Ruby Redfort

Ruby Redfort
Biographical information
Born	March 1960
Also known as	Rube Little Red Ridingfort (by Vapona Begwell) Bubblegum girl (by Lorelei von Leyden) Ruby Red (by Lorelei and LB) Kid (by Hitch) Little girl (by Froghorn) Miss Grover, a junior insurance rep (by herself, when talking to Flemming Fengrove) The child (by Mrs Digby)
Physical Information
Gender	Female
Hair colour	Brown
Eye colour	Slightly Different Shades Of Green
Family Information
Family Members	Brant Redfort (father) Sabina Redfort (mother) Unnamed grandmother † (maternal) Unnamed grandmother (paternal) Eliza Fairbank (great-great-great-great grandmother) Martha Fairbank (great-great-great grandmother)

Lauren Child - On Ruby Redfort

Ruby Redfort is the main character of the Ruby Redfort book series. She is an agent of Spectrum 8 (although she does some work for Spectrum 5 in Ruby Redfort, Take Your Last Breath). Ruby lives with her parents Brant and Sabina Redfort in Green-Wood House better known as cedar wood drive, Twinford. Due to Spectrum's sworn secrecy, they do not know the existence of Spectrum, or that she is working for the agency (nor does anyone else but Ruby's best friend Clancy Crew). She has a rivalry at school with Vapona Begwell "Bugwart". Ruby has a husky named Bug, whom she has had since he was a puppy.

Personality

Ruby is extremely intelligent; when somebody asked her why she wasn't at school she said, "They have run out of things to teach me". She is shown to be an excellent code-breaker, and has been since a young age: she decoded a complicated code on the back of a Choco Puffles box at the young age of four. Though she is good at keeping secrets, her best friend Clancy Crew is someone she can't keep anything from. Ruby spreads her stuff over surfaces as she works, and her room is often untidy because of this. Ruby is mentioned to be claustrophobic and is slightly nyctophobic (afraid of the darkness). Throughout the series, she starts to lose the fear of death as she experiences more and more near-death encounters which ultimately puts her in more danger of dying. Hitch and a few other agents become worried about this and Ruby is sent to a psychologist named Dr. Selgood - though having no lasting impact on her lack of fear.

Ruby is very popular and people feel a strong need for her to like them, but she does not intentionally seek popularity.

Appearance

• At first Ruby looks very ordinary until you look a little longer.
• She has small, doll-like teeth.
• Wears contacts (sometimes) but prefers to wear red glasses.
• Her eyes are different shades of green.
• She is small for her age.
• Ruby's hair is dark brown and she has a side parting across her right eye. Her hair is always secured with a barrette that usually has a fly on it. (The first barrette of this type was given to her by Hitch in Feel the Fear - the fly is actually a miniature tracking device that enables him to know exactly where she is at all times).

Attire

Main article: Ruby's T-Shirts

• Ruby usually wears a t-shirt with an interesting number (1729), a somewhat hostile word like bozo or a statement such as shut your cake hole, excuse me while I yawn, bored beyond belief or keep it zipped- much to her several people's, including her mother's, disapproval.
• She also likes to wear jeans.
• She likes to wear her well-worn Yellow Stripe sneakers.
• Her style is innate and different, although not many people enjoy her t-shirts or clothes.

A depiction of Ruby by an artist on Tumblr

Interests

Ruby enjoys writing in her yellow notebooks, which she has been doing since the age of 4. She also enjoys making up rules (officially her Ruby Rules), which she keeps in a small magenta notebook with the word 'rules' across the front. Over the years she has written about 81 rules, but only 47 are mentioned in the books. She has over 625 yellow notebooks. She keeps 624 of them under the floorboards and the one she is in the process of filling in the door frame. In them she writes about interesting things she has seen or heard. She also owns a pea-green notebook, in which she records her survival skills. (Ruby Redfort: Catch Your Death)

Ruby has many telephones disguised as interesting things, which she mostly bought from yard sales. Some examples are her donut phone (the first phone she got, when she was about 5), shell phone, and squirrel in a tuxedo phone (her most recently acquired). When picking up a call she will say something like "Redforts cleanery, get your clothes nice and clean without taking too long'' or ''Brandy's Hair Salon, hair today, gone tomorrow.''

A depiction of Ruby by an artist on Pintrest

She likes to drink fruit juices from Cherry Cup ( the Twinford juice bar) and banana milk. (Imported from Europe, because has hard as her dad tried, he cannot find any sellers in the USA) Ruby and her friends often stop for a waffle or plate of French toast and a milkshake on the way to school. She also likes to eat donuts from Double Donut Diner. Agent Blacker often shares jelly doughnuts with her. Her mother, Sabina Redfort, is always trying to get her to eat "healthy food" to grow taller but Ruby thinks it's just a load of disgusting rubbish and she gives it to Bug, her loving Husky.

Ruby watches a lot of TV; her and Clancy's favorite TV show is Crazy Cops. Despite the childish-sounding title, it is a great show according to Clancy and Ruby. She particularly likes detective shows, but also enjoys crime and horror shows. She also watches nearly every other type of TV show.

Clancy and Ruby have a secret tree located at the parting point between their streets; in it they post coded messages usually folded into an origami animal so they will know if someone found and read the message. Of course, they do take it into account that no one probably knows their code, but: There is more to learn than you could ever know ( RULE 5).

Biography

When Ruby was nearly five weeks old, there was an earthquake and the Fairbank house collapsed. She was pulled out of the rubble by the housekeeper Mrs Digby, but it caused the beginning of her claustrophobia.

Another depiction of Ruby

When Ruby was two years old, she spotted a woman climbing over her neighbour Mr Pinkerton's fence, while a man distracted Mr Pinkerton. When the woman returned with her basket looking like it was moving she realised something was wrong. Ruby tried to tell her parents but, being only 2 years old, couldn't get them to understand. It turned out later that Mr Pinkerton's dog had been stolen. Ruby decided to become a detective on that day. She also found a small tin badge embossed with a fly pinned to a leaf on the ground, which became her lucky charm and stayed pinned to the inside lapel of her coat from that day on, until she lent it to Clancy to give him luck for his swimming competition in Take Your Last Breath.

When Ruby was four, she went wild camping with her parents, and she got caught in some brambles. She saw a Cyan Wolf and set it free from the trap it is in. The wolf did not attack her.

Ruby took part in a chess tournament at age 6. She lost against a chess grandmaster with skill. The arrogant Kaspar Peterson smirked at her loss, so Ruby challenged him to a game, and won in 5 simple moves.

Ruby won the Junior Code-Cracking Championships at the age of seven. When she was eight she entered the Junior Code-Creator contest. The judges couldn't crack her code and sent it to Harvard University. When the professors solved her code,2 weeks later, they offered her a place at the university, but she said she did not want to be a "geek freak" and turned the place down.

At the age of thirteen, Ruby got a coded phone call. She followed the clues to a location and ended up in a secret agency: Spectrum. She started working there as a codebreaker on the Fools' Gold Gang case, but was fired after about a month. However, after saving the Jade Buddha of Khotan from the Count von Viscount, LB, the head of Spectrum, decided to recruit her as a proper agent.

Ruby was then sent on dive camp in Hawaii, where she learned to scuba dive and free dive. She was also later trained in survival skills.

Trivia

• Ruby has very bad eyesight and has to wear glasses or contact lenses otherwise life is a "just a blur". However, she does not like wearing contact lenses as she feels they always fall out at the wrong time.
• Ruby's "morning drink" is one third grapefruit, one third cranberry and one third peach, with a straw.
• Ruby's favourite scent is rose; she uses Oriental Rose perfume and Wildrose shampoo.
• She likes milk only when flavored with strawberry, chocolate, or her particular favorite - banana.
• In the third book, Ruby is given Bradley Baker's sneakers, which although look like 'little kids sneakers', are super comfy and have suckers on the soles to make vertical climbing easier. She discovers the feature when climbing Wolf Paw Mountain to rescue her best friend, Clancy Crew, from mortal danger.
• Ruby can do convincing impressions of her mother, Clancy's mother, and Clancy's dad's secretary.
• Ruby's closest friends are Clancy Crew, Del Lasco, Elliot Finch, Red Monroe and Mouse Huxtable, and her enemies are Vapona Begwell (Bugwart) and her simpering sidekick Gemma Melamare.
• She is not a morning person and does not enjoy getting up early, although she sometimes has to get up early for Spectrum meetings.

Gallery

Ruby's bedroom as shown on the the website

Yellow Stripe Sneakers

Ruby Redfort's T-Shirt

References

Ruby's age

Ruby is 13 years old.