She listens less to the words used and more to what they're framing overall. Holographic is meaningless, but projection? She understands, both from what one projects on another and the image one projects that they want believed. Something certain individuals in her acquaintance are more skilled with than others, to different extents. Peridot doesn't have a solid body. She invents one for herself. Her gem defines her: she is a gem. Alien isn't the word that comes to mind, but some different kind of spirit, something encased and located within the confines of a stone. Golem? No, though she can parse some similarities from what little she knows about golems. Spirit is almost more likely... but to manifest a form like that, to have it be a willful projection? In terms of what she knows, it sounds more like manipulating the Fade through an act of willpower. Not so dissimilar to Cole, Compassion, willing himself into being, the 'better,' the 'wished for' version of the man who'd died in the darkness.

She's not sure how morbid that thought is or isn't. Mostly she finds herself missing Cole.

"Then the most real part of you is your gem, you might say, and the rest is whatever you decide to project of yourself?" Technology isn't separate from magic in her mind, for all she knows technology that does operate without the assistance of magic. Peridot is sounding like a complex magical event, a creature self possessed of her own will and... huh. It's fascinating. A little unsettling, yes, but it starts to make more sense why she kept insistently asking why Ellana and humans didn't just heal themselves back to wholeness.