Shawn... I had to scan back through my memories for a minute before I remembered who that was. The human who was living with the druids, a priest of the god of summer. I wanted to keep my focus on Bale for when the repair of his body was finished, so I sent a return message to Chantelle telling her that I would go find Shawn after I finished what I was doing here.

A few moments later Chantelle messaged me back, Shawn would be waiting with her in the ward room when he was done. Shawn had gone there after finding the portal at the top of the fortress blocked.

Which was a problem. Not that Shawn was there, but that it was simple to get into the ward room, which was a very sensitive area with the potential for a huge disaster if someone unfriendly got inside. There was a whole section in the primer that Chantelle had given me on warding devoted to not exposing mana crystals to stresses. Apparently every few decades someone would get the idea to try to research controlled detonation of tiny mana crystals, but the list of effects was too random.

Chantelle's mother had banned anyone from doing the research after the last woman had somehow caused a rift that killed her and her family after at least ten experiments of minor effects.

Which was all to say that the ward room should be a secure area. It was simple enough to do, as well, just fill in the doorway and put a portal where it was. Then have Chantelle be the only person who could access the portal through the portal network.

I sent Chantelle a summation of my thoughts and dropped a new thread portal through the presence that was over the ward room table, moving it over to the doorway before filling the doorway in with stone.

Bale's repair was almost done when I got a communication request from Jeff again. With a sigh I dropped my time perception and accepted. Really, I just wanted to get back to creating things for the fortress.

"My lord, Ailfrid is willing to help us, but he has a request," Jeff said. "He wants to know if he could have an upgrade to his future large Bag of Holding so that magic will work inside the space, as well as the Fortress Coins for the quest. I told him that I would need to get approval for the unique award, and then I was told to speak with you."

It would be a simple matter of having a double portal so that the storage area of the bag was back in the outer world. I could make it in a vault room in the fortress, though if it was only going to be a one-off then the ward room floor would work well enough.

"You have approval," I said. "I didn't know you were on the list to be able to generate quests."

"I'm not, my lord," Jeff said. "I generate a quest using the template and then pass it to one of the leaders for approval, and they generate the quest. Is that not how you meant for it to work?"

"Honestly, I hadn't given it any thought," I said. "I like that the Demi-AI are taking the initiative in using the flexibility of the System. Good work, carry on."

Jeff sent an acknowledgement and closed the communication channel. I returned to normal time and waited for Bale's repair to finish. When it did the first thing that Bale did was stand up from where he was still huddled in the corner, stretching up onto his toes, his arms up in the air, and his tail bristling and sticking out in a straight line behind him.

"Am I dead, then?" Bale asked. "I can't access my magic still, but the pain is gone as though it never existed."

Bale settled back down on his heels. He was twenty centimeters taller than before the repair, his fur was glossy, and his skin healthy.

"You aren't dead," I said. "The pain was from the repair, once it was done your body was in perfect condition, there was nothing left to cause pain."

"No, I don't mean that pain, though that was worse," Bale said. "There was a curse on my bloodline from my grandfather's time. He upset someone with a gift for curses, who placed an unbreakable curse of misery on him and his descendants. That you just broke."

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It did take a few minutes longer than I was expecting for my power to push into Bale, but I had put that down to him having a larger than normal mana pool. At my best guess, draining his mana starved the curse of its mana source and it simply broke when it couldn't draw on any ambient mana from the environment.

"I will go straight," Bale said. "I swear my loyalty to you, unreservedly."

"I don't need you to go straight," I said. "Your leaving the criminal world would leave a power vacuum that someone else would just fill. It is possible, perhaps even likely, that Shade would come out on top, but I assume it would be a messy process."

"You aren't against criminals?" Bale asked.

"Not particularly," I said. "As I told Shade when she wanted to become a Demi-AI, I believe that criminals are inevitable to cities, and that they provide work for various professions that exist to stop or catch them. And more specifically, I would prefer organised criminals who will adhere to and even enforce my policy against abuse."

"I see," Bale said. "And if I don't want to run the criminal organisation within the Fortress any longer?"

"You are free to do as you wish," I said.

"You truly aren't going to force my actions?" Bale asked.

"Well, I do have a request," I said. "Stop using the slavery-type oaths. Or, more specifically, use a tightly bound oath that forbids the use of tightly bound oaths except in the case of propagating this one oath."

"You want to use oaths to break oaths that force obedience," Bale said. "Your wording won't work, but I will come up with something that will. Consider it done."

I pulled the exit portal from the wooden wall in Bale's warehouse and reshaped it into a doorway, sending the Pocket Dimension side down into the portal room below, fixing it to the wall in front of Bale. He was about to step through when he hesitated, turning back to face the room.

"Those are my boys," Bale said, looking to the two corpses in the end of the room. "Why were they killed?"

"They were warned," I said. "They didn't heed the warning. I welcome you to share the story as an example of my lack of tolerance when it comes to abuse of anyone within the Fortress. After all-"

I dropped myself, in my Forest Keeper body, down through the stone of the roof and landed lightly a meter away from Bale.

"-I could be anyone," I said from Shade's body.

Bale looked at me and frowned before stepping through the portal. I followed him through and picked up the thread portal behind me, putting it back in Shade's inventory. I turned to go down the hall to the outside.

"Ah, excuse me," Bale said, calling after me. "If you go out like that in the middle of the day you'll be arrested. You seem unaware that you are nude."

Right. I hadn't been paying it any attention, an odd combination of a lack of self-consciousness due to it not being my body, and a lack of attraction due to it being the body I was in.

I had gotten Shade's dress ruined, it was laying on the floor a few meters away. But I could do better than simply repairing it. I dropped my time perception in my personal simulation and began scanning through the different material I had to work with.

There was an enormous range of different types of cloth in the fortress storage. And with being able to equip clothing from the inventory, a trick that the general population probably didn't know about yet, I was able to design a very impractical dress. A red silk outer layer, combined with a black stretchable material for the inner layer that formed to the body perfectly.

I set the creation job to urgent and returned to normal time, continuing to walk down the hall. I had to pause for a few seconds with my hand on the handle before receiving a notification that the dress was ready and equipping it. My breasts were pushed up and together, and my waist was pulled in slightly. I was able to take a deep breath, but it took some effort, the dress encouraging shallow breaths.

I opened the door and stepped out, flicking my tail forward to get the red silk ribbon clear of the door before I closed it. I set off walking back to Shade's house half-automatically as I pulled up the connection to the presence in the ward room.

Chantelle and Shawn were both still there, Shawn standing against the wall out of the way.

"What do you need, Shawn?" I asked through the presence.

Shawn looked up at the presence in the ceiling, and then around the room. "Can the Gods hear us here?" Shawn asked.

"The entire fortress is warded against the gods," Chantelle said. "You're free to speak."

"The Head Priest of Summer needs your help to escape, Lord C.C.," Shawn said. "And perhaps with help in killing the God of Winter."

Killing the gods. That was a solution I hadn't considered. And maybe the god of summer would be reasonable and stop the end of the world. It probably wouldn't work out that way, but killing him if he tried to continue the apocalypse should be possible if killing the god of winter was. It sure beat the plan I had been considering. Covering the world in anti-god wards, which could easily be broken by the Instructor.