They might notice that while Siobhán sips at some water or tea if it's available she doesn't eat anything.

"Certainly. Please lead the way."

If they notice, they don't say anything. 

Po and Gerain escort their charges to another landing pad and Bullhead, which in turn carries them (in a fairly short journey) to another landing near tall structure of glass and white metal. The exterior is brightly windowed, but fences of hardlight Dust guard it on all sides. From the landing pad, twin doors hiss smoothly open. The group passes through a spacious but utilitarian hallway lit with the same steady white-blue glow as the rest of the Academy, then arrives at an office door. The nameplate reads Prof. Pietro Polendina. 

Po knocks.

"Come in!" says a cheery voice. 

A stocky, bearded man sits in a chair on the other side. He wears a rumpled but high-quality lab coat and a beaming smile. "Welcome, welcome! I cannot wait to hear your story, the General has been so tight-lipped about you. Pietro Polendina, at your service." 

Siobhan and Riley may recognize the name as a prominent Atlas bio-roboticist. 

It came up in their research. "Hello, I'm Siobhán Ionbhá, an envoy for Starlight. I also wear a robotic body."

"And I'm Riley Clearsky. I'm an explorer and researcher. I'm largely biological but I have a number of implants."

"A robotic body, you say? How absolutely fascinating. That wasn't in the briefing. But then again, the briefing consisted of about three paragraphs -" 

Po coughs, his helmet making it echo slightly. 

"- whose lack of any useful information whatsoever apparently constitutes a state secret. Bah.

"It is a pleasure to meet you, Siobhán and Riley. I expect we'll have a lot to talk about. My own research is in prosthetics, mostly, although a fully functional robotic human has been something of a long-term dream. Please, have a seat." He gestures to a pair of elegantly functional office chairs in front of his desk. 

"It's nice to meet you too."

"What are we going to be working on today?"

"I would personally be delighted to hear all about the technology that enables a fully functioning robotic body, but I suspect that is not the highest priority. I am told, however, that you have a way of preserving the lives of individuals after their bodies are destroyed? Perhaps this is related to the robotic technology after all?" 

"That's not exactly what we have. We have a way of taking snapshots of people and rebuilding them from those snapshots. If someone loses their body any memories they formed between their last snapshot and that loss can't be recovered. People in certain critical roles take snapshots constantly but most people do it less frequently."

"What happens to the Aura of someone who is killed and revived in this manner?" 

The word he's using, "Aura", continues to parse as "soul" in this language. 

"That is a good question, our people don't have Auras that can be awakened, so it's untested. We have something like Auras but we have no idea how similar they are. Our interfaces, which is the technical term we use, will reattach themselves to someone's new body as long as they're sufficiently similar. Which they almost always are. The exceptions tend to be when someone has undergone major personality shifts or there are a lot more memories than the last time they had an interface-compatible body."

"I have made something of a study of how Auras interact with technology. As a general rule, they don't; or rather, it takes conscious effort and no small amount of practice to extend one's Aura to cover non-biological prosthetics, except where Semblances are concerned. Yet it may be possible to test whether Auras and interfaces are, in fact, the same thing. Have you a way of detecting and studying interfaces?" Pietro's tone is businesslike, but his eyes are alight with excitement. 

Gawain is gawking, eyes wide. 

"Of course, there wouldn't be a technical term or experimental results if we didn't. Ironwood asked me not to run scans on anyone without permission though. I'm not sure if you're allowed to give me that permission."

Pietro rolls his eyes. "If the good General wants experimental verification, he'd best be approving of experiments, no?" He gives a pointed look at Po, who, after a brief hesitation, nods. "Besides, the briefing didn't bother saying anything against it. So I officially volunteer to be...erm...scanned." 

"Great." Riley fiddles with her staff and initiates a scan of Pietro. Pietro's interface is a tight and seemingly solid thing a bit outside his skin it seems to fluctuate a little but it's mostly static. Riley activates another array to project the scan in real time as an image in midair and adds a scan of herself for comparison. Her interface is a cloud and definitely not solid or opaque, it's more concentrated around her head but it's present around her whole body. From her center of mass there's an apparently liquid braid of something that stretches beyond the scope of the scan. Both scans include a translucent rendering of their bodies without much detail for reference.

"Your interface is very different from mine."

Pietro watches this display with absolute fascination. "Remarkable. Taking this on face value, it would appear that Auras and interfaces are the same substance, but perhaps in different form?" He begins asking all sorts of questions about the technology, if Riley chooses to answer. What is the braid of Aura, is that her Semblance? Has she gotten permission to scan an unawakened Remnant native for comparison? Would Riley mind if he (nondestructively) examined her staff with his Semblance? 

"Yeah, it does seem like they're the same thing. It's always nice when new discoveries fit into existing frameworks. I wonder whether an awakened Aura can have information embedded like an ordinary one. We use that for a few purposes though I don't have anything embedded at the moment.

Riley is happy to answer. The braid is a connection to the Heart which is the source of her magical abilities. From what's she's researched semblances are unique things only people with awakened auras have. She hasn't done any scans of the inhabitants of Remnant before just now.

She separates a bit of the end of her staff for him to look at, though she explains that the staff itself is just a series of magnetic discs they're a focus for her magic rather than devices with independent functions.

"You have the gist of Semblances, yes. Mine is ensoulment; I can place my Aura in objects, and make small changes and recover information thereby." Pietro takes the disc and turns it over, peering closely at it. His hand glows a dappled green, and for a moment, so does the disc. Then the glow...retracts? into Pietro's hand, and he returns the disc to its rightful owner. "So simple," he murmurs. "But the staff is merely a focus, you say...then the magic is bound to you, but not to your Aur - your interface, hmm?" 

"I'm not sure what you mean? My magic connects with me through my interface. That's why we call it an interface it's what connects a person to the magic they use. That's true of most magic systems we've encountered."

"You commented that you didn't have any information bound in your interface at the moment. That implied, to me, that your interface was not otherwise changed by your magic system, but it seems I was wrong in thus assuming?" 

"The Heart link isn't something we're able to change. Bound information is something we can. It looks like this." She does something and a small cube appears floating in her cloud. "That's storing a record of this conversation so far. Interfaces can store a pretty large amount of information in them without issues."

"Ah, that is a more...literal interpretation of data storage than I had in mind. We have not previously observed Auras to have this effect without Semblances involved - incidentally, nearly everything I say has that caveat, Semblances can do a lot of things - but it is always possible. Could you try storing information in my Aura, or would I have to be connected to this Heart first?"

"You don't need a heart link. Would you like me to try? I don't know if it'll work given how different your interface is."

"If you have no specific reasons to believe it unsafe. I doubt it could cause harm; the worst that seems likely is that my Aura would reject the outside influence, but I may be able to prevent even that if I focus on it. Auras respond to intent rather strongly, though not always conscious intent. And it would be further evidence whether Auras and interfaces are qualitatively the same."