pain is like... the person is everywhere and invading your mind, or has their hands in your brain.  Accidental brushes or toddlers with faulty instincts are unpleasant.  Harmful intent or longer than a few seconds makes it much worse.  It's placed in the same category as rape, morally and legally, with similar long-term effects."

"Nothing changes with distance Separation other than the distance.  They'll be upset for a while afterwards, but I haven't read anything that implies it's an unnatural sort of unhappiness.

"As for the feeling of separation - it feels like you're abandoning your soul.  And a little like you're doing something cruel to yourself.  Or like trying to intentionally bend your finger enough to break it?"  That's not quite it, but it's such an obvious feeling it's hard to put into words.  She stares at the display, trying to find a better way of phrasing it.  "I can go a little ways out.  Enough to feel the strain but not too bad.  I want to see if it registers on the hologram somehow."  

"It sounds like it is the exact conditions under which daemons vanish that are important for us to know. Do you not know those?"

He nods to Araeneve. "I'm guessing it would be safe for you to touch any mage with an active Barrier Jacket, but if even gloves are taboo it would be unreasonable to test this."

As Verity steps off the scanning dais, the visualization blanks out completely. Apparently the PADATS doesn't work on a daemon alone. They have to put Verity back on the dais and have Araeneve trot aside instead to get a good look.

The hologram of the twin dark rivers shows those rivers almost touching. The light between the rivers flickers intensely, compressed, as each twinge of pain is accompanied by a shard of light breaking off into one of the rivers before rushing away down that river towards either Verity or Araeneve.

Araeneve jumps back to right next to the dais as soon as the tests have enough data, but doesn't get back onto it to fill the room with ghost-snake-things again.  Verity kneels down to run her hands through the mane.  "I'd really like to see the difference between mine and someone separated, but I don't think I could manage it personally.  What is the light that was breaking off?"

"I'm not sure.  Probably brain death?"  She's been trying to think of more details.  This just isn't something she ever studied.  "Organs kept alive in labs don't count as people.  The daemon will survive for a while if the person's fallen into freezing water, and they don't vanish for heart transplants, so it isn't heartbeat.  Uh, going the other direction, it only appears when we first breathe, though there isn't any delay or strangeness about that for emergency babies taken out a bit early."

"I have no idea. I'd have to get a sample... I'd have to design a new procedure, just to get a sample. But I'd strongly suspect that a 'separated' bond looks like two straight rivers, parallel, without any of that light in between." He points at the hologram and a readout enlarges. "See? There's slightly less of whatever this is, now. I suspect your 'separation' is the process of discharging this exotic mass entirely."

"And I'll make a note in your file. Err on the side of caution should you ever require invasive medical attention. Alright, shall we move on to the HORI? I expect that'll be less exciting."

"Okay."  She stands back up and holds still.  Possibly not necessary, but it couldn't hurt.  Verity focuses her eyes on Araeneve, suspecting the image of organs might be worse if they're her own.

At least for the standards of her own less-advanced civilization she's a healthy 21 year old, tall at 1.86 meters and more muscular than average.  She has a small chip implanted which does birth control and deals with menstrual issues, and a small scar on her left thumb.  

Healer Zenos studies the exploded hologram of all her organs.

"Pre-panhuman physiology. Cybernetic patch. Unusual antibody mix. Yes, there don't appear to be any surprises. What about Araeneve?"

They swap places.  

Those certainly are a lot of translucent, crystalline organs accompanied by error messages. It's not even returning unknowns, just failures to even get a response.

"It appears you aren't even slightly organic. Huh. This reads like you have a Barrier Jacket up, but if that were the case the interior imaging would also be dark. A thaumotic conjuration, maybe? That would fit the other things you've said."

Verity makes a considering hum and peers at the crystalline organs.  She doesn't have enough knowledge to make an informed comment, and isn't sure what to ask, either.  

"Barrier Jackets and thaomotic conjurations would be things made out of magic?" she guesses, trying to put what she knows of what's going on together.  

"Made of magic isn't a coherent idea, really," Eelesia chimes in. "But there are a lot of different ways physical objects can be made out of mana. That does fit. Mana constructs of any variety are inherently non-perpetual without an on-going imposition of order."

She hesitates a moment. "Do you not know what a Barrier Jacket is? You were kind of acting like you knew what we were talking about, but..."