As Rarity stepped out of the shower and onto her bathmat, she noticed that something seemed… odd. For one thing, the air was unusually thick, forcing her lungs to work extra hard and making her feel as though she were wading through a pool. Furthermore, her towels seemed… not heavier, but somehow more… massive, exhibiting more inertia than seemed reasonable for their size and weight. She could clearly feel the towel pressing against her chest with each step she took, until it reluctantly got up to speed with her.
        Finishing her jog was clearly out of the question; she was getting plenty of exercise just trying to walk at a leisurely pace. Instead, she decided to head into the main shop and continue working on her designs for summer outfits. And so, she trudged through the hallways, taking slow, deep breaths and pausing occasionally if she got too lightheaded. Every time she turned a corner, she could feel her towel pressing against her side, and the towel on her head threatened to come loose. She had no idea what was going on, but she didn't like it.
        Eventually, after several minutes, she finally made it down the into her shop. The whole room seemed still and deathly quiet, more so than it normally did before she opened it in the morning. Still, she tried to pay it little mind and only focus on her work. However, on her way to her dress display, she happened to catch a glimpse of herself in one of the mirrors above her tubs. In her reflection, she could clearly see her tail, as well as the towel wrapped around her mane, pointing straight back, waving slowly as if caught in an ocean current.
        This was strange, because she didn't feel any buoyancy. To test this, she waved her hooves in the air for a few moments, and although the air resisted her movement like water, she couldn't get any lift out of her crude paddling. And yet, as she did her strokes, she could see the hairs on her forelegs wave back and forth, as though they were under water. She shook her head. "What in the world…?"
        Despite thinking she was alone, her words of confusion did not go unnoticed. Inside her, Discord's spawn perked up at the new Vibrations. They were faster, of course, but once it had accounted for the accelerated Progression, Self noticed something else that was strange about them: they were more complicated. While the previous Vibrations had been mostly consistent in frequency and amplitude, changing only occasionally, these were constantly fluctuating. However, they were not random; there was still a consistency to them, and perhaps a pattern.
        Self wondered what kind of system could cause such a phenomenon. Unfortunately, it was just too small of a sample size. Self would have to wait for the phenomenon to reoccur several times, memorizing and analyzing each occurrence, before coming to any sort of conclusion. The answer would have to reveal itself soon, however; Self's attention span was already wavering, and the Context had so many other interesting things to investigate.
        As she passed the mirrors and headed for her dresses, Rarity was considering the possibility that she was dreaming. Everything certainly did have that dreamlike quality about it: the eerie stillness, the fluid movement, the low echoes of her hoofsteps on the lavender floor. But it was so *vivid*. Granted, it wasn't unheard of for dreams to seem like the real thing; dreams were notorious for seeming real until one awoke.
        Still, living underwater? As dreams went, it was fairly mundane. As though to reassure herself, she turned around and headed back to the mirror, fighting her towels as they refused to coöperate, the one around her mane only kept on by her hoof, and, once her hoof had successfully prevented it from flying off, her telekinesis. It occurred to her too late that she could've used one of the three mirrors around her stage and avoided that hassle.
        When she reached the mirror, she glanced at her hind legs to verify that they were, in fact, still there, and hadn't been replaced with a fish's tail. Indeed, she looked perfectly normal, except for the strange motion in her mane and tail.
        And that's when she heard the clock.
        Just ahead of her, the clock in the kitchen was tocking away. Not ticking, *tocking*, its pitch significantly lower than normal. Tock… Tock… Tock… Tock… Tock…Tock… It tocked away, way more slowly than it should. She didn't have a good point of reference, but it seemed like several seconds were passing from one tock to the next.
        She normally would've attributed this to a fatigued spring, but she knew for a fact that the clock in the kitchen was a pendulum clock, and she'd just lubricated it the previous week. Something was definitely very wrong. Deciding to investigate, she tightened her grip on her towels and headed into the kitchen.
        The tocks grew louder as she approached the clock. Unfortunately, the clock didn't have a second hand, so she couldn't verify her suspicions at first glance. She briefly considered climbing onto a chair or a fetching a ladder to inspect the clock, but she worried about either the thick air making her lightheaded or her large gut throwing her off balance, either of which could cause her to fall, possibly shattering the large segmented mirror beneath the clock. Instead, she settled for using her magic and squinting at the clock from a distance.
        Unlatching the clock from a distance was no small feat; she had to walk around to get a good view, and then stand on her hind legs, alternately propping herself up on the counter and the kitchen table. Eventually, though, she did get the front of clock free from the backplate, and then it was a simple enough matter to carefully lower it down and set it on the table for inspection, though her telekinesis seemed clumsier as the clock, like her towels, was strangely resistant to being moved.
        Indeed, the pendulum inside the clock was swinging much more slowly than it had any right to. It wasn't just a rusty pivot point either, because it showed no sign of slowing down. This was also evidence against the possibility that the air had been replaced by something much thicker, although it certainly felt like it had. Gears turning in her head, she telekinetic ally retrieved the large metallic serving spoon from its hook over the counter, observing its similar increased inertia, and floated it over to the table, where she dropped it.
        After she released her grip from the spoon, it seemed to hang in the air for a moment before it began to fall, way more slowly than could be explained by the apparent viscosity of the air. And so, Rarity just watched in befuddled amazement as it slowly gained speed until it clattered onto the table. Or rather, her brain expected it to clatter, but instead it was more of a stretched out, pitch-shifted *tak, tak, tak tak tak tak-tak-tak-tak* sound, or series of sounds. She sighed and shook her head. "Twilight, you'd better not have broken time again…" she muttered under her breath.
        There it was again! But the Vibrations were so small this time that it was difficult to make anything out. The complexity was still recognizable, but the amplitude was so low that the details had been almost entirely lost to background noise as the Vibrations propagated from the Source. From experience, Self knew that vibrations propagated more effectively among Units with smaller Separations, so it used its newfound control of the Context to reduce the Separations all of the Entities in the Superstructure, including itself this time, so as not to introduce a confounding variable. Progression would only tell if this would be effective, but now Progression knew who its master was.