Perry's POV

"Any progress?" Monogram asked, his face on Perry's watch. Perry shook his head and said, in the sign language they'd developed "We've done a full sweep of the first area. We haven't found anything."

Monogram sighed.

"Well, I didn't expect much at this point, anyways. Carl hasn't made much progress on finding the location of the diamond cutter, and we still don't know how Baljeet managed it."

"I told you we should've standardized that filing system years ago!" Carl shouted from off-camera. "Quiet, Carl!" Monogram yelled back. "Anyways, keep searching," he said to Perry. "We don't think they have a way out, so just keep the entrances secure and you should be able to find them eventually."

Perry saluted and ended the call. Around him, he could hear his fellow agents scurrying around the warehouse and scanning everything in sight for life signs. The items themselves had such weird properties that they'd gotten several false positives from them already, but other than that, and the Beak robot that had taken down five of the agents before it had been destroyed, they'd found no trace of the kids.

He looked over at the aforementioned Beak robot and sighed (or made the closest platypus equivalent). That was definitely going to start them asking questions. If his owners hadn't already realized his secret, they would soon. He didn't know what he was going to say to them- "Sorry for lying to you for the last ten years? Look on the bright side- at least you won't remember any of this soon!"

They'd freaked out the last time something like this had happened. They'd been understanding after he told them the whole story, but he didn't think they would be so inclined a second time, especially considering all the agency had put them through tonight.

The only solution he could see was to capture them and erase their memories again. After that, they could turn their attentions to the Second Dimension and see what the Isabella from it had been talking about. If Doofenshmirtz-2 really had regained power, they would need all of their considerable resources to combat him. He hadn't been an easy person to fight even the last time they had. In all likelihood, he would be even tougher now.

But first, they would need to find the kids and erase their memory. And so far, that had not proved an easy undertaking. Admittedly, they'd barely managed to search any of the massive warehouse so far, but, honestly, how far could the kids have gone? It wasn't like they had a...

A label on the wall caught his eye. He froze as he took a moment to read it, and then mentally slapped himself. It was so obvious!

He activated his watch phone and frantically dialed Major Monogram. His face came up immediately.

"What is it, Agent P?" he asked. Perry frantically signaled his response. When he was done, Monogram sat in stunned silence for a moment, and then started swearing, a bit in English, but mostly in foreign languages Perry didn't know.

"Teleporters," Monogram said through gritted teeth after he was finished swearing. "I cannot believe we didn't realize already. Alright, I'm sending Carl down to sweep for teleporter residue. Call all the agents off of the sweep and have them get ready for redeployment. We'll need them to be ready to move to the kids' position the moment Carl finds anything."

Perry saluted again and turned off his watch phone.

Isabella-1's POV

We all reacted differently to having nothing to do. The other me, like myself, seemed perfectly content just to stand and wait, and to talk a bit with the others. The Fireside Girls followed our lead. Baljeet was scrawling complicated physics equations in the dust on the the shelves. Whenever he finished one, Buford would rub it out and then give him a thorough noogie.

Phineas, on the other hand, had never reacted well to boredom. He was pacing up and down the aisle and twitching like a coked-out squirrel. Every once in a while, he'd look up from his pacing, let his eyes flit around the room, and then go back to pacing and coked-out-squirrel twitching. I knew Phineas got twitchy when he got bored, but not this bored. It seemed like there was something more.

I walked over and put a hand on his shoulder. He stopped pacing to look up at me.

"Are you alright, Phineas?" I asked. "I mean, I know you're bored and all, but is there something else bothering you?"

He stopped twitching and looked back down at the floor. He didn't say anything.

"Phineas?" I asked again. Now I was sure there was something he wasn't telling me.

"I..." he said, his voice trailing off after that one word. "It's just something dumb. It's not worth mentioning."

"Well, then it's not worth being quiet about, is it?" I said, determined to know what was wrong. "If it's something so small, just tell me it."

He was quiet again. I was about to start really pestering him when he said "Well... this organization has animal agents, right?"

"Yeah."

"And Perry goes off somewhere we don't know about every day, right?"

"... No. No, no, no, no, no. Pinky goes off every day, too, but animals do that. That doesn't mean that he's some secret agent."

Phineas was quiet again. It was starting to feel like a hackneyed device overused by a bad fanfiction writer when he spoke up again.

"I guess you're right," he said. "I just can't shake the feeling that... I don't know. That there's something about him we're forgetting."

"Don't worry about it. You guys have probably done something involving pretending Perry was a secret agent before. Besides, there's no way he could have kept it a secret for this long. We would've noticed, right?"

Phineas opened his mouth, like he was about to say something, and then stopped.

"Do you hear that?" he asked.

"Hear what?"

"I'm not sure. It's kind of like what you hear if you push your ear against a table and pound on it, only like there's about a thousand people hitting the table."

I listened for a second.

"Well, I don't hear anything," I said. "But the ground seems to be vibrating."

I gave him a second to check this, and said "And it seems to be getting worse."

In fact, only a second before, the vibration had been barely perceptible. Now the shelves were starting to rattle, and everyone else was taking notice of it. People were looking up from their conversations to see what was going on (which didn't help very much, since there wasn't much of anything to see). My Second Dimension counterpart was the first one to realize just what the noise was.

"It's the agents," she hissed. "They must have tracked us here somehow!"

"How much longer does that diamond cutter doohickey need?" Buford asked.

"I don't know! There isn't a timer or anything on it!"

"Well, does the diamond have to be all the way cut to work?" I asked.

"I..." The other me nervously looked back at the device. "I don't know. The diamond might work fine, or it might not do anything, or it might only sort of work. I'm not sure; Baljeet's the one who handled that kind of stuff."

"Well, I think we're going to have to risk it," Phineas said. The Second Dimension me hesitated for a moment, then nodded in agreement. She turned back to open the diamond cutter, and then stopped.

"How do we get the diamond out?" she asked.

The pod she'd put the diamond in seemed to have retracted into a metal sheath covering the rest of the device, taking it out of our view. There was another moment of silence in the room, except for the rumbling of the approaching agents.

"Alright, out of the way!" Buford shouted, pushing his way towards the diamond cutter. "Let Buford handle this the van Stomm way!"

He stopped in front of the machine and cracked his knuckles. Then he brought his beefy forearm down on it, reducing it to a pile of scrap metal and circuits with a large diamond shining out from the middle of the scrap heap.

The other me carefully reached down, plucked the diamond out of the mess, and put it in her satchel.

"Alright," she said. "I think it's time we-"

Then the rumbling noise stopped as the agents came around the corner. They froze as soon as they saw us.

"So..." Buford said. "Run or fight?"

"Run," the other me said. "Definitely run."

And so we did.

Thanks to everybody who took the time to review:

Sleeping Kangaroo: Yes. Yes, it is.

fan-like-irving: I'll do my best!

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