Vincent's Binoculars

Making a peace treaty? Delivering a declaration of war? Letting the wife know you've been kidnapped by space pirates? No matter what the message, I'll have it delivered in the blink of an eye.

— Vincent Glasser

Named for the famous Vincent Glasser, the term Vincent's Binoculars refers to a piece of rapid transportation technology that Glasser used to deliver messages all over Milon, the The Tristan System, and nearby ships. The technology was widely sought after until they disappeared in Milon's War on Magic.

Like many of the first settlers of Milon, Vincent Glasser was an outlaw of the Tristan System, and the first to discover chunv metal. Stories say that he used the metal to craft a pair of binoculars that he could use to magically transport himself to and from the Tristan System. Though ancient texts indicate that the first settlers of Milon did sometimes return to the Tristan System, often as pirates, there is little knowledge of what kind of technology they had, as much of it was destroyed in the War on Magic, and those who understood it guarded its secrets carefully. It is likely that "binoculars" was a code that Glasser had for some kind of singular transporter or very fast one-man ship.

Regardless of the legends, evidence indicates that Glasser did create a method of rapidly transporting from Milon to the Tristan System or to various ships nearby. Though not a pilot himself, Glasser was known for making money by rapidly delivering messages on behalf on anyone willing to pay. He soon made himself known as "The Courier," and there was no faster way to reach someone in space. Glasser even claimed his binoculars could take him directly to a specific person, given a name and a picture. Though no one, even in Glasser's time, has ever been able to replicate the technology, it is clear that it worked, as several important events depended on the timeliness of Glasser's transportation device.

It is known that Glasser passed on his transport technology to his son, who also passed it to his son, as they continued the delivery business. While there are some stories of the Glasser Boys, as they became known, transporting people, it was much more common that they transported letters or sometimes small objects. Therefore, the technology likely could not fit more than a person or two. As a growing superstition against magic, however, Glasser's enemies claimed the technology was magically powered and all definite records of it end during the War on Magic.

Most likely, the Glasser family was killed in the war and the technology was either destroyed or stolen by someone who couldn't use it. Some people, believe, however, that one of the Glassers used the binoculars to escape by transporting themselves to another place, and returning only when things were safe again. Setting aside the improbability that anyone so far away would know when the war had ended, claimed sightings of the binoculars continue to abound to this day, with the most recent being of a woman from the colony of Nideon using them. As all of these stories claim the binoculars were, in fact binoculars, rather than describing a piece of transportation equipment or a spaceship of some variety, it is unlikely. It is also unlikely the technology would have survived this long.