There was a tangible amount of apprehension in the crowd from adults and children alike, which made Vinnie all the more disappointed because he knew what would happen. The sun looked on anxiously, beaming a bit hotter than it had managed all day in its curiosity and peering closer at the small crowd of people gathered before the bank’s open doors. Inside, the people in line stared expectantly as well, with the teller in front of the doors with a filled bag cradled against her chest. Amazingly enough, the reporter on the scene had seen it fit to finally stop talking. She simply stared at the giant robot in front of her while the chief of police took off his hat.

“Well, let’s see what this can do.” He smiled confidently while pressing the launch button.

The robot did nothing as he had predicted, not even a blink of its lights. Groans raised up from the crowd. Children stomped in frustration while their parents tried to smile encouragingly. Sheryl motioned for the camera crew to redirect the focus to her again, adopting a stoic demeanor.

“Yet another failure in this bank robbing attempt from local supervillain, Vinnie. My question, and the question I think the citizens of Meaubury City have as well, is how can we trust him to run a company we depends on when he can’t make a functional robot?”

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the chief of police pointing at his wrist. A quick look at the corner of his laptop’s screen informed him it was 2:10.

He smiled and gestured to the sidewalk where lines of code was projected in rows of colorful blocks. “We are so close, you guys. There’s just a teeny tiny error.”

“This is too hard.” A little boy sat down on the cleared street with a sullen look. “You said this was easy.”

“It is easy,” Vinnie insisted, “this is actually a very important lesson for coders. You can have almost everything perfect, but a computer needs for your code to be perfectly perfect to understand.”

His words did nothing to coax any more excitement back into the kids as they began to show clear signs of being too frustrated to finish the activity, which he expected considering that children under the age of nine aren’t known for being particularly patient in regards to anything really. Most of the younger kids were asking to be held by their parents or playing games off at the fringes, but some of the older ones were still pondering over the projected code on the sidewalk.

A girl was crouching beside the faulty line, chewing on her knuckles absently as she considered it.

“Rachael, do you know what’s wrong?”

She looked startled to have been called on, freezing up momentarily before looking down at the sidewalk and biting her lip. “Um...I think...um…” Her eyes did not move, but she began to fidget with the straps of her shoes. “This line needs... a thing… the thing that goes at the end.”

“A semicolon?”

She nodded.

“Okay let’s try that.”

Vinnie fixed the line and hit launch again.

The crowd erupted into cheers from the children and delighted claps from the adults as the robot began to walk across the street, weaving through the cone obstacle course that had been set up in its path before stopping in front of the doors of the bank.

“Congratulations, guys. You all truly have the brains of evil, little geniuses. Now, it’s time to collect the cash your robot has stolen from the bank.” Vinnie waved to the teller at the door who stepped forward with a smile.

“Hi, kids!” She chirped despite clearly struggling with the size of the bag. “We’re fresh out of money, but we do happen to have some candy for you to enjoy for all your hard work.”

Before she could even finish, the crowd made its way across the street towards her with children demanding to be put down and abandoning their games to rush over to form a mob around her. She laughed good-naturedly and began to pass out the candy while the parents inspected the robot.

Vinnie collected his things and made his way over to help, while the chief of police gathered up the cones from the obstacle course. Passing out little pouches of gold foil wrapped chocolate coins with the teller earned him a lot of thanks and shy admissions that coding was a lot cooler than they had thought. The chief of police even pulled him aside to thank him for offering such an enriching event for the kids, though he did request he either budget more time for anything else or at least manage his time better. So Vinnie considered it a success, even if Sheryl did attempt to question him about how this “could be indicative of any failings VMKL products could be liable to in the future” and there wasn’t even a single bag of chocolates leftover for him to snack on.

Once everyone had cleared out and officers began to move the barricades that were redirecting traffic, he looked up and saw that Milo was waiting for him across the street, leaning up against the metal gate of a cafe’s outdoor seating area.

He crossed the street with a smile as he slung his bag over his shoulder. “Hello, light of my life, did you enjoy the show?”

Milo rolled his eyes as he pocketed his phone and turned away to start walking down the street. “I hope that was permitted, Vinnie.”

“Of course it was!” He fell into step easily with his friend as they made their way down the sidewalk. “It breaks my heart that you’d think so little of me.”

“Oh, I don’t know. I’m pretty sure there’s a few documented cases where you didn’t bother, and I was the one fielding all the angry calls.” Milo took a sudden turn that led into the entrance of a storefront.

A frown took hold of Vinnie’s face as he stared at the stands of fresh produce sitting in neat piles across from where Milo stood. “Do we have to do this now?”

Milo didn’t even look up from the grocery cart that he was wrangling away from the line by the door. “Yes, Keith is going to be home from school in a couple hours, and I don’t have what I need for dinner.”

“Can’t we just order in or pick something up?”

The following silence gave him his answer as Milo began to walk away, already looking down at a torn page from a notepad. He groaned and trailed after him, dragging his feet against the dull linoleum.

Once Milo had stopped to consider the differences between two bell peppers, he climbed into the cart’s basket, earning nothing more than a raised eyebrow as Milo put the better of the two on top of him. They went from isle to isle with Milo referencing the list every so often before steering them down a new aisle and Vinnie becoming buried underneath a growing pile of groceries.

Frowning, Vinnie pulled out a box Milo had just added on top of him, raising his brow at the label. “Why would we ever need to buy veggie sticks?”

“I pack some for Keith every day.” He tossed the bag of rice he had been inspecting onto Vinnie where it punched him neatly in the stomach before ruffling Vinnie’s hair affectionately. “I’m going to grab some milk. I’ll be right back.”

Milo weaved his way through the other people in the aisle-- a mother suffering through the wails of her two children, an elderly woman asking an employee to read something for her, a man inspecting the label of a box, and a small family bickering over something-- and disappeared from sight.

Vinnie groaned and let the back of his head fall against the rim of the cart’s basket. Rows upon rows of shiny, colorful bags caught his attention, and he twisted around to come face to face with the aisle of this year’s unloved Halloween candy.

This year, they hadn’t managed to get hardly any candy for themselves. Sure, they had bought bags of every kind of candy imaginable, but that didn’t do Vinnie any good, considering Milo had only allowed him a handful to save the rest for the haunted house they had ran that had left their candy stores bone dry. Keith also had proclaimed himself to be too old for trick-or-treating, so Vinnie hadn’t been able to swipe any from him this year. Thus, his candy cravings had been near insatiable as of late, but Milo insisted he could “wait a bit longer” since Thanksgiving was only a few weeks away.

He couldn’t wait though. Thanksgiving was too far away, and he definitely needed a stash to get him through the stress surrounding that particular yearly disaster and the quickly approaching torture that would be Christmas Day. Vinnie needed this candy, and he needed it now.

A quick look around informed him Milo wasn’t back, though he was being stared at rather intensely by a small boy cradled in the arms of a woman engaged in a rather fierce argument with a man about protein content. Vinnie reached across the aisle, grabbing two bags at a time and shoving them out of sight somewhere in the depths of the pile of groceries until he had no more space to hide them.

The boy giggled. Vinnie pressed his finger to his lips, and the boy mimicked the action but was very unable to stop himself from giggling.

Milo rounded the corner while Vinnie was still shifting around the groceries in an attempt to mask the fact that there was anything out of place. He added two cartons of milk to the basket before beginning to steer them out of the aisle.

“Thanks for waiting.” Milo combed through his hair before groaning. “You wouldn’t believe how competitive it is to find the freshest milk in the fridge.”

Nervously, Vinnie willed himself not to fiddle too much with the bag of chocolates resting in his hands just out of sight. “That must have been awful.” His anxiety mounted as they turned into a check out lane, but he managed to smile back to the cashier beckoning them forward.

“Oh my gosh.” Milo shook his head. “It was horrible. I swear people will just snatch stuff right out of your hands.”

He walked around to start placing things up on the counter. Vinnie’s heart raced as Milo slowly began to move the pile before frowning down at the brightly colored bags he managed to unearth.

“Vincent,” he lifted up a bag of gummy eyes, “what is this?”

“Groceries?”

He earned an exhausted sigh and a small laugh from the cashier.

“Alright,” Milo pinched the bridge of his nose, “we can get one bag. But I don’t want to see any more sweets being brought in for the rest of the year.”

Vinnie readily agreed, so happy that he didn’t even complain about having to carry the exorbitant amount of bags all the way back home, though he was very tempted when the weight made the handles dig into his arm. Milo was appreciative of the lack of complaining, and he was quick to push Vinnie’s boundaries as soon as they stepped out of the elevator into the penthouse.

“Can you help me put away the groceries real quick?”

His patience had been thinned enough that he was barely able to suppress a groan, but he remembered that putting away groceries gives him a cover for sneaking the candy upstairs so he agreed, dropping his bags onto the counter.

While Vinnie was pretending to dedicate all of his attention towards putting strawberries and deli meat into the fridge, Milo unbagged the candy and stashed it a cabinet behind the cereals before busying himself with taking out all of the supplies he would need off to the side. Milo moved over to the cupboards on the opposite side of the kitchen and rummaged around their depths.

Figuring Milo was distracted as he would be getting, Vinnie began to edge his way over to the cabinet holding the candy.

Every step he took was followed by a glance back over his shoulder where Milo was still searching through the cupboards with perhaps a bit more frustration than before. He was careful to not make a sound as he opened the cabinet door and pushed aside the boxes of cereal standing in his way. Ever so delicately, he extracted the bag by a single corner, lifting slowly as to prevent the clear plastic from crinkling, before lifting it out over the cereal.

“Vinnie?”

He froze, but still managed to strangle out a response. “Yes, dear.”

“Have you seen my favorite serving dish?” He whined irately before resuming his rummaging. “I can’t find it anywhere.”

A quick look assured Vinnie that Milo was still very intent on his search, so he made his escape from the kitchen, moving as silently as possible.

“Didn’t my dad take it home last time he was over?” He fought off the urge to sigh audibly with relief when he reached the base of the stairs.

“Yes, but he brought it back.” Milo turned around and began to look in the cabinets below.

“Well, was that before or after the bake sale for Keith’s team?”

Milo cried out in frustration and smacked his palm against his forehead. “I left it there,” he groaned. “That was my favorite dish.”

Vinnie was nearly at the top of the stairs. “You can get a new one.”

“But that means that I’ll have to make a pancake meatloaf with one we have here.”

“That’s fine, darling.” Vinnie smiled as he passed the final stair, cradling the bag to his chest. “Me and Keith will still love it no matter what shape it comes in.”

There was a dull thud of something dropping.

“Vincent, get back down here right now!”

A little voice in Vinnie’s head told him that he had enough time to make it to the bedroom and lock the door, but common sense won out and he trudged back down the stairs.