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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Shayuri" data-source="post: 6675448" data-attributes="member: 4936">Death Otter blinked at the crazy old guy as he waddled off. Usually you had to be on some freeway onramp in the city to get a sideshow like that. But hey, free Dew included! Sadly, Cyril was out too fast for D0 to see what the guy behind the counter would be willing to do. Truth be told, she didn't get a lot of stares like that...but hey, everyone was someone's fetish, right?As she sauntered out of the gas station, already sipping at the straw of her giant drink, she tallied up the score. Crazy Indian. Free drink. Cyril got his nuts smashed.Yep, we have a new winner for Best Pee Break Ever. BPBE was dead, long live BPBE.Funny thing with the lights though.As Otter piled back into the car, noting with some amusement that Cyril had consigned himself to the dungeon, she went over in her head what might cause that sort of flickery light hoodoo. Leaving out stupid random stuff like brownouts or surges or line noise. You could, she thought, use a power line to transmit a signal. And if the amplitude of the signal was strong enough, it might cause fluctuations in power to devices served by it. Why in the name of the Spaghetti Monster anyone would want to do that though was beyond her. No one had equipment designed to read signals in power lines. You'd be screaming to a deaf audience.Induction maybe? Powerful localized EM field? But something like that would affect portable electronics long before it had a noticeable effect on a power line.Was she overthinking it? Maybe the apparent line noise was just...line noise. But since it seemed to be following them, that'd mean that someone was intentionally causing it. Someone who knew where they were, and had some kind of access...legit or otherwise...to the network that controlled the local power grids. Which they then used to...just sort of troll them?Again, yeah it was technically possible, but why? Otter was no stranger to elaborate jokes, but generally the more elaborate they were, the better they had to be to make it worthwhile. If she hacked multiple power grids, including one run by the correctional system, while simultaneously keeping tabs on a group of people moving around in a car, you can bet she wouldn't just have 'oooo ghost lights, scaaaaaaaary' in mind. It would have to be epic to justify that level of effort.Admittedly, not every hacker could boast her work ethic. Still.Hm. What about the FCC? They'd know where they were going, giving them a good idea of where to look. And they could plausibly have some kind of device that would be powerful enough to make that sort of disruption. A high tech listening device or other remote observation doodad? Some kind of jamming to make sure Otter was playing nice?Jamming. Hm. That was an interesting notion. She'd have to look into that.</blockquote>

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