In my Pocket Dimension next to the designated storage area for the Fortress Shop I made a ten meter by ten meter stone tray with partitions to section it into one hundred kilogram sections, over one hundred and fifty storage bays. The first one I filled with twenty kilograms of cinnamon, and made a dozen ten kilogram sealed cloth bags, patterning them after the bags Ian had brought the material in.

The glass bottles turned into large flat bottom flasks with cork stoppers to contain the ten kilograms of the liquids. After that I moved on to making a small stockpile of the other raw materials I had gotten. While I was working on that I started on a thread portal that would be the basis of the Bag of Holding, taking priority from the new excavator's thread portal.

I still had the visual and sound feed up from Ian, and he was reading an interface.

"There will be a delay of some time when requesting newly added materials, and for large requests of rarely requested materials." Ian said, muttering. "How long is 'some time'? Should I come back later?"

Ian's eyes started darting back and forth again, reading a new prompt, his eyebrows rising.

"'Some time' being several seconds." Ian said. "It should have just said 'wait for a moment'."

He looked down at the doors to the presence so I opened them. He reached in and pulled out a ten kilogram bag that must contain the cinnamon. I looked over to the large storage bay and sure enough half of the cinnamon was gone. Ian opened the bag, stuck his finger into it, and then licked his finger. He nodded and set the bag down on a nearby table.

I added a sensor inside of the presence to check when there was an item in there, and adjusted the program taking care of the doors to open them when one was detected.

"Fortress Shop." Ian said. "Raw- Hang on, there's a new option without a cost? Items. Oh, it opened a new list. What is a Bag of Holding?"

I opened up the Fortress Shop myself.

Fortress Shop Items - Portal Travel One Fortress Coin New Portal Destination Ten Fortress Coins Raw Material (ten kilograms) One Fortress Coin Music One Fortress Coin

I selected 'Items'. The new screen started with only one item, without a description, but it reshuffled as I thought about the Bag of Holding I was making and what its characteristics would be.

Fortress Shop - Items Bag of Holding (small) One meter by one meter by half a meter storage space. Access is through a bag opening with a circumference of sixty centimeters. Weight of stored items is completely negated. Five Fortress Coins Bag of Holding (medium) Two meters by two meters by one meter storage space. Access is through a bag opening with a circumference of two meters. Weight of stored items is completely negated. Ten Fortress Coins Bag of Holding (large) Four meters by four meters by two meters storage space. Access is through a bag opening with a circumference of four meters. Weight of stored items is completely negated. Twenty Fortress Coins

I stopped adjusting it, as it was doing it live. The small one was a pretty large storage space that you would have to put your entire arm into to reach all parts of it. The medium was a small cramped room. And the large was a portable room you would be able to carry around with you. It was almost exactly what I had pictured when I was picking the Pocket Dimension power, though I was obviously happier with how it turned out now.

"Oh, that's what a Bag of Holding is." Ian said. "Funny that it seems to be working things out as I'm trying to use it. Five Fortress Coins is all that I will have left after I replace the white sugar... Bag of Holding, small."

I had just finished making it. The bag itself would be empty, so I made it out of overlapping scales of my blue super stone. The thread for the portal itself was made of Arachne silk steel and it had a clip that would slide along it, sealing and opening the portal properly. The bag would be heavy due to the materials used, so it was mostly the loop of thread backed by the mesh of stone. It didn't look very bag-like.

Ian finished slotting in the five coins, one after the other. It was a little bit inconvenient, I just finish the first bag and the System made it disappear. I could have made a copy of most of it, only having to manually do the Pocket Dimension doorway symbols.

I would have to make the next one again from scratch. It took thirty seconds to make the bag, and three minutes to carve the symbols.

The doors of the presence opened and Ian took out the bag. Fully closed he could hold it easily in one hand. He opened it up fully and stuck his arm inside up to his shoulder, apparently feeling around the space. Which was just a small stone room in my Pocket Dimension with the portal fixed to the roof with more Arachne silk steel. Ian took his arm out of the bag and stuck his head inside, which made it look like he'd just lost his head.

After that he tried to turn the bag inside out, which I hadn't considered. The portal was double sided, so the material of the bag hit the stone of the ceiling of the room at the portal edge and stopped. He played with it for a few minutes more, putting the bag of cinnamon in it, pulling it out, putting the portal over the bag slowly from the top and it falling up into the storage space. The last was because gravity was in a fixed direction, down was opposite the portal, so as soon as over half of the mass of an item was through the portal it would pull itself through. Finally he had finished testing it and came back over to the presence.

"Fortress Shop." Ian said. "Raw material. White sugar."

The doors opened, the sugar in its bag, and Ian placed it in his bag of holding.

"Eh, you got here quick." A badger man said. "How is it working?"

"Remarkably." Ian said. "What did you bring?"

"I was in the fields." The badger man said. "I got soil, water, grain, chaff, fertiliser, and vines."

Half of that didn't sound very useful. I pulled down the active feed I was watching, I would be pinged if something interesting happened. I spent a few minutes writing something that would duplicate the small amounts of raw materials I would get into lots of one hundred kilograms, expanding the storage as it is needed, and prioritising replacing things that were bought from the store.

There were queues of people at each of the presences on the three floors, even the Forest Keeper one where they were still setting up. With that taken care of I took a presence with me down to the ward room. I had been meaning to set one up there for a while so that I could see the hologram that the detection ward showed when there were intruders on my land.

Chantelle was standing in front of the table in the ward room facing the doorway, her hands resting on its surface and her eyes closed. I guessed that she was working on something in the simulation, so after fixing the presence in the roof above the table I sent her a ping.

"Hmm?" She said, opening her eyes. "Oh, a quest window."

She quickly read through it, then looked to me and raised an eyebrow.

"I want people to contribute to the fortress." I said. "And at the same time find out what they would most want. I've been told that I can be terrifying, so this is a way for people to interact without being intimidated by me."

Chantelle nodded. "I expect that will work quite well." She said. "Aren't you going to be overwhelmed by people constantly giving you things, and requesting things of you?"

I was talking to her out in the real world, so I sent her a ping to join me in my local simulation where I constantly modelled my surroundings.

"Yes?" She asked, looking around.

I hadn't noticed that she had arrived, as she had taken up the same place as my model of her in the room.

I summoned floating screens, one for each of the background tasks that I had going, all of my digital presences, my two parallel thread portals being made, and creating the stockpile of the materials I was gathering. I had quite a lot going on, and some of it was sharing limited resources.

"That is such a cheat." Chantelle said. "You can create a set of rules and then just have it taken care of for you, extending as much as you want."

"You should be able to do the same with your magic and warding?" I asked.

"Nope." Chantelle said. "I can't reach over great distances or use my magic in multiple places at once. And it isn't something I'm able to start doing, your portals block magic, remember?"

She looked through the screens that had the presences on them, settling on one that showed the ward room from the top down.

"Oh, you have one of these up there now." She said. "Did you want to try interfacing between the two?"

She waved her hand and I got a request to dismiss all but the screen in question, which I approved.

"I'd really come to ask if you could make me a claim ward on a large full mana crystal, so I could contact the Keepers when I leave." I said. "But we could do set up the interface to the ward room first."

We moved over to the main simulation, which was in the ward room as well, but was already modelling mana and the wards.

"I originally thought we could use the fact that mana reacts to your power when you use it even if you can't see it." Chantelle said. "But the way you write programs has a lot to do with interfaces with different things. If I extend that out to warding, even though it isn't how they are typically used, there are symbols for detecting distance, which can be translated as a variable into the rest of the ward. This is everything that the detection ward can do."

Chantelle sent me a data package request, which I accepted and then loaded up. The ward could be set as to what it alerted on, what it tracked, and even the frequency of the scans. And then there was the hologram part of the ward, which was complicated but already had hooks for it to be manipulated. Changing what was displayed, how the display was split, and manipulating the lists of tracked entities.

We discussed and implemented an interface, where I was moving stone with my power and the ward was adjusting variables. Half an hour later it was working, and Chantelle had made the extra claim ward for me.

I gave Chantelle permissions to access the interface, and now she could manipulate the detection ward and display without being in the room as well.

With being able to see the fortress while I was gone, along with an instant way back with my pocket portal, I was ready to go see the Plains Keepers.