Remedying the situation was actually pretty easy. We just had to invest our money into making it better. We spent $4,600 of the $6,667 we were given as our start. I was planning on doing some more buying of empty properties with it. Because I was actually a Player and not an NPC, I got a $10,000 starter bonus to celebrate the first week of FOG's launch. We had a budget of $12,067. Spending $5000 on Quality brought it to 1 star. I put the another 5 grand into Production. Now we actually had some product that would not make our customers go blind or die. We also had a way of transporting them into wooden crates. That was obviously not the best way to do it, but it was better than nothing. That was pretty cool. Because it was our place, we got to design the logo and everything. Rosebuds' logo was simply that: a big trio of yellow roses that had not bloomed yet. Emilio liked it. Now that this was done, we had to go over to our speakeasy. There was one guy wiping down the bar counter and one on the floor adjusting tables. They had no booze and everything was dirty and dimly lit.
Clearly, we had 0 stars in Quality here. There was nothing to do here. There was nothing to see here. There was not reason to be here. We would just have to hope that selling our booze would bring in enough cash to upgrade some stuff. If not, we were going to be really sad soon. We went back to Miracle and he let us sleep in the back again. Breakfast was served. Nicolò was there too. He met the gang contact, and he was able to impress them. It was easy. He was young and unknown, so they could use him for covert operations. He had been in a gang fight and killed someone, so he had battle experience and did not shy away from having to kill people. He was of the proper ethnicity as well. He just had to go and do a specific task before he could be taken in as part of the gang. He did not tell us what he had to do. I did not want a conflict here at the dining table, so I did not push him too hard on it. There was no need to make him upset here. We made this our routine. We ate breakfast, went to the brewery, then the speakeasy. After, we slept in their backroom of the parlor. It took a week.
We got the profits placed into our accounts. Since we were together in this, we split the profits 50/50. That meant we only had a couple hundred bucks each. All people loved booze, and cheaper booze was used when their patrons were already drunk and happy from drinking good quality booze. We had the men carry crates of our own booze into our speakeasy from our brewery. That got some people coming in. Miracle sent some trusted clients our way. That was a good start. We would still need to make some serious money if we wanted to upgrade our things further. Our speakeasy was a shithole. If we did not upgrade it, no one was going to have to come in. The map was filled with thugs and drop offs. There were also tons of easy contracts to make good money. Emilio and I could get those jobs from Miracle and Brandon. They were both fixers. Going to them for jobs was pretty neat. I asked what Emilio thought. "I guess we need to start slow after all." he said with a very smug grin. He probably thought I was turning back. "Starting small!? We have rackets already! We're great!" I said.
