The cabal has gone through many hardships in the past weeks. The apparent loss of Stephen, their visits to the Digital Web, and the urgency of their mission has shaped their outlook and firmed their resolve.
The first visit to the Digital Web led to an argument with a capricious catepillar who insisted they were insane. Their objective was to find the Red Kings, one sleeping and one falling asleep. It is their belief that the original Red King is in fact Alan Turing, creator of the Web itself and pioneer of computer technology. They believe Red King Who is About to Sleep is an agent of the Technocracy, now gone rogue and attempting to destroy the fabric of the Digital Web by replacing Alan Turing. The Catepillar gave them some arguments refuting the pausibility of their theories then vanished.
It is here where the cabal lost their first member, Stephen. His insatiable curiosity led him to ingest some of the toadstool the catepillar had occupied. Without apparent reason, Stephen has vanished, only appearing intermitently to vomit and speak of his experiences while gone. The cabal has yet to investigate this matter, but other matters have captured their attention.
While following a path in the Wonderland Digital construct, the remaining troupe members came across a burning cottage, narrowly avoiding those who had destroyed it. A lizard-like creature, clothed in a housecoat, lay outside the home. Ebony, now appearing as a manga version of Rogue fromthe X-Men thanks to Naga's supercomputer HAL, probed the creatures past with her temporal senses. The scene she played out before the cabal was an unspeakable, yet ridiculous, atrocity.
The lizard had been forcefully removed from her home and summarily executed by a group of man-like playing cards with plasma rifles. All were stunned by this act of visciousness. All were stunned when two of the perpetrators appeared from the wood behind the cottage, rifles brought to bear.
Only the quick thinking of Naga Rom and his trusty AI, HAL, allowed the group to escape without violence. the cabal once again found themselves in Naga's computer lab. All but Veronica, who had been nabbed by the murderous playing cards as HAL opened the gate for their escape. HAL, in an effort to belay violence in the lab, had sealed their pursuers in a seperate drive and compressed their forms.