For reasons of the upmost gravitational, it was essential that they moved the planets of the system. This they did with the Solar Swapper, a machine made to spin like a top upon a particularly dense fold of space time, and with its two-hundred-and-two arms it latched on to various celestials with claws made of sun-forged steel. It’s functions then involved undulating the arms in sinusoidal manners, orientating and translating their states until a most optimal balance was determined. With confidence, the machine composed its balance valuation by consulting the Seven Nebulic Directions. These were not true nautical directions, but indicators in the celestial heavens coloured the blackness in particular ways that one could evaluate the greater balance of the universe.

For example, the First Nebulic Direction is called Gulkoon Trix, named after a great marinater. Gulkoon Trix was the first consciousness to devise a system for marinating organic goods on the combusting surfaces of suns. Such a valuable discovery had astounding implications on the way that future civilizations functioned, for it meant that great storages of food could be tucked away inside the lick of a solar flare – or even a star latched onto the back of a cargo hauler and used to store food enough for the journey ten times over. Gulkoon Trix transformed the understanding of the sun from a hot churning elemental factory into an essential perishables storage structure for space travel. Therefore, the First Nebulic Direction is names after Gulkoon so, and it is a direction that points towards the nearest sun to whomever is the measurer of the direction.

The Second Nebulic Direction is named after a spiralling gink star. It is not made of two twin stars, as some are led to believe, but two half stars, perfectly cleaved. The masses of both halves have been measured and they do not differ by a proton’s mass. Because of their hemispherical geometry, these stars do not orbit in elliptical patterns, but orbit in half-elliptical patterns, in a similar manner to how they might look. They orbit each other for a full half circle, and then one cuts right across – draws a straight line through the orbit – back to where the orbit started. Measuring this direction is far less straightforward, because it demands a complete picture of nearby orbits, which is not always on hand to the spacetraveller unless they remember to pack their atlas. Instead, an estimate can be arrived at by finding a loose corner in a spatial manifold and – whipping it like a dusty rug – count the waves of the ensuing harmonic frequencies.

The Solar Swapper, being a machine of intergalactical girth, is well-equipped to measure the Second Nebulic Direction without such approximate methods.

The other five of the directions are all very related, each one represents one of the Five Essential Frequencies. Some creatures have eyes across the entire spectrum, glaring great gapes into the spiking microwaves, casting their eyes upon the broad undulations of a gravity ripple. They see it all. And when asked, what colours? there replies are vague. But a student of the Five Essential Frequencies will understand that every possible colour for a cortical existence can be decomposed into a basis along which each axis we have one frequency. Take, aqua blue, a common pigment in young planetary nebulas chocked full copper. By means of spectral interleaving, we see that this brilliant hue is but ten parts Bluster Orange, six parts Und, one part Openeaver, six parts Majestic Ezwine, and no parts Eed.

Upon each of its two-hundred-and-two arms are two-hundred-and-one optical lenses, embedded with a wet wiring that auto-computes by declaring its self-awareness to nearby photons. These eyes are observant, and can see Und like a clear day, draw you a picture full of Openeaver and Majestic Ezwine, or use Eed to move you in emotional manners most dense. And Bluster Orange, why the Solar Swapper is quite the artist here, capable of erecting a visual in the spatial constraints of only an atom’s shell.

With the Seven Nebulic Directions at hand, the Solar Swapper performs its tasks with a great passion, which was the intention of its creators, who themselves were a passionate species. They lived in a curvilinear planetoid, yet fully-formed, and they could only live upon one side of their planetoid for the edges were sharp and the object was flat. Because the pull of gravity was paper-thin in any one place on the planetoid, the entities of this civilization evolved to be long and thin, so as to have their mass well-pulled along their entire body. On the opposite side of their planetoid lived a second civilization, but they evolved in a very opposite way. Rather than they become the occupation of this wafer planetoid, the planetoid became the occupiers of them, for they grew to the size of moons and were dense with high-mass elements such as plutonium or uranium. Every stage of civilization they went through, but did while their planet orbited them.

This was inconvenient for the civilization living on the planetoid surface, whom had now come to call themselves The Wide Ones. The Wide Ones struggled with the sheer consumption of The Orbular Ones, who required large areas of wheat crop to sustain their gigantic existence. Soon, as both civilizations exponentiated to the thousands of billions, they realized it was not possible to live in harmony, and a war began. During that time, the supernovas in the sky could not be trusted, for they might be the resulted of the clash and bash of The Wide Ones and The Orbular Ones, not the product of overcooked stars. Many died in this time, and the population of both The Wide Ones and The Orbular Ones was halved twice over.

But the war was suddenly ended as quickly as it had began: The Wide Ones, riddled with a number of wise engineers, tasked them to build a machine which could not kill in the traditional definition of the word, but kill in the unconventional sense. You see, The Orbular Ones persisted in their existence by thread-thin balancing of their in-between gravitational relations. A billion spherical entities in one place would create chaos if left to let fly, but The Orbular Ones very careful managed their interrelations so as to stay entirely static in a globular manner.

But The Wide Ones’s machine which they named The Shuffler, but it was in fact a Solar Swapper, ended this quickly. With its many-fold arms, it picked up and moved only a few of The Orbular Ones, but a few was enough, for the tensegrity structure they had formed through their gravity pairing was non-robust and brittle. Within a planetoid day, The Orbular Ones were now The Outward Ones, for they had been shot to the eight furthest corners of space through only the forces of chaos alone. Such a success did not stop The Wide Ones and they were unrelenting in their jealousy of spherical celestials. They moved, for gravitational reasons, more and more of the universe about them, swapping planets, rearranging systems, frazzling the nebulas, until – yes, it was in a way that suited them only.