"We think so too."

"How does it work?"

"I think you don't have the underlying technological concepts, but for us it works naturally, we're born with them."

"Huh."

"Unfortunately we don't know how to give them safely to people who don't have them; there's a species like that at home, too. They don't really want them but even if they did we wouldn't know how."

"I guess you probably have different brain structures from ours."

"Yes."

"Wow. So with these things you can be resurrected?"

"Yes, as long as the chip is intact it's as simple as making a new body around it."

"Yeah, information loss is the big obstacle to resurrection."

"Mandos has backups but I'm not sure if he's getting them from here, so if something happened to my chip I'd potentially lose some memories."

"We might be able to do something about that if it was fast enough--we can do resurrections, just not ones where the person's been dead more than a few hours. If a Great Mage does it; the rest of us have a few minutes to do it at best."

"- interesting. Does that extend to cases where the head has been destroyed?"

She shakes her head. "Maybe if it was a few seconds ago and it's a Great Mage doing it, but not at my level for sure."

Nod.

"But a piece of metal--probably degrades less than brains do."

"Oh, yes, if it isn't melted or anything it's fine indefinitely."

"It might be that if it was damaged Atennesi could fix it, I don't know."

"That would be convenient."

She gives a wan smile. "Better not to find out, though."

"Oh yes. I've avoided dying this long."

"In less hazardous conditions, it sounds, but yeah."

"It's true, Valinor is very safe."

"And whatever it is that made Atennesi Cohen think that learning magical self-defense should be one of the first things for you to do here."

"I'm not sure of the exact details of what he has in mind but I don't think the caution is likely to be misplaced." She is attempting to be aware of magic. So aware.