Somewhere in the Slums, we find Gemini and El Mariachi Muerte stood at the back of a crowd. This crowd is surrounding a very passionate young man, pastor of yet another church preaching salvation to its followers.
“Look at them,” Gemini breaks the silence, her tone holding an icy contempt. “Like sheep, willingly led to slaughter.”
“By a shepherd of lies,” El Mariachi concurred, a smirk tugging at his features.
“Precisely,” Gemini remarks acidly, her eyes still fixated on the antics of the pastor. “They are infected, decaying from within. A plague more lethal than any virus, this religious fervor.”
“Much like Lionel Troy,” Muerte comments.
“Indeed. The very man who turned Colt Ramsey, a once pursuer of truth into a messenger of treachery.” Gemini’s gaze turns colder, if possible, at the mention of the names. “They are both puppets, playing on strings held by the great puppeteer, a purveyor of false hope.”
“Yet, instead of freeing themselves, these people grip tighter to their shackles,” Death sighs, “Enslaved by fear. Enticed by promise.”
“Music and ruin, they dance hand in hand. One unearths, the other buries.” Gemini muses. Her gaze turns towards the crowd, the bodies swaying to the rhythm of the pastor’s words, minds infected by his poisonous rhetoric.
“Offering their throats to the wolf under the guise of salvation,” El Mariachi Muerte laments.
“And willingly too,” Gemini counters, her cold gaze softening a tad at the sight of the crowd blindly offering themselves to the macabre dance of pain and penance. “For what are they but clay molded by the hands of the fearful? Rendered weak and malleable by centuries of painstaking indoctrination. Reduced to mere vessels for an infection far darker than any physical pestilence.”
“The pestilence of the mind,” The Mariachi whispers, going quiet.
Gemini turns her eyes back to the pastor. With a cold, contemplative expression, she assessed not the puppeteer but the strings that manipulated him.
“But what is pestilence without resistance?” Gemini questions, her tone holding a strange blend of bitterness and solemn hope.
A small smirk etches onto Gemini’s features as an answer lingers in the air.
“Lionel Troy, standing on a platform exactly like this one, not so different from the pastor here, spins his web of deceit among the masses. And who lives under his spell, but our dearest Colt Ramsey? Just another man entranced, swaying to the rhythm of Troy’s words as fervently as this flock to their pastor.”
Her voice is icy, full of contempt, her eyes never leaving the congregation.
“And just like them, Ramsey is not his own master anymore. He’s a ventriloquist’s doll, echoing the puppeteer’s words, never truly understanding that he too, is a victim of the greatest pestilence of all – the corruption of the mind.”
“Remember, Mariachi,” Gemini whispers, her voice carrying a cold, chilling promise, “Pestilence is not the disease, but the carrier. And sometimes, the cure can be far more devastating than the disease itself.”
She smiles.
“For Lionel Troy and Colt Ramsey, their reckoning awaits in the shadows of their own corruption.”
To be continued…