You would need a lot of bananas. And so much potassium-separating infrastructure that it's a job for a whole civilization or one mad scientist with a lot of tech.

Anyway, why the peels? Most of the good isotopes are in the fruit.

Yeah, no worries, it was actually really helpful.

Turns out Everything Is a Heist, if you squint at it properly.

Those aren't goals. Those are just random actions. One of them can only be done by accident, and the other two can't be done at the same time.

Very funny. That's a task for an entire civilization, not a team of countably few individual people. Also, how would that even help? If the gang-pressers can read that dogs exist, then presumably they also see the actual dogs walking around everywhere.

I looked at the man. "Do you seriously want me to answer that?"

"What do you mean?" he asked, perhaps a touch too quickly. "That's why you're here, isn't it? Don't you want to get hired on for my next job?"

I shook my head politely. "I'm a troubleshooter. I only have two jobs. To know trouble when I see it. And to shoot it, if somebody pays me enough. And you, sir, are definitely trouble. Fortunately--"

He made as if to jump up out of his seat, but he froze when I moved my hand and he saw that I already had him at gunpoint.

"Let. Me. Finish. I was about to say 'Fortunately, nobody's paid me to shoot you.' I remember the job you're talking about, and I happen to also know what the police said was stolen. And I seem to recall that amongst the stolen property were a set of diamond and platinum cufflinks more or less exactly like the ones you're wearing right now."

"So, no. My answer is, 'no thank you.' I have no interest in working for a man who plans an entire heist just to throw off the authorities after he has already performed the robbery himself. But if the reason you actually called me here for this interview is because you wanted to figure out if anyone knew what you did? I honestly don't think that they do."

"Good to know." He swallowed. "You gonna put that thing away?"

"Not yet. Look. I'm going to level with you. You're pretty good at planning heists, but you suck at planning a life of crime. You didn't have a plan in place to liquidate the loot. You didn't do anything about the cameras at the bank. If that kid had been carrying a cell phone, your entire plan would have gone up in smoke five minutes faster than it did.

Now, you've stiffed your crew, you're hiding out in a shabby office in the Mafia's backyard, and you're within the 90th percentile of Uncle Sam's Most Wanted. Let me help you out of this situation you've put yourself in."

I gave him a moment to stew in his own juices, as he wondered what a person with my skillset could possibly do to help him.

"Half a million for all five jewelry sets. Final offer. Do we have a deal?"

"Now, hold on--"

I cocked the gun.

"I said, do we have a deal?"

And here I made a point of grinning like the devil himself.

"Or are you going to make trouble for me?"

Why do I need a troubleshooter? Well, that's kind of a loaded question, isn't it?

After all, if I knew why I needed you, I wouldn't be talking to you. I'd be talking to a specialist. The whole point is to have you on-hand to help contain the damage if things don't go according to plan.

Example. The Midtown National Bank job in 2018. Now, I was not personally involved in that one, but I've worked with most of the people who were, and I can tell you... it wasn't their fault.

That job was a clusterfuck from start to finish. A perfect storm in a bottle. Everything that could go wrong, went wrong three different ways.

So, I'm going to walk you through what happened as I understand it. And after I finish, I want you to explain to me everything that you would have done differently, and when you would have done it.

I mean-- yes, assume you have full access to our comms, you've talked to us beforehand, whatever your usual setup is, you've got it. Because on this job, I don't think it would have helped much.

So it starts with Nick. Sharp guy. Grew up on the wrong side of the tracks. Quick, efficient. Self-reliant. His job was to steal a getaway vehicle without attracting too much attention. (And you have to remember, this was kind of the last hurrah before they started putting those damned chips into everything.)

So we're about half an hour out from the start of the show. And Nick's out there casing the side of the road, looking for a good mark. And all of a sudden, here comes half the city's public works department setting up Christmas decorations. In October! Something about the weather forecast and the budget was going to disappear if they didn't spend it? I dunno.

Anyway, Nick quickly realized the downtown area was too busy to steal a car in broad daylight, so what does he do? He keeps his cool, and he heads north to the underpass. Hotwires a beaten up old Ford minivan that still has its muffler, but a bad enough paint job that he knows it's probably not owned by drug dealers. Quietly drove out of there and then opened it up on the highway.

Rolled up 5 minutes early. The rest of the crew's looking at this thing like "are you even serious?" But it worked and the engine was quiet and the previous owners probably don't trust the cops enough to file a police report right away.

Next up is Jayden. Bit of a mamma's boy, but he knows his shit when it comes to computers. He's not in the van with the rest of the crew. He's stealing wi-fi from a coffeehouse uptown. It's his job to hack into the traffic cameras and shut them down while we're passing through the area, so the authorities don't have as much to go on.

Well, he jacks in, and just as he's halfway through uploading his package, the system reboots. Turns out it just downloaded the latest firmware update. Half of Jayden's tools are suddenly useless. He can't even communicate with the cameras upstream anymore. So what's he do?

He spoofs another set of update requests downstream. You ever try to update something on your computer or your phone, after everything's already been updated? There's like a little pause, you know? Before it tells you that everything's already up to date? Well, Jayden throws together a macro and just starts spamming thousands of update requests downstream to the camera company's server. The server pings back with information about the current version, and all 28 cameras are like going "We're up to date. We're up to date. We're up to date." So you get that little update pause while it checks which version is installed, but thousands of times per second.

It doesn't shut them down, it just makes them very slow. But slow is probably good enough. Traffic is light, road crews notwithstanding, so there's a good chance that our vehicle can slip through the lights.

So now Tyler walks into the bank lobby. He's the face. Silver tongued devil. It's his job to spike the receptionist's coffee. You know, Tyler trained as a stage magician? Never made it big. But one thing all stage magicians know is that the hardest audience to fool is kids. They don't have any preconceptions, they're not concerned about being polite, their heads are all viewing the action from a different angle than your regular adult audiences. It makes sleight of hand almost impossible. And, what do you know, the reception's fucking kid is with her. Twenty minutes to closing on a weekday and she's got this brat with her. There's a whole story behind that but it's too long to get into. So what does old Tyler do?

First, he charms the receptionist, so she trusts him. That was already factored into the plan. But then he wastes five extra minutes that he absolutely does not have teaching this little kid a simple magic trick. And as soon as the little kid starts practicing it, he can dump the powder into the receptionist's coffee with nobody the wiser. She's just about closing the door to the ladies room when the Ford pulls up and Leon jumps out.

Now, Leon got his start in construction, quickly moved to demolitions. And this was back in the 80s and 90s, when the regulations kept changing. So he knew everything from welding to shaped changes. Even volunteered for the Bomb Disposal Squad for a while, until one of the bombs went off while some kids were trying to evacuate. He's nothing if not adaptable, and he came loaded for bear with 3 different ways to get himself into that vault.

And once he noticed that slack-jawed kid staring at him from behind the receptionist's desk, he just froze up. Acetylene torch already lit.

And then he reaches over and pulls the fire alarm.

Well, that got the kid out of the building. And it cleared out the tellers and the back offices. And you can imagine the receptionist clutching her drawers as she flees the bathrooms and whatnot. But it also drew a lot of attention to us and put us on a timer.

So Leon burns a hole through the lock in record time, levers open the vault, and quickly grabs the five lockboxes we were concerned about. Runs out the main entrance, hurls them into the Ford, jumps in and pulls the door shut.

Now, we need to switch vehicles. So, rewind one hour.

I don't know what to say about Devin. He's a real zoomer. He's sharp, he's quick on his feet, and he never misses a trick.

Nick had already stolen another vehicle the day before and parked it in this one parking garage that's normally at about 50% capacity. Premium space on the second-lowest level. Practically all we had to do was pull in, abandon the old vehicle, and peel out.

Devin's one job is to keep an eye on the vehicle and make sure nothing happens to it until the job.

So a beat cop shows up, about an hour out from Go Time. Big guy. Out of shape. Stereotypical as hell, except he keeps everything holstered. Devin takes note, then moves to a place where he's less conspicuous. Half an hour passes. The cop doesn't go inside the parkade, he just stands around outside, occasionally talking to people. Apparently the hustle and bustle on main street made walking his usual beat a little too much like work, so he decided to kill some time here.

Well, this just won't do, but what can Devin do about it? 20 minutes. 15 minutes. Devin gets word through his earpiece that Tyler and Nick are ready to go. Do we have a second car or not?

"We got the car."

So Devin, this fucker, he covers his face, he nonchalantly creeps up on the cop, using the pillars of the parkade for partial cover. He suddenly grabs some lady's purse, runs right past the fucking cop, and then runs a full extra block before making a right turn into an alley. I asked him later why he didn't just make a hard right as soon as he got past the parkade. He said he wanted make sure the cop would follow him at least one block. Well, I guess it worked, but god damn. Coulda been shot if it had been anybody but Paul Blart chasing him. We made the switch, no problem, apart from the fact that Devin was nowhere to be seen.

And like I said, he didn't miss a trick. Left the purse behind as a distraction. Switched out his shirt layers before parkouring down to 6th street. Disappeared into a crowd at the bus terminal. Stupid as hell. But it worked. A month later, he rolls up wanting his cut. Police don't even know his name.

So anyway, we got the car. All that's left now is to get the loot out of the country. Now, Gus is a part-time dock worker in his 50s. Very reliable. Very loyal. Affable. Knows how to keep his mouth shut.

And, normally, all of that would have made him the perfect asset to help us load the second vehicle onto a cargo ship. Nick just has to park it in the right spot, hop in the back with Leon, and it'll get loaded on the ship along with all the other new cars. We meet up in Italy after the ship makes port. Gus is just there to make sure it all goes off without a hitch.

Which is why it's too bad that his buddy operating the crane recognized him from having worked shifts with him previously. I don't know what Gus said to him, and I don't know what they did. The vehicle got loaded onto the ship, just like we planned. But when Leon and Nick left the lockboxes closed until they hit shore. If they'd broken them open, we would have known it.

But when they made land in Italy and we retrieved the lockboxes and finally did break them open, all of the jewelry was missing from them. Now how on Earth would you have prevented that?

(to be continued...)

Yep, absolutely! Actually, any team-based RPG with a character-building system that rewards specialization would probably work. So sci-fi, fantasy, horror, crime, superhero, cyberpunk... pretty much any form of genre fiction.

So that's a second lens I could use for this part of my process. Just take any RPG and use it as inspiration for both the group project and the characters. Though not the setting, obviously.

I'm learning a lot here today.

Huh. I thought I was asking for a list of team activities like "design a haunted house," not a list of individual activities that add up to one group activity. But after really thinking about your prompt, whether it was serious or sarcastic, you've made me realize that heist movies are sort of a lens through which I can view this problem of coming up with a goal for a team to pursue.

For your prompt, specifically, I kind of feel like those last two steps, anyone could do? And a real bank robbery would probably want somebody with combat training to bail their asses out or at least some means to create a distraction if the plan goes south, depending on the tone and setting? And without a method for laundering the money, they'll have trouble spending it?

But this is a start. I'll work with this.

Edit: Yeah, okay. This is starting to come together...

I'm not sure if I can do a whole heist movie in a single post, though. It's kind of a lot of character introduction and buildup to get through. I could do just the heist scene itself, but if the audience doesn't already know the characters, they won't care as much what happens to them.

Hmmm... maybe if I focus on one specific character at the start of the heist, and Underdog them early on in a way that doesn't compromise the mission...

Okay that's actually pretty funny.

"This is going to get worse before it gets better."