“Are you out of your mind?” Angel said. “Do you have any idea how risky it would be to rob this kid?”

I laughed. “He’s just a YouTuber. You’re acting like we’re going after the President or something.”

I was already well aware of how risky it was try to something like this. Harry Xtreme had gotten popular online and fans stopped him for selfies and autographs whenever he went out in public. Getting to him without anyone noticing us would be tricky. Catching him when he was alone would be even more difficult. And getting away once we’d successfully robbed him would be the hardest part of all. But that gave me an idea that was both brilliant and stupid. Brilliantly stupid.

A smile spread across my face. “What if we don’t actually rob him?”

“Finally he sees reason,” Mello said. “I can’t believe you thought you could pull off a robbery.”

I shook my head. “No, you’re misunderstanding me. Maybe we can stage a FAKE robbery on him.”

The room was silent for a moment while they tried to process that.

“I don’t mean to sound rude, but what would be the point of that?” Joey finally said. “If you’re going through the trouble of planning a robbery, shouldn’t you do it for real?”

“We’ve been talking all this time about how there have been fewer jobs for our group because of The Caruso Family,” I said. “If we steal some stuff from Harry Xtreme, we’d probably make a couple thousand bucks. That’s not bad.”

“But picture this scenario,” I continued. “Harry Xtreme is held up by some guys in masks. He’s scared for his life and has no idea what’s going to happen. All of a sudden a charismatic and badass man jumps in and defends Harry from the masked men, sending them packing.”

“Harry is extremely grateful and he’s surprised to learn that his savior just happens to work for a private security company. After this terrifying ordeal, Harry realizes that even a small-time celebrity like him could use some security. He hires this hero as his new bodyguard. The bodyguard ends up doing such a good job that Harry recommends the security company to other influencers that he knows. Now this security team has a steady stream of income coming in. I’d say that’s way better than a one-time payout. What do you think?”

Angelo rubbed his chin. “I’ll admit, that’s not a terrible plan. But I see a couple of problems with it. How do you plan on finding this guy? How are you gonna get him alone to “rob” him? And don’t you think he’ll find it suspicious that a random bodyguard jumped in to save him right when he needed it?”

I calmly addressed his concerns one by one. “Harry live streams and posts tagged Instagram pics pretty much 24/7. I don’t think it’ll be too hard to find him. We just need to watch his stream to see where he is, follow him to that location, and then pounce on him the second he ends the stream. And he’ll be so freaked out by the situation that he won’t have time to think about how convenient it is. He’ll just be glad that he’s okay.”

“What if he already has a bodyguard? Won’t we be screwed?” Joey said.

That made me pause. I hadn’t considered that. But I didn’t want them to start doubting me, so I quickly recovered and scrambled to think of a convincing response. “Seriously? Do you really think that a guy who became famous for strapping firecrackers on the back of his skateboard is smart enough to hire a security team? We’ll be fine.”

Mello snickered. “You’re making way too many assumptions and I don’t see this working out at all. Angelo, please tell me you’re not considering this.”

I narrowed my eyes. “What’s your problem, man? You shoot down everything that I say and never offer up any ideas of your own.”

“My problem is that I don’t like the idea of following a half-baked plan made by a kid who hasn’t even been with us for a week. I’ve managed to stay out of jail so far and I wanna keep it that way. We’ve been doing just fine without you,” he said.

I felt my blood start boiling a bit. Just because I was new didn’t mean I couldn’t contribute ideas. “It doesn’t seem like things are going that great to me. If you keep doing things the way you have been, this crew is just going to have less and less work. Why not try something different? What’s the problem?”

“You’ve barely thought this through. What happens when he looks up your security company and nothing comes up?” Mello challenged me.

“Easy. We can start the company for real,” I said. “I’ve looked up creating LLCs before and if you file for it online in Florida you can make one in 5 business days. We can do that today and then just slap together a shitty website with fake reviews while we wait for everything to go through. Hell, we could even make some business cards if we want to really sell it.”

Joey nodded his head. “I think this Harry guy would probably buy it if we put that much effort into it.”

“I guess we don’t have anything better going on,” Angelo said. “Screw it. Let’s do this.”

I shot Mello a smug look. He glared at me but didn’t say anything. I guess that he respected the hierarchy or whatever and didn’t want to challenge Angelo. After that, we spent most of the morning filling out the forms online to set up the LLC for the business. We put Angelo down as the president of the company since he was in charge of our group. I could tell that he liked having that title. He didn’t like entering his credit card info to pay the filing fee though. I assured him that it was $125 well spent.

Since our company didn’t have an office yet, we had to use Angelo’s address on the form. It wasn’t a big deal because we could easily change that later on. His dad did run a real estate business after all, so he could probably hook us up with a small property after we pulled this off. It made Angelo uncomfortable, but we all agreed not to tell Uncle Luca about our plan until after we succeeded. As the old saying goes, it’s easier to ask for forgiveness than permission. The next roadblock was coming up with a name for the business. We took way longer to brainstorm a name than I’d like to admit.

“Guard Dog Security is the perfect name! Why can’t you see that?” Angelo said for the millionth time.

“It’s too generic. The name should be memorable,” I said. “I still think that Bulletproof Inc. sounds better. It’s badass and sends the message that nothing can take us down.”

“That’s just corny,” Mello said. “If you guys are set on going through with this dumb plan then at least give it a name that doesn’t sound like an edgy twelve-year-old came up with it.”

I rolled my eyes. He was getting on my last nerve. “I don’t hear you coming up with anything.”

Mello was silent for a couple of seconds. “How about Rocksteady Solutions?”

This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

I did a big fake yawn to piss him off. Mission accomplished. “Sorry, it doesn’t have that wow factor. A for effort though.”

Angelo stepped in before we could start really going at each other. “Does it really matter that much what we call it? Let’s just pick something and get it over with.”

“What do you guys think of the name Divine Protection?” Joey said. “It gives off the feeling that you have some guardian angels in your corner. Not bad, right?”

It was a simple name but there was something elegant about its simplicity. Divine Protection. Somehow the name felt right for a company that was founded because of an otherworldly ring. Angelo was nodding his head and even Mello didn’t voice any disapproval. We had a clear winner. I entered the name and finally submitted the forms.

“Glad that’s over with,” Angelo said. “Now we just have to wait for the LLC to be approved and then we can figure out when to move in on that Danny Xtreme guy.”

“Harry Xtreme,” Joey corrected.

“Whatever,” Angelo said.

I groaned inwardly because I knew that this next part would be difficult. “Actually, I was thinking we could rob him within the next couple of days.”

Everyone stared at me. Even Joey was looking at me as if I was the dumbest person he’d ever met. Honestly, I didn’t blame them. If I were in their shoes I would think that I was off my rocker too. Planning a robbery this fast seemed like a surefire way to make mistakes and get caught.

But after using Mean Mug and getting a taste of how useful the system’s Skills could be, I wanted to unlock more of them ASAP. Taking a few risks would be worth it to me so I could get the 300 XP reward from the current XP. That would be enough to buy multiple new Skills! I couldn’t mention my true motivation for wanting to do this so quickly though.

Angelo pinched the bridge of his nose. “Nico, I get that you’re hyped to do this thing but you need to slow down a bit. If we’re gonna do this, we need to take our time and make sure we do this right so it doesn’t blow back on us.”

“Why wait? All we need are some masks and a knife and we should be good to go,” I said. “He’s got a stream scheduled for tomorrow night, so we can do it then.”

Mello threw his head back and laughed like a hyena. “C’mon, you can’t be as dumb as you look. Even you’ve gotta see that rushing this is a recipe for disaster.”

Angelo shot him a dirty look. “Watch it. That’s my cousin you’re talking to. I agree that we shouldn’t rush this, but that doesn’t mean you can talk to him that way.”

Mello deflated a bit and looked down at the ground. “Sorry, boss,” He said.

Part of me wished that I could just use Mean Mug to get them to agree with me, but the cooldown hadn’t ended yet. It probably wouldn’t be wise to start mind-controlling my allies anyway. That would’ve made things much easier though, assuming that it activated successfully. I briefly wondered if I should be concerned about how quickly I was starting to rely on the system. But that was something I could worry about later. Right now, I needed to get them on my side or the XP would slip through my fingers.

“Why are you pushing for this to happen so soon? What’s the harm in taking some time to think about all the things that could go wrong?” Angelo said.

“Aren’t you tired of waiting around for things to happen instead of taking action?” I asked. “You mentioned earlier that your dad just leaves the shitty jobs for this crew. Well if we take the initiative and find some work for ourselves, maybe he’ll start to trust us with more responsibilities.”

He considered what I was saying but I could still see the hesitation in his eyes, so I kept going. “Look, I’ll take full responsibility for everything. If this goes south, you can tell Uncle Luca that I planned the whole thing and you tried your best to stop me. That’ll be the last time you ever have to listen to one of my ideas. But it won’t go wrong because we won’t let it. Deal?”

Angelo sighed. “Okay. We’ll do this tomorrow night. But the second I feel like this might go off the rails, I’m calling the whole thing off. Got it?”

I smiled “Yeah, that’s fair. Thanks.”

Angelo looked over at Mello who was still scowling at the floor. “You don’t have to be a part of this if you don’t want to, Mel. We can handle it without you.”

Mello glanced up. His eyes met mine for a second before looking back at Angelo. “No, I’m in. I still think it’s an awful idea, but I don’t wanna see you get caught so I’ll help you out.”

“You act like you hate everyone, but I knew you cared deep down inside. Way deep down,” Joey joked.

Mello rolled his eyes but he had a small smile on his face.

Now that the robbery was a go for the next night, we hurried to make our preparations. Angelo sent Joey and Mello to buy some Halloween masks & get business cards printed while I used his PC to slap together a website to make everything look more legit. I didn’t have any experience with web development, so I just used one of those website builders where you customize a template and add your info to it. It looked pretty basic, but most small businesses seem to have crappy websites so I thought that maybe it would add to the authenticity. Besides, we were on a time crunch so the most important thing was that we just had a site that people could find.

I decided to go the extra mile by creating a Google business page as well. Then I made two new Gmail accounts and used them to leave good reviews for us. I wanted to make more but Angelo brought up the good point that it would be suspicious if there were a bunch of glowing reviews that were all left on the same day.

The other guys returned not long after that with three Looney Tunes masks and a large pizza. They placed the order for our business cards, but the store wouldn’t finish printing them for another couple of hours. All that scheming had left us hungry, so we dug into the pizza.

Everyone seemed to get more excited about the plan as we got further into our preparations. I was excited too since it was my plan after all, but I was also excited for a different reason. This fake robbery would also serve as a way for me to test the system's limits. The wording of the quest that it gave me was to “rob Harry Xtreme”. It seemed straightforward at first glance, but I wanted to learn if there was any wiggle room.

Would the system reward me with XP the moment that we robbed him? What would even be considered a robbery? Was there a set amount of things that we needed to take from him or would it be considered a robbery if we got him to hand over one item? Could the system take the XP back from me if I returned the stolen goods to Harry? This was a good chance for me to learn a little bit more about how these quests worked so I could exploit them in the future.

The text alert sound on my phone went off. I wiped the pizza grease off my hands with a napkin before pulling out my phone. Mia, the girl I’d met at the poker game, had sent me a text saying hi. In all the excitement of getting ready for the new quest, I’d almost forgotten that we’d swapped numbers. She seemed cool and I wanted to get to know her better.

“Hey, Angelo. What would you text to a girl that you just met?” I asked.

“Nothing, because I’m loyal to my girlfriend,” He smiled.

“Didn’t you and Biamca break up in the summer because you cheated on her?” I said.

“That was the old me. The new me would never do something like that,” Angelo said defensively. Why’re you asking me this anyway?”

“Nico got the number of this hot chick last night after he embarrassed that guy who was making a scene. I guess he’s trying to make a move,” Joey grinned.

“Any advice?” I blushed

“Yeah. It’s just a text, bro. Stop overthinking it.”

I opened my mouth to object, but I realized he was right. I wasn’t great at dealing with girls and didn’t want to mess things up. But it wasn’t that big of a deal. Even if I came across as lame and she stopped responding to me, there were plenty of other gorgeous women in the sea. And maybe some of them would also be interested in a college dropout who worked for the mafia. I tried to convince myself that I believed that as I responded to her text.

“That’s good advice, Angelo. Thanks,” I said.

I settled on sending her a joke about how she couldn’t get enough of me if she was already texting me so soon. It was a little cringy, but that was the best I could do. Maybe she would think the joke was so bad that it came back around to being funny. I waited anxiously for her reply. A few seconds later she texted back asking me to stop using pick-up lines from 1999. I smiled and challenged her to come up with a better one. Pretty soon we had a nice back-and-forth going on. The conversation that the guys were having around me fell into the background. Before I knew what had happened, I’d set up a date with Mia for Saturday night.

I wasn’t sure what energized me more; the thought of this upcoming stick-up job or my first date with this girl. Aw, who am I kidding? It was the date.