I have a headcanon/fan-theory that goes in this direction:



Penny stated that she is the first artificial lifeform capable of generating an aura, which means one of two things:

1. Another person´s aura was crammed into her.

2. Her AI is so close to that of humans and faunus that she can generate an aura the same way humans and faunus do.



For this theory, I´ll focus on the second option. So, here I go:

When meeting Ruby for the first time, Penny immediately got accepted as friend by her, leading to an increase in social interactions and because of that, Penny´s artificial intelligence evolved at an accelerated pace. In the movie I, Robot, it was stated that robots with artificial intelligence sometimes show signs of random code fragments appearing at random, which manifest themselves as dreams. For Penny, it means her AI evolved not only faster and more efficiently than expected, but also in different ways.

Due to her friendship with Ruby, it seems likely that these random programs primarily focus on Ruby, and that during her fight with Pyrrha, one of Penny´s new programs, one that she herself might not have known about, was actived and sent Penny´s consciousness to a new body when her current one was destroyed. Of course, it was something related to Ruby, namely her scroll.

And before you ask why Penny didn´t bother to say anything this whole time, she´s a human mind on a scroll. She´s probably in some form of standby mode so Ruby´s scroll doesn´t overheat and explode or something.

But now that Ruby is in Mistral, and close to the CCTS tower, it could be possible for Penny to transfer her consciousness to said tower, should it still be active, and operate from there. I know the CCTS is down, but the individual towers could still function, albeit on a smaller scale. Maybe it´s just like a regular relay tower now, who knows?

Anyway, I´m really looking forward to see if my theory is true.



And, in case anyone was wondering, I got the idea from a book I wrote about ten years ago, where the protagonist was a robot from the future who was sent into the past to deal with some ancient evil. He´d die several thousand times over, only to have his mind get sent to the nearest technological device, be it a smartphone, a microwave or a calculator.

Of course, first he had to survive long enough for computers to be invented...