Kenji (Narrator): The Royal Quartermaster's office did not smell like authority. It smelled of stale ink... wet dog... and the greasy underlying scent of roast turkey. Princess Liora didn't knock. She kicked the door open with a silver-greaved boot the impact rattling the dust off the heavy oak frame.
Liora: Goro! Explain yourself!
Kenji (Narrator): I walked in behind her brushing the warehouse dust from my sleeves. I felt a phantom sensation on the bridge of my nose and reached up to adjust glasses that were no longer there. My vision was perfect now... a sharp high-definition overlay of green grid lines against the dim torchlight... but the muscle memory of being a corporate drone died hard. Sitting behind a massive mahogany desk was a man who looked like he was made entirely of soft dough and expensive velvet. This was Goro. He was currently trying to slide a half-eaten turkey leg under a stack of parchment.
System: Entity: Goro the Quartermaster. Class: Bureaucrat. Status: Nervous. Hidden Trait: Reference Error.
Kenji (Narrator): The system returned an error on his trait. That usually meant data was missing. Or hidden.
Goro: Princess! To what do I owe the... er... sudden pleasure?
Liora: The Northern Gate was breached! My men fought with sticks because the armory was a landfill! If this... Auditor... hadn't found the weapons using sorcery we would be dead.
Kenji (Narrator): She gestured at me. Goro squinted his beady eyes assessing my rough tunic and foreign face.
Goro: An auditor? He looks like a peasant who got lost on the way to the turnip field. What does a peasant know of High Imperial Logistics?
Liora: He knows how to find things. Which is more than I can say for you. I want a status report Goro. Now. How much grain do we have for the siege? How many arrows? And how much gold is left in the war chest?
Goro: Ah... Highness. You see the logistics of a kingdom are... fluid. Nuanced. I have the records right here of course.
Kenji (Narrator): He gestured grandly to a side table heaped with scrolls loose papers and leather-bound books. It looked like a paper factory had exploded.
Goro: But deciphering the cross-references takes time. Weeks perhaps. I cannot simply conjure a number.
Liora: We don't have weeks! Kenji. Fix this.
Kenji: Fix... the paper?
Liora: Do your magic. Make the numbers speak.
Kenji: [sigh] Princess... data analysis isn't necromancy. I can't just wave a wand and make incompetence disappear. Although... I could probably delete the row.
Liora: Just read it!
Kenji (Narrator): I walked over to the side table. The mess was offensive. It wasn't just disorganized; it was disrespectful to the very concept of information. In my previous life I had fired interns for less than this. I reached out and placed my hand on the top scroll.
System: Connection Established. Source Data Identified: The Royal Ledger. Data Quality: Very Poor.
Kenji (Narrator): My vision flickered. The stone walls of the office dissolved into a digital darkness. I wasn't in the castle anymore; I was inside the data. It was hideous. Green grid lines stretched out in every direction but the cells were a disaster. There were numbers stored as text. There were dates formatted as 'The Third Moon of the Year of the Badger.' There were merged cells... the devil's formatting... locking data into unreadable chunks.
Kenji: It's garbage. The data integrity is zero. Who maintains this system? A goblin with a crayon?
Goro: How dare you! That is the Royal Ledger! It is sacred!
Kenji: It's unstructured. You have non-contiguous ranges. You have blank rows inserted for 'aesthetic spacing.' Excel is a neat freak Goro. It can't analyze chaos.
Liora: Ex-cel? What spirit is this?
Kenji: The spirit of Order. And it is angry.
Kenji (Narrator): I stepped back from the table. I needed to impose structure on this entropy. I needed to define the boundaries of reality.
Kenji: Stand back. I'm going to convert this range.
Liora: Is it dangerous?
Kenji: Only to people who are hiding things.
Kenji (Narrator): I raised my hands. I didn't chant a spell. I visualized the keyboard shortcut that had burned itself into my fingertips over ten years of late-night financial reporting. Control T.
Kenji: Create Table.
Kenji (Narrator): Hummmmm. A deep resonant vibration shook the room. The inkpots on Goro's desk rattled. A glowing blue box materialized in the air in front of me.
System: Where is the data for your table?
Kenji (Narrator): I looked at the pile of scrolls. The system was trying to guess the range but Goro's messy filing was confusing it. I saw a dotted line of light... the 'marching ants'... begin to race around the perimeter of the scrolls. It moved like a living thing hunting for the edges of the data.
Goro: The ants! He summons insects! Guards!
Liora: Shut up! Kenji what is it doing?
Kenji: It's selecting the range. No. Exclude. The. Blanks. A table must be contiguous.
Kenji (Narrator): I narrowed my eyes. I reached out with my mind and grabbed the dotted line forcing it to snap inward tightening around the actual data. The system asked if my table had headers.
Kenji: Check.
Liora: Check what? Are we playing chess?
Kenji: No. We are defining the schema.
Kenji (Narrator): I slammed my hand onto the imaginary OK button. BOOM! A shockwave of blue light rippled through the office. The pile of scrolls exploded. Parchment flew into the air swirling like a tornado of bureaucracy. The scrolls didn't fall back down. They slammed together in mid-air fusing flattening and expanding. When the light faded the junk pile was gone. Hovering in the center of the room was a massive translucent holographic sheet. It was beautiful. It was rectangular. It was banded. At the top the headers... Item... Quantity... Cost... Location... glowed with bold authority.
Liora: By the Gods. It... it's so tidy.
Kenji: [sigh] It is an Excel Table. It treats the data not as loose scribbles but as a single cohesive database entity. The structure prevents errors.
Goro: What... what have you done to my books?
Kenji: I organized them. And now that they are organized... they can be questioned. Look at the bottom. The Total Row.
Liora: Fifty thousand gold crowns? Spent on... 'Consulting Fees'?
Kenji (Narrator): She spun around to face Goro.
Liora: Fifty thousand? The army's entire budget is ten thousand! Who are you consulting with Goro? The Gods?
Goro: It... it was very high-level consulting! Specialists! From the... the East!
Kenji: We'll see about that. Because now that this is a Table I can do more than just look. I can Slice.
Liora: Slice? I can help with that.
Kenji: Not that kind of slicing! Put the sword away. I mean Slicers. Visual filters. Select Fields... Location.
Kenji (Narrator): SNAP. A smaller pane of glass materialized floating next to the main table. It contained blue buttons for every location listed in the inventory.
Liora: Goro's Summer Villa? Why is there inventory listed at your private estate?
Goro: I... strictly for safekeeping! The humidity in the castle is terrible for... er... grain! It rots!
Kenji: Let's see what is there.
Kenji (Narrator): I reached out and punched the button labeled Goro's Summer Villa. CRUNCH. The holographic table convulsed. It was the sound of a vacuum sealing. Thousands of rows vanished... hidden instantly. The table shrank down to only twelve rows. They glowed with a sinister red light in the dim room.
System: Item: Royal Grain Reserve. Quantity: 500 Sacks. Location: Goro's Summer Villa. Item: Enchanted Rubies. Quantity: 50. Location: Goro's Summer Villa.
Liora: You stole the grain. The peasants are starving in the Outer Ring... and you have five hundred sacks of wheat at your villa?
Goro: It's a lie! That wizard is lying! It's a trick of the light! Illusion magic!
Kenji: Data. Doesn't. Lie. Not when it's formatted as a Table. You thought you could hide the theft in the mess Goro. But you forgot that every variable leaves a trace.
Liora: Guards! Take this traitor to the dungeon. And send a squad to his villa. Recover the grain.
Kenji (Narrator): As Goro's screams faded down the hallway Liora turned back to the floating spreadsheet. She ran her hand through the blue light again disrupting the numbers like smoke.
Liora: You captured the truth. It took my father's spies months to find nothing. You found it in seconds.
Kenji: Spies look for whispers. I look for patterns. But we have a bigger problem.
Liora: What?
Kenji: [sigh] I saw the Total Row for Column F. The Debt column.
System: Total Debt: 10,000,000 Gold Crowns. Status: Default Imminent.
Kenji: Ten million.
Liora: [gasp] Ten... million? That is impossible. The annual tax revenue is only eight hundred thousand.
Kenji: Which means this kingdom isn't just broke. It is insolvent. If the Empire invades next month you won't be defeated on the battlefield. You'll be foreclosed on.
Liora: You're conscripted.
Kenji: I refuse. I want a nap. And I still haven't gotten my coffee.
Liora: You are now the Grand Auditor. Fix the debt Kenji. Or we all starve. And if we starve the first thing I'm eating is the Auditor.
Kenji (Narrator): She turned and marched out of the room her cape swirling behind her. I sat alone in the silence. I picked up the key she had thrown. It was cold and heavy.
System: New Title Acquired: Grand Auditor. Quest Updated: Save the Economy.
Kenji: [groan] Great. I escaped a soul-crushing accounting job in Tokyo just to get a soul-crushing accounting job in a fantasy world.
Kenji (Narrator): I looked at the spot where the hologram had been. The Table. It was powerful. It was orderly. But it had revealed a nightmare. I was going to need more than just Tables to fix this. I was going to need Formulas. Complex ones.
Kenji: [sigh] I really need that coffee.