Serenity

"*I glance over my shoulder at Serenity—the perfect rows of immaculate white homes, the swimming pools positioned on the lots like aquamarine postage stamps, the basketball hoops lined up like sentries, all lovingly set down amid the striking southwestern landscape.*"
—Eli Frieden, *Masterminds*

**Serenity** is a small, perfect town located in New Mexico. It was the site of Project Osiris, an illegal social experiment designed to test whether someone is born evil or becomes evil throughout their life, and was founded by scientist Felix Hammerstrom for this reason. Serenity is the ideal utopia where nothing bad supposedly ever happened, leading Malik Bruder to christen it "Happy Valley". The Osiris subjects and other kids living there were isolated and protected from exposure to illegality, violence, deception and fraud.

The three Essential Qualities of Serenity Citizens are honesty, harmony and contentment. The unofficial town motto is "You can spend your whole life wandering only to find that what you're searching for is right in your own backyard." This motto is engraved on the gazebo in Serenity Park.

## Description

Serenity is located right on the edge of the Carson National Forest, surrounded by canyons, foothills, woods and about eighty miles of desert. The town consists of a traffic cone factory (the Plastics Works), which claimed to be "one of the largest producers of orange traffic cones in the United States", a school, and a park. There's also a small general store that fits in one room, including a lunch counter, which is the town's only restaurant. The Serenity Public Library, a small place that resembles the size of a closet, is located in Serenity's town hall.

Every house has a treehouse, pool and basketball hoop, except for the houses with toddlers, which have a swing set and a sandbox outdoors. One road passes through Serenity: a two-lane paved ribbon its residents call "Old County Six." Serenity's streets and avenues are named Fellowship, Harmony, Amity and Unity, and the whole town is so small that you can walk from one side to the other in about nine minutes. Before anybody left Serenity, the population was 185, which included thirty kids.

## History

Serenity claims to have been founded in 1937, when in reality it was only founded with the start of Project Osiris around 1999. The Serenity Cup was said to be presented by President Roosevelt himself at the time of its founding, although that is also untrue. Steve Pritel, the surrogate father of Tori Pritel, claimed that there was never any smoke coming out of the smokestacks of the Plastics Works because the factory was a green industry that didn't pollute and that Serenity had switched to this system in 1978.

Serenity was self-proclaimed to be #1 in the USA for standard of living, and its local newspaper was known as the *Pax* (Latin for "peace"), which only published non-violent articles taken from other well-known newspapers. Every year, there was a local holiday named Serenity Day, which was meant to celebrate the day the town was founded with food and drinks, games, tug-of-war, a water polo game and more.

In *Masterminds*, five Project Osiris clones—Eli Frieden, Tori Pritel, Amber Laska, Malik Bruder and Hector Amani—escaped from Serenity and broke through the barrier in a speeding traffic cone truck, creating an enormous fireball in the sky. Shortly afterwards, Serenity was abandoned and the evidence of the project in the Plastics Works was burnt down, save for a single sheet of paper. and the remaining clones, their surrogate parents and the Surety traveled to Poseidon Resort and Water Park to hide out. The remaining residents that didn't have anything to do with Project Osiris scattered, and it is unknown exactly what happened to them.

## Previously known inhabitants of Serenity

* Peter Amani
* Tina Amani
* Bigfoot
* Melanie Brandt
* Ellen Bruder
* Henry Bruder
* Malik Bruder
* Freddie Cinta
* Mr. Cinta
* Mr. Cole
* Mrs. Cole
* Stanley Cole
* Stanley Cole's younger brother
* General Confusion
* Bryan Delaney
* Mrs. Delaney
* Tomfoolerus Dingbat
* Dodecahedron Face
* Fowler twins
* Eli Frieden
* Alexander the Grape
* Felix Hammerstrom
* Mr. Hardaway
* Mrs. Hardaway
* Randy Hardaway's sister
* Mike "Arachnophobia" Jones
* Amber Laska
* Mr. Laska
* Mrs. Laska
* Secret Agent Man
* Melissa
* Screaming Mimi
* Robbie Miers
* Major Nosehair
* Kurt Osterwald
* Mr. Osterwald
* Elizabeth Pritel
* Steve Pritel
* Tori Pritel
* Margaret Rauha
* Mrs. Rauha
* Penelope Sonas
* Ben Stastny
* Rump L. Stiltskin
* Sunshine
* Mr. Universe
* Aldwin Wo