History On Replay : Operation Hindenburg

Two

Beverly Hills, Los Angeles, California

"Yo, I know that the first Gansta Robot movie broke a billion-dollar box office, which is why now's the time to make my movie!" Ryder Miller shouted over the phone. "I've told you a thousand times! It's about a kids in the streets who just wants to be a dancer!"
He paced through his swank living room, gesturing wildly. Giant black and white photographs of Jonah gazed down from the walls of the room, and sunlight streamed in from the floor-to-ceiling windows that looked over his infinity pool. Beyond it, Los Angeles shimmered in the heat of midday.
The sky over Los Angeles was turning gold and red with the sunset. The palm trees that ran along the city streets cast long shadows, and streaks of soft pink light painted the stark white walls of the Miller crib with delicate stripes.
As Ryder argued with his manager, Lauren Wallace, Brooke Adamm, Martha Olsen, and Harvey Clark sat on the white leather sofa, staring at the deep-pile black rug on the floor. It seemed to change color the longer you stared at it, blue-black to black-blue to black-black to off-black.
Lauren hadn't even know off-black was a color.
"I do too know about the streets! Gaaarrreett!!" Ryder's voice grew shriller than Lauren Wallace had ever heard it. The sound pierced through her exhaustion, through her worry, and made her want to toss her teenage superstar best friend's phone out the window....but she couldn't interrupt him. The money he made off his Hollywood career was the only money the had,now that an old man calling himself the Disaster had challenged them. He cut off their access to local bank accounts!
Lauren had been too happy to hand over the leadership of their operation to Harvey Clark, who had been too happy to take over leadership of their operation. He said it was the role he was not to play.
He didn't get to play it for long if he couldn't prove that he was responsible enough to take over.
The Disaster had kicked the five friends out of their school, turned all their friends against them, and promised to recreate four famous disasters from history that the kids would have to stop, if they could. They still haven't sent them a clue of what the first disaster will be.
Now all they could do was wait. Waiting was not something Lauren enjoyed.
"Would you please get off that infernal phone call!" Harvey Clark finally blurted. Apparently, waiting around wasn't something he enjoyed, either.
"No! No way!" Ryder yelled.
Harvey's face flushed. Lauren tensed. When Clarice Wallace, Lauren's grandmother, had been alive, she would never have allowed her authority to be openly defied. She's casted people out for less, even her own husband. And Lauren knew for certain that Harvey's parents had been killed for less. Lauren wondered what Harvey would do.
But Ryder kept yelling. "I will not add a vampire to the story, Garrett, no matter how much the fandom wants to see it!" Ryder ended the call. He hadn't been yelling at Harvey at all - he'd been yelling at his manager.
Lauren relaxed.
"Sorry about that, Harvey." Ryder shrugged. "Show business you know?"
"I most certainly do not know!" Harvey replied.
"Ryder, are you sure you want to make a movie about a dancer?" Martha Olsen asked. She was Ryder's best friend, personal manager for non-showbiz matter, and cousin, and right now she looked genuinely worried about Ryder's career choices.
Ryder shrugged. "It's a drama about the silencing of the artist in the noise of contemporary pop culture."
"Uhhh...." Said Martha.
"And Gangsta Robot wasn't my thing," added Ryder.
"But I like Gangsta Robot," Martha told him. "Stuff blow up."
"If you would both please stop!!!!" Harvey interrupted the!. "Might we not discuss the relative merits of stuff blowing up? We still need to wait and see what the Disaster wants us to do."
Just then Lauren's phone buzzed in her hands. She frowned down at it. "It's Aunt Charlene."
Aunt Charlene was their grandmother Clarice's sister, but what Clarice had had in charm, daring, and intelligence, Charlene had in greed, gossip, and cheapness. She used her slice of the Wallace cash to spend half a year in Florida, as far from Lauren and her brother, Nathan, as she could get without having to learn a foreign language. She spent the other half in Boston, disapproving of them.
"What does she want?" Nathan asked. "She sent us a text," Lauren told him, more puzzled than ever.
"That doesn't sound like her," said Nathan. "She doesn't even know how to text."
Lauren held up the phone so Nathan could see.
The text only contained two words:

Look up

"I don't think that's from your Aunt Charlene," Harvey said as he looked up through the wall of glass, past Ryder's infinity pool, to a blimp that had settled itself in the air over Los Angeles, framed perfectly in the center of Ryder's windows, a public air show aimed at just the six of them.