py-complete does not work on variables, only on module namespaces

py-shell-complete and py-complete work well on namespaces like numpy, cv2, matplotlib.pyplot , however, on variables only py-shell complete seems to work.
Consider the following example:

import numpy as np
x = np.array([1]) # completion works in the intermediate string x = np.arr with both py-complete and py-shell-complete.

However,

when attempting to complete
x.s # here only py-shell-complete gets all of the completions for this variable
Possible completions are:
x.swapaxes x.sum x.strides x.std
x.squeeze x.sort x.size x.shape
x.setflags x.setfield x.searchsorted

 whereas py-complete returns nothing.

The caveat is that py-shell-complete also fails if there is no *IPython* shell buffer open where my whole script ran. This sort of makes sense but I am wondering whether it would be possible to do everything in a separate, invisible shell.

Attempting to run py-documentation on the string 'x.shape' or any other function fails. Maybe this should be fixed? when running py-documentation on 'x = np.array' it works very well.

My question is: can py-complete work on variable names too? If not, how can I use py-shell-complete's list of completion to be passed to ac-sources. py-complete has the variable ac-sources-py-complete but I have found nothing of this sort for py-shell-complete.