System was quiet, listening.
"So the monitoring function," it said carefully. "The light I found. That's not extraction."
"No," Elara said. "It's the opposite."
She paused.
Organized the explanation the way she organized everything — by what mattered most, stated first.
"The collars already existed," she said. "I didn't build them. What I built was a secondary layer within the existing framework. A recording function, not an extraction one. It registers emotional states — specifically distress patterns, fear responses, the physiological markers of sustained trauma." She paused. "It doesn't transmit. It doesn't report to me. It stores locally, within the collar itself, and accumulates a longitudinal record of each individual knight's baseline over time."
System looked at her. "Why."
