Yes, on rec.arts.anime.misc, once upon a time, someone was actually
foolish enough to ask me about dear, sweet Kalia-chan.  Thanks muchly,
Scott Schimmel, for giving me the gold-plated excuse to run off at the
mouth. ^_^  That post is preserved in it's entiriety here.

In article , Scott says...
>Blade <kumonryuu@hotmail.com> wrote:
>:>Sure, you can pseudo-explain it by saying that Ifurita was made by
"advanced
>:>technology", but that's the equivalent of saying the super powers
in X-men
>:>are "explained" by genetic mutation. Ifurita's powers are generally
in the
>:>realm of fantasy, especially the "I can absorb any attack and toss
it back
>:>at you" schtick.
>: She doesn't absorb attacks.  Kalia does.
>And that reminds me... How do you explain Kalia's powers then? ^_^

I am SOOOOOOOO glad you asked. ^_^

In fact, I'm so glad, I'll not only explain her powers, but I'm going
to rant about all my various observations and conclusions drawn about
her, mostly because I am a shameless Kalia fanboy. ^_^

First, personality.

(Somebody from OAV2 had a personality?  Well, yes, but it's
well-hidden.)

The first major thing I came up with with Kalia was that I think that
she must chafe at her duty as much as Ifurita did, but for a
completely different reason: the execution of Kalia's duty inevitably
involves her own destruction as well as everyone elses, and I really
don't think, given her personality, that she's all that keen on dying
for the revenge of her long-dead creators.

Of course, she's not capable of defying her duty...her creators
couldn't be that stupid.  So she must be prevented from overstepping
her bounds. How might they do it?  Well...

Given what we know about the world at the time, Kalia had an
incredibly difficult task in front of her.  Sure, she was more than a
match for any given Ifurita in combat, but even if there were only
half a dozen (and I'm sure there was more than that), they could
overpower her in a straight-up fight.  So, in addition to giving her
her impressive repertoire of powers, her creators would have had to
imbue her with considerable intellect so she could outthink as well as
outfight opponents.  As indeed they did, since Kalia shows a
considerable devious streak. ;p

The problem with this, of course, is that an intelligent, thinking
android is unlikely to look with great favour on the idea of
destroying themselves for no real gain.  But if they stymie her
thinking, it could cripple her chances of achieving her goal.

Therefore, a possible solution would be to build Kalia as she was, and 
insert a heavy override in her "brain", disallowing her from taking
any action that did not in some way contribute to her ultimate
mission.  Thus, her thinking is still intact, but she has no chance of
breaking the programming, because the very act of TRYING to break it
would be shot down immediately.  Unable to devote mental resources to
even trying to think of a way to circumvent her duty, Kalia is more or
less stuck; she knows her fate, she doesn't want it, but she can't do
anything about it.

Reason I feel this makes sense is that Kalia, for someone so
undeniably nasty, has a habit of not finishing what she starts.
Multiple times in the second volume she had enemies-the priestesses,
Yuba, Makoto-more or less at her mercy and then leaves rather than
following through and killing them, and "mercy" seems a little OOC,
all things considered. ;p  I thus postulate that killing them, while
no doubt satisfying to her, was no longer a useful priority at the
time.  Note that when Makoto is spearheading the major coalition
against him, she tries to kill him, but when he's only helping out 
the wounded Yuba, she virtually ignores him.  Also, note that she
ignores Ifurita until she finds out that her power could be useful in
activating the Trigger of Destruction, at which point Kalia attacks 
herimmediately, and then again fails to kill her upon finishing (I 
have another reason for that, as well, but that comes later).

This also, I feel, would help explain in part her personality change
in the second volume.  In the first part, Kalia is basically only
examining the situation, and possible opposition, and thus has
relative freedom of action to go about this (and as such, has some fun
with Jinnai and the heros).  Once she makes her move for the Trigger,
tho, her freedom of action becomes sharply curtailed; she basically is
constrained to shooting straight ahead towards her unwanted goal.

Anybody would resent being in such a situation, someone with Kalia's 
personality especially.  Thus, as she gets closer and closer to her
goal, she becomes nastier and more vicious, welcoming the chance to do
anything aside from the strict dictates of her duty.

Make sense?

Hoi, then.  The next question to be addressed is the one major
incongruity my theory doesn't seem to cover: the fight with Ifurita.
Oh, there's no problem with the fight happening, as noted above, but
the ending is off...Kalia seemingly wastes energy in "sealing
Ifurita's mind", when the easiest and most efficient thing if she felt
the need to do more than just defeat and drain her would be to finish
her off then and there.  (In fact, this makes no sense in the original
OAVs, regardless of whether my theory is applied or not)  So why'd she
do it?  Well, therein lies the story...

First, it is my theory that Kalia is constructed of nanomachines.
Why?  First, she is both organic (she spits up a substance that
certainly LOOKS like blood in her fight with Ifurita, a phenomenon
harder to explain than Ifurita's tears) and mechanical (several times
mechanical sparks and designs appear on her face).  Second, there's
the fact that upon death she dissolved into a pile of featureless
glop, as did much of the Trigger of Destruction (which would make
sense, if they were just a colony of nanomachines that stopped
functioning).  Third, this explains how she reshaped her "gauntlet"
into a wicked looking claw to kill Makoto with (why didn't she do that
earlier?  That looked COOL!).  Fourth, and most tellingly...how the
HFIL did Kalia seal up Ifurita's mind, anyway?  OAV2 seems to be
toying with the idea of her having psionic powers or something (see
her last scene with Makoto), but not only do they have no explanation
or definition of said powers, quite frankly it doesn't make SENSE.
She is, after all, an android, and while I suppose it would be
possible to build an android with psionics, science so advanced to do
that would be far above the Eye of God (besides, no native Roshtarians
appear to have powers like that).  Not to mention, of course, that she
never uses these "psionic powers" for anything else, which would
strike me as phenomenally stupid.

But if you speculate that Kalia is made up of nanomachinery, then the 
process, at least, makes more sense...not only that, but it also
explains why Yuba found a mini representation of Kalia blocking his
efforts.  Now, as for why she did it in the first place...?

Basically, what happened is that the REAL purpose of what Kalia did
earlier was to "infect", so to speak, Ifurita-2 with her nanomachines.
There was the obvious infection, but she also planted, as a safeguard,
a latent program with her personality, programmed to activate and
begin its work if the original was destroyed.  This also explains
another big inconsistency in the series...Kalia was obviously
activated once before, and then deactivated and sealed where Jinnai
found her.  The big question: why the hell wasn't she destroyed
before, given it is apparently so easy to do so?  But if she could
create such a program, timed to activate on the event of her body's
destruction, the scenario leading to her entrapment as in the OAVs
becomes easier to imagine.

Did they clear up the other infection along with the overt one?
Mayyyyyyyybe...

Now, as for Kalia's powers (yes, the actual answer to the question!).
First, unlike Ifurita, whose source of power is apparently her staff,
Kalia runs on an internal generator, and the only thing her staff was
apparently needed for was to activate it (hence she says to Jinnai
that she doesn't need the staff anymore).

The red gems dotting her outfit appear to be the receptacles of her
power; she stores energy in them-presumably from her generato-to use
at will, but ALSO from outside sources, such as the priestesses'
abilities.  Yet she doesn't seem able to absorb the energies of
Ifurita's staff (when fired, that is).  I would speculate that the
priestess' relatively weak abilities are easily absorbable, but
Ifurita's blasts are deliberately tailored to prevent that, either
through using a wavelength that Kalia can't store, or they're simply 
too focused for her to suck in fast enough.  

The gems can store energy in a variety of formats, and also seemingly
information (as shown when she uses Ifurita-2's energies to get around
the safeguards placed on the Trigger of Destruction); chances are they
are another nanomechanical construct, or possibly an unknown material
that can store the fast amounts of energy Kalia appears able to wield.
In addition, she can use her stolen energies rather creatively, as
shown when she trashes the priestesses (as all good villains must).  

This is, naturally, the most pseudoscientific part of her abilities,
but the problem is not so much complete ridiculousness as a lack of
understanding as to what the gems are or how they work; OAV2 doesn't
give any clues aside from observing what they can do, but as I've
noted elsewhere, knowing the inner workings of Kalia's gems was not
really important to the plot and was thus not relevent enough to be
explained (of course, Kalia's ORIGIN, which could have been relevent 
to the plot, was also not explained, but hey, that's OAV2 for you).

Kalia is able to suck out energies that are not directed at her, such
as when she kills the plants or drains Ifurita-2, which is a logical
collary to the above, giving her the ability to supplement her innate
energies in preparation for a large task (which, given her duties,
would undoubtedly be necessary at several points).

Thus, you have Kalia: lean, mean, nanomechanical fighting machine.  A
work of art.  A really cool villain, whose potential was wasted by the
evil OAV2 writers.  But hey, can't win 'em all.

As an aside, my theory on Ifurita is that her core would be solid
(metals, plastics, semiconductors and all that good stuff) while,
under her "skin" is a layer of semiliquid gel that gives her her
humanlike "feel".  This gel could harden or soften in response to
minute electrical signals at certain points, thus allowing her flesh
to closely imitate the feel of a real human (something which they seem
to be going for, given her appearence).  This is not terribly out of
line with things we can do today, provided one had a VERY
sophisticated computer system to direct the electricity.

As for her staff?  No clue.  We know too damn little about the thing,
but it seems clear that it has an immensely powerful, long-lasting
generator of SOME sort.  If I had to guess, I'd say it'd be nuclear
(anything else would run out of fuel too quickly); possibly a cold
fusion reaction, with the "fuel" thus not needing to be anything but
air.

And that's all, folks.  At least for the moment. ^_^