Towards the mountains and jungles of Chiapas

Modest Hostel, Anonymous Streets of Mexico City 

The decision to go to Cancún, driven by the longing to find Aria, had seemed final the night before. But the dawn brought with it a new and unsettling perspective for Seraphina. While Rafael still slept, she had been reviewing, over and over, the digital copies of Jacobo Grinberg's files that Ruth Cerezo had given them. There was something in the notes about Tampico, in Grinberg's obsession with Porfirio Díaz and the strange phenomena of that coastal city, that would not leave her in peace.

When Rafael awoke, he found her gazing blankly at Grinberg's diagrams, a deep furrow of concentration on her brow.

"Diego..." she began, her voice soft but with a new undertone of conviction. "Last night... I know our hearts were screaming at us to go to Cancún, directly to where we believe Aria might be. But I've been going over this..." She pointed to the files. "The Tampico matter. Grinberg's insistence that there was a fundamental key there, something beyond simple hurricane protection or an isolated UFO base. I feel that we still need more information, a crucial piece of the puzzle that we will only find there, before we face whatever is happening in the Cancún vortex and wherever our daughter may be. If we don't understand the root of the manipulation, how can we effectively combat it?"

Rafael, though his paternal instinct urged him southeast, knew and deeply respected Seraphina's intuition. It had saved their lives on innumerable occasions. He saw her struggle with the decision, her love for Aria pulling her in one direction, but the wisdom of a warrior of the White Brotherhood, and now this new, inexplicable premonition, pulling in another.

"If your heart, your tona," he said, using an ancient Nahuatl word for destiny or spiritual essence they sometimes used between themselves, "tells you there is something crucial there, my love, then we will go to Tampico first. Let it be a quick stop, but a necessary one. Aria will wait for us. And we will reach her better prepared."

Thus, with a new and precarious plan, they undertook the arduous journey in their all-terrain vehicle, not towards the Riviera Maya, but northward, towards the coast of Tamaulipas. Endless hours on dusty roads and bustling highways, always vigilant, always aware that any mistake could alert their pursuers. Fatigue was a constant companion, but the new lead, the feeling of following an important thread in Grinberg's research, infused them with renewed energy.

They arrived in Tampico as the afternoon of the next day was waning. The port city was bustling with its usual activity, but there was a strange, almost imperceptible calm in the air, as if it were enveloped in a protective bubble against the elements and perhaps, against other things.

Following the coordinates and descriptions from Grinberg's files, they located the site of what he had identified as the first, or one of the first and most significant, Coca-Cola bottling plants in Mexico. It was an old, red-brick building in an industrial area near the port, now perhaps a warehouse or a different factory, but the original structure was unmistakable to those who knew what to look for.

While Rafael discreetly kept watch, Seraphina concentrated, extending her magical sensitivity, trying to connect with the echoes of the past and Grinberg's theories.

"Here it is," she murmured finally, her eyes fixed on a particularly ancient section of the factory wall, as if she could see through it. She opened Grinberg's notes on her device. "Jacobo not only suspected the city's anomalous protection from hurricanes, nor Díaz's possible alien nature. He investigated consumption patterns, the key industries established here under his mandate, searching for... connecting threads."

She read aloud a passage from Grinberg: "The massive introduction of certain consumer products, apparently innocuous, coincided with periods of... 'social pacification' or changes in collective consciousness. Coca-Cola, for example. A beverage that, for most of its history and especially during its aggressive global expansion in the 20th century, had contained enormous quantities of refined sugar, and other components whose long-term interaction with the human nervous system and its energy fields was only beginning to be understood by independent science."

Rafael looked at her, beginning to understand the terrible implication. "Sugar... in those industrial quantities..." he recalled his own Brotherhood teachings on how certain processed foods and substances could affect the body's and mind's energetic vibration. "Grinberg says it here," he pointed to another passage in his own copy of the files. "'Something that lowered people's vibrational frequency on a massive level,' Jacobo wrote, 'making them more docile, more focused on the material and immediate, less connected to their subtle perceptions, to their intuition, to Gaia's voice. Easier to control, to herd'."

"And Mexico, unfortunately," Seraphina added with profound sadness, reading another excerpt, "had become, over the decades, one of the largest per capita consumers of this beverage in the world. A perfect tool, if one thinks with the twisted minds of our enemies, for large-scale energetic suppression, disguised as pleasure, modernity, a symbol of 'lifestyle'."

As they processed this horrible possibility – a globally beloved beverage as a potential instrument in a century-long plan to facilitate Cthulhu's return by weakening human consciousness and vibrational frequency – another set of Grinberg's notes caught their attention. They were analyses of anomalous consumption patterns within Mexico itself.

"But look at this," Rafael said suddenly, pointing to a map of the republic with certain regions highlighted in red by Grinberg. "There's a specific region where consumption isn't just high... it's disproportionate, almost ritualistic. Where the drink has been integrated in strange ways into indigenous religious ceremonies, sometimes even replacing traditional offerings like posh or balché."

Seraphina followed the indication, and a shiver ran down her spine as she read the name of the highlighted state. "Chiapas," she whispered. "The place where, according to the most recent and alarming data Jacobo was able to gather before he disappeared, the most Coca-Cola is consumed per Mexican, and where it is, in some remote highland communities, almost like a form of worship for its inhabitants, a status symbol and an offering to the 'new gods'."

They looked at each other, a new and terrible piece of the puzzle fitting into place. If the "frequency lowering" was real and deliberate, and if Tampico had been a nexus for the introduction of these tools of manipulation under the aegis of an alien-influenced Porfirio Díaz, then Chiapas, with its almost sacred and massive consumption, could be... the current epicenter of that influence, a place where its effects were most visible, where the connection to the Earth was being actively suppressed, or perhaps... where the resistance or the deepest truth about this manipulation might be even more jealously hidden.

Their investigation in Tampico, confirming one of Jacobo Grinberg's most disturbing and seemingly mundane theories, now led them inexorably southward, towards the mountains and jungles of Chiapas, in search of another link in the chain of the cosmic conspiracy.