I left the ward room and headed up to the druid floor, which had its portal permanently placed in the portal nexus room. Brutus and Bala were on guard there, though the druid portal was the only one in the room, so they were guarding an empty stone wall.

"My lord." Brutus said, turning at the sound of me entering the room. "Dael explained the coins, and our being paid for a day of guarding, were something to do with being rewarded for contributing to the fortress. But what are they used for?"

The portal nexus had a presence itself, but it was in the roof of the room to provide an aerial view. I moved it down to the stone guard stand that I had placed in the middle of the room to give the guards some cover. Most of the portals had presences of their own, but it would be useful to have one in the room itself.

"You can open up the Fortress Shop by saying or thinking 'Fortress Shop' at any of the presences in the fortress." I said. "That will give you a list of things that you can exchange coins for, materials, items, and services."

To my surprise it was Bala who opened the interface first, using the voice option. He didn't speak much when I was around.

"Fortress Shop." Bala said. "Raw materials. Cooking. Wow, there are a lot of things in here. And the shop is all in our language. I don't have any coins yet, though."

I opened up the Fortress Storage screen to see the new categories of items.

Fortress Storage Fortress Coins Nine hundred and two Items Six items One item out of stock with purchase requests Alchemy Forty five items Forty five items below storage quantity Blacksmithing Twenty six items Twenty six items below storage quantity Carpentry Twenty items Eighteen items below storage quantity Cooking Thirty three items Thirty items below storage quantity Farming Forty items Twenty eight items below storage quantity General Eighty items Seventy items below storage quantity Tailoring Forty items Thirty five items below storage quantity Trash Forty five items Forty five items below storage quantity

And then immediately got a new window in front of it.

Action Required 'Bag of Holding, small' has been purchased three times. Purchasers have been notified that complex items can take some time to be ready after purchase.

I dismissed the window and started my digital side on making the bags in the background, they should all be done in fifteen minutes time. Looking at the Fortress Storage screen, people had added over three hundred items so far, which I could easily see by the number of Fortress Coins that had been given out.

Brutus and Bala were going through the different things in the shop, discussing them. I was preoccupied with the concept of Bags of Holding and wasn't paying much attention to them.

There was a problem with physically accessing the storage. You had to put your arm through the portal and into the storage space to get what you wanted out of it. If you stacked a lot of things into it then it wouldn't be very useful at all, as you would have to pull a lot of things out to find the one thing you were looking for.

Small items, like Fortress Coins, would fall through the larger items to the bottom of the storage. The System was already moving things around with the quests, so it should be possible to make the bags more intelligent.

I reserved the first Bag of Holding for myself as it finished and pulled it through my pocket portal. Focusing on what I wanted the System to do I sent a request to summon a Fortress Coin through the Bag of Holding. I put my hand into the open bag and pulled out the coin. Putting it back into the bag the System dematerialised it, looking into the bag the coin was gone.

Inventory subsystem initialised Inventory rules compiling...

System Evolution approved...

Implementing Inventory...

Success: New Inventory tab available. Inventory Characteristics Inventory access is linked to Bags of Holding

Inventory access is linked to each individual person. Only the entity assigned to the Bag of Holding can access the inventory function. Physical access is still possible.

Fortress Coins do not take up physical storage space, they may be summoned by removing them from the Bag of Holding. Use of coins with the Fortress Shop is automatic upon purchase.

Things bought from the Fortress Shop can be delivered directly to the inventory and quest submissions can be done from the inventory.

Proximity to a Fortress Presence is still required for Shop and Quest interactions.

Entities with inventory access may spend fractions of a Fortress Coin. Only whole Fortress Coins may be summoned from the inventory.

Trade is possible between two entities with access to their own inventories.

That was... A huge change to how things would work. Bags of Holding could still be stolen, and the things inside them weren't locked from other people accessing it, as securing their items was something that was the responsibility of the individual. I didn't think it was something the System should do, and so the implementation didn't do it.

Likewise with other currencies, Fortress Coins would be tracked by the system but a coin from another currency would just be an item that would take up space and be tracked by the inventory. The interaction with quests and purchases made sense, though it wasn't something I added when I was thinking about what I wanted the System to do. Spending of parts of a Fortress Coin was so someone could do things like buy one kilogram of a raw material with a tenth of a Fortress Coin and still have nine tenths left. And trading was just the interaction of two inventories, and would be handled by System screens.

I was very happy with how it worked out, though it did change the Bag of Holding from being a useful item if you were travelling and wanted to carry a large amount to being a necessity for interacting with the fortress. Which would mean that I would likely need to make one Bag of Holding for every person in the fortress.

It would be a great incentive for people to emigrate to the fortress though, as while it would be possible for outsiders to earn Fortress Coins, I wouldn't be going out of my way to provide ways of earning them like I would be with my own citizens and bags of holding were expensive.

I opened up the shop to check if the description for the bags had changed. There was a single new line added to their description, 'Provides Inventory access.', with the word 'Inventory' bolded. Focusing on the word brought up a screen explaining the inventory, which was the same as the Inventory Characteristics screen I had gotten earlier, except it also explained how to open the inventory. I assumed that the people who had purchased the bags were notified of the change, as they all had them by now.

I moved the internal Pocket Dimension portal so that it linked the portal nexus room and the portal room that led to the basement of Gerry's shop and left through it after giving Brutus and Bala several Fortress Coins each as back pay.

I moved the connecting portals back to their resting places and walked up the stairs. I knocked on the door that led to the shop floor and waited. I was about to knock again when Gerry himself opened the door.

"Hello and welcome again." Gerry said. "I was just preparing to open for the day."

He went to the front of the shop and started raising shutters over the windows, unbarring the two doors as he went by them. He was much stronger than his small size would indicate. The street was just becoming lit by the coming day.

"I did look through the portal you set up." Gerry said. "It just led to a small stone room. Quite interesting, because I know that it is solid stone down there, and the stone is completely different than anything I'd ever seen before. But still just the size of a storage room."

"You would have had to speak or go into the room." I said. "Then you would have been asked what destination you wanted to connect to. Though the process has changed now that I have a few more things set up. It costs Fortress Coins to use the portals now, one coin allows the one way travel of up to twenty people to a single destination."

"And what is a Fortress Coin?" Gerry asked.

"The currency of my realm." I said. "A single coin can allow you to use the portal network, or exchange for ten kilograms of any raw material that the fortress has a sample of, ten coins buys a request for a new destination to be added to the portal network."

I considered for a moment and then created a quest for Gerry for a once off quest to provide one kilogram each of two raw materials that were new to the fortress.

Gerry stopped what he was doing and turned to look at me.

"What is this?" Gerry asked, gesturing in front of himself.

"A quest." I said. "After you accept it, once you fulfil the conditions you will get the stated reward. You can bring up the quest and where to hand it in by thinking of it after you've accepted."

Gerry nodded and went to get two bolts of cloth, then headed down the stairs with them.

"These are heavier than the one kilogram required by the 'quest'." Gerry said. "At an estimate there is two kilograms left on each, about half of the full bolt. What will happen to the remainder?"

"I'm not sure." I said. "It has likely come up, but I didn't see what the result was."

We arrived at the portal through which was a portal room that had a presence in it with the new doors that opened as he approached.

"They weren't here last time." Gerry said.

He placed the two bolts into the presence which closed for a few moments, then opened as two Fortress Coins rolled into the tray from the coin slot. The two bolts of cloth were still in the presence, but half of the cloth from both of them had disappeared.

"It looks as though it only takes one kilogram if more is there." I said. "Citizens of my fortress have this as an unlimited open quest, and I would welcome you becoming one. But with two coins you have access to portal travel to and from the fortress. I'm sure my people would like the opportunity to buy some of your wares. Say, or think, 'Fortress Shop' while in front of the Fortress Presence to access the interface."

Gerry's eyes grew wider and wider as they scanned up and down, reading through the Shop listings.