Stainsprings

There was a time when glass mirrors would simply reflect that which was in front of them, making them incredibly useful tools for grooming and examining one's own appearance. Due to this, they could be found in any household, with at least one in any home's bathroom. To this day they can still be found in many older buildings, useless relics though they may be.

Nobody knows exactly when or where the first of the mirrors changed, but most scholars of the topic agree that it started somewhere in Switzerland during the winter months of 1986. It was a small change, not even noticeable to the human eye, but reflections began to move just a moment before that which they were reflecting.

By the time this was properly noticed and study began, the strange temporal contagion had spread to nearly every sufficiently reflective pane of glass in the country. By year's end, every mirror in Europe and many beyond were affected.

While the physicists of the bygone era were never able to determine the cause or underlying mechanics of what they first referred to as reflective time dilation, they were able to make a number of strange discoveries about this anomalous behaviour.

The first major discovery of note was that the time delay between reflection and reality was not taking place at a fixed rate, but expanding over time.