I hope y'all are staying healthy. I will try to get some writing done to help y'all stave off boredom. It's about the only thing I can do from quarantine myself. I'm working on CoLu week for next month as well. Prompts are in my profile if anyone is interested.

Fern McGarden: 8 (Loke, Levy)
Lilo Strauss: 7
Lacey Dreyar: 11

Disclaimer: I do not own Fairy Tail.

This homework assignment was going to kill her.

There was no doubt about this in Fern's mind. This assignment was impossible to complete and Lucy-sensei was just trying to drive her to insanity, as assuredly as Alnair himself was.

Beady eyes watched her, as the Celestial Spirit preened his feathers. Fern stared back at the coal-like eyes, which gleamed in the low light of sunset, containing far more intelligence than the average bird. Which made sense since he was a spirit, and not really a bird, but it was a bit hard for Fern to see anything beyond his shape that would indicate the answer to her homework.

"Lucy-sensei! Lucy-sensei! Look what mother got for me for my birthday!" Brandishing the silver key in front of her teacher, Fern grinned broadly. It was only her second key ever, after the Canis Minor key was given to her by her father a couple of years ago. To receive keys from both of her parents was more wonderful than the eight-year old had the words to describe. And with Levy raising her as if she were her own, that vocabulary was truly massive indeed.

Her teacher had smiled at her in genuine delight at her young student's new prize. "That's wonderful, Fern! Congratulations! Which key is it?"

"Grus! The crane!"

Lacey, curious about the noise coming from downstairs, appeared in the doorway. "That's really cool, Fern," she congratulated her fellow student. "Have you made the contract, yet?"

Shaking her head so hard her unruly tawny hair floofed out, Fern informed them, "Mother said to wait until my next lesson with you, so you can help me if there's any problems." The child made a face at the notion of needing help to contract with a spirit, but nonetheless here she was, diligently obeying her mother's instructions.

"Can I stay, too?" inquired Lacey. "I've never seen a Grus key or spirit before."

With a slight turn, Lucy regarded her daughter with a knowing eye. "Don't you have a job lined up with your team? And isn't it Lilo's first job with you?"

Her cheeks colored at the reminder. "Yeah, but this won't take that long, right? They can wait a few minutes for me. Lilo will understand. If I run top speed through the town, I can totally get there in plenty of time-"

"Please do not run top speed through the town," Lucy said, starting to sweat a little at the thought of her daughter just bowling people out of her way as she booked it to the guild or the train station.

Fern shrugged. "I don't mind if she stays." She looked up to Lacey, as her fellow student and as the daughter of the guild master, and normally she would have been ecstatic over Lacey wanting to watch, but she had bigger problems now. Namely that she had waited two whole days for her next lesson so that she could summon her new spirit. And this mother-daughter argument was delaying this process further.

Quelled for the moment, the pair sat down in the living room to watch Fern make her contract. The contract itself was nothing out of the ordinary as far as contracts went. Grus was summoned – a beautiful red-crowned crane – and Fern did as she had been drilled in terms of forming a contract, using the spirits hoots and whistles and cries to fill in her notepad as the spirit's beak didn't allow for human speech.

But then came the portion where it came time to figure out what the spirit's abilities were, and the game of twenty questions came to a grinding halt. The spirit fell silent, unable to communicate effectively outside of that. It had ruffled its feathers and looked blankly on at Fern.

Fern, in turn, looked to Lucy for help on how to handle this part of the process.

And Lucy had smiled again at Fern, but this time there was no comfort in the expression. "How about we make this your homework assignment for today, Fern? You are to figure out how to either communicate with your spirit effectively, and to discover what its abilities are. You have until our next lesson."

Lucy-sensei was evil.

That had been two days ago, and Fern was finding herself no closer to an answer than before. The library – her first destination on her search for the answer – had yielded so little information that it was almost laughable. Fern had already known that Celestial Spirit Mages were rare these days, but that the literature was also sorely lacking was a hefty blow. The most she had been able to glean about the constellation itself was the fact that it existed, and the names of some of the stars. Which had led to her and Grus coming to an agreement on what to call him – Alnair – but hadn't given her anything else to use. Her parents had been no help, either. Levy had insisted on more research, and Loke had refused to subvert Lucy's teaching lessons in the past and now was no exception. Lacey was still out on her job with her team, so she couldn't ask her, and Sabertooth was farther away than her mother would let her travel by herself.

Fern felt… stuck. For the first time in her life, she was having trouble finding the answer to something. Research had failed her. Her parents weren't helping. And there was no one to instruct her in how to proceed. And Alnair couldn't communicate effectively with Fern.

For the first time in her life, it sunk in for Fern just how hard being a Celestial Spirit Mage was. Being half spirit herself, Fern had always assumed that the magic would come easily to her. And so far, that had held true. A lot of the requirements didn't hold true for her as they did for Lacey. Opening gates and closing them was as easy as breathing for her. And understanding spirits? That was easy too. She'd had no problem understanding her Canis Minor spirit, Crim. But Alnair's speech just sounded like… bird noises.

Tears of frustration gathered in her eyes. This wasn't what she wanted. It was too hard.

It was at that moment, that a realization struck her.

Was the entire rest of her life going to be like this?

As far as she knew, she was the first half-spirit, half-human in centuries. There were no books and no people she could rely on to guide her in this. Her mother would do what she could for humans, and her father would do what he could for spirits, but… there was no one in the in-between area. Just… her. Just Fern.

And that prospect was terrifying.