The council had only gotten halfway through speaking before she vanished from Sandora and me again. This time, several full seconds passed before she reappeared, flickering all over. Seeing that, I could not help worrying. "Um... are you all right?"
"It's fine." The council remained calm. "My primary data body is on the planet, so interference affecting this extension body on the network will not affect the primary body. The Yu Nade collective contains an enormous amount of data, and we do not possess Mass Projection technology as advanced as yours. If I wish to appear at a distant network node and interact with the material world, I can only use this sort of highly bandwidth- and environment-dependent..." She flickered, vanished, and reappeared before continuing, "...extension body technology."
Coco Kina looked at his long-lost partner, whom he had only recently reunited with. "Actually, you didn't have to come here using an extension body. If you used a conventional projection, you could still see what was happening here, couldn't you?"
"But I wanted to personally 'touch' that thing. I wanted to know what sort of thing brought such a Great Disaster upon you." The council smiled faintly and looked at Coco Kina's wavering face. "Contact with the material world is my only pleas—"
Three seconds later, the council appeared before us again. She looked earnestly at Lin Xue. "Um... could you turn off that little device in your hand? You may not think much of it, but it has a major impact on our still-fragile network."
I glanced at Miss Lin and found that she was playing an online interstellar game through the Data Terminal—and she was playing against Bubble. I immediately understood what had caused the abnormally frequent interference since earlier, and I felt deeply apologetic toward the council.
Just