Grif was most surprised to find himself in a state of disbelief about the inversion of his ship. It was something that, he, being such an adept porthand, of a dialect that spoke in dials, toggles, and that one control that was like the nob of a radio but turned in small clicks, he, should not have been so perturbed by.

A complete ship inversion? That’s standard work.

From the inside of the magnesium tongues of the Mardiz Nebula he thought he had spotted a face against the backdrop of that speckled abyss. Grif was one to capture such experiences with a small camera he carried that had a telescope lens and could capture a good range of light waves. Ultraviolet worked wonders to tease the texture from the great space clouds, rising their complexities to the surface like the crinkling of a cloth realizes the purpose of the threading pattern.

But: a complete ship inversion?

It was a face with a mood, and it did not take kindly to being captured on the surface of photo-sensitive paper. First it scowled, then it growled, and Grif had requested of this gaseous countenance if, please, it could drop that scowl or, even, produce a grin, for it just was not pleasant to have a photo wasted on an unhappy gas. The nebula, whose name was Mardiz, and who could not speak because it was a nebula of intergalactic proportions and in fact was constructed of thousands of clashing suns that burned and tore at the fabric around them, creating great swellings of unwell gravitation mounds that fed hungrily on the surfaces of nearby celestials. Mardiz could not speak, but it felt that such behaviours were of lesser-evolutions, for, if one is so small and so non-omnicient, then of course one must learn to speak. How else to survive if not work together in your worthless, tiny world, yapping and slapping, clapping the lungs or clucking the tongues, just to get attention or get help or hear about the weather on the other side of the planet.

Mardiz required of language nothing, for Mardiz was a nebula, hot and full and was about the width of one-thirtieth of the Milky Way, so it did not really have to squint much to see what was going on about it.

Despite Mardiz’s vantage point on existence, Mardiz had quirks for a nebula. Pulsars, for example, drove Mardiz into a rage, for Mardiz always had to turn a different way when one appeared, otherwise Mardiz could never sleep. The gravitational constant, too, this upset Mardiz and it had rallied to get this changed, but with not much support, Mardiz had resorted to just being begrudging about it at small gatherings. But, of all the things that Mardiz found to be most challenging to live with, it was photos – photos of itself – that would not do – would not do!

And so, in a fit of plasmatic fury, frightening fluid and mostly blue in colour due to the amount of ions present at the time, Mardiz had bore one of its many eyes upon Grif as he had pointed his fine camera towards the nebula. At the time, Mardiz was experimented with a lift of his cheeks, a draw out of the chin, slight tightening of the forehead to hid the signs of age, even – and Mardiz had only recently been introduced to such a technique – a smize, which was a false smile, purely disguised behind the raising of the eyebrows to give the impression of an uplifted face.

Mardiz, the nebula, was attempting to smile.

But Grif, he and his camera, this brought up all sorts of rude words which Mardiz had never spoken for Mardiz had no use of language. But these words were still there and they took charge of Mardiz’s expression, piloted it in a relative downward direction, smearing it like wet clay. It became more shadowy, that face of Mardiz, done with great intention by folding the swirls of gas upon themselves as a baker might treat a good croissant dough, until the whole thing was dark and gloomy throughout.

Grif was disgusted and yelled through the megaphones of his ship: “Please, put back that smile. Your drowsy, droopy face is unreasonable.”

That was when Mardiz chose to invert Grif’s ship.

It was done quickly, as most inversions go, and fuelled by a large supply of gravity that Mardiz had kept near for such occasions. As with the hand of a surgeon, the operation is so fast that not even the body has time to pretend it is in a fatal situation. The seams of the ship were steel bolts with round tops. There were five-hundred, and each one popped right out. Like paper under command of an origami orchestrato, the hull was folded, thrice round, and once more to make four. Grif blinked in disbelief and looked around him: his arms were there, and the arms of his chair were there. The maze of dials were truthfully blinking interesting and unclear information, but the only difference was that it was frightfully cold now. For when he swivelled on his red leather throne, he did not see behind him his kitchenette, or either side of him a port window and a drinks dispenser, but in fact an infinite void speckled with stars and a great frowning mug of a nebula scowling back.

Most inconvenient were the various furnishing that drifted off. His blue titanium thermos, still full with a warm tea, he watched take orbit around a nearby moon. His only two hand towels joined soon after, and eventually a small ring had formed around the blue moon made of a vintage 80s armchair, all his goldware cutlery, a stone statue of Barus Minor, and about three-hundred-and-twelve leaves of his notebook torn apart and no longer in order.

I should have numbered the pages, thought Grif to himself. At the same time as that thought, a button on his port display made a click sound and he swivelled back around and continued right past it for he had forgotten that now he was outside, he was full of angular momentum. Halfway though his fifth spin he stuck out his arm and caught the panel, stopping himself abruptly. He slammed the blinking button.

“Grif! Grif!” it was a voice made of a trash bag full of tin cans. The voice of Grif’s very good friend, Mof Duxley.

“Mof! Now is not the time,” spoke Grif, a bit hurriedly but certainly angry, “I’ve just been inverted.”

Mof paused and then rung some tinny notes, “A complete ship inversion? You?” Grif thought he heard Mof laugh, or perhaps it was just the crackle of the connection.

“I was caught by surprise by a quick-witted and complex-faced nebula. Nothing to laugh at! Perhaps I was tired from poor sleep last night.”

Mof either ignored the excuses or had more desperate things to discuss: “Grif! I have in my sights something quite incredible: a nebula, blue and green and so much colour, but – but! This is no ordinary nebula, I believe. For, I see it has something one might call a visage, a countenance, a face – and it expresses with this in a great many ways!”

Now, Mof was a machine made of parts. Collected, each part was, from all eight corners of the universe such that depending on which was you looked at him, his shadow cast the figure of eight different sorts of machines. For example, from his anterior view, he looked like a yellow lifting crane, or from his dorsal view, an assembly line claw for binding of the soles of shoes, and so on. Eventually, Mof’s creator had thought better of the idea of creating such a multipurpose machine that she had thrown it to the nearest orbit. There Mof drifted until he was struck with the realization that perhaps no longer did he need to drift idle as per his programming, and took off, landing on a small village in a hillside. Those at the village taught Mof most of what he knows now which is fishing, baking, and how to weave a sturdy basket.

“Mof, your coordinates?” it was Grif, who had a suspicion there were very few nebulas in their galaxy whom could scowl. Mof provided his position relative to the seventeen closest pulsars, which put him precisely in the Dreary Drop.

“What are you doing there?” asked Grif, ducking as a china mug whizzed past his head and out into the abyss.

“I was seeking a smell. I’ve heard the quarks smell a little different here due to the nature of their spins – slightly tilted by the spacial fabric.” Mof coughed here and said excuse me, but a cloud of dust had just passed his nose, lifted from the table. When Grif asked if his gravity aurator was broken, Mof replied in the negative – he said “my ship has just been entirely inverted, by, I believe, the gaseous mug. Everything is all loose and adrift.”

“Hold steady, I’m coming,” and Grif tried to twiddle the dial, turn the engines and crank the window blinds, but being so inverted it felt far too foreign to control and he gave up. “My ship is totally useless, I just can’t turn a wheel left when I must go right.”

“Mine too,” said Mof and crackled a little bit after saying this. “What do we do?”