The quest to the leaders of the fortress had obviously placed the destination that they should meet me as the portal at the top of my fortress. Veya and Michael were there for the humans, Dael for the druids, Primary for the Mountain Keepers, and Ailfrid and Gerry for the leprechauns.

I checked through the portal travel logs and found that Gerry and his family had come through from the mountain city a few hours ago and were staying on the leprechaun floor. I had set up portal travel to be automatic unless there was something that raised an issue. The process involved a notification being sent to the guards in the portal nexus room, and then two internal Pocket Dimension portals would connect the end of the portal rooms of the origin and destination. There had been some travel between portals so far, mostly between portals within the fortress as that was now marked as free.

"The quest did say that the race change would only be for the leaders," I said. "I assume that is what some of you are here for, what are the others doing here?"

Veya looked around the group. "I can't speak for the little people," Veya said. "But I am here for the race change, but if I am going to be a new race then I will need Michael to be the same race as me."

"I would also like my wife to be able to join me," Mal'Thorn said. "I wouldn't demand it, but it would be important to me."

"I am only converting the leaders right now," I said. "And after that I will be converting the people who will be in the Fortress Army. Spouses and family of existing Demi-AI will have priority of conversion after that. Conversion will also be an option in the Fortress Shop, likely for fifteen Fortress Coins."

"We would have to pay for them to be converted?" Veya asked.

"I'm undecided on that," I said. "The conversion is costly for me to do, with regards to time and effort. And using Fortress Coins as the deciding factor means that people will need to contribute to the Fortress a decent amount, and it makes a good reward. Do you have an argument as to why they should get it for free?"

Veya thought for a few moments. "No, my lord," Veya said. "It is getting difficult to get more coins, though, as the easy raw materials to submit to that quest have all been done."

"We will have to come up with quests that encourage and reward improving the Fortress, then," I said. "Something that doesn't penalise the Plains Keepers or other species that arrive late."

"Thank you, my lord," Ansar said. "These Coins are important?"

"Very important," Gerry said. "Five Coins will get you a Bag of Holding and Inventory access, both of which are essential. On the topic of why I am here, Ailfrid asked me to join him."

"I am coming to the end of my lifespan," Ailfrid said. "And we leprechauns are matriarchal, males cannot rule. I asked Gerry to accompany me because his wife Lizzie would be our candidate for the leadership, her mother would step aside peacefully for her."

"One of the perks of the new race is immortality," I said. "I would be able to reset your biological age. As to males not being able to rule, this is leadership as I and the Fortress acknowledge it, it would be a simple matter to have the leader that your people acknowledge be someone else."

"It would take little time before who you acknowledged as the leader would become the only leader," Ailfrid said. "No, our candidate for leadership of the leprechauns is Lizzie. Gerry and myself shall avail ourselves of the opportunity to convert when it becomes available."

"I have no objection," I said. "We will be starting soon, where is she?"

Gerry made a bird whistle and Lizzie came up the last few stairs to the landing.

"Veya, Dael, Primary, Ansar, and Lizzie," I said. "You are the chosen leaders of the five remaining species in the Fortress?"

Each of them nodded as I looked them in the eye one by one.

"Please follow me," I said. "The rest of you may go about your business."

Ailfrid, Gerry, and Michael all left while the rest followed me deeper into my Pocket Dimension, including Mal'Thorn. We reached the stone cliffs and I formed stone tables for the five of them to lay down on, each to match the stature of their race, and immediately began pressing my power against them.

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"The process we are about to begin will be very painful," I said. "I give you the opportunity now to back out."

"I will attest to that," Mal'Thorn said. "More painful than you can possibly imagine. But I would do it again without hesitation."

They all nodded and took their place on their tables, only Lizzie and Ansar looking nervous.

"My lord," Mal'Thorn said. "If my presence isn't required, could you summon a portal back to my floor of the Fortress?"

I nodded and took out the portal from my pocket, forming it into a doorway and connecting it directly to the portal that was against the Heart of the Forest fence.

"I will be bringing people to the common simulation as I hook them up," I said. "If you would care to join us there?"

Mal'Thorn nodded and left through the portal with a wave.

I had the five digital platforms with Mind Links ready, and another twelve being built in parallel that would house the first members of our army. And I had increased the memory I had available to my digital side so that I could easily store the full scans of all seventeen new people.

"We have some time while we are waiting for all of your mana to adjust to my power," I said. "I mentioned a Fortress Army before. I am forming a fighting force and I will be converting two additional members from each of your races to join it. They will be becoming Demi-AI for the immortality attribute of the race. You will each need to submit two candidates."

Primary frowned, looking as though he was going to object.

"The Mountain Keepers won't be fighting," I said. "They will be assigned the role of support or logistics. But they are still expected to contribute."

Primary's frown eased and he nodded. "We may not fight," Primary said. "But we are able to take supporting actions that do not directly lead to the harm of others."

Dael was the first person that my power sank into, and I started building a full scan of him. He hadn't spoken that I had noticed since he arrived.

"You're up first," I said.

He nodded. I had his model modified with the Mind Link micro-portals added. I gave him my pre-healing speech and then triggered the body modification program, dropping down to do the micro-portals. I monitored his progression to digital and sent him a communication request as soon as it completed. He accepted and I brought him to the common simulation, sharing with him a copy of his model to use. I also sent him a data packet on the basics of being a Demi-AI, coding, data packets, time perception control, and some other small things.

"This is..." Dael said, "Wow."

We had landed in the plain white room that I had made, which was a simple simulation I'd made when I'd first brought Mal'Thorn here. There was one simulation that led from the room, taking up an entire wall. Mal'Thorn had put a lot of time into writing the simulation of the forest in summer.

The perspective had changed to being partway up in the canopy of the trees with a wooden platform of branches and boards that extended out a good distance, and a few meters away there was a railing looking down into a large clear area.

In that clear area there was an ethereal map of the entire Forest Biome, gold light ebbing and flowing through the links of the roots between the trees. The space that the railing surrounded was only twenty meters by twenty meters, but when you looked down into it you could see the detail of a single tree as well as the forest as a whole at the same time.

Mal'Thorn was standing to the side with a twenty meter tall screen of blue light in front of him that he was writing and modifying code on.

"Oh good, you're here," Mal'Thorn said without turning around. "I'm having trouble expressing the whole coverage of the Forest that I am getting from the Heart of the Forest. Could you take a look?"

Dael looked as though he would be occupied with the data packet I'd sent him for some time, so I nodded and pulled the code up. After an hour of studying it I had a good idea as to how it worked, it was pulling data directly through Mal'Thorn's biological side when it had access, and the amount of data was immense. The current display was a looped snapshot and not live data.

"You're having two problems, both to do with memory," I said. "The first is that you need to buffer any collection from your biological side, we're simply processing too fast for it to arrive in a sensible fashion. The second is that the common simulation doesn't have enough memory to hold all of the data you're trying to throw at it. I can see you're trying to encode it to take less space, and the losses are hurting you. Both problems are solved by throwing more memory at it."

I had plenty of memory that I could spare, so I queued up a task on my digital side to move half of the memory from the twelve unused digital platforms to the common simulation. It would take a minute to finish, in normal time.

"It's going to take a while if you stay down at this speed," I said. "Maybe a week. And I have to get the rest of the leaders in here."

"I'll work on other things or step up higher," Mal'Thorn said. "Thank you, my lord."

I went back to normal time and converted the other four to Demi-AI with no problems, inviting them each to the common simulation in turn. I had just sent the Demi-AI primer data packet to Veya, who was the last conversion when Dael walked over to me in the simulation.

"Parties, my lord," Dael said.

"Parties?" I asked. "What are we talking about?"

"You wanted a Quest that encouraged and rewarded improving the Fortress and that wasn't biased against new people," Dael said. "Have hosting a party for all peoples of the Fortress be a Quest that can be taken."