excuse me while I yawn...

Anabel and Agents

'Literally! They're all, like, gone Clance!' whispered Ruby in a dramatic voice. He started to giggle a bit. 'It's not funny! Where have they gone?'
'No, no, I didn't mean it like that..! It's just that I've been at yours for 2 hours, Quent has been downstairs whittling on to your mom for half an hour and you've said the same thing 37 times, now.'
'I'm just shocked, Clance. No one there. Even Froghorn was gone!' Said Ruby, putting extra emphasis onto the g, 'And Froghorn is always there. It's kinda scary how he never gets ill...' Ruby tailed off as she glimpsed something suspicious out of the corner of her emerald eyes. A woman was walking down the street. Mrs Beesman! But, Ruby sensed that it wasn't Mrs Beesman. She walked in a funny way, almost a limp, but she didn't have her little walking frame. She did, however, have a small ginger cat in her handbag. She removed this cat and all of a sudden, she threw it at a silver Range Rover. Clancy came to join Ruby at the window at this point and saw the orange blur fly across the air.
'Cruelty to animals!' Yelled Clancy, as Ruby turned to shut him up. But it was too late as the woman stopped in her tracks and whipped round to face the pair. Although she couldn't quite see them, she ripped off the grey wig on top of her perfectly bleached hair and lifted the cover to a man hole. Without hesitation, the woman jumped into the darkness.
Thump, thump, thump. Quent was now making his way up the winding stairs of the Redfort household. 'Rubyyyy!!' He screamed, not realising how close he was to the bedroom and then smack! He jumped up and the top of his head hit the pearly white door frame as he toppled backwards on to the landing.

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the next day

Ruby woke up to the awful smell of beef and sausages. She looked up to see a pair of ocean blue eyes staring back into hers. Bug then proceeded to lick her face thoroughly before she could push him off. She groaned and swivelled around to the side of the bed which creaked as she did so, and got up, not bothering to do anything with the pile of dirty clothes on her desk chair. She stumbled over to the washing chute and threw herself down it, landing on the other side approximately 3.2 seconds later at the other end of the house.

She couldn't stop thinking about the woman with blonde hair. Who was she and what was she doing in the man hole? Sure, Ruby had an idea that this wasn't some ordinary woman but she was curious to see where the drain led to. Her watch beeped and in surprise she glanced down at it. It was flashing red. She pressed the speak button and Hitch's voice came out. "Redfort. Report to HQ ASAP."
"And good morning to you too, bozo." Muttered Ruby as she grabbed a pair of newly ironed jeans and a white top which read 'not listening to a word you're saying' in black letters. She pulled on some ankle socks over her heels and headed for the front door, which was unguarded as Mrs Digby was not in the kitchen at 5:37 am.

Ruby sauntered down the driveway and stopped at the gates. She looked left and then looked right. To her left was the newest entrance to Spectrum HQ but on her right was the mysterious man hole cover. She looked at her watch in despair. In the corner of her eye, Ruby noticed the man hole cover move slightly up and down. She decided that if she was to become an agent when she was older then she had to start somewhere. Groaning, she ran over to the cover and lifted it. It was surprisingly heavy. Ruby discarded, with much effort, the cover to the side and stared into the darkness. Drips of water fell from every angle as the sky turned black and the rain tipped down onto Twinford. Trying to stay as dry as possible, she found a ledge in the wall and put her foot on it, stepping into the hole and covering it back with the cover. She felt for the floor. From the ledge she could just reach it with her tiptoes and so jumped down and landed with a thud on the stone.

There was no light and no door. She felt for all the buttons on her watch until she reached the fourth one along which she pressed and the scene was illuminated. The room was encased in white walls with a small hole in the wall to her right. In the hole she noticed a fly no larger than a quarter of a cent and so pressed her finger into the whole. It took a few seconds, in which Ruby had though she was wrong, and then an opening was revealed in the opposite wall. She stared down the corridor into Spectrum HQ.

LB stepped out of nowhere. "Ah, Redfort. I see you made it on time. How did you figure out our new entrance? We hadn't informed you of it yet."
"Lucky guess." Said Ruby, following the tall, barefooted woman down the hallway. LB turned left and then took two rights and the pair arrived at her office, in which Hitch was already seated. She gave him a thumbs up and he rolled his eyes at her. She took the seat to his left. The register for the previous week lay in front of her and she noticed three names - Redfort, Hitch and LB. Every other agent was either marked as ill or Missing. Ruby observed the papers for roughly 2 minutes before saying "the signatures are all in the same handwriting."
"Are they?" Said LB, bringing the papers closer to her eyes. In the silence, Ruby looked up to the pictures on the wall and motionlessly grieved at the face of Bradley Baker. To his right there was a girl framed in a photo who was stood next to the Grand Canyon with a big grin on her face. The girl looked no older than twelve and her eyes seemed to dig into Ruby's mind. They were bright blue, but not like any she'd ever seen before. Blue as the ocean on a hot day. Bluer than the husky's eyes. Blue as sapphires. Ruby recognised the girl immediately for she had seen a picture of an older version of her in the hands of her best friend, Clancy. The girl on the wall was Anabel.