"Well," Sebastian muttered, his voice a corrupted buzz of overlapping audio files. "That was definitely one way to clear my schedule."
He slowly turned his masked head.
Hovering just a few yards away in the dark, swirling purple smog was a single, brilliant pillar of pure blue light. It was the astral tether. It was the only clean, uncorrupted thing in a sector filled with millions of tons of floating garbage.
And stepping out of that light, looking like a ghost made of starlight, was Valerie.
Her Astral Avatar was completely translucent, radiating a soft, warm glow that aggressively pushed back the toxic ambient radiation of the Juncture. She didn't have her physical body here. She was just raw, unfiltered soul-data projected across millions of miles of empty space from the basement of Sanctuary.
