Having a random brain in his pocket.

Niall truly is an inspiration to all mad scientists out there.

Naturally, that is one of A-SMV's next questions.

"So please go guard that area!"

"What is my purpose then?"

"To guard."

.... You know, all this talk of robot brains has got me thinking.

Magically speaking, in this universe -- do the robo-panthers have souls? We know Jayhawk can synthesize "faux-soul" energy. Are the panthers imbued with a spark of it? Do they naturally generate it by force of personality? Absorb a little from the environment as a seed crystal, so to speak, for their own souls?

Basically, the model I'm using is that a soul naturally forms around a sentient mind, and the panthers do indeed have souls. In fact, that's the reason Jakob stole the panther brain technology in particular, because he detected that they had souls unlike something more programmatic. If you have a dead person and a blank brain you can attach their soul to it and the memories will gradually populate in the brain (which treats them like working data or cache, the master copy being in the soul itself).

Well, that's an impressive trick if I'd say so myself. Though that alone defeats the sole purpose of material value if everyone could conjure up that kind of stuff out of thin air... but on the contrary... That only means it must be coming from somewhere, but where exactly?

These comics started out as DMFA fanfics so a lot of the basic worldbuilding comes from that. e.g. http://missmab.com/Comics/Vol_652.php
As A-SMV mentions, material refined to have zero magic in it is very expensive, and you can't just conjure up something with a complex structure to it.

With that said, what are the limitations of this "conjuring" thing here? If you don't mind me asking.

It's not something I've needed to go into but I would assume that the amount of mass being created will require a proportionate amount of magical energy to conjure up. Individuals have a mana pool which slowly replenishes - if you cast something that requires more energy than you have readily available, the remainder will come from your life. So creating a little blob of metal is probably going to take a negligible amount energy, which is why Niall just does it there and then as a parlour trick. However, summoning a metric ton of aluminium might take centuries off your lifespan or kill you outright if you're a less powerful creature. So it would be more practical to just order it from an aluminium smelting plant like we would.
Besides the energy requirement and skill going up if you need to conjure a complex material, there's also the fact that as A-SMV says, conjuring up a lump of metal will give you a lump of metal imbued with magic. This tends to act somewhat like radiation and will not play nicely with electronics, garbling the signals, introducing noise and potentially damaging microcircuitry as happened with Intel's early DRAM chips with the ceramic package which turned out to emit alpha particles and corrupt the memory contents.
Hence, conjured materials aren't a good fit for advanced technology, at least, not without a lot of work to refine them afterwards.

That's, interesting. Albeit the risk of overproduction can be very taxing on one individual.