Gentoo invalid profile

So. Been going at the gentoo install without proper instructions until very recently. After emerge-webrsync stage of the install a message pops up saying "your current profile is invalid". It appears to be a blocker on emerging to kick off the rest of the install. This doesn't seem to be an issue with the laptop (NIC is working and changing ssd does nothing for this issue) and I've validated the SHA-512 against the DIGEST.asc associated with the downloaded tarball. It seems unlikely the livecd I'm using to install would have been rewritten over this network connection. eselect is functioning, and experimentation with the 35 defaults yields no results. Have created a custom profile but am having issues having it appear on eselect. Confused somewhat on the documentation for this, continuing to experiment. Suggestions welcome. Have already run eselect profile list and eselect profile set for the default profiles. The issue persists after an emerge --sync. In fact the issue first occurred after an emerge --sync. Have readlink'd the make.profile in portage and tried a few different symlinks. Resources: * https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Profile_(Portage) * https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Project:Eselect/User_guide * https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/User:Sakaki/Sakaki%27s_EFI_Install_Guide/Installing_the_Gentoo_Stage_3_Files