The blazing sun hung overhead. The mountaintop was bare, with someone having arranged stones into a circle. Another Rick, draped in a white bedsheet, sat cross-legged at the center of the stone ring.
Around him stood Mortys dressed the same way. Every one of them was pale-faced, yet wore a satisfied smile.
"You came?"
Even without opening his eyes, Rick sensed Morty's arrival. He called the boy's name in a gentle voice, like spring rain nourishing all things.
"I shouldn't have."
Morty had already noticed that something was wrong with those counterparts. Aside from their eerie smiles, there were plenty of empty syringes and tinfoil scattered around them. Thinking it over, he could easily tell that these guys were high right now.
"It is only natural for people to come and go in this world, yet you, foolish child, cannot see through it." Rick, seated at the center of the stone ring, turned his hands over and assumed a pose of holding a flower beneath his nose as he spoke words brimming with philosophy.
"Is that why you drugged the Pocket Mortys?" Though Morty resisted with his words, his legs still carried him toward Rick.
For some reason, this old man in white cloth seemed impossibly charming. Every gesture of his bewitched the heart.
"No, you are mistaken. I have no desire to attend the Quartz Congress, and I firmly oppose all hegemonic activities." Rick smiled faintly, his expression filled with Zen. "Human thought should be free. Restricting the body does not restrict the soul. What I wish to do is not make you join Obamacare, but grant you freedom."
After listening to that tongue-twister, Morty wore that Tibetan fox expression again. "Huh?"
"Yes. Close your eyes, tie on a rubber tourniquet, then give yourself an injection with this syringe."