I needed to jumpstart my creativity, so I asked a friend for a prompt, because that is legit a thing I like doing, writing stories out of short prompts. Well, I say "short"—the one that kicked this fic off was a bit on the longer side:

"Why is the sky—such a strange color—oh? it isn't—a different color, for you?"

The Animal Crossing series is developed and published by Nintendo.

"The stars are wrong," he said, peering one-eyed through the narrow end of the telescope. He kept his other eye open—the better to watch the owl at the corner desk as she started, sending loose sheets and documents cascading to the floor.

"What?" she stammered.

She was a halting, hesitant thing. She would probably let him be, even if she did think he belonged at the funny farm. "The stars are wrong, I said," he said, and moved aside so she could see for herself.

She was at the telescope so fast he felt almost impressed, even with how close her desk was anyway. It was a cramped afterthought of a space—this "observatory." The kind of room that had no right to the equipment it had. Someone up there had access to a few ears. Only—just a few.

"I don't see any mistakes," said the owl, carefully. Her head was swiveling back and forth between the telescope lens and a hastily unfolded chart, and the movement set him on edge, too birdlike to be human and too human for the animal she clearly was. "Could you show me where—"

But he was already halfway down the stairs.

"Are you looking for a certain star in particular? I can help you, if you don't mind!"

Her voice was too cheerful for the time of night, but she was genuine—or she sounded like it, at least. If this was a no-show job she was inhabiting, she was probably the last one who knew. "How about the North Star?" he said.

"Do you mean the northernmost star?"

"I mean Polaris."

The owl's eyebrows—feathers—scrunched together in obvious confusion. It could have been cute, if it hadn't been wrong in so many ways. "'Polaris'? Let me check my charts—I don't recall—that's a little embarrassing, when I'm the one in charge of the observatory—"

The answer was a stone in his gut, even if it had been the one he'd expected. "Never mind," he said, and because he hadn't been disappointed enough: "What about Crux? The Southern Cross?"

She'd never heard of the constellation. But that was okay, she admitted—she liked to make her own constellations, too.

He hated her, in that moment. Just a little.

The floor of the observatory was carpeted in pastels and star shapes. As observatory décor, it was awful. As a carpet, it was as good a place as any—or better—to sit browsing the owl's collection of astronomy hardbacks.

He lifted his eyes from the latest page of nonsense and caught her watching him back from her usual spot at the desk. For some reason, he thought she might turn away in embarrassment, but she just smiled, benignly, and somehow with her beak.

"You come here often," she said, "almost every day. You must like stars very much!"

"I like my stars," he said, and tried to get back into another map he didn't recognize.

No luck. "Oh—but—they're everyone's stars, aren't they?" the owl said. And then she blustered on: "But that's what makes them so beautiful, in a way. No matter where you are, you can know someone, somewhere is looking at the same stars at you! Isn't that romantic?"

"It means that the stars are wrong," he said.

The owl blinked down at him. Her eyes were wide, just a little too large. "You said that the first time I saw you," she said. "Now that you mention it—but I never asked you. What did you mean by that?"

He dipped his head into his reading, closer and closer, too close to make out the letters, and eventually she took the hint and went back to work.

He finished reading through her library, and then there wasn't anything else to do except sit in front of the telescope and watch.

Only—the human mind had to have something new to digest, after all. He found himself gravitating over the owl's shoulder as she worked. He stood there, towering over her, and felt like she deserved it.

She hadn't been kidding about making her own constellations, it turned out. Aside from the serious references and instruments and records, her desk was littered with sheets and sheets of star charts, each with stars connected in different ways and different shapes—there a connect-the-dots apple, there another moon traced out in the sky, there that brother of hers, the one downstairs that talked too much. He watched her put the finishing touches on some humanoid figure—and then her pencil stopped short and she whirled suddenly in her chair—jumped, at the sight of him so close—

And then, before he could properly swallow the urge to apologize, she seemed to relax all at once, smiling up at him. "Oh—well—it's you," she said.

"I've been here a while," he said.

"You usually have," she agreed. "Oh, not that I mind, not at all! It's wonderful to have someone who enjoys the night sky as much as I do. Would you like to try making a constellation yourself?" She lifted her own sheet, as if offering it to him. "It's actually very fun!"

There was probably a better way to turn her down than a straight and simple "no," but he went with that anyway.

He was lying in the observatory carpet with one of the softer texts under his head when he realized that he didn't know how long he'd been there—how long it'd been, since he'd been away.

The owl found him a glass of water. He gulped it down with her watching worriedly over him and tried hard to hate her for everything.

"If you don't mind me asking," he heard the owl say, one evening, "why do you visit the observatory as so often?"

He looked up from the telescope. The owl wasn't smiling. "I enjoy stars," he said to her. "You said so yourself."

"Yes, but—perhaps it isn't my place to say, but it seems you spend more time here than anywhere else."

He considered the words, tried contradict them—and couldn't. The past months seemed muddled, run together. He didn't know when that had happened. "You might be right," he admitted.

"And you don't seem to enjoy watching the stars at all."

The owl still wasn't smiling. He looked her in the eyes, and she looked back unflinchingly with an expression he couldn't understand.

And maybe it was the familiarity of her, but he felt as if she deserved the truth, or some measure of it. "I'm waiting for the stars to go right," he said.

"Yes, you've said that before, haven't you? You kept saying it before—that the stars are wrong." The owl's eyebrows scrunched, that look of confusion he'd seen so long ago. "What is it that you want to see, when you look up at the stars?"

Polaris, he thought. Or Deneb, or Lyra and Vega. Or else Centaurus or Crux.

Out loud, he said nothing.

The owl's expression softened. "If you feel you can't tell me—well, I don't understand, but—" She stopped there, mid-sentence, as if searching for something.

When she spoke again, her words were careful, chosen.

"This is very important to you, isn't it?" she asked.

"Yes," he said.

"Then—well, until you find the stars you're looking for, feel free to come back to the observatory anytime you wish."

"Yes," he said, and then, "Thank you."

"It's what the observatory is for, after all. And—" and she seemed to pep back to her usual self, just in that moment, "—when the stars are right, please don't keep it to yourself. That is—I suppose I'm curious, now, as to what a 'right' night sky might look like!"

But you won't be here, when it happens, he thought. That's the point. And because he was tired, maybe, the thought seemed almost sad.

And he thought:

You're kind of a polestar, in that way.

"Could you pass me one of those charts?" he asked. "The blank ones."

And Celeste gave him a pencil, too.