"It will be something of a field test, I expect," replies Po grimly. "Deaths are hard to avoid." And if there weren't any losses among the handpicked group sent to scout Grimm-infested territory, then Ironwood would need to find a volunteer for the most dangerous experiment in the history of ever. Po himself would volunteer, of course, if Ironwood chose to risk his loss. 

Po and Gerain each take a turn at the snapshot as well. Po stores the activation on a mini-scroll embedded in his gauntlets, and as for Gerain...a small object about the size and shape of a bee emerges from his metal backpack and buzzes to the table to receive the blue glow. 

Afterwards, Po turns to Gerain. "Take this to team GMBL at the staging area. They'll be briefed before you arrive." Gerain nods grimly and departs. 

"I hope it doesn't prove necessary. The first time is always the hardest to deal with."

"If you are taking this risk it would probably be better for the team not to carry their tokens with them."

"Oh, but of course," agrees Po. "Scrolls can send and receive files. Mine is already on my commander's terminal, and on a deadman's switch with staggered time-delay release to be sent to several loved ones with instructions should I perish. Gerain likely made similar arrangements - his token is a recon mite, designed for scouting and communications, and it can send files too. And for physical security they can be programmed to return to a particular person or object - such as, say, a snapshot crystal. Atlas has grown highly competent at strategic redundancy, if I do say so myself." 

"I'm glad you've thought this through. Snapshot crystals can't make new bodies though. The equipment for making new bodies is rather more elaborate, and the process takes longer too."

"Can you tell us more about how that works? What do we need to build a facility here in Atlas?" 

"You need material and energy. For materials food and water work well enough, the closer it is to matching the matter that will make up the body the faster the process works. You'll also need a decent amount of power about 4000 watts for optimal function. The crystal needs power too in the long term, I have a linked generator with me for testing purposes so it'll work anywhere within a few kilometers of me but outside that radius it'll need about 200 watts to work."

"Is there another crystal that does the, er, re-embodiment?"

"Yep, a lot of our technology works that way, the stuff that's easy to distribute and compact anyway." She pulls out another device this one has a crystal in the center but it also has a number of posable appendages of some kind attached including two very obvious bare metal protrusions like battery terminals. "This is the core of a re-embodiment setup."

"May I examine this one? What else is needed to complete the setup?"

"Sure, feel free, we're planning to give you a bunch of these so it's not like we could realistically stop you from examining them however you wanted to. To get it working you need some sort of container with the raw materials in it that has enough space to hold the body of the person you want to re-embody. You'll also need enough water to fully immerse the person. The non-water materials can be kept separate to prevent spoilage or you can keep the whole assemblage in a refrigerated area and the crystal will process the raw materials in advance. Either way you need to connect a power feed to these two terminals and attach the assembly to the container using these grippers. After that you just need to tap a token to the crystal and it'll read the token and start the process if everything's setup correctly. There's also a troubleshooting mode that can either work via mental interface or by giving auditory or visual feedback."

"I apologize, I'm just eager to get started." He repeats his Aura-examination trick, this time focusing for several minutes, frowning intently while his hands and the crystal glow a dappled green.

Eventually, the glow on the crystal starts to brighten, and small patches on Pietro's hands glow less. 

"Pietro." 

"Hmmmm...? Oh!" Po's slightly sharp tone brings Pietro from his reverie, and the green recedes from the crystal into his hands. "I'm sorry. I've never seen anything like this, it is a marvel of engineering. It could take me weeks to fully understand it." Pietro is blinking rapidly, eyes somewhat moist. 

"With a spotter, one assumes." 

"That might be wise," murmurs Pietro, still looking poleaxed. 

"I'm impressed you can even understand it at all, most analyses can't get a lot from resonator crystals. You're right about it being complicated though, I'd be happy to explain in more detail at some point but there's a lot of functionality we had to encode into it even with setting it up to use external libraries."

"So that's the gap I was detecting. I did wonder, it seemed incomplete even accounting for the other equipment you described." 

Pietro asks more questions about setting up the reembodiment and snapshot devices, and he proposes some designs, including one for a robot that carries devices around to collect snapshots. 

Riley is happy to answer all his questions. As for the robot, "That's definitely something you can do if you want you'd need a good power source but you need that for any sort of robot. We can also change the configuration, they aren't technically limited to touch range we just set it up that way to make them easier to use."

"Power is rarely a limiting factor where Dust is concerned. And robots also have security benefits. Even if you distribute these freely, many might be tempted to steal and hoard them. What do you have in the way of security features?" 

"You mean anti-theft features? We mostly don't have those. We can track them of course, I'm not aware of any other measures though."

"Our preferred solution to such things is just to distribute enough that people don't feel the need to hoard them. If that doesn't work we'd use the tracking ability Riley mentioned either in concert with local groups or directly using operatives."

"That may suffice." 

"Now here's an ugly thought," interjects Po. "Can Grimm use them?"

Pietro shudders. 

"The snapshot devices only work on those magic considers to be people which is to say people with an interface and Grimm don't have auras according to your records. Even if they did the re-embodiment devices only work for species they're programmed for. We expect that Faunus as they exist in your world are close enough to human to count but we'll definitely want to do some scans to confirm. Based on what I've read the Grimm don't even seem to be made of normal matter."