Omnivision Glasses

The Omnivision Glasses turn hidden threats into visible scenes, making them more than a means of seeing at a distance. Professor Hora lends them to Momo when the Men in Gray are searching for her, and later uses them to show her the full scale of the siege around Nowhere House. At the end, he watches Momo and her friends through the same glasses after time has returned. Their changing images trace the movement from pursuit, through encirclement, to reunion.

Appearance and Operation

Professor Hora identifies the glasses as the reason he does not need to leave the house to watch Momo and her friends. He removes the small, gold-rimmed spectacles and offers them to Momo. The object is modest in appearance, but the view it affords is anything but ordinary: it opens onto distant streets and events beyond her immediate surroundings.

The glasses do not provide instant, effortless sight. When Momo first puts them on, she can make out only whirling colours, lights, and shadows; the disorientation makes her feel dizzy. Professor Hora says that this confusion is usual at first. Standing behind her chair, he gently adjusts the frame, and the scene suddenly comes into focus. The transition from blur to clarity gives the glasses a distinct operation in the story: seeing through them requires a brief adjustment before the concealed scene becomes legible.

Momo’s First View of the Men in Gray

Once the view sharpens, Momo sees the Men in Gray and their three limousines at the edge of the district where the strange white buildings begin. They are pushing the cars backwards. The detail is striking because it presents the searchers not simply as a distant presence but in the midst of an odd, concrete action, visible to Momo from Professor Hora’s house.

Looking farther across the city, she sees other gray figures in the streets. They talk and gesture excitedly, apparently passing information among themselves. Professor Hora explains that they are discussing Momo and cannot understand how she managed to escape. The glasses therefore reveal both the searchers’ physical movements and the immediate consequence of her escape: the Men in Gray have noticed her absence and are trying to account for it. What had been a danger outside her view becomes an organized pursuit spread across the city.

The Siege Around Nowhere House

Later, Professor Hora asks Momo to look through the glasses again before answering her question about whether the Men in Gray can force him to hand over time. As before, colour and shape initially swim before her eyes; then the besieging force comes into focus. The Men in Gray stand shoulder to shoulder in a long, unbroken line across the mouth of Never Lane and around the district of snow-white houses. Nowhere House lies at the cordon’s midpoint. The glasses disclose the scale and arrangement of the threat: the house is not merely approached or watched, but surrounded.

Momo also notices that the figures look misty. She first suspects a problem with the lenses or her own unfamiliarity with them, but recognizes that the blur is in the scene itself. The mist rises from the streets, dense in some places and only beginning to form in others. The Men in Gray stand absolutely still, wearing bowlers, carrying briefcases, and smoking gray cigars. Their smoke does not disperse in the glass-still air; it clings to the streets and climbs the walls, ledges, cornices, and windowsills of the white houses. It gathers into a bluish-green fog bank that rises until it encircles Nowhere House like a wall.

Momo takes off the glasses and looks toward Professor Hora, ending her view of the besiegers. He then explains the stakes that the visible cordon alone cannot show: although the Men in Gray cannot reach him personally, they could subject the world to an evil worse than anything they have inflicted so far. They hope that this threat will force him to yield. In this scene, the glasses present the siege as both a material enclosure and part of a larger coercion. They reveal the danger to Momo while Professor Hora supplies its purpose.

Witnessing After Time Returns

After time returns, Professor Hora wakes from his first sleep ever. Still pale, as though recovering from a serious illness, he watches Momo and her friends through the Omnivision Glasses. This final use reverses the earlier views: the object that made pursuit and the threat to Nowhere House visible now frames a gathering of friends after the danger has passed.

For once, Professor Hora had been unable to watch what happened. When Cassiopeia touches his foot, he removes the glasses and sees her beside him; he tells her that she and Momo did a fine job and asks her to tell him all about it. The moment distinguishes seeing from knowing: even a device that lets its wearer observe distant events cannot replace an account from someone who was there. Across the story, the glasses expose scenes hidden from Momo, but their closing significance is more modest and intimate. They let Professor Hora look in on the reunion, while Cassiopeia’s presence supplies the personal report he missed.