With a slight frown she walked up to Luri and poked the priestess' cheek ever so slightly, still somewhat uncertain of how exactly her body and Lunarilia's differed in Fantastoria. Luna felt like a normal person and Ash didn't feel any different from usual. She was still thinking on Prudentia comparing Ash's body to a marionette versus Luna's to an artist's mannequin.
Luna laughed slightly and moved Ash's fingers to the pulse on her neck, "The difference is here, Asha, in the body's ability to circulate mana."
Luna had asked for an in-depth explanation while Asha had slept, partly for her own curiosity and partly because she knew Asha would ask at some point and wanted to be able to answer without having to call for Sidus. It was a little rude of her, she knew, but she wanted to keep Asha to herself for just a bit considering how quickly she'd been pulled away to deal with temple matters despite the promise that she'd be able to help Ash get settled into Fantastoria without interruption.
Like so many other promises, the temple heads had broken it immediately, complaining that they couldn't function without the high priestess' advisement. She hated it, hated the pedestal they put her on because she was the only guardian whose Starborn had survived. Just like with the other guardians, she'd had nothing to do with Ash's desperate fight for survival that day, had been stuck doing work for the temple that the temple heads were meant to be doing themselves.
The temples had grown complacent, though, had gotten stuck into the tradition of having the guardians of the Starborn lead the temples. When the Starborn began to be hunted, the leading positions became hereditary to those families as if providing them with work would take away the sting of losing the one they were meant to protect. There were far more suitable among the priestesses, priests and paladins of the temples to lead but tradition had become a chain that was hard to break.
"My mana circulation is complete. It matches with what I'm capable of at full strength. For someone like you, that isn't something that can be done easily," she explained, "You need a form like the ones the gods use when they visit the material plane, something that can channel a lot of magic without breaking. The thing is, even the gods can't craft something like that easily. The forms they use to be tangible here are things that have been exposed to their magic for hundreds of thousands of years in order to be able to use even a fraction of it. For you, they needed something connected specifically to Fantastoria and that meant that they had to start with what they call an unattuned form. Lord Sidus was able to push things along a bit, to use his own magic and that of the Star Ash to make certain you'd be able to cast first tier magic but he assumed you'd take your time since you were told it was a game and that you were here to take it at a leisurely pace."
Ash sighed, understanding that she had messed everything up even if it wasn't intentional. It was time to fix things and important that she do so as swiftly as she could. She only had thirty days remaining before the flame boar came after Redwood Stars. Even if she knew with every fiber of her being that others would be able to take care of it, she couldn't stand aside and do nothing. She had to help protect as many of the lives of the Earthborn as possible, lives that had been changed as part of a desperate bid to save two worlds.
She took a few deep breaths, feeling the mana circulation that ran through Luri. It was interesting, stronger than what she was used to in Terra without being unfamiliar. Luri still had potential for growth in her, Ash realized, potential that had been stifled by years spent looking after the temple affairs.
"You were able to get your skills up on par with where they are on Terra already," she observed.
Luna nodded, "I was. It wasn't exactly easy. I spent months in and out of dungeons in every moment of spare time I had to be here. Part of it was testing, making sure that you'd be at home here. Part of it was also making sure that our bond could be replicated properly with the body they were making for you."
Ash's lips tilted downward again in a slight scowl, "They said they needed help making it," she prompted quietly, her pink eyes questioning.
Luna looked around the beautiful home that Ash had designed for herself and stood, leading the way outside rather than explaining. Her eyes moved over the Star Ash, taking in its beauty. Some of the new leaves were colored with anger and fear and pain in large quantities. Ash's hurt was visible in the new growth but so was her calm and her joy in the days preceding as well as the days following her corruption. Eventually she nodded at the tree, indicating Ash should touch the tree and waiting to see what happened.
Ash stepped up to the Star Ash that had become her home and reached out to touch it. The tree was happy to show her the beautiful clearing over several millennia of its growth, eventually moving on to when Sidus and other gods had come to visit its clearing.
The tree had happily offered its help and had provided magic to the sleeping body they brought with them. Its magic had helped form that of the Starborn into a world in which they didn't exist. It felt strange, seeing herself sleeping in the grove and knowing that the body had no soul attached to it at the time, knowing it had been waiting for her.
That knowledge made it feel equally strange that her own body could have been left in that situation during all of the chaos that had unfolded when her magic had been corrupted. Looking back, she knew she'd been stupid. Corruption was so very dangerous to her but she'd trusted in her ability to cleanse it. Instead, she'd almost lost her life to it.
Luna caught her around the shoulders, gently guiding her back inside, "So, tell me all the plans you have so I can help figure out what to hand off to other people and what to leave to you," she said with her mischievous grin in place, "Healer's orders, that is to say mine and Gardenia's, are that you need to take it easy and not just jump in to trying to work all day long or cast a ton of magic right away."