Who (what) do they love truly, 100% unconditionally (if anyone)?
A hard question right off the bat, haha. Unconditionally is a very, very difficult word to ascribe to Jade, as almost everything she deals with has conditions- she is, at her core, a barterer and merchant. So using circumstantial evidence, the closest thing that Jade has an unconditional love (desire) for, is probably hope.
Given how careful she is with her private life, it makes sense that she hasn’t revealed anything too personal from her appearance in Penacony- however, what we, the players, have is the name of her Eidolons, and her Light Cone. Her Eidolons all formatted in the same way- in that they name a virtue, and then essentially put it in the terms of a trade: “Altruism? Nevertheless Tradable” and so on.
So- bringing our attention to her Eidolons, there are two that I would like to focus on. E5: “Hope? Hitherto Forfeited” and “Equity? Pending Sponsorship”. E5, because, well, look at that name. Firstly, as mentioned above, all of her Eidolons put some form of virtue and then a term regarding trade. Hitherto Forfeited- lost or given up until a specific time. On top of the general business usage of the term, it also has a sense of loss, which will be elaborated on later. The E6 important as it is often theorized that its image shows the true self of the character in question.
(Honestly, I think Hope? Hitherto Forfeited might be better suited to be the name of E6, but given that the gameplay mechanics of E6 put her as a debt collector when she grants someone else the debt collector state, it was switched to match the name of “equity”. But I have no proof.)
What is Jade’s E6? It’s her reflection in the eye of her snake. Forfeit may also be defined as “to lose or lose the right to, especially by some error, offense, or crime”. With my previous theory about Jade’s true name of Eve and her numerous allusions to that particular Biblical story, I don’t think I need to spell it out.
Moving onto her Light Cone! (Yippee) “Yet Hope is Priceless”. Now isn’t that an interesting turn of phrase, miss “do you think everything in this world can be traded”? To be honest, that name is what spiraled my search here. If hope is priceless, it cannot be exchanged, even to the owner of the Bonajade Exchange.
On top of this, we have one of Jade’s only “personal” exchanges, with Firefly in the Penacony story- and I say personal because she says so directly (“Consider it more of a personal offer from myself. It doesn't represent the IPC or the Strategic Investment Department.”), which is important, because she describes the Stonehearts with a particular set of phrases:
However, unlike you Stellaron Hunters or the Astral Express, we band together... merely to obtain what we want. [...] This journey could be either brief or long, as each of us carries a void in our hearts that can only be filled from the outside.
I’ve bolded the parts of her dialogue that I think are interesting here. The usage of merely implies that she doesn’t think this bond is as high value or at least not as important as those of the Stellaron Hunters or the Astral Express, which, yes, makes sense to a point- if the Stonehearts are driven entirely by individual goals, their sense of unity is limited at best. What’s also important is that “what we want” is, well, another way to describe desire. Desire, aka the very thing Jade collects- the very thing that she trades for, over and over again. She, too, is bound by her desire. And what does that entail? The void in her heart. Naturally, we don’t know how much she knows about all the other Stonehearts, and how accurate her assessment is but what we do know is that she knows herself.
The void in her heart “can only be filled from the outside”. It is not something she herself can innately fulfill, even with her ability to fulfill desires and grant wishes. Maybe it’s a limitation of her own power, that she can’t grant it herself (possible) or it’s something truly intangible (priceless), something that she can’t even grant Firefly:
Firefly: It's a shame, though, that this pawnshop can't give me what I desire. My last attempt in Penacony... Well, it ends with "hope."










