Tamett blinks and takes a moment to gather his thoughts, surprised to be asked his opinion, though the quiet scratch of pen on paper doesn't stop. 

"Magnetic storms..." He sits up a little straighter, heartened by the new hypothesis. "So when we see a compass needle twitch, that could be from their presence. And in a long wire, exposed to their effects for a long time; that builds up like -"

Inspiration strikes, and he picks up a couple of the long-necked glass water bottles and takes them over to the horse-trough.

"Electricity is like a fluid, so -" He upends one bottle, giving it a twist so that a vortex forms, allowing the water to drop and the air to flow in smoothly. Then he upends the other without that twist, water glugging out slower and less regularly. "...a kind of, what's the world, turbulence like that could build up, and then when we apply heat or cold or turn off the power then that lets it start to settle back down inside, but maybe we need to leave it longer for the wires that keep having that problem."

Witred's horse glares at the disturbance.

"And we could detect that by putting a compass or some iron filings by the wires, to compare when the power is on and when the problem starts."

Lemrae nods. "Turbulence. That makes sense, it's a good thought. Compasses tend to twitch anyway when they're close to telegraph lines, of course. We'll have to keep it a short distance away from the wire to make sure we're only detecting the storm, not the transmissions. But it should work." 

He looks back towards the farmhouse. "What would be really nice is something like a seismometer connected to a compass. Something that'll make a log of where the needle's pointing. That might let us see exactly when the storm sets in. Maybe I can put one together -- but we should start with the most simple method. Compasses and iron filings."

Compasses and iron filings... do not turn up the expected effects. There are the minute twitches as a signal goes down the line, reduced to nothing further away. However, a degraded wire and a fresh one present no differences to the compass or filings, and no magnetic storm can be detected.

By now, they have some lines in the yard that undergo transient resistivity almost immediately upon being turned on again. When this happens the compass shows no deviation beyond the initial twitch, while the filings are disturbed as though by a faint breeze or dust devil rustling about the wire. It is a still day. Tamett looks queasy as he double-checks his shorthand.

Lemrae frowns, nudging a wire contemplatively with his foot. "Let's run another line, one without any cladding at all, and see how fast it degrades." He looks at Tamett. Something seems wrong.

"Are you alright?"

"I don't feel so good, sir. May I be excused?" 

He almost runs to the farmhouse, the tendons of his hand visible from how he clenches his stationery.  

Lemrae nods absently. There are stories about ideomotorists. That their bodies are controlled by spirits, that their skills cause them strange maladies, that they form a globe-spanning conspiracy to do... something or another. Most of the stories are probably nonsense, but it can't be denied that the chroniclers can behave very oddly sometimes.

Walking to the shed, Lemrae takes a length of wire without cladding which has never been used. He carries it over to the testing ground, runs it next to the wires, and turns it on, watching the ohmmeter intently.

This time, he barely has to wait a minute for the transient resistivity to begin. The ohmmeter dial slowly rises, and it seems to do so in fits and starts, almost discrete jumps. A silent movement of the air disturbs the grass.

Lemrae watches the meter tick up, then stares at the wire until his eyes hurt. "Why? Why so quickly now?" He checks the other wires. Their resistance hasn't exceeded the previous peaks. If the storm is stronger now, the wires still have some sort of hard limit of resistance.

The wire covered in tar continues to conduct completely normally. What if it's only slightly uncovered?

Taking a small pickaxe, Lemrae kneels in the dirt and begins to gingerly remove the layer from a small portion of the wire. Electricity and magnetism, Lemrae knows, travel very easily along wires. If even a small piece of the wire is exposed to the storm, the whole thing should reach maximum resistance in a few minutes. 

By now the tar from that experiment has hardened and cooled. Chipping off a small patch of it to expose bare wire again causes the resistance to rise within a couple of minutes, but unlike the previous wire there's just the one small jump in resistance. 

Over the next several minutes, there's no more increase in resistance. The dried tar at the edges of the gap does slowly start to fragment and flake away like the cladding did. It's a strangely uncomfortable process to watch.

Lemrae's eyes twitch as he watches the exposed wire. His head starts to hurt. His eyes switch to the ohmmeter, seeing the needle tick up in discrete jumps as more tar flakes away.

"This isn't a weather phenomenon", he murmurs.

What is it then? Something discrete, quantized. Something that needs access to the bare wire to induce resistance, and which exerts physical force to do so. Once a little weakness was exposed in the tar, the weakness was expanded.

Something that scared Tamett. Something inconsistent, only affecting certain parts of the world at certain times. Lemrae's eyes close as he turns the problem over in his mind. Something hard to look at. Something that messes with my vision, or my perception. Every time Lemrae looked hard at a resisting wire, his eyes started to hurt. The iron filings were disturbed, even though nothing was there. Some kind of invisible animal? Lemrae imagines a swarm of invisible rats chewing through the cladding, chewing on the wires.

Lemrae rushes to the equipment shed, grabbing a tin bucket which he fills with rocks. When he returns to the wire, the hole in the tar has grown -- but it's still smaller than the bucket. He dumps out the rocks, holds the bucket above his head and then, in a single swift motion, brings it down to cover the hole, hopefully trapping anything inside.

The inverted bucket slams down. Something or some things inside are bumping against the tin walls.

He can feel them.

A whine intrudes on the edges of his hearing, an angry tinnitus buzz. 

Holding the bucket down with one hand, Lemrae puts a heavy rock on top of it, and then begins packing around the outside with dirt and more rocks. His head darts this way and that. Something is there. He didn't catch the whole swarm. They seem... angry.

They're trying to get in, as well as out. The tar at the base of the bucket is beginning to flake.

"Someone shut off the power!" Lemrae shouts. "Now!"

Serna jumps up from his seat, spilling his infusion on himself and swearing. As an experienced electrician, he's already got a master breaker for the workshop rigged up, and in a few moments the lever is yanked down to cut all flow of current that's not battery-powered.

In that time, multiple painless cuts appear on Lemrae's extremities, only noticeable when the blood starts to flow. 

Lemrae takes a step back, his arms starting to sting. More cuts are appearing: they're attacking him now. Lemrae drops to the ground and begins to roll back and forth. He feels something cut into his back and lies down, rubbing the area along the ground to crush whatever's on him.

Whatever it is, it's about the size of a rat but it digs into his skin like a spiny crab. Fortunately, he's able to crack its carapace with his weight. When he does so, a new harsh scent oozes out, and with a sound like an exhalation the air around him stills.

Lemrae gets up, breathing heavily. He's covered in cuts, some shallow, some deep, and many of the cuts are now covered in dirt. His clothes are completely torn up -- fortunately, he was wearing his green work outfit. Lemrae limps to the house, wondering if it would be an abuse of his position to get Serna to boil some water for a bath.

Serna and Witred are already hurrying out from his earlier cry, and meet him on his way in.

"What have you done to yourself?" The nomad asks, looking at him like a madman. She grabs a roll of bandage from one pocket and hands that to Serna so the old man can start treating his cuts.

"Nothing... intentional." Lemrae pants. He bunches up the rags on his back and, working by feel, wraps the carapace in a scrap of his clothes. "Need to clean the wounds. They have dirt on them. I figured out what was causing the transient resistance. And it attacked me."

Lemrae is sitting on his bed, more or less wrapped in bandages. He's invited the others into his room: it's a little unusual, but there aren't any other soft places to sit. A scrap of his clothing is still clenched in his fist: wrapped up, containing something.

"Where did Tamett go?"

"The boy said he had to go see his teacher about something. Struck me as awful glum."

"You sometimes see cuts like this, working outside, but never so many," Serna mutters as he ties up the last of the dressings.

"Yeah. They're coming from rats. Or crabs, or something like that. You can't see them, but they cause resistance." Lemrae puts the bunched-up clothing scrap on his bedside table and pushes a finger into it. He can still feel the hard carapace inside. "I don't know if we'll be able to see this, when I open it up. Can someone get me some paint?"

"You said you were attacked. This was your attacker?" Witred asks doubtfully, standing watch at the door.

From another of her pockets she has produced a stubby pepperbox pistol, the barrels little longer than its width. As she's made no mention of having a patron, it's almost certainly unregistered and illegal.

Serna hurries to collect some grease-paint, offering can and brush, and then having second thoughts about the bedsheets and providing a wooden board for Lemrae to lay over his lap as well.