I'm not sure a wish was involved at all there. That may just be a trick they learned to do after one of them had her body destroyed. A magical girl's body is just a puppet controlled by a Soul Gem, after all, no reason it has to be the original girl's gem, especially not if the original girl is giving you permission.
If that's still too witchy, if we tried, we could probably make an inert grief chibi. Sight could be done with the photonic cantilever trick that we used before for cooking breakfast for Mami remotely.
Take your time and do what feels natural. I for one am willing to wait moths for this quest at least.
What may be an issue is the girls' reactions to their bodies being constructs instead of organic bodies. They may instead just decide to go suicidal like Mami in that one timeline where Homura and Co. learned about the Witchbomb. Add on the potential trauma of remembering being a witch as a possibility and there is a high chance of BAD THINGS.
This would get into the wibbly-wobbly philosophical realm of consciousness, except Soul Gems make the whole discussion redundant: The Soul Gem is the seat of consciousness for Magical Girls, and the body is non-continuous external hardware. As long as the gem is able to identify the body as 'my body', it'll connect with it. Niko's Molecular Reconstruction breaks down and rebuilds matter in a matter almost identical to the Alchemy in Full Metal Alchemist; as long as she has a reasonably accurate blueprint (which Umika's magic can provide, by reading the Soul Gem's memories), she can transmute something like, say, a pig carcass into a human body that's indistinguishable from 'the real thing'.
This isn't explained; my theory is that they're a contract killer paid in Grief Seeds.
I'm not talking about that, I have no doubt that the SG can connect. What I'm worried about are the psychological effects that the girls will suffer if/when they find out their bodies are constructs and are living in them now. It'll be worse than Sayaka finding out what a SG is with all of the conclusions that can be drawn. At least then, that was her own body.
It actually is, this means we can roam around with them for *LE GASP* fun!
Unless Niko fucks up, it shouldn't feel any different, so they shouldn't even notice unless someone tells them, and to anyone who's lichbombed, the distinction is basically meaningless anyway. We can also just tell them up front 'hey, welcome back to the land of the living! this psycho bitch was going around incinerating magical girls, so we had to build you a new body!' and work them through things from there.
Thanks for giving me that bit of nightmare fuel. Someone may have taken my conscious and placed it in a construct with lord knows what, and I won't notice until something happens.
I feel like we might be talking past each other a bit, but this is... basically the Lichbomb. I don't think putting someone's soul in a robot is going to phase them nearly as much when they already know that their soul is already (in) a rock. Especially when that robot is literally just their original human body down to the atomic level. I can see people being nostalgic and upset that it's not their 'real' original body, but it's not exactly going to be an earth-shattering revelation by that point.
This is the more problematic logistics situation, and something we'll be able to figure out as we do recon. Do the Soujus just abandon the body after they bodykill someone, or do they incinerate the evidence? If there's no body, the girls having gone missing and being miraculously rediscovered is a lot easier to work with for both us and Kyubey.
They might not have known the lichbomb yet when they got gemmed, though.
I can see that, but it may just be my personal opinion talking, but I would find my soul being a rock much better than being in a different body. I'm not used to actually actively arguing points outside of academia.
This, on the other hand is an extreme problem in terms of trauma.
If not, then we got a lot of house calls to make that will all be along the lines of. "Hey there, I know you lost your daughter and might even be past the grieving phase but she's not actualy dead, magic is real and your daughter was caught up in it and got kidnapped by someone who was stealing souls, but we stopped them and she's alright now"
We could try it out with Mami before then.
