Before an active volcano erupts, there is a calming of seismic activity. The longer the quiet, the more extreme the eruption. However, the wave of calm the kajunganauts felt wasn’t seismic. It wasn’t physical at all. It shot out from the final open point of the celestial pulsar gate deep into the roots of their consciousness. A few tranquil moments seemed like hours before their peace of mind was ruptured by a violent psychic explosion.

A terrible primordial being — a vast and shapeless force formed of chaos and nothingness — rushed through the pulsar gate. It was a titan from the preconscious world. Dead and dormant for an eternity, it was awoken by the space rangers' amateur handling of alien technologies. By merely existing in the universe it caused a shockwave to race through the astral plane, corrupting the essence of consciousness in this dimension.

As the blast reached the technomancers, it completely disrupted the normal constructs of their minds. Their spirits stripped bare, exposed raw to the constructs of reality. With no mental frame with which to view the world, their senses ran amok. An ocean of shifting patterns overwhelmed their vision. Colors morphed into a cascade of gray shades, infinitely more granular but ultimately irrelevant. Their acute hearing was assaulted by unescapable otherworldly sounds. The cardinal directions inverted and twisted. Pain and pleasure were rendered meaningless amidst the torrent of haunting sensations. On the physical plane, nothing seemed out of the ordinary other than four humanoids quickly devolving into a vegetative state. With long stares and beads of drool, their bodies animated only with a slow subtle sway.

As their minds rapidly decayed, the sonic sorcerers mustered what little willpower they had left and stumbled to their mod-rigs. A soft light began to glow as they booted up their CMIs (Cyber Mind Interface). These hard-light terminals — an unstable tech plagued with UI problems but the fastest known way to program — allowed for direct communication between mind and machine. Unfortunately, both Cloudy Kid and Ryote fumbled with their devices and failed to obtain a full neural link. Their bodies reeled as their minds collapsed, trapped in a changing world they weren’t designed to comprehend.

The remaining rhythm operators began to code as quickly as they could under the horrible metaphysical duress. They were attempting to program virtual realities in which they could upload their minds and hide their psyches from the ethereal entity’s onslaught. With limited time they could only assemble rudimentary networks to house their essence — a stripped down analog of reality. Once inside, they were able to connect to VIBENET. And once again, enlisted the help of other technomancers operating within the cybersphere. This newly formed crew of highly trained electro-hackers assembled to create a plan. If they could reverse engineer the meta-changes, they could create a polyhedral plasma-tomb where they could trap the ancient energy for eons to come.

Hidden deep within the algorithms of cyberspace, they began to hack and take control of sensor stations positioned inside and outside the psychic burst radius. Through remote photon-viewers they observed and recorded the alterations being made on the astral plane. Blindly trusting their instincts and deficient technology, they created a script that reflected the heinous blob’s contortions of the mental universe. The only thing left to do was lure the primordial cloud into their virtual prison. But they couldn’t do it without capable agents in the physical world. Will the digitized beat brigade find a way to rouse their drooling husks before their brains atrophy and they become stuck in cyberspace forever?