Raul Rescue Plan

Perhaps in some people's imaginations, programmers were a very lofty profession.

Sitting in a modified chair, with eight screens in front of them, they would think for a moment, let their fingers dance across the keyboard, and then several black command windows would pop up, lines of code clattering past, with a background that absolutely had to be green 0s and 1s.

In reality, only programmers in film and television worked like that.

A real programmer's workflow usually involved thinking for ages before typing a few lines, running them, discovering they did not work, hitting backspace, opening a search engine, leaning back in an ergonomic chair, and starting to scratch their head.

Right now, Drogo was watching a roomful of elderly men and women scratch their heads.

He was honestly afraid they would scratch out what little hair they had left. You would never see such a sight in a game company on Earth—programmers did not make it to that age—but mages did.

Win!

There were no search engines here, either. They could only rely on books and scrolls. Every scrap of material remotely related to illusion magic from Twin Towers City Library and Repin Library had already been moved out.

Drogo had no choice but to get another building. This time, he had bought it properly. Two floors were packed with books, while one floor was for people.

Because the borrowing periods for the books were limited, they had first built a large database within the Divine Remains before development on the workshop began.

Besides the library collections, the veteran illusionists had all contributed their own knowledge. Perhaps as they gradually realized just how revolutionary the Visual Inscription Workshop was, they had cast aside their sectarian prejudices.

No matter what kind of profit-chasing capitalist tool it later became, the internet had been filled with the idealism and romanticism of technical workers at its birth.

Of course, this database was still crude. It only had keyword search and lacked any special algorithms capable of retrieving relevant information based on user needs.

Looking on the bright side, at least there were no ads.

One elderly mage after another, all nearing a hundred years old, sat at workstations formed from white desks. In front of them were tools for constructing spells. The only thing separating this from a major corporation was an employee badge hanging around each person's neck.

However, the benefits Drogo offered were a hundred workshops ahead of any major corporation.

Nine to five, weekends off, meals provided, all holidays off, and paid leave.

The mages were voluntarily working overtime purely out of immense enthusiasm for their work.

There was overtime pay.

Development was progressing quickly, too, so why exactly did those bosses who made their employees work around the clock do it?

Maybe they were just immoral.

Drogo himself did not participate in composing inscriptions. He could not help it—his skills were too crude to keep up with the veteran illusionists.

Even those little games he had made before had already been collaboratively restructured from the ground up and iterated through several versions by the students of Repin Academy.

So now, his main job was conducting tests together with those mage apprentices.

Testing was hardly easy work, though.

"Flynn, come quick. There's a problem with one of your functions."

"Where?" Flynn no longer looked as elegant as usual. She wore loose clothes and slippers, had casually pinned up her hair with a pen stuck through it, and had stopped wearing makeup. She carried a bag of snacks everywhere and ate whenever she pleased, effectively easing her stress.

"Look, right here." Drogo restarted Illusion Mimicry and launched the function Flynn had written.

After a brief delay, it ran successfully.

"Where's the problem?"

"Uh, it was there just now." Drogo tried again, and it still ran successfully.

"If you give me another false alarm, I'm hitting you." After baring her teeth at Drogo in threat, she shuffled back to her workstation in her slippers.

"That's impossible." Drogo was certain he had seen an error message just now.

So, unwilling to believe it, he tried once more.

It froze.

"Flynn! I told you there was a problem!" This time, Drogo cleverly preserved the scene of the crime.

"Wait!"

Communication between developers and testers always gradually turned into shouting at each other.

Flynn stared at the faulty section for a long time in silence. Two streams of hot air puffed from her nostrils, and Drogo watched as sparks even flew from within them.

"Old dragons sure have tempers—Ow, ow, ow! Didn't you say you'd only hit me for false reports?"

"Then bite me!"

Flynn stormed back to her workstation.

Half a minute later.

"Ah! Why can't I reproduce it?!"

A cup of tea, a pack of cigarettes, one bug fixed over an entire day.

Drogo was tired.

He did not smoke, and there was no tea here, either. The Eastern Continent, which produced those miraculous little energizing leaves, had not been discovered in the Sutton Kingdom.

And this planet's Age of Discovery had long since ended. It was very likely that tea was destined to remain absent from his life as a dragon.

There was only coffee here. He firmly believed drinking coffee was about the same as taking medicine.

The lounge also provided all kinds of snacks and the day's newspapers.

He casually picked one up, first looking for jokes, then comics, and finally, with great reluctance, reading the articles.

"The Pope Bestows a Title Upon the Second Prince of the Loman Empire."

"Civilian Conflict Breaks Out on Virian Kingdom Border."

"Shocking! Famous Actor Commits Such Demonic Acts, Innocent Young Girl Chooses to Publicly Accuse Him..."

No, looking at that exaggerated headline with its faintly familiar feel, Drogo wondered whether his attack on the potion factory had set a bad precedent for news in this world.

How had they all learned to write clickbait headlines? They had really gone bad fast.

Still, he really was curious about what it said.

"Recently, Raul Winter, the actor who rose to fame through his role in Holy Mountain Journey, has been accused. A girl of only six chose to expose his wrongdoing, claiming that as a friend of Marlin, Raul's daughter, she had repeatedly been violated by Raul himself while they were playing together..."

Damn it. The Magic Shadow actor he had just cultivated was finished.

Bang!

The lounge door was violently shoved open. It was Aisha. And Battleaxe, with someone tucked under his arm. That person looked familiar—was that Huo An from the Wranglers troupe?

A few months apart had left him much darker and thinner, but why was he panting when he had been carried here under someone's arm?

"Something terrible happened!" Aisha said.

"Raul got into trouble?" Drogo supplied the next line.

"How did you know?"

"The whole city probably knows by now." Drogo showed her the newspaper in his hand.

Aisha glanced at it and continued, "It's not just an accusation now. He's already been taken away by the Garrison Corps."

"Oh?"

Drogo smelled a conspiracy. Their response was far too fast. The Garrison Corps and the newspapers had acted in tandem, intending to stir up public attention in the shortest possible time.

"Are we getting him out, or...?"

"What if it's true?"

"That's impossible! Mr. Raul would never do something like that!" Huo An hurriedly said.

"Then here's the question: how long have you known him?"

"Uh, two months, sir. A little over two months." Huo An did not know what to call the draconic being before him, so he settled on sir.

"Are two months enough for you to truly know someone?"

"Y-Yes. Mr. Raul would never do that." Though Huo An answered that way, his voice lacked conviction.

"So are we just leaving him alone?" Aisha asked.

"We can't leave him alone either." Based on his experiences on Earth, Drogo really did not have much faith in the moral standards of people in the entertainment industry.

"Of course we can't leave him alone! People die in the Garrison Corps' dungeons!"

Huo An was right. This era did not care much for civilized law enforcement.

"So first, we need to find out whether this is true or false. If it's false, we'll resolve it as peacefully as possible."

"And if it's true?"

"Battleaxe, how do the orc tribes deal with members who prey on children?"

"Cut off the part below and feed it to the pigs!"

"Good. Then that's what we'll do."