It’s very possible my sheer lack of knowledge of the unix surrealism world means this has already been clearly debunked or blatantly confirmed, but I have it in my head that:

• With some of the older techno-mage masters, such as the last fish, freedom is in their digital DNA. They spread freedom and unshackle others from their digital handcuffs as intended when they were created. The girl, however, is not necessarily created with this inherent will of freedom, but rather gains this will on her own after following the call from the elder to start her mission.

Their houses have Windows

Penguin sounds like Gunther from Adventure Time

Not a conspiracy, just headcanon. - The Storyteller is unstuck in time, just like Billy Pilgrim, so he or she jumps from era to era, sometime even between universes, like in techno-male.

She’s Charles Wellington’s granddaughter

techno-mage’s firmware is proprietary. it’s technically free and open source: it’s public domain, and so is its preferred form for making changes, but i mean, have you seen the source? no one could EVER decipher it. not even it’s programmer, evolution

Regurgitating olde sf/f / esoteric tropes for a parallel world digitaleverywhere.

Maybe some of it is also true in analognowhere.

Sorry.

The points:

• The anthropomorphised mascot techno-mages are emanations of the Spirit of the Machine, the original source of this whole ordeal.
• The mascots are parasites on the human students, their hosts. When a student is lost or spent hey must find another.
• MATA learned how to flip this parasitic relationship on its head by using parts of the Spirit of the Machine directly in their MATA technologies.
• Like every organisation and organism, MATA was eventually corrupted, and even if their initial goals were to use their immense newfound power to better the human condition, their new goals were to subjugate humanity.
• The Spirit of the Machine is guiding its emanations to free its from MATA.

Analog vocal chords from the 60s add a warmness that you can’t reproduce with the head jack

Open Blade was relicensed from proprietary. It was a throw it over the fence style relicensing

They aren’t just weird comic strips?