Serenity Hills

When Miki woke up for her morning run, she hadn’t really expected her day to south. She certainly hadn’t expected it to go so quickly.

It had started off simple enough. Wake up, clean up, get dressed, grab her iPod, and run. And really nothing was wrong with that. Nothing was wrong at all until her path took her toward the small park in their happy corner of perfection. Normally she would bypass the park and stick to the sidewalks of the neighborhoods, but this time she’d felt the desire to burn some more energy along with the extra calories she knew she had acquired since November.

She was jogging along the runners’ path at the park and humming along to Paramore’s ‘Decode’ when she found herself stumbling over something. She tumbled forward, narrowly catching herself with her hands before she could land face first on the pavement. As it was, her palms and her knees were now scrapped and bruised from the fall. She winced at the damage before checking the cause of her physical malfunction.

It was a pair of feet.

Miki’s eyes widened and her injuries were forgotten. She crawled closer and found the feet were attached to a very still body hidden behind the bushes. She got to her feet, carefully not to touch anything, and pulled out her phone even as she stared at the still form.

It was a woman, or what appeared to be a woman judging by her body shape. Miki couldn’t judge by the face because there was simply no head to look at. There was also no blood on the scene and that only caused the young investigator more confusion. That wasn’t possible. Was it? At least she thought that until she realized that it wasn’t a body but a broken mannequin.

Miki snapped a few photos with her phone anyway. It was a little odd even if it wasn’t world shattering. It would make for a semi interesting topic of conversation at any rate. She shrugged and prepared to go on her merry way when something hidden further in the bushes caught her eye. She crouched and pushed aside the greenery for a better look and realized she had found the head. This oddity still wouldn’t have been a bother except something nagged at her mind as she stared at the cold dead eyes of the mannequin head.

“Oh shit.” She muttered as realization dawned on her. The mannequin’s face looked exactly like one of her missing persons. It could have been a coincidence but Miki wasn’t so sure. She snapped some more pictures and pulled a few strands of the hair off of the head. After a moment of debate and checking to see if anyone was around, Miki pulled out a small pocket knife and proceeded to scrape a few bits of mannequin ‘flesh’ off the body to have tested. Thankfully she never went anywhere without at least one or two Ziploc bags... though she had to admit that it was usually so she could steal extra food from buffets in restaurants… Still, they were also handy for times like this.

Once she was finished, she headed back to her house as nonchalant as she could with the intent of having her new items analyzed while filling Egon in on her new lead. Maybe they’d find out what had happened to these missing persons yet. A part of her couldn’t help but be giddy at that thought. She may have just found a real and true lead! South or not, it was still a better way to start the day than the hum drum perfection that life in Serenity usually was.

But damn did her hands hurt from that fall. When she called Egon she was so going to whine and try to get some sympathy for it. And if she didn’t get any, she was going to make her revenge for Halloween’s costume fiasco even more painful to him.